90+ | June 5th 2008

Jillian Edelstein

More and more people are reaching their 90s--and living a full life. We sent Maureen Cleave, a mere 73, to ask four of them what lies ahead. Here, she introduces the series and meets her first 90-something, the author and campaigner Leo Abse ...

I'm 73. That used to mean being one of the older generation. Now we've been downgraded: books are written about us with titles like "Late Youth". "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?" Paul McCartney sang, in his 20s. With many of us still working full-time in our 70s, the question seems daft. We're not allowed to be old, to sit around with rugs over our knees, complaining. We're coy about our age. We dye our hair, the men having trouble with sideburns that seem to grow white again faster than the rest. We model clothes in fashion magazines, marry again, up-sticks and live in the Bahamas. If we have rheumatism, we say it's tendonitis. But we don't fool anyone: the young don't give us the time of day; to them we're boring. If we run in the London marathon, no one notices.

We've been supplanted by the 80- and 90-year-olds, who grab all the attention. Young people find the really old curious and rather interesting. They help them unload their shopping, listen to what they say. As Alan Bennett said in his diary, you have only to eat a soft boiled egg when you're really old for everyone to say how wonderful you are. For this article, I interviewed four people over 90, all in full possession of their wits (the general thinking is that physical decline is easier to cope with than mental). They had the interest of historical personages in that three of them had direct experience of the war. They all agreed that the worst time of day was when you first wake up in the morning, their advice being to get going immediately. Three of them were writing books, one was still driving a car, only one believed in God. Most surprising was that none of them complained, none feared for the future. I decided that the secret of a contented old age is a sunny disposition.

(Also see: Diana Athill, Betty Stevens and Brian Power.)

*****

LEO ABSE 91

"IF YOU WANT TO LIVE A LONG TIME, LOVE AND BE LOVED"

Eight years ago, when he was 83, Leo Abse married for the second time. His first wife Marjorie had died four years before. His new wife, the gentle Ania Czepulkowska from Poland, 50 years his junior, was doing an MA at the Royal College of Art when they met over his garden fence. She was strolling along the Thames towpath with a friend; he was smoking a cigar and doing a bit of pruning.

The two most difficult stages in the human lifespan, he says, are adolescence and old age. "You grow out of adolescence, you grow into old age and what you need for a happy old age is love," adding in his saucy way, "someone in his 80s should not have roving thoughts. Ania married me for sex, I married her for her money!" He must add her practical skills: she had worked as a mechanic and electrician in the Gdansk shipyards, the only woman among 31 men. Now, she has just reglazed one of the windows in his sunny drawing room overlooking the Thames, where he reads his Guardian. He is at his desk by 10.30 every morning, after Ania has given him a light breakfast and a shave. He's very deaf but he can always hear Ania. She never raises her voice. Without her, he says, he would not have survived the stroke he had five years ago.

Looking back on his life, as a lawyer, MP and writer, he sees nothing but good. "I had two great advantages: I was born a Jew in Wales in the benign climate of Welsh non-conformity; we believed we had a covenant with God and God would look after us. Being in a minority within a minority, I had the benefit of being an outsider without feeling inferior. And I never went to university, which meant I wasn't groomed to conform."

The art of staying alive, he says, is never to repeat yourself. "Keep stretched. Once you just do what you can do, you repeat yourself. When I left school, I worked in a factory. After the war, with a government grant, I became a solicitor, then a criminal lawyer and, after I'd defended all the criminals and rapists, I moved into industrial accident and employment law."

He even sees some value in the short spell he spent in prison while serving with the RAF during the war, when he was arrested for standing up in the Forces Parliament and arguing that the Bank of England should be nationalised. "Very good experience for a politician to be arrested and put in prison. If people like Blair had worn uniform and had had experience of war, they might not have sent young men to Iraq. This gang--Blair, Brown and so on--they're too young, they have no capital, no hinterland. I find it ironic that these whippersnappers have made such a cock-up of governance. The finest governance we had was that of Clement Attlee which brought in the Welfare State. When the average age of the Cabinet was 60, these men recast the whole structure of Britain."

As an MP, Abse passed more private member's legislation than any man in the 20th century, all of it relating to human relationships: divorce, homosexuality, widows' damages and, most important of all, the Children Act of 1975, dealing with fostering and adoption. After 30 years, true to his principles, he got out. "Being in the cabinet never interested me. Margaret Thatcher vetoed me for the House of Lords and did me a good turn. Unlike the ageing opera star, you've got to know when to give up. I became Leo Abse, writer and former MP."

He wrote not his autobiography--"Write your autobiography and you're writing your obituary"--but books about Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. (The first edition of Tony Blair was called "The Man Behind the Smile", the second, "The Man Who Lost His Smile".) Then he wrote a major work, "The Bisexuality of Daniel Defoe".

Life, he says, is inevitably tragic, because we are born to die. "If you want to live a long time, love and be loved. I married two women who loved me. And you can continue living productively if you follow the rule of the Roman stoics--carpe diem. Don't live expectantly, live for the day."

What he calls his valedictory work is a collection of essays in which characters from the Bible are subjected to Freudian scrutiny, for instance the nakedness of Noah and the curse of Ham. There's another on Moses the Stammerer. "This is about speech defects in leadership. Demosthenes used to put a pebble in his mouth to conquer his speech difficulties. The most famous orator of my lifetime was Nye Bevan and he was a stammerer. He had a wonderful vocabulary because every night he would sit with a Thesaurus, looking for alternative words."

And there will be a very naughty essay about Abishag. "When King David is old and dying, the servants have a committee meeting and decide the way to get him better is to search Israel for the prettiest girl they can find--Abishag. Then it says, 'But David knew her not.' If you really read your Bible, you'll find she gave David new life. He knew her all right, just as I knew my Ania."

(Maureen Cleave was one of the first feature writers on the London Evening Standard. Her last feature was "Beggars can be orators" for the Spring issue of Intelligent Life. Jillian Edelstein, who took the portraits for this series, is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker and Vogue.)