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?Virginia McKenna as Elsie in Amanda Waring’s What Do You See? |
Finding ways to face up to an old problem
A special event will examine the plight of the elderly, consider our attitudes towards them and find out why we still use the word ‘dearie’, writes Ruth Gorb
WE are, we are told ad nauseam, a nation of older people.
The government does its bit by way of recognition in the attractive form of Dame Joan Bakewell, our lady speaker for the elderly.
Ok, there are “policies” that are wholly admirable. But what is actually being done about restoring dignity to old age? How do we stop patients over 70 in hospitals being called “dearie”? And what price policies when what is needed in everyday life is a smile, or a friendly hello, or an offer to do some shopping?
Good news, then, of positive action. There is to be an event including a film screening at Bafta in Piccadilly on Monday to celebrate old age, and the dignity owed to it. Among the guests will be actors Richard Briers, June Whitfield, Corin Redgrave and Kika Markham; Doctor Thomas Stuttaford, health correspondent at The Times for the past 27 years, and gerontologist Dr Jackie Morris. Baroness Julia Neuberger will read from her book, Not Dead Yet: A Manifesto For Old Age. And Virginia McKenna, who features in a film called What Do You See?, will also be there.
The film was made by Amanda Waring and is dedicated to her mother, the actress Dorothy Tutin, who died in 2001. It is short, very personal, and heartrending. It shows a woman being cared for by nurses who are not unkind, but who see only her wrinkles, not her beauty – nor indeed the real woman, still young beneath the wrinkles. In her mind, as she is bathed and fed, she sees herself as a child in a sunlit garden, as a young girl, as a bride, as a woman growing older. “What do you see,” she wants to ask the nurses, “when you look at this old woman?”
Amanda Norton, Hampstead businesswoman and by her own admission an inveterate mover and shaker, heard Waring talk about the film on Radio 4. She contacted her and arranged a lunch in a local restaurant; Dr Stuttaford (affectionately known as Dr Tom) and Jackie Morris made up a foursome and plans were laid. It was, says Norton, a combination made in heaven.
Norton has for the past four years been running an awareness programme focusing on health issues of the over-40s. She started it because she felt that hard-pressed GPs simply do not have enough time to deal with diffidently presented problems – and let’s face it, as you get older there is a tendency to forget important detail.
What Norton did was contact top specialists in various areas of medicine and ask them to come and answer questions put to them by an audience.
“I told the specialists I couldn’t pay them anything, but they all said they’d come,” she says. “How did I get hold of them? I just rang them cold. I couldn’t find DrTom’s phone number, so I rang his doorbell.”
Her tenacity paid off. The distinguished medics turned up at the 999 Medical and Diagnostic Centre in Finchley Road, and the public came eagerly to put their questions.
Weren’t they inhibited about discussing health problems with other people listening?
“There is something very comfortable about being with people suffering the same thing as you are,” says Norton. “And after a question or two and a glass of wine, all inhibitions went.”
The cancer evening, she says, was oversubscribed, as was a menopause session. Other topics covered have been diet and lifestyle, prostate cancer, slowing down the ageing process, and lumps and bumps – an important investigation into worrying moles and skin cancer.
Norton is planning sessions on arthritis, depression, back problems and heart concerns, and welcomes suggestions from members of the public – you contact her, and she will find a top specialist to answer your questions. Entrance fee is kept at about £15, simply to cover costs.
It is, she says, a practical way of helping older people with their health concerns. Practicality is what has made Dr Jackie Morris redesign a ward for elderly people to make room for an extra shower and loo – there had been only one in a certain hospital for an outrageous number of patients. And it is practicality that has led to Amanda Waring showing her film in hospitals, care homes and schools.
“As we are turning into a generation of older people, we want to be celebrated as we get older, which is why it’s so important to talk to schools,” says Norton. “And the issue is now being taken seriously by the powers-that-be: health minister Philip Hope put this quote in The Times: ‘Dignity and compassion are not a nice-to-have bonus. They have got to be hard-wired into the DNA of the NHS’.”
He need look no further than this formidable team of women:Waring is passionate about care for older people; Norton, Basia Kapp and Eileen Raperport – friends who have known each other since school days – are equally committed to improving the health prospects for us all as we get older.
“It’s not easy,” says Norton. “But we’re going to see if we can do it.” The poem “Look Closer” by Phyllis McCormack, which inspired Waring’s film, will be read by Jackie Morris at the Gala Evening on Monday – its last lines telling the whole story:
Not a crabbit old woman/ Look closer…see…ME.
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