by Sue Townsend
She handed Pandora a piece of paper, which Pandora glanced at briefly before crumpling it and throwing it into a wastepaper basket. ‘I’m going to romp home,’ she said. She laid a red-taloned hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s so good to see you, sweetie,’ she said.
‘Don’t you dare call me sweetie, Pandora,’ I said. ‘I’ve known you since you were thirteen and three-quarters. I lived in your boxroom when you were in a ménage à trois with a gay husband and a dyslexic bodybuilder. I know your secrets.’
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve turned into a bit of a monster since this campaign started. I’ve been taken over by ambition,’ she added sadly, as though ambition were a terminal illness. Her mobile phone trilled. She pressed a button. ‘Mandy!’ she said, and turned her back on me.
I prised my mother away from Ivan Braithwaite and his silly sculptured side-whiskers, and we drove to the first of our pick-ups: an old woman called Ida Peacock whose house smelled of dead cats. She walked with sticks. She told me that Tony Blair was going to give her two new hips. Our second pick-up was Mabel d’Arcy, whose great-great-grandad was a surviving officer on the Titanic, she bragged to my mother about the fact until Ida Peacock said, ‘He shoulda gone down with his ship like a gent.’ They didn’t speak to each other again.
Our last pensioner was an old bloke called Harry Worthington. He said he hadn’t been out of the house for a week. My mother said how sorry she was that he was so isolated. Worthington said he was far from isolated, he’d recently fallen in love and had spent most of the time in bed with his new girlfriend, Alice Pope. Ida and Mabel giggled like girls and gave Harry many admiring glances. He was seventy-nine, but the old git carried on as if he was Hugh Grant. He’d got a thick head of hair, and a bushy moustache. I asked him why Alice wasn’t voting, and he said that she was an anarchist who didn’t believe in any form of government. I asked him who, in the unlikely event of Alice Pope’s anarchists coming to power, would maintain the drains. He said Alice didn’t believe in drains. I pointed out that drains are absolutely pivotal to civilization. Worthington said that Alice didn’t believe in civilization. No wonder he didn’t get out of bed for a week. She sounds like an animal.
As I helped Mabel out of the car at the polling station at Rosie’s school, it transpired that she was a supporter of Sir Arnold Tufton, and intended to vote Conservative. ‘He was very good when I was burgled,’ she said.
‘Did he catch the burglar, or recover your stolen property?’ I asked in a faux-naïf fashion.
‘No, but he told me that if he was Home Secretary he’d chop the thieves’ hands off,’ she said, benignly.
‘Dr Pandora Braithwaite is very strong on Crime and Punishment,’ I said. This was no lie. I knew for a fact that Pandora had studied Dostoevsky’s masterpiece for A level, and received the highest grade in the East Midlands.
As Mabel staggered down the drive of the comprehensive, I tried to brainwash her into changing her political affiliation. I told several lies: that Pandora was a blood relation of Winston Churchill, that Pandora hunted with the Quorn, that Pandora made her own bread. But who knows how the old bat voted in the end?
Harry was a Pandora devotee; the things he admired about her were ‘her kissable lips, her delightful breasts’ and her legs, ‘like Cyd Charisse’.
Ida Peacock voted for Paddy Ashdown because ‘He is a military man.’ Didn’t she mind his admitted adultery? I asked. Ida smiled, showing her eighty-one-year-old teeth. ‘All the nice girls love a sailor,’ she sang.
Harry Worthington joined in, then sang the hideous song ‘I’ll See You Again’, complete with throbbing vibrato and ludicrous Noël Coward accent, all the way back to his pensioner’s bungalow. I was glad to see the back of them all.
My life was once blighted by a pensioner called Bert Baxter, a Communist with an unstable Alsatian called Sabre who was addicted to beetroot (Bert, not the dog). Baxter bullied me into such unsavoury activities as cutting his horny toenails, and burying his decomposed dog in hard-baked earth with a coal scuttle. Sabre’s interment was one of the worst days of my life. It still rankles with me now. Bert died two years ago. I was quite surprised at how much I cared, though I have to admit that my main emotion on hearing the news was relief that I wouldn’t have to cut his toenails ever again. Bert was Leicester’s oldest and most objectionable man. On his 105th birthday Pandora and I were present when he was interviewed in the lounge of the Alderman Cooper Sunshine Home, where he was surrounded by the Lord Mayor, Lady Mayoress, fellow residents, staff and friends. The interviewer, a young woman in a pink suit called Lisa Barrowfield, tried manfully to stop Bert from making references to her breasts, which were not particularly prominent, as I recall: slightly larger than Jaffa oranges, but not quite the size of Marks & Spencer’s grapefruits.
Lisa asked, ‘Bert, you’re 105 years of age. To what do you attribute your long life?’
Poor Lisa asked this question fourteen times. None of Bert’s replies could be broadcast before the watershed of nine o’clock. Eventually, after the mayor and his wife had dissociated themselves from the occasion, Lisa phoned her boss at Central TV and asked for guidance. She was told to record several interviews with him and they would do a ‘heavy edit’ job in the studio.
My disenchantment with television began the next night. Bert Baxter had been edited into a harmless, pleasant old man. Here, just for the record, is one of Baxter’s real replies.
LISA: Bert, you are 105 years old. What’s your secret?
BERT BAXTER: Well, I reckon that the sixty Woodbines a day I’ve smoked have sort of put a healthy lining on my lungs. I’ve never jogged or played games or been to bed sober, so I’ve slept well. I shagged my way around Europe during the war, and I live mainly on beetroot sandwiches, Spotted Dick and custard. But the secret of a healthy life, and I’d tell any youth this, is don’t let your sperm collect up inside your balls, let it out! (Laughs) Let ‘em all out! (Coughs) Light me a fag, Pandora, there’s a good gel.
What was transmitted was this manifestation of the TV editor’s black art.
BERT: Beetroot sandwiches have kept me healthy, I’ve slept well, and played a lot of ball games in my youth. I’ve never smoked and I’ve jogged my way around Europe.
Bert was horrified when he saw Midlands Today, which had been trailed by teasers all day, e.g. an unseen announcer would say between programmes, ‘And in Midlands Today at six-thirty, the Leicester pensioner who says that jogging around Europe has kept him alive for 105 years.’ Why the stress on ‘has’ was there, I don’t know. Was there a dispute about this? I don’t think so.
I was glad that Bert died in a stair-lift accident the day before his 106th birthday. I couldn’t have gone through another grisly birthday party. And I know for a fact that the Mayor and Mayoress of Leicester had booked a holiday in Tenerife to encompass that very day, May 9th. Still, I think Bert would have been pleased with the size of the headline in the Leicester Mercury, if not the content.
STAIR-LIFT TRAGEDY: OLDEST JOGGER DIES. Bertram Baxter, the oldest man in Leicester, died early today in a tragic accident involving a dressing-gown cord and the mechanism of a stair-lift at the Alderman Cooper Sunshine Home, in Brook Lane, where he had resided for many years. Mr Baxter, whose wife Queenie died in 1982, was described by the senior nursing officer, Mrs Loretta Harvey, today, as ‘quite a character, who didn’t suffer fools gladly’.
Mrs Harvey recalled the time that Mr Baxter had sued the Alderman Cooper Sunshine Home for damages – claiming that he was not being provided with his dietary needs. Mr Baxter ate only beetroot sandwiches, Spotted Dick and custard. The case became a cause célèbre when Mr Baxter went on hunger strike and for a while he enjoyed considerable national notoriety, becoming known as ‘Beetroot Bertie’. His victory was widely applauded as a triumph for common sense – though Mrs Harvey claimed that the kitchen staff were ‘greatly inconvenienced’.
I shouldn’t be sorry if I never saw another old-age pensioner again. I have decided that I cannot bear
their slowness, their ill-fitting teeth and their mania for pickled vegetables. My mother soon got bored with assisting the pensioners: she said she’d rather be ‘at the hub of things’, so I dropped her off at Labour Party HQ. I continued alone.
The next person I picked up was another old man called Archie Tait. He was infuriatingly slow in getting into the car. He hawked and coughed into a large white handkerchief, and when I asked him sarcastically if he was all right he said no, he wasn’t, he had pneumonia. He spoke very nicely for somebody who lived in a terraced house.
‘Shouldn’t you be in bed, or in hospital?’ I said.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I must vote, I’m a socialist.’
‘Mr Blair wouldn’t want you passing out at the polling station,’ I said.
‘Mr Blair?’ he said, disdainfully. ‘I’ve just said I’m a socialist, I’m voting Socialist Labour, for Arthur’s party.’
‘Arthur?’ I checked.
‘Arthur Scargill,’ he said, as if talking to an idiot.
I tried to persuade him to change his mind and vote for Pandora. I told him that she had supported Mr Scargill during the miners’ strike by holding a raffle at school and sending the proceeds (£19.76, I recall) to the Strike Fund, but he would not be deterred.
‘I left my left lung and my right leg at Arnhem,’ he informed me, as he lurched out of the back of the car. ‘And I didn’t do that so that English men and women would turn into Europeans, drinking lukewarm cappuccino.’
To try to counter his fanaticism I said, ‘Cappuccino is a perfectly harmless pleasant-tasting beverage. I drink six cups a day.’
‘It’s a little bit of coffee and a bloody lot of froth,’ he said.
He shook my hand and thanked me for the lift. I told him that I would wait and take him back home. Morally I would have been perfectly entitled to leave him, with his right lung and left leg, stranded at Carts Lane Primary School.
I felt a bit aggrieved that he had accepted a lift under false pretences, claiming to be a Labour voter when he was, in fact, a socialist all along.
When we were driving back towards his house, he apologized for swearing earlier. I said I no longer noticed profane language. I explained that I worked in a Soho restaurant where derivations of the F-word were used as nouns and adjectives and verbs – they were the building blocks of most Soho sentences.
When we stopped outside his terraced house, he had a violent coughing fit that made his face go red and his eyes run. It took a long time for him to catch his breath, so I helped him out of the front passenger seat and supported him to his front door. He took a bunch of keys out of his trouser pocket and handed them to me while he leaned against the wall, gasping.
As the front door swung open, I saw a bookcase stuffed with books. Facing me were Das Kapital, Ulysses and Harold Nicolson’s Diaries. Under the window that faced the street there was a single day bed. A low table stood next to it, covered with a clutter of medicines and jars. A coal fire glimmered in the hearth. A fat cat sat on the mat. Tait lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. He was a tall man, his feet (foot) hung over the end board. As I went into the tiny back kitchen to put the kettle on, I cursed God and socialism for sending this pensioner to me. Am I never to be free of them? Are pensioners my albatross? Am I destined to voyage through life with their liver-spotted hands circling my neck?
I made him as comfortable as a one-legged, one-lunged old man with pneumonia can be and took his phone number. I ascertained from him that he had no relations (of course), and no friends (naturellement), he had quarrelled with his neighbours (mais oui) and guess what? Quelle surprise! He is alone in the world. Apart from the huge ginger cat, which is called Andrew. I complimented Tait on the creature, saying it was the biggest cat I’d ever seen.
Then I wrote out my mobile number, stuck it under a jar of sweet piccalilli on the low table, and told him to ring me if he needed help tonight. He assured me that he was perfectly all right, and asked me to go away and leave him in peace. I knew he wouldn’t drink the tea I’d made him in the big china cup with the rose design and the gold rim. He didn’t look as if he had the strength to raise his head from the pillow.
As I drove back to the committee rooms, I wished that everybody over fifty years of age would commit mass suicide and give the rest of us a break.
I understand that certain ‘grey’ industries would collapse; garden-trellis and thermal-underwear manufacturers spring to mind. But the benefits are obvious: no pensions to pay out, no residential homes for the elderly to maintain, and at least half of the disabled parking spaces outside Marks & Spencer’s would be reclaimed by the young and the able-bodied.
Once again I thank Pepys, the god of diarists, that my own journal will never be read in my lifetime. I would not like to be thought an uncaring ageist. I know that when I reach fifty, I will happily sacrifice my life so that the young are not saddled with the old.
On reflection, perhaps fifty is too young. Fifty-five would be a more reasonable cut-off point (if in good health or a non-smoker), but sixty would be my absolute limit. What’s the point of anybody living after then? Sans teeth, sans muscle tone et sans sex?
My last job before the polling station closed at ten o’clock was to pick up a Ms Clough of Bevan Close, Beveridge Estate. To my horror she had three little kids with her. ‘I’ve got to bring ‘em with me,’ she said. ‘I ‘aven’t gotta babysitter.’
Ms Clough was excited by the prospect of a Labour victory. She thought that Tony Blair would ‘support single mothers’. She had heard him say so on the Jimmy Young programme, so she knew it must be true. I assured Ms Clough that Mr Blair was a trustworthy, caring man who had dedicated his life to righting the wrongs of our inequitable society.
‘Do you know Mr Blair?’ she asked, looking impressed.
I watched in the driving mirror as my expression changed from confident to enigmatic. ‘Does anybody really know Tony?’ I said. ‘I think even Cherie would say she doesn’t really know Tony.’
Ms Clough disciplined her children, who were fiddling with the pine-tree air-freshener, and, with a touch of irritation in her voice, said, ‘But have you met him and spoken to him? Does he know your name?’
I was forced to admit that, no, I had never met him; that, no, I had never spoken to him; and that, no, Tony Blair did not know my name. We passed the rest of the journey in silence. Ms Clough should join the Leicestershire Constabulary – she would be very effective in the Criminal Investigation Department.
Nigel’s Next van was parked outside the house when I got home. He was in the kitchen drinking tea with my mother and Ivan Braithwaite. My mother was parading between the worktops in a new scarlet trouser-suit, which (I thought) clashed horribly with her red hair. However, Ivan Braithwaite (fifty-five, so ripe for the cull) was saying, ‘It’s immensely elegant, Pauline, but it needs high heels.’
How dare Braithwaite advise my mother on suitable footwear! The man is a sartorial disaster area. He is the Pompeii of menswear in his hideous Rohan outdoor trousers and his Birkenstock sandals/white socks combo.
I remarked to him that I was surprised he had the time for tea-drinking – wasn’t he meant to be Pandora’s local media co-ordinator? He said he had already written the local press releases. One if Pandora wins, and one if she loses. He said there was a lot of national press interest in Pandora because she was exceptionally beautiful and had long hair. Most of the other women Labour candidates had short hair, and couldn’t fill a thirty-six AA-cup bra. Also, despite grooming lessons, they applied their make-up as though they were toddlers who had run amok at Boots’ No. 7 make-up counter.
I was shocked at Braithwaite’s shallow attitude to the democratic process. At no time did I hear him talk about his daughter’s beliefs, principles or policies. I said as much, and reminded him that he had once resigned from his local Labour Party branch on a point of principle (somebody had been fiddling the tea money).
No doubt to fill the conversational void that ensued,
Nigel said he was sorry to hear that my marriage was over. I shot one of my venomous glances at my mother, who had the good grace to blush and look away (another hideous clash of reds). I said to Nigel that, on the contrary, I was better off out of it. My mother said, ‘On the contrary, it’s Jo Jo who’s better off out of it.’
I said I could not understand why she had divorced me on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour. My mother replied, ‘Come on! What about the Cotswolds sneezing row? That went on for three days.’
She was referring to the time when I accused Jo Jo of sneezing in an exhibitionist manner, by putting unnecessary emphasis on the shoo! of Ah-tish-shoo! And also of extending the shoo for longer than is functionally necessary. I accused her of wanting to draw attention to herself. Jo Jo pointed out that she was a five-foot-eleven, heavily pregnant black woman with braided and beaded hair walking down a Cotswold street, which was entirely populated by white people who were staring openly at her. ‘I lack many things, Adrian, but what I do not lack is attention!’ She sneezed again, extending the shoo! to ridiculous lengths. Men have murdered for less. I said so. My mother and father, whom I had foolishly invited to stay in our rented cottage, took Jo Jo’s side totally. I was virtually sent to Coventry.
Meanwhile Jo Jo’s exhibitionism worsened. She began to put even more stress, an inordinate amount of stress, I thought, on the Ah! before the tish! I was in torment. Dr Ng, my personal GP, put me on Prozac when we got back home to Soho.
Shortly after the Cotswold disaster, William was born into a paddling pool at the Royal Infirmary Maternity Hospital, Leicester – at my specific request – thus joining a dynasty of Moles who had drawn their first breath there (the Infirmary, not the birthing pool). It was my wish that William should enter the world via warm water, candlelight and Bach, as described in a leaflet issued by the Society of Radical Midwives. Jo Jo, however, was curiously resistant at first, saying that she would prefer to be unconscious throughout the labour. When I expressed surprise, saying, ‘I’m sorry to hear you say that, Jo Jo. I’d have thought that you, as an African woman, would have had a more natural attitude towards childbirth,’ to my utter amazement she became tearful and angry, and raised her voice to me, saying, ‘When my waters break, why don’t you find me a field that I can work in throughout my labour? And there must be a tree in this field, because, as an African woman, I will naturally want to give birth under its branches. And, of course, as soon as I have done so I will strap the child on to my back and return to my work in the fields.’