Centrepiece
Within our sausage-skins
Colin Welch
A few weeks ago it was my 60th birth-
day. I sauntered past the milestone, kicking up the dust, eyes averted, whistling with assumed nonchalance Papageno's birdcatcher song, hoping to escape the notice of the Reaper, of the President of the Immortals, the proprietor of all earthly bumpers and boats for hire. I was born on 23 April, St George's Day, Shakespeare's birthday and the very day in 1924 when the Empire Exhibition opened at Wembley with the statue of the then Prince of Wales carv- ed in New Zealand butter, near which Bingo Little — I think it was — rapturously rediscovered his mislaid fiancée. Gone Em- pire, statue, Prince; gone even St George (so the impious say). I live yet (DV) for a lit- tle spell, Shakespeare and Wodehouse for as long as English is spoken.
I had not thought of issuing a message to the world on this obscure and grim event, till I recalled how interested I had always been in the reflections of those who were travelling a few years ahead of me. The great and good Maurice Green, editor of the Daily Telegraph when I was entering nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, often reported back on what life was like at 60. His dispatches were on the whole encourag- ing, so I pass them on, if you feel weary, out of sorts and a failure in your fifties, he said, no need to think it's going to be like that but getting worse all the time for the next 25 years. After the male menopause (I don't think he used such a modish expres- sion), there are recoveries of lost health and powers. Some things indeed are lost forever, but the pain of losing them is mer- cifully abated. Unabated in Maurice's case was his joy in Wagner, fishing, shooting, porcelain, smoking cigarettes, sluicing and browsing, even editing. Logan Pearsall Smith said: 'There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.' I think dear bald Maurice would have agreed. Do I? For many or most, to be sure, for the lucky and the wise. For me? Yes, though of course there is sadness too: 'Who never ate his bread with sorrow, who never spent the midnight hours weeping and waiting for the morrow — he knows you not, ye heavenly powers.' That remains true. As for the risks of boring my contemporaries by writing about senescence, they exist, but grow less with every passing year till, after 80, all con- temporaries are friends.
I think that many of us at 60 are con- scious, though it is fruitless to wail about it, of daily unavoidable injustices done to us. Try as I may, for instance, I cannot see my contemporaries in, say, the Press Gallery as they were when they were young, unless like George Lochhead I knew them then. To Auberon Waugh we look like walking sausages. So we do, as will he, DV. Yet within our sausage-skins lurks and lives still, though invisible, all we ever were children, youngsters, little rascals, bullies or bullied, swots or truants, young lovers, young journalists, young fathers, jour- nalists in their prime: yet all that can be seen is old fools. And, of course, it is the most distant parts of our lives which seem to us old fools the nearest. The first time we en- counter this, that or the other, it makes an indelible impression: we are bowled over with an amazement, joy, fear or love which we shall never forget. So long as we are still receiving these first impressions, life seems infinite, unfolding slowly with leisurely lux- ury. As we gain experience and lose the faculty of wonder, so do the telegraph poles fly past ever faster; the scenery in between is less memorable; and so at last I can better describe my young nanny's dress when I was two (very fashionable then and since a short shift or cutty sark, with candy stripes of yellow, green, blue, orange, black and mauve) than a dress I admired last week.
Wilde's Lord Henry said that the tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is young — yes, and in great part very young indeed. The injustice is that we don't look or seem so. Behind the huge soup- stained beards of old Tennyson and Brahms were imprisoned the ardent handsome young men they had once been, just as in Keats and Shelley lay immanent, never to be achieved, the possibility of huge soup- stained beards.
Peter Simple regards photography as one of the most baneful fruits of progress. For once I can't agree with him. For what better than fading snaps in an album can bring back what we were and therefore still are, resurrect tracts of our own lives half- forgotten, reveal passages of other people's half-forgotten or never known, raise the dead and forcibly remind their children that they too were young once? Snaps are a sort of higher court, to which we can appeal against the harsh verdicts of old age and
`It's a collection of very dull storeys.'
failing memory.
Someone said that no one was ever in love who did not have a passionate interest in the loved one's childhood. And there in snaps part of that childhood may ,be preserved, complete perhaps with spade' bucket, floppy hat, beaming aunts, Picnic rug and cherished dogs. Vividly do 1 recall a yellowing photo of my mother, then still at, convent, arrayed in a costume both absurd and touching to play St Pancras (saint tt°1 station) in some edifying entertainment, het. proudly smiling face a much younger' sweeter and more innocent version °I( Gustav Mahler's. And when my mother died at a great age, I could not help think" ing with anguish of that little girl Song down within her, as in a shipwreck, piteous- ly screaming and battering vainly on th,,e,. bolted hatches for release as the %vat' poured in. Another inescapable injustice is done to the opinions of the old. These may hte been with luck the product of long thntigilid reasoning, not all of it conscious, an debate, inner or outer, about experiences 0' things heard or read. Yet, when passed orl to young people, without any possibiltrY reproducing, even if they could be recalleaf h the complex and tedious processes whic„, produced and link them, they must see' mere arbitary prejudices, as hollow, ernPtY, and meaningless as broken bits of statues °`f pottery piled up in a scrapyard. And ° course many of them have ossified jiltc, mere prejudices. A long life has taughtto, that this is the best way of doing or incitti; this or that. Often we can't easily rernent' why. What once may have been reasoned has become automatic, a reflex acti°11. Challenged, why do we behave or speak s2i our old jaws drop open: we haven't thong "d about it for years. Once we too clebathee with each other far into the night,,,, , %, nature, say, of the laws of propertY• we just say flatly, 'That's my coat'; we P it on and go. A long life is like an old city, with11181 different layers on top of each other, wit old buildings adapted, shored up or falling into decay, new buildings built within or 0° top of them. It appears inexpkable, incom- prehensible, its message confused and Mu fled, its mysterious rationality (if any) ac-
cessible patient study, excavation and
Every generation, moreover, is doomed to be a sort of secret society, with sPetae thoughts and interests which, I' passwords, are well known to its contem- poraries but cannot be communicated to Its ddescendants. Ourto outnumberdescendants. us a nddes descen- dants friends. Our failure to communicate Not" them thus becomes ever more serious. F°r. as we grow old we lose, as Goethe lamented, one of the greatest of human rights — the right to be judged by our Life was This loss did not daunt Goethe. LIP„ was for him like the Sibylline books, the more precious the less of it is left. May our judges and descendants be merciful to us-
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