FOR VARIOUS REASONS, neither I, nor my wife, really knew our grandparents. So I shall ask for your forbearance and write instead abut the woman who was ‘grandma’ in our home for many years: my wife’s mother, Rose.
She was a Catholic shop assistant who fell in love with a postman who happened to be a Protestant – a sin for which she was summarily excommunicated by her priest. But then this was Liverpool in the late 1930s when religion was only marginally less important than life and death.
Rose and Charlie married and eventually were lucky enough to move to a newly-built council estate in Huyton on land bought from the neighbouring Lord Derby, who insisted that all homes built on what had been his estate should be in the Georgian style and have front and back gardens.
Thus it was in a tiny Georgian-style house with two tiny gardens, that the couple brought up four children, all of whom went to grammar school and became in turn a teacher, a ship’s captain, a deputy headmistress and a professor. It was their youngest daughter, Kathy, who was to become the academic and, incidentally, my wife.
We both read English at Leeds University and I first became aware of her when she had a singing role in – this being 1968 – an anarchist musical put on by the drama group starring a certain Alan Yentob, who was later to become the BBC’s Arts Supremo. Her lyrics were accompanied by a discordant melody, which was considerably enhanced by the fact that my wife-to-be had a terrible singing voice. But it was a case of coup de foudré and I fell in love that night.
We married four years later and Kathy subsequently accompanied me to America where I became New York correspondent of the Daily Express when it sold well over three million copies a day, before joining the then much smaller circulation Daily Mail as American Bureau Chief.
Years passed and by now we were back in England where I was climbing – and occasionally stumbling down – the greasy executive ladder on the Mail. Rose, by now widowed, was still living in that hugely aspirational home, but all was not well. About a mile away in open countryside, the council had razed woodland, filled in ponds and built four tower blocks, which brutally protruded from this bleak wasteland like accusing fingers. They were built for families from the notoriously impoverished Liverpool 8 area, which was being demolished. The new residents moved in, their old communities decimated and no new community to be found in their sterile homes in the sky.
Indeed, nothing had been done by those architectural geniuses in the planning department to provide any sense of community or to even lay on buses to the shuttered fortresses that passed for local shops. Not surprisingly, the ex-Liverpool 8 children ran riot and soon that established estate of small Georgian-style houses was infested by crime. It was when her house had been burgled seven times and she discovered a youth trying to break in through her toilet window that Kathy and I decided to ask Rose to come to live with us in London.
For the next twenty years, she was a constant feature in our household. She helped teach both my sons to read, and helped in the kitchen when my wife came home exhausted. Possessed of almost surreal serenity, she radiated a warm, calming influence throughout our home – especially when my eldest son, by then twelve, was off school for a year with illness. I don’t think I have ever seen a prouder woman than Rose when, a year later, he won a scholarship to Eton.
Five years ago, at the age of ninety, she was diagnosed with stomach cancer. In hospital she was, against her express wishes, put in a mixed-sex ward, an indignity that – I exaggerate not – traumatised her. Later she was to refuse an operation which might have prolonged her life a little, preferring to spend her last days in our home which was, of course, by then her home.
She died in her own bed with her family around her, overlooking the garden she loved, stroking Freddie, our Cairn terrier, who had always made her laugh.
The reason I’m telling you all of this is that I believe that the most disturbing aspect of modern British social culture is the way many of our elderly are treated.
Put to one side the scandal of shunting them off to those soulless and often cruel battery farms called old folks’ homes. Equally worrying is the way that, too often, we airbrush them from our lives instead of welcoming them into our homes and lives where they can make such a rich contribution to the family unit.
Over the years, I have asked politicians from both the Left and Right of the political spectrum why they don’t give tax breaks to those who look after their own parents. It seems lunacy that we do so little to encourage families to look after their own relatives, instead spending more and more taxpayers’ money to finance the ever-burgeoning old folks’ industry.
My boys learned so much from their grandma. They learned about the dignity of the elderly, their selfless patience, kind generosity and wisdom. They learned about illness and how it is possible to cope with it with quiet resignation. Above all, they learned how a contented death, while immeasurably sad, can have a moving beauty that can actually be life-enhancing for those who remain behind.
That is what Rose taught my family. To have put her in a home would have been our loss. For modern ‘civilised’ Britain to consign so many of its elderly into anonymous homes is its loss.
Paul Dacre is Editor of the Daily Mail and Editor-in-Chief of Associated Newspapers.