Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir

  And in any case, I am someone else now. This seems to contradict earlier assertions that you are in old age the person you always were. What I mean is that old age has different needs, different satisfactions, a different outlook. I remember my young self, and I am not essentially changed, but I perform otherwise today.

  There are things I no longer want, things I no longer do, things that are now important. I have no further desire whatsoever for travel. What? No further desire? You who crossed the Atlantic twice a year or so? Who left Heathrow twelve times one year? Who was happy to hop off pretty much anywhere at the behest of the British Council or on book-related business? Who went on holidays? That’s right; absolutely no further desire, and that includes holidays. I never want to see another airport. And, furthermore, I don’t miss it. Maybe I wouldn’t feel like this if I had not done so much – been there, seen that – if I didn’t have it stashed away in my head, though the random retrieval system means that only some of it floats up. A sudden glimpse of those ring-tailed lemurs in Melbourne Zoo, and the publisher’s office in Ljubljana where I was given the Slovenian translation of “Jabberwocky;” the audience member at a reading in New York Public Library who had brought me a red rose from her garden. The summers with friends in Maine and Massachusetts. I have it – at least, I have shreds of it – and that will do nicely.

  All right, this is the diminishment of old age. I don’t want to travel anymore because I know I couldn’t do it now, and perhaps there is some benign mechanism that aligns diminished capacity with diminished desire. Though I’m not sure – contemporaries have disputed this: they do miss travel, they resent being grounded. And some of them are not – still braving Terminal Four, still sitting squashed in a metal canister with hundreds of others for hours on end, still, I suppose, getting that adrenaline rush. Perhaps I have just given in to diminishment, or, I prefer to think, I have simply made a choice. I don’t want to do it anymore.

  Domestic travel is another matter. I still get around the UK, but I don’t regard that as travel – that is simply checking out the territory, discovering, revisiting, crossing my own path, and I wouldn’t be without it. A number of years ago the railway authorities, with a sudden rush of indulgence, decided that senior citizens should be allowed tickets to anywhere at non-peak times for five pounds, I think it was. I remember finding myself on an east coast train surrounded by jubilant gray heads, busy racking up all the mileage they could. That offer was withdrawn, in a panic, after a month or so. That’ll teach them.

  So, domestic travel only for me now. I am nicely smug, where my carbon footprint is concerned. What else do I not want to do anymore? Go to anything about which I am unenthusiastic. Time was, I attended hither and thither, frequently out of compunction: I really ought to show up. Or I thought: come on, give it a go, you never know . . . Not now. It is pure self-interest, today. I attend only when I think I will probably enjoy this. Out with all those speculative sorties to some event or gathering; far more alluring is the evening with a couple of hours reading and maybe some TV if there’s anything with promise. I can – just barely – remember how it was to be twenty with the horror of a blank evening ahead, nothing to go to, no company lined up. I can remember what that felt like, I can remember myself feeling, but this is the sense in which I am someone else now.

  This someone else, this alter ego who has arrived, is less adventurous, more risk-averse, protective of her time. Well, of course – there is the matter of the spirit and the flesh, and that is the crux of it: the spirit is still game for experience, anything on offer, but the body most definitely is not, and unfortunately calls the shots. My mind seems to be holding out – so far, so good. My poor father had Alzheimer’s; that shadow lies over all of my age group, with the numbers of sufferers now rising all the time – but that is of course a factor of the new demographic. Dementia is irreversible and you can’t fend it off, though it seems that exercise and a healthy balanced diet can help to do so, along with regular brain activity such as crosswords and sudoku. I am not a crossword addict and sudoku defeats me entirely; I must put my trust in writing novels and, maybe, this.

  Writing is not a problem, thankfully. The language arrives, the word I want. I have never much used a thesaurus, and don’t do so now. But here’s an odd thing – words remain biddable, but names do not. Names drop into a black hole – the leader of the opposition, that actor I saw last week, the acquaintance who comes up at a party. After a while Ed Miliband will surface, and I dance around the problem of the acquaintance by avoiding introductions. I’m not worried, because I know I’m not alone – my contemporaries all have the same complaint. But why names and not words? Nothing that I have yet read on the operation of memory or the function of the brain in old age has yet offered an explanation; answers in comprehensible detail, please. A friend says: it’s because we’ve known, and known of, so many people – we have name overload by now. I am aware that there is a condition that makes sufferers unable to remember the word they are after – aphasia; Kingsley Amis had some wry fun with it in his novel Ending Up. But the name difficulty seems to be generic, and I’m skeptical about my friend’s explanation.

  Writing survives, for me. Other pleasures – needs – do not. I was a gardener. Well, I am a gardener, but a sadly reduced one, in every sense. I have a small paved rectangle of London garden, full of pots, with a cherished twenty-year-old corokia, and two pittosporums, and various fuchsias, and Convolvulus cneorum and hakonechloa grass and euphorbia and heuchera and a Hydrangea petiolaris all over the back wall (well, some of you will be gardeners and might share my tastes). It gives me much pleasure, but is a far cry from what I once gardened – a half acre or so that included a serious vegetable garden: potatoes, onions, all the beans, carrots, squash, you name it, the lot. All I can do now is potter with the hose in summer, and do a bit of snipping here and there, thanks to the arthritis; forget travel, what I really do miss is intensive gardening. Digging, raking, hoeing – the satisfactory creation of a trench for the potatoes, deft work with the hoe around a line of young French beans, the texture of rich, well-fertilized soil. Pruning a shaggy rose: shaping for future splendor. Dividing fat clumps of snowdrops: out of many shall come more still. And that was – is – the miraculous power of gardening: it evokes tomorrow, it is eternally forward-looking, it invites plans and ambitions, creativity, expectation. Next year I will try celeriac. And that new pale blue sweet pea. Would Iris stylosa do just here? And what about sweet woodruff in that shady corner? Gardening defies time; you labor today in the interests of tomorrow; you think in seasons to come, cutting down the border this autumn but with next spring in your mind’s eye. And I still have something of this, in my London patch; twice a year, my daughter takes me to a garden center for the seasonal splurge – the summer geraniums, the pansies for winter.

  An addiction to gardening is genetic, I believe. My grandmother gardened to the exclusion of almost everything else; my mother had the gene, and now my daughter has it too. A working musician, she acquired Royal Horticultural Society qualifications in spare time that she did not really have. I wish I had done that – I admire and envy her more informed way of gardening.

  All the discussion of how to confront old age focuses on physical and mental activity. We must not subside into the armchair and pack up; we should go for a brisk walk every day (hips and knees permitting), we should reach for the crossword, pick up a book. There is much said about attitude, too. Those who had a positive attitude toward old age when in their fifties and sixties have been found to display a more sprightly outlook when it arrives. Well, I dare say, and that is really just a matter of diversity; some of us are like that, others are not. You are exhorted to be positive when you have cancer, with the underlying suggestion that if you don’t your chances will be that much worse. Hmmm. A positive view may well do much for the state of mind, but I doubt if it affects the disease.

  Something of the same applies to old age – condi
tion not disease. A positive attitude is not going to cure the arthritis or the macular degeneration or whatever but a bit of bravado makes endurance more possible. Not everyone can manage this – diversity again. And bravado comes a great deal easier to those cushioned by financial security; I am intensely aware of this. There’s something else, though, and that is not so much state of mind as what the mind in question is up to, indeed, whether it is up to anything at all. Friends in my age group who are successfully facing down old age are busy; several are hampered by hips, knees, etc. but still pursue their interests and activities. I know I have a fairly left-field range of friends, nearly all of whom have earned their bread through brain work, and nobody forces a writer into retirement (except incompliant publishers), but there does seem to be some staying power bestowed by . . . what? Curiosity? Mental energy? Perseverance? A surviving drive to seize the day? Any, I think – and all.

  Can’t garden. Don’t want to travel. But can read, must read. For me, reading is the essential palliative, the daily fix. Old reading, revisiting, but new reading too, lots of it, reading in all directions, plenty of fiction, history, and archaeology always, reading to satisfy perennial tastes, reading sideways too – try her, try him, try that, Amazon and AbeBooks would founder without me; my house is a book depository – books in, books out (to family and friends, to my daughter’s Somerset cottage where there is still some shelf space, to wonderful Book Aid which sends English-language books to places where they are needed). I buy; I am sent. Publishers send what my husband used to call “bread upon the waters” books to people like me: “We’d love to know if you enjoy this book as much as we have . . .” I can’t read each one, but I always have a good look. Any book represents effort, struggle, work – I know, I write them myself – every book deserves attention, even if that ends with dismissal. And occasionally there is gold: today the postman hands over Robert Macfarlane’s latest, The Old Ways. Ah, discerning editor! I have devoured and reread Macfarlane’s earlier books.

  Reading in old age is doing for me what it has always done – it frees me from the closet of my own mind. Reading fiction, I see through the prism of another person’s understanding; reading everything else, I am traveling – I am traveling in the way that I still can: new sights, new experiences. I am reminded sometimes of the intensity of childhood reading, that absolute absorption when the very ability to read was a heady new gain, the gateway to a different place, to a parallel universe you hadn’t known was there. The one entirely benign mind-altering drug. Except of course for those who ban or burn books, in which case benign doesn’t come into it, but the power of books is all the more acknowledged.

  So I have my drug, perfectly legal and I don’t need a prescription. Over the last few years, I have considered nature and nurture with Matt Ridley, explored Hengeworld with Mike Pitts, enjoyed centuries of British landscape with Francis Pryor, discovered France with Graham Robb. Plus a raft of novels and an expedient injection of poetry. More later on a lifetime of reading and the way in which reading has powered writing. My point here is to do with the needs of old age; there is what you can’t do, there is what you no longer want to do, and there is what has become of central importance. Others may have a game of bowls, or baking cakes, or carpentry, or macramé, or watercolors. I have reading.

  *

  Writing this chapter, I have sometimes felt that I am eerily attuned to the thought processes of 10 Downing Street, where clearly some are much exercised about the new demographic. This morning the paper tells me that one of Prime Minister David Cameron’s advisers says that elderly people should be encouraged to go back to work and move into smaller houses. It is not their welfare alone with which he is concerned; he wants their family-sized houses for the next generation, while to advance the retirement age would of course have an impact on the ever-increasing pension bill, though he masks this by insisting that the elderly need the social contact supplied by work – many of the old complain of isolation. True enough, I’m sure, and apparently the Swedish prime minister has floated the idea of seventy-five as a potential retirement age. The prospect of a future in which a great swathe of a nation’s resources has to be set aside for the sustenance of an entirely inactive slab of the population is indeed challenging. But seventy-five-year-old refuse collectors? Seventy-five-year-olds digging the roads, erecting scaffolds? I don’t think so. Office work, maybe, and indeed all those occupations without an element of physical labor. Many septuagenarians might well welcome that. I hope the Swedish prime minister has thought this through, and indeed our own, who has apparently said that he loves the idea of an automatic “life expectancy based adjustment” to the state pension age – which is already due to go up from sixty-five to sixty-eight over the next three decades. This is all very well, and I’ve advocated finding a means for those elderly who are able and keen to be useful to continue to be so, but the increased expectancy will have to be accompanied by increasingly robust hips, knees and everything else.

  Professor Tom Kirkwood has written: “There is a little progress with age-related diseases.” But he went on to say that in his study of a group over eighty-five not one had zero age-related disease, and most had four or five. Doctors’ offices and hospital waiting rooms are well stocked with those over sixty-five; it is the old and the young who demand most attention. On a trip to University College Hospital Accident and Emergency a couple of years ago my companions in the waiting room were seven elderly men and women, and three mothers with babies or toddlers, all of us supervised by a stern-faced security man in case we started causing trouble. My visit was purely precautionary, insisted on by my doctor: I appreciated the resources and the efficiency but felt very much that I was indeed cluttering up the system.

  Well, we do, and we can’t help it. Over the last years, I have had surgery and treatment for breast cancer; hips and knees are holding out so far but my back gave in long ago: I have been in intermittent pain for fifteen years – discomfort always, tipping into real pain. My sight is dodgy – myopic macular degeneration, which may get worse (but also – fingers crossed – may not). There is a shoulder problem – a torn tendon. The worst was a cracked vertebra, four years ago, which required surgery – balloon kyphoplasty – which left me in intense, unrelenting, and apparently inexplicable pain for three and a half months. Pain that had the specialists shaking their heads, baffled, passing me around like the unwelcome parcel in that children’s game – and I am sorry, apologetic, through the miasma of pain, sorry to be such a challenge, but sorrier still for myself. I want my life back. I want to be able to sit, stand, walk to the supermarket, watch the TV, meet a friend. Write my novel. We have run through the entire repertoire of pain-killers, starting with kindly and ineffective paracetamol and ibuprofen, moving through flirtations with co-codamol, Voltarol, the fentanyl patch . . . We are on to the hard stuff now; morphine turns me into a madwoman, so we don’t go there again, but Demerol gives temporary relief. Demerol is – or was – used in childbirth; I remember it under different circumstances. But it works for about an hour and a half, and you can only take it every four hours. So, the blissful float into a hazy pain-distanced zone, and then back to reality, and watching the clock. Over those dreadful months, I wanted to see, talk to, only my children, and two friends. And my physical therapist – superb professional, practical, breezy, funny, convinced that we’ll beat this: “You will get better.”

  I did. At last.

  I have sometimes wondered if an experience like that has some salutary value for any of us: it puts into perspective subsequent distresses. As for the rest of my continuing ailments, they seem more or less par for the course for an eighty-year-old; of those I know in my age group, most can chalk up a few, or more, with only one or two that I can think of maddeningly unscathed.

  You get used to it. And that surprises me. You get used to diminishment, to a body that is stalled, an impediment? Well, yes, you do. An alter ego is amazed, aghast perhaps – myself i
n the roaring forties, when robust health was an assumption, a given, something you barely noticed because it was always there. Acceptance has set in, somehow, has crept up on you, which is just as well, because the alternative – perpetual rage and resentment – would not help matters. You are now this other person, your earlier selves are out there, familiar, well remembered, but you have to come to terms with a different incarnation.

  “In seventy or eighty years a Man may have a deep Gust of the World. Know what it is, what it can afford, and what ’tis to have been a Man.” Reading Sir Thomas Browne, today, on a winter London afternoon, I’m in touch with a former self, who was discovering Urne-Buriall in Jack’s set of the Works, in Oxfordshire in the 1970s: “The treasures of time lie high, in Urnes, Coynes and Monuments, scarce below the roots of some vegetables.” Today, I am warming to Browne’s discussion of the long view: “. . . such a compass of years will shew new examples of old things, parallelisms of occurrences through the whole course of Time, and nothing be monstrous unto him, who may in that time understand not only the varieties of Man, but the varieties of himself, and how many Men he hath been in that extent of time.” Yes, yes – exactly. And how strange, how exciting, to find an echo of what I have been thinking about myself in that wonderful seventeenth-century mind. Back in my forties, I was responding to Browne’s archaeological interests, being that way inclined myself, and relishing, always, always, that language – the cadences, the flourished word, the music.

  “. . . the varieties of himself;” perfect phrase. And it is of the varieties of myself that I am aware, seeing how today’s response to Browne links me to that Oxfordshire self, in mid-life, busy with children, but essentially the same person. The body may decline, may seem a dismal reflection of what went before, but the mind has a healthy continuity, and some kind of inbuilt fidelity to itself, a coherence over time. We learn, and experience; attitudes and opinions may change, but most people, it seems to me, retain an essential persona, a cast of mind, a trademark footprint. It is not so much that we simply get more like ourselves, as has been said, but that the self in question may expand, mutate, over time, but retains always that signature identity. A poet’s voice will alter and develop, but young Wordsworth, Tennyson, Larkin are not essentially adrift from their later selves. There is this interesting accretion – the varieties of ourselves – and the puzzling thing in old age is to find yourself out there as the culmination of all these, knowing that they are you, but that you are also now this someone else.