It says something about life in 2009 that the cover of Irma Kurtz's book on
ageing shows her not as the Tiggerish old bat that she is, but as a vibrant
young woman. This is not Irma's doing but she is sanguine about the media's
priorities. Would I like her to talk about sex, she volunteers.
It's a kind offer. But she has told us often enough about the promiscuous
period in her twenties, the affair with the married man and the abortion at
30, the deliberate conception of a child out of wedlock at 37 and the
decision to become celibate at 48, taken because she was giving up on love
and it made sense to give up sex at the same time.
No thank you, let's talk about getting old. This is Irma's theme in About
Time: Growing Old Disgracefully, and her views are insightful because that
is what she does, most notably as Cosmopolitan's agony aunt. She has done
that for 36 years and still advises on the enduring themes of frustration,
sexual jealousy, insecurity and competitive friendship, but at 73 she finds
herself confronted by new territory. She is old, she says, and the book is a
necessary exploration of that state because the templates followed by her
parents and grandparents don't fit any more.
“We really are pioneers. This generation of old people, there's never been
anything like us before. We live in the present. It has to do with us and
now, not us and our memories. Oh, we take them with us and we're made by
them, but that doesn't mean that you don't exist now and have an effect in
the present. We have to find ways of staying in life. We, the aged, must
remain curious and able to change our minds. It's as important as a flexible
spine. More, maybe. In the long run you do have to work at being alert. You
have to not give in to being old.”
Her generation is different from their predecessors because they are
healthier, more energetic and experienced, more educated, likely to live
longer, and if they're not always prosperous, they are less often hungry,
she notes. There are more of them - for the first time the number of people
in the UK aged 65 and over exceeds those under 16 - and they're no longer
passive. Aware of a new sense of political identity - next month's
publication of the Equality Bill will fire a debate about the right of
employees to work past the age of 65 - they are getting bolder and noisier.
Irma is typical. She may not wear leather and sit astride a purring
Harley-Davidson, and she may not wear purple (it doesn't suit her) and strut
around on elegant heels (she thinks anyone who wears heels over the age of
70 needs treatment) but she defends the right of any contemporary to do so.
She even insists on it: you must be yourself, she urges. “The only way to
grow old is your way. You have to not knuckle under and become a statistic.”
Her way is to be emphatically active and you don't have to be with her for
more than a second or two to realise that she is so ludicrously vigorous
that you have to curb the urge to tell her to calm down. She was brave
enough to move 18 months ago, leaving Soho, which she once loved for being
bohemian but which lost her when it tipped into sleaze. The new home is
still in Central London, an eyrie with spectacular views, within walking
distance of theatres and cinemas, and a busride from her son. It is tiny;
she has had to edit her life to fit into it.
There is another mousehole home in Northern France and there she is a
different person, more solitary and relaxed. In London she is garrulous,
rippling with laughter, hungry for conversation and full of tales about
meetings with strangers. Some of them bore her, young and old alike, some
become friends. Do I think she should strip the original kitchen cupboard?
Can I bear to drink her terrible coffee? There's nothing wrong with it but I
suspect that all she means is that it doesn't interest her, she'd rather
talk than drink it. “I need people, I think a lot of us do.”
She reminds me that she was once a “proper journalist”, who reported from
Vietnam and interviewed celebrities long before they were called that. John
Lennon was the most thrilling because he was so bright, Rex Harrison the
most grumpy. But her formative act was her decision to escape her homeland -
she was born in New York where her father was a dentist - and her
predestiny: marriage or, as she prefers to see it, belonging to another
family as a passenger and never being the driver.
“When you have to escape something it turns you into a rather bold individual.
I think a lot of women of my generation are pretty bolshie. We are, we're
not easy. We grew up on Frank Sinatra. We really believed he [a man] would
come along and if we were free and intelligent and experienced, not in a
sexual sense but if we'd travelled, seen things, he would love that in you
and love nobody but you forever. I've seen it with the bitter women of my
generation, who are on their own like me. We really believed, and I speak
for a few of us as strong independent women. I'm just so grateful I had a
child because it's a very lonely thing, getting old.”
If this sounds unbearably poignant, Irma recovers quickly and says that she
wouldn't change anything about the choices she has made. Yes, she does look
at old couples and think, how nice that they can walk arm-in-arm and know
each other so well that they don't have to talk: “That is the best
retirement plan in the end.” But she doesn't envy them. She is too good at
being herself for that and wise enough to recognise that for all the
privations of old age - and sometimes she feels an intense melancholy, a
passive kind of depression that she thinks all old people experience - there
are shafts of light too. If no one notices you, then you don't have to keep
up appearances and you are free from judgment and uncomfortable truths. You
can see more of what's going on around you. Thus, she insists, one of the
miseries of old age becomes a source of stimulation.
“It can be difficult because we're being pushed out - you're past it. There's
no recognition of how much we had to do to get here and how much we've
learnt. A lot of older women start to feel invisible and they're very
miffed. But you can always cease to be invisible by saying something,
meanwhile, do you see things! You can watch how people are in a way that you
can't when you're visible. In a funny way you are safer. I've seen behaviour
I could never have witnessed before because people don't care I'm watching.”
She cites a train journey in which she watched a young couple in an
end-of-the-relationship conversation. She sees people flirting. “When I was
a little girl I always wanted to be invisible. I just wanted to know what
people talked about when I wasn't there. Invisibility is fabulous.”
For her being a grandmother is another unexpected joy, and she relishes her
good fortune as she watches contemporaries either not becoming grandparents,
or becoming grannies to children who live far away. It is no longer a state
to be taken for granted, she says, though for her it is a final passion at a
time when she wasn't expecting another one.
“I've met other grannies who've mentioned a strange and unexpected romantic
element to it. When I'm going to see my grandson I feel my heart do that
thing it used to do only when I was going to see a man I was in love with.”
And she says, looking very pleased with herself, when she is alone with the
child she has been known to give him chocolate, contrary to his parents
instructions. “I gave him his first taste of ice-cream. I'll never forget
the look on his face. First of astonishment. Almost pain at the coldness and
then the dawning that this was sweet. Oh gosh.
“Now I wasn't supposed to give him ice-cream, was I? Oh what! It's traditional
to have secrets but it's true that the disgraceful way to grow old is to
refuse to grow old in the corner where the younger generation would tend to
put you. Don't do it.”
About Time: Growing Old Disgracefully by Irma Kurtz, published by John
Murray, £16.99
