Elderly will be forgotten again after election

Published: 15 April 2010

MY new passport has arrived, after they received my £75. It runs until 2020 when I will be 89 and may be enjoying poor health and the fear of the judgment awaiting me. 

It was two residents of Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, who made me aware of the ageing scenario and its consequences. 

One Dr Jonathan Millar, as early as 1970, in the tone of a schoolteacher with a brain, foresaw the increase in our elderly population and our lack of preparation for the pensioner boom.

Then Alan Bennett told a disturbing parable of his mother being fed minced and diced carrots in a care home in Weston-super-Mare. 

The gaunt grey army of the aged has arrived at the city gates, justifying Millar’s futorology. Nothing improves the mind as well as direct experience. And I was able recently to put it to the test in a large ward in a good general hospital.

There were 32 male patients, 16 on either side, and a nursing team of six gave meticulous care.

But where was the blowsy humanity, and the brusque humour?

Old people have “accidents” and suffer initial embarrassment, and this was all handled with great respect for the patient. I was drawn to the conclusion that the day of the mechanical robot nurse was about to dawn. The ward was as quiet as the tomb. 

But none of the men had been classified as NYD (now you die), or more ominously put nearer the exit door. Not one of the individual TV sets flickered. No braying parson or pink-faced priest swanned by.

The timetable had a hallmark of a well-run prison, army camp or zoo – rigid but efficient.  

Most of the men spent the day in bed, heads slumped precariously forward.

Hands had grown slim and slender, and gold wedding rings hang on to the fingers. 

In old age, the hands as well as the face, say it all. 

The majority of the those were widowers, and visitors were thin on the ground, although the common factor seemed to be the eldest daughter and impatient son-in-law, bearing cartons of orange juice, the new elixir of life.

Old men, as a rule, do not talk to each other. But the place was in fact an Aladdin’s Cave of experience. 

They had chosen to isolate themselves from the bustling reality of our lives. 

One turned out to be an artist and a friend of Max Ernst and Jackson Pollock. 

Another elderly youth was a jeweller, of sensitive face, his the horror of having his family murdered by the Nazis. 

One had spent 50 years road-building across the UK – there was all mischievous nature in those Irish eyes. 

One enormous man, it turned out, had been a cinema commissionaire – a gatekeeper to illusion.

It can’t be Bennett’s mince and carrots diet that distanced them from our troubled planet. 

A man is talking on the wireless in the background – a toiler in the old people’s industry. 

He is speaking of Grey Power – 11 million pensioners, able to exercise effective political clout in 60 marginal constituencies. 

The issue is care – that awkward buzzword when uttered by dubious politicians. It is a hard but uncomfortable truth that the Queen is running out of 100th birthday cards. 

The hollow sound of breast-beating and the dignified request of our great group will be met by bluff arguments offering spring and port wine, and quickly forgotten after May 6 when some of the current honourable members will disappear with pension pots of more than one million pounds. 

An Oxford-based insurance company puts it in crystal clear and uncompromising terms: the average cost of a place in a care home in the UK is £36,000 a year, whilst in the prosperous South-east it rises to £50,000 a year. 

Even the kindest local council will bill you for £800 a week. 

All is not lost, if you know and are connected to the top people – then you could send your grandson to England’s leading public school instead, much cheaper at £29,000 a year.

Not an alternative for many of us, or a golden opportunity. But a golden opportunity has come in golden period – grey power has the force of numbers and wisdom of the ages to make politicians very uncomfortable. 

• Illtyd Harrington is literary editor of the New Journal