Home Front Alice Pitman
As my nonagenarian mother – the Aged P – rarely ventures out of her care home room, I sometimes get the feeling that staff view her as a bit of a peculiarity. When I wheel her around the grounds – which I suspect she only goes along with to please me – carers have been known to react with varying degrees of surprise. They say things like, ‘Ah! The Queen has come out of her castle!’ It is all meant affectionately, of course, and the Aged P plays along, giving a regal wave as I wheel her on by.
When she arrived there three years ago after a long spell in hospital, staff were always encouraging her to join the other residents at some coffee morning or other. A fleeting look of horror would cross her face before she graciously declined. Over time, her room became her own Rorke’s Drift, which she defended with all her might. Anyone who tried to get the Aged P to ‘come out of her shell’, under whatever kindly meant premise, would lose the battle every time. Murmured discussions took place in corridors about the obstinate new arrival. Although they have since learned to accept that she is perfectly content with her own company, minor ructions still occur from time to time.
The last occasion was when an agency nurse with New Ideas arrived on the scene. Nurse Ratched – I shall call her – seemed to resent my mother, possibly because she did not fit her idea of how an old person should behave. Enjoying her nightly vermouth in front of true crime documentaries, reading a lot and laughing uproariously with visiting friends and family were all, one imagines, frowned upon.
The last straw was the day Nurse Ratched told the Aged P that her face was too white. ‘Too white?’ ‘Yes. Is not healthy.’ She asked how often her family sat her outside in the sun (‘As if I was an under-ripe tomato – the impertinence!’). Then she tried to get her to eat in the communal dining room with its blaring TV and dispiriting institutionalised ambience. When my mother refused, Ratched tried to enlist the support of a Hungarian carer.
But this backfired spectacularly for Ratched as he and my mother were good pals. He was completely on her side: ‘That’s Mrs Pitman – she must be left alone.’
After a lifetime of relative domestic privacy, it must be disconcerting having your every move – or non-move in the Aged P’s case – noted and commented on. Her aforementioned love of reading, for example, is often viewed as an outlandish eccentricity. ‘Your Mum’s always in there with a book on the go,’ said a nurse once, her tone seeming to hint at hidden dangers (as though the Aged P was carrying out lethal experiments with bubbling test tubes instead of reading the latest Susan Hill).
Organised games too are anathema. She would rather share a prison cell with Rosemary West than play Bingo or attend Scrabble morning in the communal lounge. The Aged P is far from being a snob, but why would a person who has never been a joiner of clubs want to start now in her ninth decade? She loves cinema, but doesn’t do the film club either (‘What’s the point when I can watch them on the telly?’). They only ever seem to show old films, too. The Aged P loves these as well as anyone, but her cultural curiosity did not stop around the time of the Suez Crisis. It is the same age stereotyping that assumes residents in many care homes only want singalongs of music-hall and First World War tunes. There should always be room for those evocative and timeless songs, but must they always be to the exclusion of everything that came after (with a few grim exceptions – ‘Tie A Yellow Ribbon’, ‘Delilah’…)? The majority of old people would have been only in their thirties, and younger, in the 1960s. In the Seventies, they may even – like the Aged P with her fondness for the Bee Gees’ ‘Night Fever’ – have been partial to a bit of disco. Yet they persist with ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’ as if the Armistice had only just been declared.
In twenty years from now, will care home-confined ex-punk rockers be coralled into singing ‘Boiled Beef and Carrots’ while yearning for ‘Anarchy in the UK’? No wonder so many old people look gloomy in these places. It must be like having suddenly to assume a strange new identity of Official Old Person in an unsettling twilight world completely alien to them. As Johnny Rotten might say: ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’