The dream of having it all is now the nightmare of doing it all
Two very different women, two inspiring stories of how Femail helped to change their lives for ever
Fifty years ago, when the first issue of femail hit news-stands, i was a one-year-old growing up in South Wales.
i was born into a world where women had little or no financial independence; where the idea of a woman going to university was still considered novel (indeed, my own mother set aside her own academic ambitions to look after me); where fewer than five per cent of MPs were female; where only 50 per cent of kitchens had a fridge; and when the average shoe size for a woman was a size three.
With my gigantic feet (even at birth they were so unusually large the nurses felt obliged to comment on them to my poor mother), i was clearly a harbinger of things to come.
By the age of 14 i was already a shoe size 7, prompting my maternal grandmother to say that it was a good job i was relatively bright, since with plates of meat like that no man was ever going to want to marry me.
She belonged, of course, to another age. An age where women cooked, cleaned and raised children, married as best they could, stayed in unhappy relationships because they had very few other options and spent their lives in service to their families.
But with my mother’s generation, all that began to change in earnest.
Of course, the signs had been there for a while. But the late Sixties and early Seventies was a time when the rumblings of ‘women’s liberation’ erupted into a full-throated roar.
Women like my mother — nice, well brought up middle-class women who might otherwise have been expected to put up and shut up — began to see for themselves a different path to the one their predecessors had trodden.
Although she displayed all the traditional skills of an old-fashioned mother — she made my clothes, fed me properly, taught me manners — it was always very clear to me that she had ambitions far beyond the boundaries of what society dictated.
Over the course of my childhood, she carved out a number of careers for herself, from librarian to translator to model to magazine editor.
As soon as my brother and i were out of her hair, she went to university and finished her education, taking a degree in fine Art. She remains an indefatigable source of energy, always taking on new projects and ideas. Without her, and the women who have edited and produced femail over the years, life for people like me and my daughter would be very different. they were the first bridges between the different worlds of pre- and post-feminism. And they bore the burdens of both.
they had to satisfy all the expectations of society placed upon them as wives and mothers, as well as the growing expectations of feminism.
They were bombarded with messages about who and what they should aspire to be — sexually, financially and intellectually fulfilled; but, at the same time, they were still shackled to their traditional roles.
it’s largely thanks to them that we find ourselves today in a society where women, while perhaps still not equal in every respect to men, are catching up faster all the time.
the number of women who obtained university degrees in the UK in 1960 was less than a third of men, whereas today a fraction more women than men are entering further education.
in the workplace women who might once have been limited to jobs as typists or shop assistants, on an average wage of about £10 a week, feature prominently in all walks of life.
even in the notoriously testosterone-fuelled arena of politics, we are gaining ground.
Not quite parity — 208 out of 650 seats in the house of Commons are held by women — but what we lack in numbers we make up for in clout: theresa May, Arlene foster and Nicola Sturgeon are all leaders of their respective political parties. But
Does anyone really feel prepared for loneliness? It can happen suddenly, or creep up on you. In my case, it only really hit 11 years after my beloved husband Desmond died.
We had been soulmates, sharing everything in our life together. At first, the memories of that life sustained me.
It was only when I downsized from our family home to a flat and, aged 71, was living on my own for the first time that I felt truly alone. No matter how busy I kept my days, each evening I found myself walking around my empty flat with nobody to have a cup of tea with. Living off cheese and biscuits, because who cooks for themselves? Not me.
Like many people my age, I became desperately lonely in a way I had never expected, and I found it almost impossible to admit, even to myself. I felt totally unfit to live alone. From the moment I was born I had been surrounded by family, friends or colleagues. Best of all, my husband, two daughters and a son. every hour of every day I could turn to someone next to me and say: ‘Isn’t this fun?’
But with my husband gone, and my children grown-up, I soon found I also had fewer friends than I once had. It’s a consequence of growing older. You lose people you grew up with and love.
Loneliness eats you away until you feel empty. I remember sometimes receiving an invitation to a party and dressing up in a sparkly dress, only to lack the courage to straighten my shoulders and get out there. I’d have a boiled egg in front of the television instead, telling myself nobody would miss me.
And so I rang Femail and asked if others felt the same, and they told me to write about it and see. I didn’t want pity — after all, there are lots of single widows around. As my mother said: ‘We cope because we have to cope.’
But I did speak frankly about how I felt. After all, statistics show three out of five women over 75 live alone. some may enjoy their own company, but for those who feel as I did, it can be potentially dangerous. Doctors tell us loneliness is as damaging as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and more dangerous than obesity. And if we should have the misfortune to fall, there is the risk that we will lie there for hours, perhaps even days. It happens.
The article describing my own feelings was the most difficult I have ever written as loneliness carries a deep stigma. I regretted my confession when a close friend who also lived alone rang to rebuke me: ‘How could you write that, esther, haven’t you too much pride?’
BuT the stigma needed to be confronted. Now I’m so glad I did write it, for it produced the greatest response I’ve ever received, changing my life and those of many isolated older people.
one who wrote to me was Bob Lowe. His letter included a poem in memory of his beloved wife Kath, who died from Alzheimer’s disease three months earlier after 65 years of marriage. Its lines remain with me still, among them: ‘I am alone, now I know it’s true/There was a time when we were two... When darkness falls and curtains drawn/ That’s when I feel most forlorn.’
And then were letters from those whose business is to reach out to the loneliest older people: churches, WIs, AgeuK, Contact the elderly and more. All told me that as people grow older and lonelier, they become ever harder to locate. Because, as I know only too well, loneliness attacks selfconfidence, until your front door becomes a brick wall, impossible to break through.
All this outpouring made me determined to do something about the problem of loneliness.
First, Femail asked me to write another article, after which I was invited to speak at a conference created by the Campaign to end Loneliness, where I shared my letters from readers.
That’s when I had a light bulb moment. I found myself telling the audience that, 25 years earlier, I had spoken to a similar group of experts about the stigma of child abuse, and we had discovered that a helpline could provide support. That conversation led to the creation of Childline.
This time, we were talking about the stigma of loneliness. I wondered, could the answer now be a helpline for older people? The experts said yes.
I spent a year researching existing services. I soon found they were almost all local, with nothing open 24/7 — although I knew from my own experience that the worst pangs of loneliness can hit you in the dark hours before dawn, or on a sunday, or Christmas Day. And so The silver Line was born — a national helpline offering friendship to isolated older people.
The then minister for care services, Paul Burstow, gave a grant to hire a brilliant Ceo, sophie Andrews. Comic Relief funded a year’s pilot, and then a grant from the Big Lottery Fund enabled us to launch nationally in November 2013, two years after I first admitted my loneliness to the readers of Femail.
since then, my own life has been transformed once again. The silver Line has taken me around the country, attending meetings and conferences. In little ways, I try to practise the lessons I’ve learned from our silver Line callers. When I pass an older person in the street or a shop, I now notice how they avert their eyes, accustomed to being ignored or pushed past, perhaps ashamed of being slower, more vulnerable.
I stop, smile and try to find some little comment to share, even if it’s only about the weather (thank heavens for British weather, which is always worth talking about). I know I may be the only person they speak to that day.
I’ll never cease to be amazed by the change I see in lonely older people who finally start to feel valued once again. The greatest example of this is Bob, author of that moving poem, with whom I have become fast friends.
I invited him to attend the launch of The silver Line back in 2013, and he was then asked to speak about loneliness on Channel 5. He recited his poem and, to his delight, it went viral. He was then filmed for sport Relief and his interview attracted the highest audience of the night.
PeRHAPs it was inevitable that he became our first Community Ambassador, and still tirelessly campaigns for The silver Line.
For all his hard work, he was honoured as Citizen of the Year in his home town, New Milton in Hampshire. His commitment is an example, especially to those who underestimate what 90-year-olds have to offer. I look forward to celebrating his 97th birthday next month, over lunch at his favourite restaurant.
of course, the overwhelming response of Femail readers to that first article has changed much more than our two lives.
The silver Line has now received more than two million calls, with 10,500 every week. We have trained 4,000 silver Line Friends who reach out to new lonely people, and set up telephone discussion groups called silver Circles.
Margaret, in her 80s, is part of a silver Circle. A carer for her husband, who had dementia, she loves speaking to The silver Line each week. ‘I cannot tell you what a pleasure it is — I am a normal human being once again. We support each other, share the good things and the not-so-good things. We should not be written off just because we are old.’
so I have Femail to thank for giving me the opportunity of admitting my own loneliness, and giving rise to The silver Line. As Margaret says, nobody should be written off just because they are old.