Postcards from the Edge

You think the English seaside is perfect for the retired? It’s got nothing on Texas, where they treat the elderly with respect, says Mary Kenny

Deal in Kent is a town that attracts migrants; they’re an affluent tribe called ‘Down from Londons’ (DFLS), who generally express themselves delighted with this picturesque spot on the English Channel.

Sheila Thurau is an arrival with a contrasting perspective. Aged 91, petite, trim and elegant, she has migrated from Houston, Texas, where she had previously lived – though she’s a Londoner by origin. After her husband died and she was living alone, Sheila’s concerned daughter, Alice, felt that her nonagenarian mother would be in a safer harbour back in Blighty.

But Sheila thinks that Trump’s America is a much better place for oldies than provincial England.

‘The people in Texas are delightful,’ she says. ‘Open, generous and hardworking. There’s so much culture, arts, and languages – I have my French and Spanish groups there. There’s music, and Houston Public Library is terrific.’

And ‘Texans have so much respect for the older generation.’ It’s ‘Yes, ma’am’ this and ‘No, ma’am’ that. Americans think oldsters can do anything they want to do. By contrast, she finds that the English attitude to old age is so passive – even dull.

‘You’re expected to sit at home and be happy if your grandchildren visit you three times a year. Well, no! I want to go on taking life at a gallop!’

And life in England is also much more expensive. As for health, American Medicaid has been every bit as good, for her, as the NHS.

Sheila, who has two daughters and three grandchildren, has lived much of her adult life in Mexico and the US with her late husband. But now there is an ‘old flame’ in the area with whom she has renewed contact. Who knows if romance might still blossom?

She was one of ten children, losing her mother aged nine, and evacuated seven times in wartime England: a generation which grew robust, perhaps, through hardships, and can remain feisty past 90.

Here’s a typical pub quiz ‘trick’ question: who was the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons? The usual answer – I am told by quiz aficionados – is Nancy Astor. No! Lady Astor was the first woman to take her seat at Westminster. The first woman to be elected was Constance Markievicz, the first female past the post in December 1918, exactly a century ago, as Sinn Fein representative for a Dublin constituency. As she was abstentionist, she didn’t take her seat. And she was in Holloway prison at the time – for sedition – so wouldn’t have been able to attend anyway.

Constance howled with laughter when she received a letter from 10 Downing Street: ‘Dear Sir – I hope you may find it convenient to be in your place for the King’s opening of Parliament...’ She’d have been more inclined to take her Mauser to George V than her deferential place.

She was born Gore-booth into an Anglo-irish family (Casimir Markievicz was her Polish husband – quite a good artist), and one of a number of English or Anglo-irish women of her time who embraced Irish rebel nationalism, and the cultural context that went with it, Roman Catholicism. She was converted by watching Easter 1916 insurgents kneel down and recite the rosary between interludes of firing on the British army.

Socialist, Bolshevik and feminist – as well as ace horsewoman, accomplished gardener and artist – she remained an ‘unorthodox’ but devout Catholic, holding the rosary when she died aged 59. The centenary of her electoral success falls on 14th December but, for militant feminists today, the catch-cry ‘Get your rosaries off our ovaries’ is somewhat paradoxical when it comes to the true first feminist of Westminster.

A record number of Brits are seeking Irish passports, as a hedge against the possible vexations of Brexit. All you need for an Irish passport is one Irish grandparent and, in times gone by, conditions could be vague. ‘Dig up an Irish granny somewhere,’ went the advice.

The late Taoiseach Charlie Haughey – a likeable rogue (and a shrewd finance minister) – once awarded an Irish passport to an Arab sheikh, in return for £20 million worth of investment in the Irish bloodstock industry. He handed over the green passport in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin with a magnum of champagne: I thought that was rather stylish, even if it was difficult to discern the sheikh’s Irish granny.

Rules were possibly more lax in those days: the situation has tightened now. Applications for Irish passports rose from 99,944 in 2015, to 132,035 in 2016, and 163,026 in 2017. On the minus side, there’s been a dramatic increase in the number of applicants being refused. A total of 15,074 applications were turned down in 2017. In 2016, only one application was refused.

Seems to be getting harder to dig up an authentic Irish granny.