What Dilys the 82 year old skydiver can teach you about eternal youth
‘When all this started, I was quite prim, I suppose’
WHAT is the key to living along and happy life? Well, according to Dilys Price, 82, it is about ‘turning over every stone, until underneath you find something you’re passionate about’. It could be embroidery, she explains. It could be ten pin bowling. Or maybe ‘sending postcards to political prisoners’. In her case, though, it is something far less predictable.
Dilys’s passion is skydiving, or — as she puts it — ‘jumping out of an aeroplane and going: “Yeeesss!” I love it. I need it. I can’t imagine life without it.’
Dilys might look like a retired teacher from Wales — which, technically, is exactly what she is — but she is also in the Guinness World Records book as the oldest female skydiver ever, having clocked up an astonishing 1,132 jumps.
The even more giddying part? She only did her first skydive at the age of 54, before which she was petrified of heights.
‘Before my first jump I often wondered why on Earth anyone would leap out of an aeroplane into the blue sky,’ says Dilys. But then some of her students decided to organise a sponsored skydive to raise money for a good cause, and Dilys, keen to lend her support, agreed to take part.
Now, nearly 30 years on, there’s no stopping her.
The quite marvellous Dilys is a participant in the ITV documentary Secrets Of Growing Old, where older people who seem particularly, well, young, share their tips.
It was a riot of a programme, and quite the eye-opener if you are on the wrong side of 40, or 50, or 60 and wondering what comes next. Who knew it could be skydiv- ing, or modelling, or even bodybuilding, as it has been for some of the contributors?
Dilys’s life sounds like a film waiting to be written — a Shirley Valentine in the sky.
‘Yes,’ she giggles. ‘It was quite mad at the time. Outwardly, when all this started, I was quite prim, I suppose, but I discovered this daredevil aspect to me. Maybe it’s because I’m a Gemini.’
She says she can still vividly remember her first jump: it was a tandem one, with an instructor strapped to her back. ‘I felt sick. When I went out I remember thinking, “This is death”, then, “Oh my goodness, I am flying”. By the time I landed I was thinking, “That was BRILLIANT. Sign me up”.’
Her local skydiving club was slightly bemused when she asked to do the training that would allow her to jump solo.
‘They weren’t at all sure it was safe for a fiftysomething woman to be jumping. There was a bit of debate about it.’
Ditto when, truly bitten by the bug — to the point where she was jumping every weekend — she decided she wanted to go to the U.S., the ‘skydive Mecca’.
‘I remember being told that a woman my age had done it and killed herself. I went anyway,’ she says.
Dilys is the best possible advert for how to age disgracefully, wonderfully sparkling company and has a grin the size of a house. It wasn’t always the case, though. If anything, she says, she felt older in her 40s.
‘I went through quite a difficult time. I got divorced. I was bringing up my son alone. I was in a teaching job that I really didn’t like. I didn’t get on with my boss.
‘I’d get up in the morning and think: “Is this it?” Life felt as if it was closing in. It felt claustrophobic.’
Leaping out of a plane is a radical solution — she has nearly come a cropper a few times, and tells some hairy stories about tangled cords and the Earth coming to meet her faster than is comfortable (‘When things go a bit wrong and your parachute hasn’t opened, everything goes a bit brighter, somehow,’ she points out casually).
What if the worst does happen one day? ‘Well, what a way to go!’ she says cheerily.
Even more vehement in his refusal to wind down gradually is Charles Eugster, aged 96 and ten months.
‘I want to publish a book called How To Get A Beach Body at 97,’ he tells me. ‘You don’t have to wait until you are 97, though. If anything, I’ d suggest starting decades earlier.
‘But my point is that you can still do it, whatever your age. This idea that you have to wither as soon as you turn 60 — nonsense!’
He should know. Charles is believed to be the oldest bodybuilder in the world, a man who didn’t start weightlifting until he was 87, and who is puffed up not with steroids, but with the idea that he has discovered a way of life we all need to adopt. And sooner rather than later.
‘Yes, I want to change the world,’ he admits. ‘I see people half my age huffing and puffing and walking around with fat tummies— tummies that are killing them — and I want to shake them. Do they not understand?’
But let’s clarify. Is this beach body book going to be just for men?
‘No, absolutely not,’ he says. ‘You know what infuriates me? The idea that women can’t be sexy and desirable over a certain age. I’m actually looking for a woman in her 80s. You can’t get them anywhere. Older women are wonderful. Look at Joan Collins — glorious.’
Charles, a retired dentist who was born in London but lives in Zurich, is quite glorious himself, but his attitudes seem as rigid as his pecs. Because he has honed his body to Greek god standard (‘Yes, the ladies do like it’), he takes a rather dim view of anyone who hasn’t.
‘I get irritated by obese people,’ he admits. ‘I probably wouldn’t date an overweight woman, either.’
Since he hurled himself into the fitness business, he has gone on to break all manner of records. Rowing, running, you name it, he does it — and to a level that has won him the informal title of the ‘world’s fittest pensioner’.
Vanity, he insists, not a health kick sent him back to sport.
‘I talked to a personal trainer, a former Mr Universe, and he got me on to weight training.’
And how. He has spent the last decade not just honing his body so that it performs like one 20-30 years younger, but studying the science, too — science that suggests even oldies who think they are keeping active might be doing it all wrong.
Get him started on pensioner marathon runners and he becomes incandescent.
‘Madness! It is my opinion that anyone running a marathon over the age of 50 is doing something very dangerous indeed. No, we need exercise, but a specific type. We need short, sustained bursts, we need to build muscle. Marathon running does the opposite. It eats into the reserves.’
He is as evangelical about staying mentally alert. His number one tip for staying young? Never retire.
Charles worked as a dentist well into his 70s, then set up his own dental magazine, but got rid of it aged 83 after his second wife died.
‘That was a terrible decision,’ he says. ‘I was unemployed for a few years until I was 90. Then a German fitness company employed me as an ambassador.
‘ It saddens me that I’m the exception to the rule. In the Western world, we throw people on the scrapheap when they have decades of contributions still to make.
‘Look at the Queen. She’s the ultimate role model. Her secret? A wonderful work ethic and a job that forces her to stand and not sit down at every opportunity. We were never designed to sit. It has turned us into couch potatoes.’ The elegant Frances Dunscombe, who also features in the programme, was never one to let standards slide in that regard.
She is a woman who reached her late 70s thinking life had little more to offer. She had met her husband, Ralph, the love of her life, at 17, and when he developed dementia, she nursed him until the end.
When he passed away a few years ago, she felt ‘washed up and hopeless’. Yet life took a very odd turn.
Last year, aged 82, she accompanied her daughter, Tineka, a model in her 50s, to her agency in London — Grey Model Agency, set up to supply older models.
They took one look at Frances’s still-exquisite cheekbones and she is now the oldest model on their books.
‘I left it rather a long time, didn’t I?’ she says. ‘I thought they were having a joke.
How could you possibly model at my age? But they were quite serious.’
In the programme she’s filmed whirling and laughing in front of the cameras.
‘It’s actually quite hard work,’ she says. ‘But it is magical, too. I don’t want it to stop.’
Nor does it show any sign of doing so. For any of them.
‘The idea you have to wither at 60 is nonsense!’