Best medicine for old age? The company of lively four year olds!
AT WHAT age are we officially very, very old? according to Scarlett, aged four, it’s once you get ‘wibbly-wobbly on your knees when you bend down’.
that sounds fair. the no-nonsense wibbly-wobbly knees test, you can’t argue with it. But then Scarlett adds a harsher criterion: you’re very, very old at 37.
By that reckoning, some of the residents of the Old People’s Home For Four-Year- Olds ( c4) are positively Jurassic. take retired factory cleaner Sylvia, who admits to being 102, although ‘i’m beginning to miscount on purpose’.
a widow of 40 years, Sylvia gave birth to her first child during the Blitz of 1940. the midwife arrived wearing a tin helmet as bombs rained down across the city. ‘We’ll be all right,’ she assured the anxious mum-to-be, ‘as long as one doesn’t actually hit this house.’
note to millennials: when very, very old people bang on about the Blitz spirit, that’s what they’re talking about.
Sylvia and her friends at larkhill retirement village in nottingham were taking part in an experiment begun on a smaller scale last year in Bristol, which had remarkable results. they were invited to befriend a group of preschoolers, joining in their games and helping with nursery lessons. it’s hardly surprising the old folks enjoyed themselves, and their spirits perked up. Only a terminal curmudgeon can resist a smile from a cheeky, confident four-year-old.
More unexpected were the health advantages. the company of children made the pensioners stronger, sharper and more resistant to disease. that’s bizarre, because most parents of four-year-olds find their little darlings can leave them wrung out by the end of the day. Maybe you’ve got to be very, very old to feel the full benefits.
this is a lovely telly format. it combines the charm of channel 4’s Secret life series, where playschool cameras eavesdrop on the children’s games, and poignant interviews with the larkhill residents, aged 81 and up.
the contrast is bittersweet. there was mischievous Scarlett, informing us that her favourite things were ‘rabbits, spiders and worms’, and serious Phoenix, who liked Underground trains and could already read. then we met 97-yearold Dunkirk veteran Victor, a dapper man with a David niven moustache who described himself as ‘ a bit of a hermit’ since the death of his beloved wife Marjorie, and compared retirement to a prison sentence — ‘What are you in here for, mate?’ What they all need is jelly and ice-cream, followed by storytime. that’ll make everyone happy.
the academic and writer a.n. Wilson described himself, at 67, as ‘an old man’ in Return To T.S. Eliotland (BBc4) — adding that eliot himself had advised, ‘ Old men should be explorers’.
this biography of the great modernist poet saw Wilson stomping around Margate (where eliot wrote part of the Wasteland). in his capacious, buttoned- up overcoat with round sunglasses and a colossal beret, he looked like Paddington Bear’s intellectual cousin.
Whether he’s truly old is arguable, but Wilson is certainly old-fashioned. He speaks with the precision of a pre-war vicar: once, all BBc commentators adopted this style but now he’s the last.
like Kenneth clark, the Sixties presenter of civilisation, Wilson highlights his speech by emphasising random syllables. according to him, the novel Ulysses should be pronounced ‘ youliSSeese’. clark played the same trick with ‘ ca-Pit-alism’. like clark, Wilson is very clever — but at times it was like watching an archive documentary.