Still crazy after all these years

Author Jane Miller has written an engaging book about what it means to grow old, even though she doesn't feel elderly in the least, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN

'THERE ARE days when the interval between drawing back the curtains in the morning and closing them in the evening is so short that it seems hardly worth acknowledging it as a day at all," writes Jane Miller, in her engaging book, Crazy Age, Thoughts on Being Old.

She adds – and this is typical of the wry humour of this retired professor of the London University Institute of Education – that “just as you become slower at everything you do, take longer to do the simplest things, you find yourself hurtling downhill with no brakes”.

Although she was born in 1932 and her 80s are, therefore, on the horizon, she chuckles about a reviewer who complained that she is too young to write a book about old age. There again, when she sat down to write the book herself, “At the time my thinking was it’s ridiculous I’m not really old.”

“I should come clean,” she writes. “I’m not sure that I really believe that I will be dead one day, any more than I entirely believe that I’m as old as I am. Somewhere, in some part of me, I am still young and possibly eternal.”

Most of the chapters in the book have been published separately and so it has the feel of a collection of elegant and engaging essays on topics ranging from the relationship between old and young to the loss of a friend to Alzheimer’s.

She is very good on that unbridgeable gap between the generations. Her love for the young children and teenagers in her extended family is palpable, but there is no point in denying that their worlds are different. For instance, “I try to believe that my old flared jeans are back in fashion, that a granddaughter or two might be taken in.

“But they won’t be. My flared jeans are subtly and disastrously different from anything they would consider wearing, and they’re not quite ‘vintage’ either.”

From me, the most affecting chapter in the book is about her great friend Mary who developed Alzheimer’s without realising it.

“My friend, unusually I think, did not realise what was happening to her,” she told me. “For that I thank somebody. I think most people go through a period of ‘What’s happening to me?’ By some miracle, that didn’t happen to her.”

Her friend did, however, take what she describes as “terrifying” walks on her own through Edinburgh at night. It was, though, the people around her friend and not Mary herself who found the walks terrifying. “So far as I could see, people were kind to her” on these excursions.

They were both great talkers but now, she writes, “Mary has become the strings of words, the sentences she utters, their internal grammar as firm and intact as her body and its sturdy skeleton.

“It is the relation of her words to the world that is fractured, dislodged; though the real problem lies somewhere else.”

Later, she recounts a scene familiar to those who have ever visited a loved one confined to a nursing home because of Alzheimer’s.

“When we left to go home, she must have thought for a moment she would be coming with us, and I can’t forget her outstretched arm and her fingers delicately touching the closing glass door with its computerised lock. But perhaps I will forget, just as she has. She didn’t look sad. Sometimes I think she may never have been happier.”

But by the end of the chapter, things have got worse. “And now there are no more stories. A fit during this last autumn put paid to them and to her happy wanderings. There she sits, immobile, 80 or more, in her old rocking chair, though it no longer rocks.”

Miller is clearly not one to get caught up in “the hospital years”, to quote the title of one of her chapters, to any greater extent than that dictated by her health. This refers to that endless round of visits to doctors, clinics and outpatient departments that seems to take over the lives of some old people.

No doubt for some this is all an unfortunate necessity but others, she observes, “get too taken up by the hospital years. I have friends who get themselves tested for things they have no sign of having.”

And now, of course, there are the new moral dilemmas about being able to live longer than is, perhaps, agreeable. “In the past, one would have died of these complaints,” she says. “Now the fact is you might be kept alive for a very long time with everything wrong with you.”

Nonetheless, she begins her book with the declaration: “I like being old at least as much as I liked being middle-aged and a good deal more than I liked being young. There are lots of bad things about it, but then there were lots of bad things about being young.”

She is a busy woman. She helps her husband of more than half a century whose health is poor, and she edits Changing English, a quarterly journal about teaching.

In time, she says, she may write another book. She has already written many books on education, gender and writing and retired in 1998 from the London University Institute of Education where she trained English teachers, taught MA courses and supervised research students.

And, like many of the rest of us, she is right up to the minute in having lost money in the recession. She had briefly made money out of selling at auction letters from Karl Marx to her great-grandfather who was once his editor.

“The irony of making a profit from Marx’s letters and then, within a month or so, parting with a good deal of it to the Credit Crunch, or the Economic Downturn, or indeed to the End of Capitalism, was not entirely lost on me,” she writes.

“But I’m so pleased to be shot of them that I have barely dwelt on my brief gain or sudden loss.”

Crazy Ageby Jane Miller is published by Virago at £14.99

“ I like being old at least as much as I liked being middle-aged and a good deal more than I liked being young. There are lots of bad things about it, but then there were lots of bad things about being young