Wandering through a world of silent tragedy

ARE old people our real underclass? I am distressed by the small coverage given last week to an all-party parliamentary report on hunger. It dwells on the plight of the old, lonely and poor, and suggests that 1.3 million older people in this country are malnourished. This isn’t always caused by poverty alone. Sometimes it is the result of loneliness.

The report tells of one woman who was found by a visitor not to have eaten a proper meal for nine weeks, another who had shrunk to 6st over months of quiet suffering. It says some pensioners are turning off their lights and heating, except when they know they are about to have visitors. A Meals on Wheels volunteer recorded the case of one old man who switched off his Christmas tree lights as soon as the meal service staff left his flat.

Perhaps most distressing of all is the case of a man in his 90s, banned from his local supermarket because he had twice suffered falls there. They said he was too much of a threat to their liability insurance.

This last case is a study in miniature of the institutional callousness of much of modern Britain, and the general terror of lawsuits caused by the Thatcher and Major governments’ shameful licensing of ambulance-chasing lawyers.

But the whole report made me wonder how often I pass people in the street who are concealing this sort of desperation, and how close I myself might be living to such silent tragedies. We tend to assume that we have some sort of safety net for all. Increasingly, I think this is no longer true.