Four-year-olds who gave us the most magical Christmas gift of all
It can be a lonely time of year in an old people’s home. But this year Santa brought something truly special ...
THE shopping trolley Ken Pidcock can manage. He says he likes to lean on it, using it as a sort of walking frame. The giant toyshop, though, with shelves groaning to the ceiling, is just too much.
As he wanders from aisle to aisle, confusion is writ large on his face. Charged with finding a present for a four-year-old girl and her friends, the 87-year-old widower realises he has no idea what to do.
For their entire life together, his wife Barbara — or ‘Barbie’ and ‘my beloved wife’, as he calls her — did all the family’s present shopping. She also did all the preparations on Christmas Day, scooped up all the wrapping paper when the opening frenzy was over, and even found time to play with the dog.
But when Barbara died five years ago, Christmas died too for Ken. There is a particular sort of loneliness experienced by the bereaved at Christmas, and Ken, who met his wife at a whist drive when he was 13, knows what it feels like: ‘You just feel so terribly sad because you remember all the wonderful family Christmases you had.’
Those treasured days — and many more — are captured on a videotape entitled MEMORIES that Ken regularly views.
‘I could watch Barbara all day,’ he says as his wife comes alive again on his TV screen.
The date on the home movie reel is 1964. There are Ken’s two daughters in pigtails, unwrapping presents and skipping around in fairy costumes. In one shot it’s Ken, in his paper hat, in the picture rather than Barbara.
‘We took turns with the cine camera,’ he says. ‘That year was the first at our new home in Africa. We’d moved to Uganda because I got a job there. We didn’t even have a camera before we left — not many people had in those days — but we bought a stills camera and a cine one because we knew we were embarking on a big adventure.’
The adventure ended just after the last Christmas the devoted pair spent together. ‘Barbie had just been told she was terminal. We didn’t believe it, of course, and she was so good on that day, we thought maybe they had got it wrong and a miracle was happening. But it wasn’t. She died soon afterwards.
‘I never wanted to celebrate Christmas after that. I became a bit of a hermit, I suppose. I didn’t want to see anyone — she did all the organising of our social life anyway. I realised that afterwards; funny I never had before. But it was even worse at Christmas.’
Of course, he still had his daughters (and adored grandchildren) by then, but it wasn’t the same.
‘It became a time when I just wanted to be on my own. I didn’t want to spoil it for anyone.’
This Christmas might also have been one to be endured rather than enjoyed for Ken, had it not been for the arrival of another lady in his life.
No, he hasn’t found love again. Or at least, not that sort of love. But Ken was one of the stars of this year’s heartwarming TV series Old People’s Home for 4 Year Olds, the Channel 4 programme that ships a busload of excitable youngsters into a retirement home, and tests what happens next.
In Ken’s case, what happened was something he was wholly unprepared for: life becoming fun again.
The hermit widower, who had resigned himself to a solitary existence, was paired up with a little girl called Lily (or Lily Bobtail, as she insisted on being called). Lily may have seemed rather a bossy little madam — her opening gambit, over lunch, was to ask whether Ken would like to swap his chips for her vegetables — but the pair quickly became inseparable.
Now the cameras have returned for a Christmas special, which sees Ken despatched to a toyshop to buy presents not just for Lily but for all the children in the experiment.
‘Even with our own grandchildren, my wife did it all, and when they got that little bit older we gave them cheques so they could buy what they liked. When they asked me to go to the toyshop I thought, “hang on, but there are nine ladies here”. I realised very quickly what they were doing.’
How did the gruff pensioner (‘I don’t like shopping,’ he complains at the start) react to being practically frogmarched to the toyshop? Well, he thoroughly enjoyed it, even when he found himself playing a game called Pie Face that involved him having whipped cream splattered on his nose. He and another retirementhome pal turned into big kids themselves as they tried on giantsized panda and bear heads.
‘Well, it was the most fun I’d had in ages,’ he admits. ‘Even if they forced me into it.’
The enchanting Old People’s Home for 4 Year Olds has now helped two sets of pensioners in different retirement homes. When the programme was conceived, Channel 4 went to great lengths to present it as a bona fide social experiment. An army of experts was enlisted to run a series of tests on the pensioners involved, to see if daily contact with children made them more physically active, alert and, well, alive.
Studies in other countries, particularly ones where there is a policy of combining nursery schools and retirement homes on one site, have suggested the interaction is beneficial to all.
Much of the programme is involved with setting the participants tasks, then, at various points, assessing how agile they are and how depressed they feel.
But in truth you don’t need people with clipboards to convince you this experiment works. You just need to talk to the elderly people themselves — and the parents of the children, for that matter.
That the residents of Lark Hill retirement village in Nottingham stayed in touch with their respective charges even after the cameras stopped rolling tells its own story.
A more powerful one is told with Ken’s wide smile as he explains how contact has been maintained.
‘We go to see them and they come to us,’ he says of the children. ‘Last Saturday they all came over with their parents and had lunch. I think there were 40 of us in total. It’s like acquiring a whole load of new greatgrandchildren. When we see them it makes the whole week brighter.’
LILYBOBTAIL may still be his No 1 friend, but Ken confides that he has also become close to another family who took part in the show.
Scarlett Pollard’s father Tim had allowed her to take part, but with some trepidation. Scarlett had lost her mum Sally to cancer just months before filming started. The scenes where Scarlett told her new friend Beryl, 84, that her mum was dead left viewers in bits. ‘I have a heartache,’ she explained.
It seems that ever since, Scarlett and her dad have been scooped up by the residents of Lark Hill — something Tim describes as ‘completely unexpected’.
‘They’ve become friends — family really,’ he says. ‘I had no idea of the impact doing this would have on our lives. I agreed to do it in the first place because, like most parents, I wanted to see what Scarlett was like when I wasn’t around.
‘Because we had just lost Sal, I was worried about her. But to see her not only making friends but friends she could open up to about what she was feeling was incredible.’
How did he feel, though, when he watched his daughter explain for the first time that her mum was dead?
‘It was a punch in the gut,’ he admits. ‘ But there was also relief that she could say it, that she had found someone like Beryl who she was comfortable enough with to say it. I always remember the words she used: “My mum died.” The voiceover
came in at this point and said “Sally passed away…”. I thought that was striking. It’s the adults who try to sugarcoat it with the language they use.’ Scarlett is again a standout star in the Christmas special, which involves the children laying on a festive show and inviting other elderly people in the neighbourhood to come along. She is the one who asks the residents to help her with something she doesn’t understand.
‘ Why doesn’t he have claws when he’s called Santa Claus?’ she asks, as any hint of morose mood evaporates.
Yet her dad says the residents of Lark Hill — all of whom have had their own heartbreaks — have become unofficial grief counsellors for his daughter. ‘They have all experienced loss, so I think it has normalised it for Scarlett. ‘She knows there are other people who have lost mummies and daddies, and husbands and wives.’ He has benefited from that wealth of experience too. Tim says he sat next to Ken at a special screening of the Christmas show, and the tears flowed at the part where Ken was watching his wife Barbara walking across the screen. ‘I put my arm around him, hoping he wouldn’t mind,’ says Tim. ‘ We’ve actually become very close, which I didn’t expect. Ken knows what it is to lose his wife. He has gone through a lot of the things I’ve been through.’ Tim is definitely a convert to the idea that retirement homes and nursery facilities should be combined. ‘It’s a no-brainer because it’s the way it used to be. I think it should be rolled out in every town. It’s a win-win for everyone.’ That is a sentiment shared by retired teacher and magistrate Pauleen Davies, who is 92. Pauleen is a no-nonsense type who thinks she was chosen to appear in the show because she was ‘a bit bossy and an antidote to the sad souls’.
SHechallenges the idea that all elderly people in residential homes are lonely or worn down by life. She kicks off our chat in sparky fashion by pointing out that it’s the male residents of Lark Hill who tend to have turned their faces to the wall and lost the will to live.
‘Think about it,’ she says. ‘There were nine women in the show and three men. Who was doing the moping?’
Isn’t it often the case that men are hit harder by the loss of a partner, though?
‘I think that’s true. The women do the organising, so when they die the men are lost. I mean, I miss my husband terribly. When he first died, I used to look at the empty armchair and think “how could you do this to me? How could you leave me?” but you have to go on. Life has to go on.’
Pauleen moved to Lark Hill nine years ago, after a fall on some ice made her realise she had to ‘start planning for my future, so as not to be a burden on my children’. Her two sons live nearby, but Lark Hill has been the perfect solution for her.
She says she has hopefully made a friend for life in young Ismail, the little boy she was paired with. His family, too, have come to visit. ‘We have a shindig about once a month,’ she says.
She has watched, incredulous, as the more troubled souls around her have been transformed by the children’s presence. ‘It has made the world of difference to Ken. People like Ken keep themselves to themselves and don’t feel the need to integrate, but now he wants to.’
Ken becomes quite emotional when I ask what his beloved Barbie would make of his new friends and the joy they have given him.
‘Oh, she would be thrilled,’ he says. ‘She loved children. I used to call her the Pied Piper because they always flocked to her. She’d love this, I think. I know she’d want me to be happy. And I am.’
OLD People’s Home For 4 Year Olds at Christmas is on Channel 4 tomorrow at 9pm.