No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year

by Virginia Ironside

  There is also the bizarrely pleasurable knowledge that my family is now part of a chain. On one level I couldn’t give a fuck—oh, Marie, no no no! That is not a nice word for an old person to use! All my contemporaries say it, but it just doesn’t suit them—anyway, I couldn’t give a pin, let’s say, or a fig, whether the Sharp genes staggered on to the generation after next, but now I’ve discovered that they have, I feel ever so slightly smug. So smug, in fact, that I find it terribly hard to talk about Gene to anyone who either has no children or who has children but has not yet got grandchildren. I should never have told Penny how happy I am about him. It’s exceptionally bad manners to gloat.

  September 14th

  Michelle asks, “What means vegetation?” She swears that this is a plantlike substance that, in France, grows up people’s throats and into their sinuses, and has to be cut back regularly in some patients. I simply cannot believe it. She then asks me if I know how to pronounce the film Beneer.

  After five tries, I look baffled.

  “Beneer!” she says. “Charlton ’eston! Many horses!”

  September 15th

  Couldn’t resist it. I went to John Lewis today and bought a knitting pattern.

  It was my grandmother who’d originally got me started. She bought me a book called How to Knit published by Paton and Baldwins. The patterns were not only for socks and vests, but strange garments like mittens, pinches (?), footlets and spencers. She also bought me a pair of huge wooden needles. She taught me how to wind the wool round my fingers so it wouldn’t slip and, snuggled in the corner of her vast sofa, I would struggle to control these vast sticks that, in my small hands, seemed like two great broom handles, waving around beyond my control.

  After hours of trying, I succeeded, eventually, in knitting my father a twelve-foot-long lime-green scarf in secret for Christmas, which he nobly wore for years. Occasionally it trailed out beneath his duffle coat and dragged along the ground.

  I had a very odd moment in John Lewis. I was looking at the carpet for some reason, which was bottle green, and something seemed to spring out of it like that creepy thing in Alien, and whack straight into my heart. I think it reminded me of a bottle-green coat I once had, but it filled me with a mad and poignant mixture of comfort and nostalgia. The John Lewis staff around me must have wondered whether to put their Health and Safety strategies into operation when they saw me staring at the carpet, completely goofed out.

  And then last week I saw a leaf on a bush and for some inexplicable reason it reminded me of walking to school on a hot autumn day, holding my father’s hand. The tears that sprang to my eyes were inexplicably pleasurable.

  Everyone tells me how they are losing their memory now that they are getting older, and complain about “senior moments,” but I, on the other hand, am astonished by how much my memory has improved. The short-term’s got better because I am so much less anxious than I used to be. And I also take masses of fish oils. If fish could improve Jeeves’s brain, then they can improve mine, too. But what is wonderful is the sudden gift of long-term memory. Cracks seem to appear in the walls of my consciousness, revealing glimpses of the past as clear as if they were happening in front of my eyes. Sometimes I feel intense emotions about these moments that I never, as far as I remember, felt at the time.

  September 20

  This afternoon I just sat in my garden with a cup of tea doing absolutely nothing. I say, nothing. A lie. I was eating a delicious gingernut—oddly, the presence of Gene has got me back to biscuits. Chrissie keeps a tin of biscuits and offers me one with coffee whenever I go over, and today I took the big step and bought some for myself.

  Pouncer was lying on his back on the grass in the golden September sun, his eyes closed in bliss, his velvety paws resting in the air. So vulnerable. On the cherry tree sat two woodpigeons as fat as gray cushions, and hopping on the lawn was a blackbird looking for worms among the daises. Toward the back of my garden, where there is a forest of trees and shrubs, it was green darkness, from which, amazingly, emerged a gray squirrel.

  I had one of those really weird moments when you feel like St. Francis. Not only do you feel like St. Francis, but you also feel peculiarly at one with nature. I never used to feel like this: it feels like another age thing. Nature is saying: “Now you’re getting on and coming to the end of your life, come and join us. We’re your friends. There’s nothing to fear.” It was definitely a presentiment of death, but not a creepy ghoullike-figure-in-a-black-cape-clutching-a-scythe kind of presentiment but, rather, a beautifully peaceful and seductive kind of presentiment, a call to a world where the phrase “Go for it!” and other such unpleasant prods to do an Open University course or live for three months with a Masai tribe in Africa, have no place at all.

  Sep 25

  These things can never be repeated, of course. Today, I made my cup of tea and got out the last of the gingernuts, and sat down in the garden with my Sudoku puzzle—a fatal addiction that was introduced to me by Lucy, who is a demon at it. They say it keeps the brain active, but it just drives mine into a frenzy of fury, mental cross-eyedness and frustration until the final stage when it all works out, and you’re flooded by this ludicrous sense of achievement, swiftly followed by a terrible sense of inner emptiness. Anyway, I’d just got going and done all the threes and the fives, when over the gardens the raucous noise of a football match commentary blared out through the trees.

  Instant fury. Telling myself to calm down, I went back into the house and sat in the cool, but half an hour later it was still going on. I rang up Penny.

  “Can you hear it?” I asked.

  “Can I hear it!” she said. “It’s deafening! It’s that idiot across the way from me. I’ve asked him to turn it down, but he won’t.”

  “Let me see what I can do,” I said grimly. I put on my Furious Old Bat Face (a face that is all too easy to summon up, I’m afraid) and stomped round to Penny’s. Into her garden we went, with the noise getting louder and louder, and there, over the wall, sat a huge, elderly yob, covered with wrinkly tattoos; his head was shaven and he wore shorts, over which spilled a vast beer belly. He was barefooted and he appeared, to make things worse, to be fast asleep.

  On the table beside him were three empty cans of Special Brew, and a transistor, turned up at full blast.

  “Excuse me!” I shouted. No response. “Excuse me!” I felt like such an idiot. I wished I had the kind of voice that was able to say: “Oy! You there!” but I don’t. After the fourth “Excuse me!” he looked up.

  “Yeah?” he said drunkenly.

  “I wonder,” I shouted, forever polite, “if you would be so kind as to turn down your radio.”

  “Why?” he said, staring sullenly at me through drunken eyes.

  “Because not everyone in these gardens wants to listen to the Arsenal v. Chelsea match. Or whatever it is,” I added, as he strove to correct me. “I live ten gardens down and I can’t hear myself speak.”

  “It’s a free world,” he said aggressively.

  “It is indeed a free world,” I replied (oh, dear, that “indeed”—it doesn’t come across well in a shriek). “But,” I added, “I am chair of the local Residents’ Association, and I am speaking not just for myself, but for dozens of other residents who have complained about the noise to me.” (Not true, but what the hell.)

  “Fuck off,” he said glumly. “You’re not tellin’ me what to do.”

  I upped the ante slightly. “If you continue, I’m afraid I will have to complain to the Shepherds Bush Housing Association, which owns the house you live in. I don’t want to go down that route. I want us to be friends.”

  “Wha’?”

  “I want us to be friends,” I shouted. “And by the way, I’m not telling you to turn the radio down, I’m begging you!”

  At this point a window flung itself up from across the way and a woman leaned out.

  “Here we go,” muttered Penny, who was hiding in a bush behind me. “Now we’re for it. It’s Shei
la the Dealer.”

  I’d never come across Sheila the Dealer but she is a known drugs supplier in the street. Actually drug dealers are so common in the streets round here that there isn’t a street that doesn’t have one. They’ve become like corner shops, an essential attribute of every neighborhood.

  “Oy! You!” she shouted. Both the man and I looked up. Her voice was piercing.

  “Not you,” she screamed. “Fucking you!” Neither of us was any the wiser. I was terrified she was going to gang up with the man against me, this appalling old middle-class complainer.

  “Look, you fuckin’ arse’ole!” she yelled. “Can you ’ear the lidy? She’s not fuckin’ tellin’ you to turn your radio orf, she’s fuckin’ beggin’ you! You deaf? So fuckin’ turn it off, you cunt, and give us all a fuckin’ bloody break, OK?”

  Her outburst startled the man so much that, without a word, he took the radio off the table and marched indoors. Just as I was about to give Sheila the Dealer a friendly thumbs-up sign, the window banged down and that was that.

  “Wasn’t that just amazing?” I said to Penny.

  “Astonishing!” she said. “Cup of tea? Or perhaps, as it’s five, it’s not too early for a drink?”

  For the next half hour we discussed whether we would like a tattoo ourselves, and discovered that we’d both always longed for one but thought that now it was too late. Penny wanted a flower, but I wanted a bird. “Or what about a bracelet that would read: ‘This is my wrist,’ Magritte style?” I suggested.

  We then wondered why we had taken drugs when we were young when it is surely now that’s the time to take them. If one went totally off one’s head it wouldn’t matter terribly. Penny said that she’d read that a combination of Red Bull, aspirin and Coke can make your brain sharper. But the mixture sounds about as plausible as the recipe we used to try in the sixties, when, before we got on to the harder stuff, we tried to get high by smoking dried banana skins.

  I long to take an E. Penny says she’s up for it if I can find any. Will ask Jack—though maybe he’d disapprove of his old mum taking drugs? Perhaps, I suggested, she could ask Gavin, but she says Gavin only smokes dope. Typical.

  At the mention of Gavin she went all quiet. Then she told me that apparently after a blissful day during which they had made love, laughed, walked, sang songs together, read poetry to each other and found they had everything in common, he had become completely unobtainable. Not a peep.

  “He hasn’t texted or e-mailed or rung,” she said. “I’m starting to wonder if he’s dead! Had some frightful accident!”

  “You and I know,” I said firmly, “that unfortunately, men are never dead or lying in hospital in a coma. We are experienced old ladies who have acquired a certain bit of wisdom. The reason that a man—or anyone, come to that—doesn’t contact one is very simple. Either they are terrified to do so or they don’t want to. Or they are married. If I were you, Penny, I would settle for the terrified option. It is, quite honestly, easier to bear.”

  She looked so sad and frail, like an elderly five-year-old, if there is such a thing, that I put my arms round her and gave her a hug.

  “You’re very brave,” I said. “You’re braver than me. I couldn’t do it anymore. I’d be too frightened of getting hurt. You’ve done it once. You’ll do it again.”

  Penny’s body shuddered with sobs. “The trouble is that with this love business—or whatever it is—just because one’s old doesn’t mean to say it isn’t just as agonizingly painful as it was when one was seventeen,” she said through her tears. “Oh, I wish I hadn’t started it. I must have been mad.”

  I rather wished we could go round to Sheila the Dealer and score some drugs right there, but perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea.

  September 26th

  The sight of the awful cat that Maciej gave me for my birthday made me feel so ill that I have taken it off the mantelpiece and put it into a drawer. Will he notice? That is the question.

  Later

  Decided putting it in a drawer was too hurtful to Maciej. Hit on brilliant idea and asked if Michelle would like to have it in her room. That way Maciej will see it when he cleans her room, and I can say that she liked it so much that I let her have it till the end of her stay. To my delight she was enchanted with it.

  Later

  Hughie rings. It turns out that after trying a course of antibiotics, the doctor has finally given up, and Hughie’s waiting to have a chest x-ray. He asks if I’ve heard the one about the man who was visited by an angel one night. I say I haven’t and he says that the man asked the angel if there was a golf course in heaven. The angel replied: “Do you want the good news or the bad news?” “Good news,” said the man. “OK,” said the angel. “Yes, there is a golf course. It’s a brilliant green, wonderful grass, superb scenery, dozens of caddies and endless sun.” “And the bad news?” asked the man. The angel said: “You’re due to tee off at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning.”

  “So I’m getting my golf clubs polished in readiness,” adds Hughie.

  Find Hughie’s preoccupation with death rather grueling sometimes. He seems to have got it all taped, but no one around him has, that’s the problem. Anyway, who said anything about dying?

  September 28th

  Was delighted when I went round to see Gene today, to find that he was contentedly sucking a large see-through purple-and-yellow-striped dummy. Not only that, but there appears to be a spare one with red and blue spots, on the kitchen table. Could they have come from the Design Museum?

  Poor Chrissie is shattered with getting up and feeding Gene, though now he has a supplementary bottle. What is it about feeding babies? It is just so lovely to sit with him on my lap, his little head cradled in the crook of my arm, and watch his tiny lips just sucking away at the teat, his eyes closed in a kind of blissful meditation. His eyelids are transparent and blue, and he smells of warm cotton wool. He only has a small bit of hair, so the shape of his head is quite clear, with the little soft fontanel at the top, and the skin in the triangle moving slightly, bomp bomp bomp, to his tiny heartbeat.

  He’s got to the stage when he stares at you with what can only be called a quizzical look, not a word I often use, and studies your face as if he’s searching for something he’s lost. I look back at him, also searching for something I’ve lost.

  Have to say that I feel slightly nerve-racked carrying him upstairs. And I don’t think I’d be very happy having to lift him down a flight of concrete steps wearing high-heeled shoes, just in case I dropped him. I don’t feel quite the same confidence with him as I did with Jack, simply because he isn’t mine. And yet, what is so immensely rewarding and fulfilling about being with him is that my love for him is pure and clear, unclouded by all the guilt, panic and anxiety that I experienced with Jack when he was tiny.

  When he cries, I don’t have any of those feelings of “Oh, Lord, he’s shouting and crying, he must hate me…oh dear, if I do this or that it will affect him for life…oh, why did I bring him into such a terrible world?” I just think, quite simply: “Ho hum, he’s crying. He’ll soon get over it.”

  Some other grannies, talking about their grandchildren, give a fearful wink as they end up with that well-worn cliché: “Yes, aren’t they lovely! And the best thing is, you can give them back at the end of the day!”

  But I can’t go along with that. For me, the only thing I have against being a grandmother is that, sadly, I have to.

  October 1st

  Oh dear. Today I called Jack “David” (his dad), Chrissie “Mummy” and Gene, “Jack.” Am I going mad?

  October 2nd

  Maciej said how kind it was of me to have lent the dreadful ceramic cat to Michelle.

  “Beautiful cat for beautiful girl,” he said. “But I will bring you new cat!” he said, his face lighting up in the most lovely smile. “Beautiful cat for beautiful woman! My brother, he import them, actually. I will bring you one with green eyes! Bring good luck! If you want more for your friends, I get!”
>
  October 7th

  Archie left a message on my answering machine. He asked if I could bear to come for the weekend next month, as he’s having some kind of house party. God knows how he’ll manage without Philippa, who used to organize all that, but good for him for making the effort. I can’t imagine that Ulla or whatever ghastly name the Swede’s got, will be able to cope with organizing a house party in the same way that Philippa used to. Anyway, surely she won’t have any time for the Marions and Tims of this world—of whom Archie knows plenty. They’re like barnacles that you suddenly find you’re stuck with, whether you like them or not, simply because you’ve known them for so long.

  Still, rather wish Archie hadn’t got hitched up to this creature quite so soon. Anyway, when—and if—she goes he’ll certainly find another bimbo just as fast. So unfair that older single men can take their choice of women from twenty to eighty, while all us female oldies can get are either weirdos like Gavin or, worse, ancient old gentlemen who want someone to wheel their bath chairs for them.

  Can’t go, however. Next time. And actually quite relieved. It’s not that I’m remotely interested in Archie, but to see him with a succulent young blonde draped around him might, I’m afraid, make me feel rather ill. Makes me all the more determined to give up men forever.

  October 9th

  Penny rang and while we were talking about Scotsmen, she asked me if I thought it was true that they wore nothing under their kilts.

  October 10th

  Today I took care of Gene all day while Chrissie went off and did some work at her old company. She seems to have to fly off to Brussels and back in one day. My plan was to take Gene shopping in the morning, then bring him back and give him his lunch, then make some phone calls and do some bits and pieces when he was asleep and finally take him to the park in the afternoon.

  I was almost sick with fear as I bumped him down the steep steps that lead down from Jack and Chrissie’s flat, tightly gripping on the handle of the pushchair, visualizing a dreadful Potemkin scene in the middle of the road. I wasn’t only sick with fear because I might let go of the buggy handles, but also because before I’d set out, Jack had warned me: “Remember to take care, won’t you, Mum. There’s only the odd maniac and mugger, but it’s old ladies like you who stop and make mobile phone calls in the street who are a natural target. Not that you’re old…And that handbag looks rather inviting.”