Why the young view old age through the wrong end of the telescope

Rembrandt, Self–Portrait at the age of 63 (Detail) 1669 

I have only read some half dozen of Shakespeare’s plays, but I remember – in The Winter’s Tale – being particularly struck by Polixenes’ reply to Hermione when she asks what his boyhood was like with her husband Leontes:

We were, fair Queen
Two lads that thought there was no more to behind [to come],
But such a day tomorrow as today
And to be a boy eternal. (I, ii, 36)

These were exactly the sentiments of Richmal Crompton’s William Brown / Just William, who – with the ‘outlaws’ at his side, and his dog Jumble at his heals – felt that an eternity of

freedom stretched before him. And small wonder that, when a wily tramp offers to let the ‘outlaws’ into the ‘profession’ (at the consideration of (2/–) two shillings apiece), the attraction of endless roaming and the freedom of the road seems like a chance in a lifetime. Well, this was a road chosen by Walt Whitman, W H Davies, and Henry Thoreau (in his own way). But then they probably felt like Ruskin that although, ‘The world itself is round, and indeed more or less everything in it ...  human work ... is often very flat indeed.’

And what has given rise to these thoughts? That although most young people think it very desirable to live   a long life, nevertheless the old and elderly tend to be invisible to them. Not that this is surprising. It stems from an intense preoccupation with the ‘now’, and a lack of long experience of life. Not that everyone’s childhood is by any means necessarily a happy one. Some children may be sadly propelled into the world   of adult experience far too quickly. However, insofar as there are certain ‘fixtures’ these do tend to take on a kind of permanence in a child’s mind. So that a degree of sadness or plaintiveness is felt when, for example, granny dies, and it is no longer possible to visit a person and a house which has meant so much to us. Moreover, we seem to have a certain tendency to go on thinking that, whenever something good happens to us it is the first in an endless series – rather than a ‘one–off’, or the first of a limited number of such experiences. Hence the frequency of celebrity divorces: a fairly predictable result of dizzyingly unrealistic expectations... French chateaux and the yachts in the Mediterranean can anyway make for a remarkably tedious and empty life.

Well, I have strayed somewhat from the question of the perceived desirability of a long life. But my part–time work in one of the UKs biggest hospitals is very salutary in this respect. Twice a week I witness what  it can be like to reach the kind of age that the young think so desirable. And, truth to be told, it is not much fun growing old – if, that is, your health has seriously deteriorated. I remember my aunt Joy saying to me, ‘Don’t grow old, Peter.’ She would say this in a very matter of fact way, and without a trace of self–pity. She died in her early eighties in 1987 – just before the ‘great storm’ which tore like a fury through the woods behind her cottage. That same wood in which – in the 1950s – I had painstakingly severed the ivy from the base of every tree. (Some kids, walking along the footpath at the top of the wood, told me that I was on private property. Like a young prig, I informed them that, ‘I happened to be staying with the owners . . .)

There was always something magical about the view over the Surrey countryside from Joy’s cottage.   It is utterly indescribable. By chance, my wife and I were able to visit the cottage just a few years ago. It  was as if time had stood still. The landscape – and all its distinctive features – was as magical as when I first saw it in the 1950s. The general advice tends to be, ‘Don’t go back’, but in this instance it was as if I had never been away...