Not Dead Yet: A Manifesto for Old Age. Julia Neuberger
good to be attractive to nurse, visit or simply be someone to be wheeled out for the grandchildren. But it was an opinion that was widely shared among older people themselves. The fact that their own definition of ageing well involves looking good suggests that this is hugely important to some older people, if not all of them. Some undoubtedly feel that being older means you can give up on the diet, abuse the body and wear tracksuits day in and day out. But it is hard to escape the bombardment from images of older women having botox injections, of plastic surgery for both men and women, and of tanned older men with younger women on their arms. It feels important.
Worse, the opposite – the popular view of older bodies – has always been rather gross. ‘Sans teeth,’ was Shakespeare’s view; ‘wrinklies’is hardly a term of endearment, and everywhere we look there are pictures of wrinkles being ironed out by botox, flab being surgically removed, Fonda-esque body improvements by exercise and surgery.
It is easy to be puritanical about all this, but that is to ignore just how deeply ingrained our resistance is to this aspect of getting older. The broadcaster Joan Bakewell, once described as ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’, wrote a thoughtful article about being over 70 in the Guardian in 2006, describing herself as ‘vain by nature’, and missing the admiration which no longer comes her way.1
‘While old men are thought to be ruggedly attractive, old women are deemed to be beyond allure, devoid of sexual chemistry, a worn husk of their juicier former selves,’ she wrote. ‘I remain true to my inner self: I still enjoy clothes … I still love high heels, have my hair tinted, watch my weight. I confront the mirror less often than I did, and when I do I make a harsh appraisal, and do my best with what’s left.’
The publisher Diana Athill says something similar about the experience of ageing:
The most obvious thing about moving into my seventies was the disappearance of what use to be the most important thing in life: I might not look, or even feel, all that old, but I had ceased to be a sexual being, a condition which had gone through several stages and had not always been a happy one, but which had always seemed central to my existence.2
Then out of the blue, at the end of 2005, a series of advertisements for Dove soap included a woman in her nineties, admittedly a model, advertising the soap as much younger women were doing. The point was being made that we have to love and respect our bodies, fat, thin, young or old. For many people, the image of a nearly naked woman of this age was deeply shocking. For others, it came as a welcome relief from the constant bombardment with images of young, thin, ditsy blondes, resplendent on the arms of men, the bonnets of cars, or simply wearing gorgeous clothes that are manifestly unsuitable for older women.
The other side of this debate is why we need to be quite so ashamed of our older bodies. Michele Hanson wrote about catching sight of herself (aged 60 plus) with horror in the mirror in the changing rooms in Marks & Spencer.3 ‘Of course I tried things on,’ she wrote. ‘But if you are a repulsive old crone, no garment can help you, so I sat down on my ghastly sagging bottom and wept.’ Why does it have to be that way, at least so much?
The fear of wrinkles are such that those supermodels over 40, with their botox-smooth skin, risking cancer with their human growth hormone, prioritize their removal over almost everything else. It is almost as if there is a class divide: those who can afford it chop themselves and stitch themselves up again to make sure they look no older than 30; the rest of us wrinkle.
There is a very long way to go before women start accepting their wrinkles, but there are signs of something happening. There are new images of beauty and maturity as advertisers begin to wake up to the possibilities of the older market. The issue is being discussed more openly and, in July 2007, even Vogue celebrated ‘ageless style’. The journalist Virginia Ironside, in her excellent book No, I Don’t Want To Join a Book Club, set out a wonderful list of rules for how to dress after middle age, most of which were given to her by her mother.4 They include:
1 Never wear white. It makes yellow teeth look yellower.
2 Always keep your upper arms covered. Those bits of flesh that hang down at the sides (known, apparently, as bingo wings) are hideous, and so are those strange rolls of flesh that appear between your underarms and your body.
3 Get a new bra every six months.
4 Don’t disguise a lizardy neck with a scarf or polo-neck. They always look as if you have something to hide.
5 Never wear trousers after 50, unless they are ludicrously well cut and slinky, and never wear short skirts.
6 Make sure you possess and wear the most glamorous dressing gown in the world.
When a 56-year-old woman called Mary asked the Age Concern discussion website whether people should ‘dress and live like the age I’m supposed to be?’, she was overwhelmed by the response.5 This came from much older women refusing to grow old ‘gracefully’, quoting Jenny Joseph’s famous poem ‘Warning’ – ‘When I am old I shall wear purple’ – and wearing whatever they felt like.
With the emergence on magazine covers of powerful actresses in their sixties and seventies – Dames Helen Mirren and Judi Dench – celebrated for their style, it is clear that older women are now more fashionable. That should be some comfort for those who are more inclined to worry about whether they could fit into fashionable shoes.
But there is still a very long way to go. If the advertisers and the fashion magazines are beginning to shift, and the newspaper columnists are beginning to talk about it, that is important. But older people worry about it enormously, and those professionals whose job is to care for them later – and who make policy about their care – often have not the slightest idea that appearance is important to them at all.
The issue of what to wear and how to wear it remains hotly debated. What seems to unite older people I talked to was that it was important to do it with style and effort, because of the message that action gives to yourself and others that you remain an active human being. The business of appearance underpins the active role that older people play, and therefore helps them stay healthy and happy.
Work
I wrote at the beginning of the book about how much my mother wanted to go back to work when she was in her eighties. There is no doubt that older people wish to feel that they are active providers in the community, that they are a useful part of society, and that they are not a burden on others. It is the other side of keeping up appearances: older people have to protect their self-respect, not just by looking as if they are playing a useful role, but by actually playing one.
Of course, people manage being active providers better if they live in their own homes, and are mobile enough to get to family, friends and shops. They also have to be in reasonably good health, but that is not an absolute. Even if older people’s health is getting worse, there are ways of making sure their quality of life holds up, or at least that it doesn’t go down at the same speed. There are a range of technological advances that can keep people independent.
Productivity means different things to different people. So many of my discussions with older people make it clear how much they long to be back at work. This might be because they need to earn more money, but it is about more than just money. For many of them, it seems to be a sense of being of value. The more our society judges people by what they do, rather than by who they are, the more older people are going to want to go back to work. Of course they will.
The point is that even those who have run their own businesses, or been very senior in some major corporation, and who have all the money anyone could wish for, still need to be needed, and long to