John Burningham - The Time of Your Life: Getting on with Getting on

Compiled and illustrated by
John Burningham

RESEARCH BY ROSE FOOT

The following charities and causes chosen by the contributors of essays and interviews to this book have benefited from donations made in their name by John Burningham:

Abbeyfield Society (Eastbourne), Age Concern, Amnesty International, Cancer Bacup, Help the Aged, Imperial Cancer Research Fund, Norwood, Royal National Lifeboat Institution, Rudolf Steiner House, SOS, St Margarets Hospice (Taunton), The Samaritans, SPUC, South Downs Planetarium, The SPACE Centre, Spelthorne Farm Project for the Handicapped, Tribune, Voluntary Euthanasia Society.

First published in Great Britain 2002
This electronic edition published in 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Drawings and selection copyright 2002 by John Burningham

Copyright in the original pieces especially written for this book
and listed on the contents page remains with the contributors.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the copyrightholders for all
other copyright material reproduced in this book.

For a detailed listing see the acknowledgements pages.

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To Helen for forty years,
and to Patrick Woodcock who wrote
the first piece for this book

FOR CHILDREN
Borka
Trubloff
Mr Gumpys Outing
Avocado Baby
Granpa
Cloudland
Whaddayamean?
Husherbye

FOR ADULTS
England
France

Arriving at my year of the Bus Pass was rather an alarming milestone. Suddenly life becomes definitely leasehold. With this in mind, I thought it would be interesting to get the views and advice of others on the subject of age and to compile and illustrate this book.

I remember, some years ago when my children were young, one of them asking me, When was your day, Dad? For the mayfly (Ephemeroptera), its day lasts just twenty-four hours. Undoubtedly, we all have our day and probably never realise when it is.

Now, with modern medical techniques, we are able to keep going for much longer than most of our predecessors. We seem to live in an age that encourages the cult of youth. People are desperate to remain young and go to endless lengths to try to hold onto youth. This of course is quite acceptable if it does not carry with it a great fear and dread of ageing, and the tendency to despise rather than respect those who have become old.

This book is an attempt to examine the subject of age both in the past and in the reflections of contemporary oldies.

I am immensely grateful to all those who have written pieces or given their time and effort to be interviewed for this book. It was surprisingly difficult to persuade some people to discuss the subject of old age. So I am indebted to those who did agree to contribute for a donation to a charity of their choice.

I must also thank Rose Foot who researched this project, locked for days in the London Library, and who selected material, and edited the interviews we recorded.

Hopefully, we can all gain from the observations, comments, and advice in this book. After reading it my mother-in-law said, Thank goodness, its not just me.

John Burningham
JULY 2002

The time will come in your life, it will almost certainly come, when the voice of God will thunder at you from a cloud, From this day forth thou shalt not be able to put on thine own socks. To the young, to the middle aged, even, this may seem a remote and improbable accident that only happens to other people. It has to be said, however, that the day will most probably dawn when your pale foot will wander through the air, incapable of hitting the narrow opening of a suspended sock. Those fortunate enough to live with families will call out for help. The situation is, in minor ways, humiliating and comical.

Its a law of script writing that scenes get shorter and the action speeds up towards the end. In childhood, the afternoons spread out for years. For the old, the years flicker past like the briefest of afternoons. The playwright Christopher Fry, now ninety-three, told me that after the age of eighty you seem to be having breakfast every five minutes. These film scenes, building to an inevitable climax, tend less to tragedy than farce. Dying is a matter of slapstick and prat falls. The ageing process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isnt ready to appear ridiculous.

JOHN MORTIMER, The Summer of a Dormouse (2000)

Oh my God, said my mother. Can I really have a daughter who is seventy? and we both burst out laughing.

She was ninety-two. It was eight years since she had driven a car, six since social services had supplied her with a seat to help her bathe without getting stuck in the tub. She needed two sticks when she made her daily inspection of her garden, and had given up the needlepoint embroidery she loved because her sight was no longer good enough. She was well aware of being a very old woman, but she still felt like the Kitty Athill she had always been, so it was absurd to have another old woman as a daughter.

Another person, however, might have forgotten her own name before reaching that age, so it is impossible to generalise about growing old. Why, I was once asked, do so few people send back reports about life out on that frontier; and the answer is that some no longer have the ability because they have lost their wits, some no longer have the energy because they are beset by aches and pains and ailments, and those lucky enough to have hung on to their health feel just like they felt before they were old except for not being able to do an increasing number of things, and for an awareness of their bodies as sources of a slight malaise, often forgettable but always there if they think about it.

I belong to that last group, touch wood (once you have made it into your eighties you dont say something like that without glancing nervously over your shoulder). The main things I can no longer do are drink alcohol, walk fast or far, enjoy music, and make love. Hideous deprivations, you might think indeed, if someone had listed them twenty years ago I would have been too appalled to go on reading, so I must quickly add that they are less hideous than they sound...

It seems to me that once one has got over the shock of realising that a loss is a symptom of old age, the loss itself is easy to bear because you no longer want the thing that has gone. Music is the only thing I would really like to have back (whisky would be nice, but not nice enough to fret about). If a hearing aid is developed which truly does restore their real nature to those nasty little scratchy sounds which make silence seem lovely, then I will welcome it.