Secret to a long life: ‘pottering’
Staying busy works well for Tom Marston, aged 94. Warren Gamble drops by for a ‘‘yarn’’.
On a bright winter’s day, the front door at Tom Marston’s home is slightly ajar.
I knock but there is no reply. I knock a bit harder, because while Tom is in remarkably good health he doesn’t hear as well as he used to. I put my head in and call out. Nothing.
Tom has lived by himself for 36 years. What if he is lying incapacitated inside?
We’ve all seen those stories, elderly residents whose disappearance is not noticed for weeks, until a gruesome discovery is made.
I go down the corridor, past the photos of Tom in the war, pictures of his family, bowls awards, certificates of thanks from service groups. No sign, but just when the first flutter of alarm stirs, I hear movement outside.
Tom is walking down the sloping path from his backyard, dotted with barelimbed fruit trees and plots with winter veges – pumpkins and healthy-looking silverbeet.
‘‘Hello,’’ he says. ‘‘Just been doing a bit of work in my worm farm.’’
Of course. At 94, Tom keeps himself busy. ‘‘Pottering around’’ is his motto for a long life. He has his garden, he still drives (he just got his two-year-renewal) and he can stay in contact with family on the internet.
He is the oldest member and patron of his local bowls club. He goes for a roll up only occasionally now, on fine days. ‘‘If I get something near the jack everybody says ‘well done Tom’. I think they get a bit of a surprise, same as I do really.’’
His daughter rings every day from Alexandra (‘‘I think she wants to make sure I’m still alive’’), and he has regular Skype calls with his Auckland-based son, who is travelling through Europe with his wife.
He marvels that he can be talking to them while they are driving through the French countryside in a campervan, or on a yacht off the Croatian coast.
But there are a lot of hours in the day, and days in the week, when it’s just him and his big house.
Tom spends the winter mornings at the brown formica table in the kitchen with green-and-yellow walls. It feels comfortable, familiar, a kitchen straight out of my 1960’s childhood.
In it are small markers of his life, birthday cards and mementoes for his 80th and 90th, photographs of Lake Hawea where he worked for the New Zealand Electricity Department.
In his black-and-red checked bush shirt he reads the Nelson Mail, warming up under the heat pump and, on good days, the sun that lights up the snowcovered Western Ranges.
‘‘It’s not a bad view, that’s why I don’t want to leave. I don’t like living by myself, but I like living here. I know my way around.
‘‘My wife died here and I’m the same — I sort of got attached to the place.’’
Tom married his wife Rona in 1948 after he returned from serving as a leading aircraftman with the Air Force in the Pacific Islands at the tail end of World War II. After stints in various parts of the country with NZED, Tom and Rona moved to their four-bedroom weatherboard house in a quiet Nelson cul-de-sac, with their three children, in 1968. It cost them $12,400.
They enjoyed the region’s great outdoors, boating trips to Totaranui, fishing, shooting rabbits near Golden Downs.
They also gave back to their community through various service clubs, including the Stoke Lions. The pair were on the first committee of the Nelson branch of the Cancer Society when it was revived in the mid-1970s and helped organise its first street appeal, with Tom picking up the daffodils from a farm near Riwaka.
Tom was treasurer, and Rona later became president. When she was injured in a car accident, the society’s annual general meeting was held in Nelson Hospital where she was in traction, recovering from a spinal fracture. But tragically, doctors also discovered the bowel cancer that should have been picked up earlier when her symptoms were missed.
She died a year later, in 1982, a year before Tom was due to retire. At her request he spread her ashes on Mt Arthur, one of the peaks he can see from his kitchen. The ashes of his youngest son Jimmy, who died from motor neuron disease, are also spread there.
Before Rona died she asked Tom to promise to remarry. He didn’t promise and didn’t marry again. But 18 years later he met Dulcie who ‘‘twisted his arm’’ to go with her to a seniors ball, and became his ‘‘weekend wife’’.
They lived in their own homes and danced away 15 years together before Dulcie got Alzheimers and died last year.
‘‘It was quite sad to lose two of them,’’ Tom says.
Around him there were more losses. The neighbourhood that had been home to long-term, mostly elderly residents who knew each other and chatted in the street had changed. Some moved away, others, like Mary and Frank from next door, died within months of each other.
‘‘That left a big hole in my life,’’ he said. ‘‘Frank and I used to sit out on the lawn and say awful things about the Government and the council. I haven’t got anybody now except Val who comes over every couple of weeks. She’s keeping an eye on me.’’
He has introduced himself to new neighbours, but it hasn’t progressed beyond basic hellos.
‘‘It seems to be the in-thing now, people don’t want to talk to their neighbours, maybe they’re too busy.’’
After Dulcie’s death, he told his
family he was lonely. He still kept himself active around the house and garden, and kept up his reading, watched a bit of TV, but there were times when that wasn’t enough.
Tom is a natural storyteller, with a lifetime of material. Like the time he and an Air Force mate snuck out of their Wellington camp through a hole in the fence and went to a dance where he met Rona. He likes having people to talk to, and he has a way with words that speaks of a disappearing generation of Kiwis, men are ‘‘blokes’’, mistakes are ‘‘stuffups’’, a conversation is a ‘‘yarn’’.
So his daughter-in-law got onto Age Concern, and they assigned Tom one of their volunteer visitors. Once a week for an hour or more retired carpenter Bob Mills shares a cuppa and a chat.
‘‘We talk about everything really. We talk about Tom’s life; I like hearing stories about what they got up to. In the end you become friends,’’ Bob says.
He is impressed by Tom’s drive to stay active. ‘‘There are not many people Tom’s age up a ladder, and with a fifth of an acre, doing what he does. I go home and think ‘hell I’m only 70 and I’m not doing what Tom’s doing’.’’
More remarkable is that Tom only has one eye, after the other was removed in the mid-1990s when a specialist discovered a melanoma. Apart from a few minor skin cancers, and a minor stroke five years ago, his health remains good.
But he has made some concessions to his age. He has a sleep after lunch, he no longer drives at night and he gets meals delivered during the week. ‘‘I got sick of cooking for myself; I haven’t enjoyed it at all and I’m not much good at it.’’
Looking around the comfortable clutter in his kitchen, he smiles. ‘‘That’s why I reckon I have got to die here because I’ve got too much junk gathered over the years. I have got a basement full of junk too.
‘‘My aim for later years was just to survive longer than my father, who died at 93. I’m past him so I’ve achieved that. I’m ready to go now.’’
But does he ever think about living to 100? ‘‘You don’t know, do you? There are a surprising number that are these days.’’
When loneliness still strikes he ‘‘just wears it. It’s part of life.’’
He has one further goal though. His internet reading turned up stories about virtual retirement villages, popular in the United States, where groups of independent elderly people living in their homes are connected through an online group. A volunteer co-ordinator helps organise meetings and trips.
He has talked to Age Concern about the possibility of setting one up here, but figures they have enough on their plate.
In the meantime, there is pottering to do. Tom puts on an old pair of bowling shoes and heads to the garden. There are blossoms on the plum trees, clumps of daffodils on the lawn. Another spring is here.