FORUM: Illtyd Harrington - ‘As I Please’

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Published: 11 February, 2011
by ILLTYD HARRINGTON

Get old along with me! - The best is yet to be… 

A VOICE like rustling silk did not whisper solicitously “memento mori” meaning remember you must die. Instead it asked anxiously: “Have you made your funeral plan yet? Or consulted your financial adviser?” For a moment I thought it was the angel of death. Chastened, I answered no to the first and to the second: “My cashflow is inadequate to justify employing such a creature.” I refused to bite his seductive cherry.

I have inherited Irish Roman Catholic paganism so I am confident that my disposal can’t take place without me. 

As I told him: I have every intention of being at my own funeral.

By coincidence I had just returned from one. It was for one of the new old old, those over 90. She was one of a growing group which are threatening the whole pensions industry and causing worrying blips in the demography of population. These dangerous insurgents are out everywhere in their wheelchairs, walkers and sticks. Somehow I never saw Hilda Burgess, aged 99, an avowed adherent of the strict Baptist Church, uncompromising card player, as a threat to society. We buried her on a clifftop overlooking the English Channel, three of us, me, the manager of our sheltered accommodation and a retired porter.

A vicar on the undertaker’s approved list in the black, flowing cape read the majestic poetry of the Book of Ecclesiastes. It could have been a railway timetable. He caught my sceptical eye and later confided to me “I've got three today”.

Hilda in life was 4ft 9ins and in fact had led a hardworking and generous life, with her husband Albert who was 6ft 4ins, looking after the welfare of members of the armed services throughout the world. She had seen the end of empire, drying up the red on the map. For both of them had taken part in the Long March of time – progress and regression.

Years later Albert was struck down with Alzheimer’s and began wandering off into the town. In his bewilderment he oftened resisted her attempts to bring him home.

To me she was for all their world a Beatrix Potter drawing of Granny Mouse.

She was a prime suspect, part of our accumulating national treasure whose accrued wisdom, and strength of character should be our delight.

Young people when encouraged are quite startled to be talking to people like her who have lived through history. Through wars, scientific revolution and the extension of the welfare state. And too often we mummify them or calm them down with pills. They watch indifferently the television in the ghastly dayrooms.

A year or so ago I went into one and focused on the one man who looked really spaced out – an artist. I just mentioned Max Ernst the abstract painter. He sprang into life, for Ernst had been a very great friend of his. There was a great deal in him which I felt privileged to hear.

The powerful, the venal and the obnoxious are given memorial thanksgivings and solemn requiems – even celebrations of their lives, glowing with sycophancy and inaccuracy.

Some of our old do not even get an obituary or an epitaph. In the New Journal worth is remembered before worthlessness.

The composer Aaron Copland wrote Fanfare for the Common Man which is an ideal choice for one of these funerals. Incredibly the odious Senator Joseph McCarthy tried to intimidate him for this work. To the obsessive McCarthy, Common Man meant Communism. Copland didn’t even acknowledge the summons but made public his contempt for McCarthy and the hysteria which had overtaken America.

So what is to be done for the Common Man? It was supposed to be his century.

After debasement of the honours system what is it that should be recognised in the people who really keep this society going? 

Why not let more of them into schools? 

They are natural teachers – make them prominent on public occasions.

As much as I dislike the word we now have a proactive mayor. Why can’t at least two of these people be honoured with the freedom of the borough once a year? Bernard Shaw would have approved of the idea. This Is Your Life is written on their faces. In 20 years’ time there will be 400,000 people over 100. What a post bill the reigning monarch will have then. Our political and social élite really should be left in the ignorance and indifference that sets them apart.

We carry them off the stage in a perfunctory way. I do not want the Victorian panoply of death to come back. Our folk memory is the People’s Bank. Our genetic pool is a lake which we are entitled to swim in.

Robert Browning wrote: “Get old along with me! The best is yet to be.”

This is a time when we are becalmed in a political doldrum. My own optimism is that of Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. 

This symbol of working-class motherhood was played by Jane Darwell. She won an Oscar for it. As she stood looking into an uncertain prospect she says to her son: “We are the people and we are going on.” 

By the way, John Steinbeck the author, was also threatened by McCarthy. McCarthy died in ignominy and public disgrace. Unlike Ma Joad and unlike Hilda, who was known as the black widow, wearing her widow’s weeds for her love.