This Much Is True

No one ever tells you about how things change as you get older. It’s one of those topics that people avoid talking about until it’s too late and you are old too. That’s when you realise that it’s going to be such an effort bending over to pick something up, you might as well not bother. You change, and what you want changes. I get extremely irritated by it — I don’t mean in the superficial sense of mourning my youthful good looks: I refer to the general sagging and wrinkling, the age spots and skin tags, the sprouting of facial hair. Some of my friends have had plastic surgery and Botox, but that’s not for me. My face has always been a pleasant one; I have a winning smile and good eyes. The wrinkles which have appeared are the honourable traces of my life: laugh lines rather than frown lines.

My body is taking its revenge. The years of overeating and under-exercising have resulted in a belly of gargantuan proportions. I am ashamed of it. And my bladder is weak, or is it my sphincter? All I know is that I have about ten seconds to get to the loo. I always carry a spare pair of knickers: when this book is finished, I’ve promised myself a course in pelvic firmness. Apparently, it can be done, so I live in hope.

Although I was never sporty, as a young person I was not unfit. Until the inexorable passage of time took its toll, I had health, vigour and stamina. I’ve always loved water, and for forty years I swam every day. I wasn’t a good swimmer; I was, in fact, a pathetic swimmer, but at least I did it.

When I was a child, my parents forbade me to join in school swimming lessons: they were frightened of polio as many believed that swimming was where children caught the disease. In 1955, Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine and the world breathed more easily, much as we’re doing now facing the horrors of COVID-19 and the sensible ones rushing to get their jabs. (Don’t mention anti-vaxxers to me; that is not a sane opinion to hold.) Eventually, however, I persuaded my parents to let me learn to swim — at school, we had our lessons in the River Cherwell. From that moment on, swimming was my sport. In London, I used to swim in the Marshall Street Baths in Soho, or sometimes at the Queen Mother Sports Centre in Victoria. Mary Wilson, Harold Wilson’s widow, used to swim there, and also Jennifer Paterson, one of the ‘Two Fat Ladies’. We always knew when she was in, because she was a baritone and she sang, ‘Pomty pom, pomty pom’ in stentorian tones as she dried herself in the cubicle.

My local pool, on Clapham Manor Street, is one of my favourites, as it’s easy to step into. I hate pools where they have only perpendicular metal ladders, so you are required to be a climber as well as a swimmer. And I prefer to swim in the open air; if Tooting Bec Lido and Brockwell Lido were heated in the winter, I would be so happy. My favourite pool in the world is the Carnegie Memorial Pool in suburban Melbourne, but alas, it’s being redeveloped (a word which strikes terror into me — next to ‘cancer’, my least favourite word is ‘developer’), until at least May 2023.

My daily swim was marred only by selfish swimmers. Pool Nazis are usually men, who pound up and down the lane, ignoring anyone nearby while they splash, hit and kick with impunity. There is no excuse for not looking around to see who else is in the pool.

In my seventies, I was diagnosed with benign positional vertigo (BPV) perhaps caused by water getting into my ears. That sadly brought an end to my daily dips. My poor body was used to swimming, so when I stopped, it gave up too and went to pot. I’ve had skeletal problems, osteoarthritis, and a knee replacement operation since. The latest blow is spinal stenosis, a debilitating condition which makes it difficult to walk or even stand for any amount of time without severe pain.

Consequently, I’ve become physically nervous, though I think that’s something that comes to all of us with age: while I never liked my body much, I used to trust it, and now I worry it’ll let me down and so I move about the world, anxiously and carefully. I walk with a stick, and if people get too close, and their droplets could infect me, I wave the stick in their faces — and mostly, they keep away.

The worst thing about ageing, obviously, is the great sorrow of losing friends — as you grow old, people you have loved and imagined would always be there start, with wretched regularity, to leave your life. I’ve loved writing this book, but the saddest part has been revisiting the losses.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. There are perks of age. People listen to you more. They don’t see you — you’re invisible when you’re in the street — but if they’re sitting talking to you, they think you’re wiser and you’re going to be talking sense because you’re old. It may not be true, but still…