As they start to cull pensioners, may my neighbour Nell rest in peace

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Published: 23 September, 2010
ILLTYD HARRINGTON: ‘AS I PLEASE’

THIS is a requiem for old Nell.

I watched day one of the Liberal Democrat conference with a terrible sense of déjà vu. 

It reminded me of that gruesome mass suicide of an American religious cult who had settled in the Guyanan forest 30 years ago. Happily mutilating themselves, before obediently following their pastor, Jim Jones’s injunction to mass suicide. A terrible slaughter but for them heaven was imminent. 

Nick Clegg has not gone that far yet. He’s more or less Joseph in his coat of many amazing colours. Others see him as the warm-up man for a Billy Graham religious revivalist meeting in Earl’s Court. 

The smug Vince Cable, was talking with his usual bank manager’s regretful voice but whispering, “we have a national emergency”. I thought perhaps the Martians were coming. The older generation will soon be going into the attic, not for antiques to sell, but retrieving war-time gas masks, and building air raid shelters in the back gardens. The keepers of our borders will warn newcomers that we are fighting a national epidemic, “come on if you have the nerve”. The anchorites are culling the sybarites, among whom are the OAPs, recklessly eating the seed corn, picking the bones of the slaughtered fattened calf. From being an essential ingredient in sweet adverts we have become a nuisance, wilfully delaying our arrival in the graveyard.

Yet in the midst of all the blood-letting, and grim warnings of cuts, one item remains inviolate. 

I gather from an informed source Tony Blair’s original idea for a state funeral for (Baroness) Margaret Hilda Thatcher, remains in the active list. By that time, hopefully delayed, the army will have been privatised, and Lord Ashcroft will have to provide the necessary security guards for the long cortège. 

All the above went through my mind at the funeral of old Nell Collins, a neighbour. She was 97, blind, incontinent, smoked like a chimney about to burst into flame. She was the widow of a regular in the Royal Navy. She swore in salty tones, enough to frighten the milkman and the postman, if there was one. If we lived in a land of equality, we would have awarded her the honour of the Heroine of the British Working Class. Instead her options in 2010, are getting fewer and fewer. 

And she’s an old-style Tory voter. Her total capital was £7,000, not a king’s ransom, but enough to keep her in a private care home for six weeks, but she insisted on allocating her funeral charges first. 

Nell had been brought up in the country and knew all about the country house feudalism, and the downstairs maids. Her funeral, which she had arranged, started with Roll out the Barrel, went on to two of the longest Victorian dirges in the hymn book, and then the Dambusters March. For, like her idol the late Queen Mother, she hated the Huns.

She had insisted on one-armed Harry, from the pub, to play the organ. His myopia and his musical education, derived in the main from spasmodic listening to Capital Radio, resulted in an appalling clutter.

To me, Nell represented that indomitable spirit of Edwardian working-class matriarchs. She even brushed aside a burglary by two drug addicts, when she was away for the day, Christmas Day. Nell’s intrepid courage has carried her through a century, where every benefit had to be fought for and protected. She lived to see a new breed of political scavengers, gnawing at the foundation of social responsibility and strong communities. Their philosophy, often right-wing Christianity, rubbishes the golden age of humanity, which Nell believed would come. Nye Bevan used to josh his Labour colleague, Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford), who had been chairman of the National & Provincial Bank, with “remember Frank, it was Jesus, who drove the money lenders and changers out of the Temple”. 

Opponents of the welfare state might recall that it was Count Bismarck, the Prussian statesman, who began the first one in the new Germany. 

Attlee’s government in 1945-51 nurtured it, and none other than Prime Minister Winston Churchill, again a one-time Liberal, said in very charged words, in 1943, “national compulsory insurance for all classes, for all purposes, from the cradle to the grave”. 

I leave the last word to him – perhaps it could be said at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral: “There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into new babies.” 

The milk-snatcher would not approve.