Home Front

The Aged P has lived in her care home at Whiteley Village, Surrey, for four years now.

It struck me the other day that this was the exact period John Lennon lived in his mock-tudor mansion at the nearby St George’s Hill estate. These are the sort of profound thoughts flitting through my mind during my weekly drive along the Seven Hills Road to the Aged P’s.

Two parallel worlds separated by time. Beatle John half a century ago, stunned by fame, unhappily married, and taking too many drugs on one side of the road. The dear old Aged P in the present, dismayed by institutionalised living, consoling herself with the belief that it is nevertheless ‘better than the alternative’ on the other.

Sometimes my thoughts also stray to Mr Home Front as a boy, being driven unwillingly along this same road back to Feltonfleet Prep School in the early 1970s. Or to his paternal grandmother’s home in Weybridge for Sunday drinks, where he and his brother, besuited like junior Jacob Rees-moggs, were expected to make polite conversation with Surrey’s finest golf club bores, bridge players and George Sanders-type spivs.

So a cloak of greenbelt melancholy shrouds this part of Surrey for us. Even picture-postcard Whiteley, with its own church, dairy, and clubhouse, can exude the faint spookiness of a village from a John Wyndham novel.

The grounds by the lake are especially idyllic. But you seldom see anyone there, the exception being an old lady with her small terrier. She used to stop and stare warily whenever she clocked me walking my old dog Lupin in the distance. ‘This is for Whiteleys people!’ she would exclaim, like Tubbs from The League of Gentlemen. ‘But my mother is a resident!’ I’d say. ‘No matter! Outsiders are forbidden to use the grounds! You must leave at once!’

Old age ain’t for cissies, as Bette Davis said. There’s no greater testament to this than the formidable Aged P, protected against the iniquities of age with her love of true crime documentaries and books; her nightly tipple; Femme perfume and Rimmel make-up. Every few weeks, the wonderful library volunteers arrive, bearing carefully chosen biographies for her. A recent loan was The Insider, The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade by Piers Morgan.