Another voice

Gerontophobia

Auberon Waugh

The Prince of Wales had some distinctly old-fashioned things to say about the new British sport of granny-bashing when he addressed the lads in a Bermondsey pro- bation bation home last week. I suppose he is nght, and we should all desist, although I left hoped at the end of this month to take up his new appointment as Editor of the Field he would give me a page of that admirable magazine to write about the sPorts of cock-fighting in Manila, dog- fighting in Arkansas, ratting in Somerset, topless female boxing in Liverpool and also granny-bashing in South London. This strikes me as one of the most interesting Phenomena of our time, and one which has been written about so far in terms only of Its shock-horror-sensation value, without any reference to its sociological context, let alone to its relevance in the overall sporting scene.

The most obvious explanation is that these old people are the most vulnerable

section of the community, the easiest to rob after children under the age of ten, who

seldom have quite as much money as old

age pensioners, or t faster, any rate spend it

When I a first took an interest in the

Matter, about four years ago, I decided that the explanation was simply that old people nowadays had more money than was good for them. Standing, as I do, every Monday orning to buy stamps a my post of- nce o among the swaying, t grumblingqueue

°f ldage pensioers, bright-yed for their

weekly o f state welfare,e I watch the nuge bundles of dirty £10 notes being put Into every trembling hand and marvel that lany of them gets home safely. There was no class to suppose that Britain's crimina,aa sses were any less lazy than its 'workers, . Jec1/411 the thousands of millions of pounds of h Paid out in old age pensions and sup- Plementary benefits to the old seemed an uPen invitation to have a bash.

If I was right in this explanation it was

une boring because the only solution to (..he Problem must have been to reduce old ''_ge Pensions and supplementary benefits — or replace them by payments in kind — un- Othe temptation was removed. This would E Workbecause most old age pensioners, oY meeasl y rec bkoning, would sooner risk the on ...al bashing than accept half the eveogr?neY, or payment in kind. In any case, my nts analysis has ben overtaken by onents In that it fails toes ake into account these attacks. Every week one or another of e Popular newspapers carries the photograph of some little old lady's face with broken nose, split lips and blackened eyes. Recently an old man was made to eat his big toe which his assailants had cut off. Sadism of this sort is bound to involve extra work. While everybody joins in deploring such developments, nobody has yet tried to ex- plain them. It seems to me there might be two possible explanations. The first is a perversion (as opposed to atrophy) of nor- mal moral instincts which might be explain- ed by video nasties, Shirley Williams's education reforms or what you will. The sec- cond is a growing hatred of the old. Either the old in this country or the young (or possibly both) must be exceptionally nasty. People may accuse me of being fanciful if I attribute some of the present enthusiasm for Neil Kinnock and Gary Hart to this same granny-bashing syndrome. Certainly it is a more respectable manifestation than the other, even if it may cause greater havoc in the long term. I have heard younger Americans say that what they particularly resent about having such an old President is the thought that Ronald Reagan may not be afraid of dying. Their anxiety must have in- creased since the arrival of Chernenko, who is plainly on his last legs. Hart and Kin- nock, it is felt, being younger, must be full of that essential life-urge. I find it hard to quantify popular anxie- ties about nuclear war, chiefly because I do not happen to suffer from them myself. It has always seemed to me that the dangers are much less than those of being run over by a bus, that no human tragedy is greater than its constituent parts. lf, individually, we are prepared to face the risk of being run over by a bus, or contracting some fatal disease without living in mortal terror, why should we collectively be unable to fact the risk of being blown up as the price we have to pay for our life of pampered freedom? Add to this the fact that the poor wretches who live under socialism have the same risk of nuclear war and it does not seem to me that there is a case to answer. But not everybody feels the same. Talk- ing recently to Fay Weldon, the novelist and female thinker, I was surprised to hear her say that she sould prefer to live with Bri- tain as a vassal state of the Soviet Union than with her present anxiety about the im- minence of a nuclear war. Many people, and not only women, profess these same anx- ieties, to a greater or lesser degree. Perhaps because I do not share them, they seem to me to be suspect, even generated by hysteria, the expression of. some entirety difficult restlessness, possibly of what Dr George Steiner (in Bluebeard's Castle, Faber 1971) characterised as 'The Great En- nui'. Not to put too fine a point on it, the countries of Western Europe have been at peace too long; the nuclear threat rules out any serious involvement in a foreign war to cream off the restless element. Granny-bashing is the result, not to men- tion football hooliganism, Hell's Angels and the rest of it. In 1649 Sir Richard Lovelace wrote one of the most ridiculed poems ever to appear in the English language: 'To Lucasta, (on) going to the wars ... '

°Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkinde That from the Nunnerie

Of thy chaste breast, and quiet minde,

To Warre and Armes I flie .

Yet this Inconstancy is such, As you too shall adore; I could not love thee, Deare, so much Lov'd I not Honour more.'

The Warre to which he refers was an expedition to help the French recapture Dunkirk from the Spaniards in 1646, on the return from which he was flung into jail. It was really not his squabble. But one does not need to know this in order to smell a rat. From internal evidence alone one can guess that he was bored out of his own mind by the Nunnerie of Lucasta's chaste breast. What he was looking for was the opportunity to bash a few wogs across the Channel with the possibility of some slap and tickle with a French (or Spanish) wench on the side. These possibilities, which have always ex- isted in the past, have now been officially withdrawn, with the deplorable effect which we all see on the rapscallion element in our midst. Lovelace, who died in rags in 1657 after once being accounted 'the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld, much admired and adored by the female sex' (Wood: A thenae Oxon, III 460), was also able to work off his angry passions in a properly conducted civil war, which his side unfortunately lost. It is to this solution of its neuroses that the country is now heading, or so I main- tain, as the brutal, half-witted north of England becomes ever more obdurate and unreasonable in its demands on the gentler south. Eventually the south's readiness to conciliate, compromise and pay Danegeld must be exhausted, even if the violent stupidity of the north — Mr Scargill's Yorkshire millers, the frenzied social workers of Liverpool — does not break out into aggression first. Meanwhile, in the south, we quietly bash old ladies over the head. Rather than exacerbate it all, I am taking my own restless or aggressive urges on another tour of the Far East and may miss next week's issue, although I will try not to do so.