Third Age
January 2013
Getting up close and personal with the past
Third Agers know better than to make a big deal about New Year. It is just another January with things lurking in it. But this year I have to carry out a vow: to go through my papers. On the stroke of midnight, a fine sweat on my brow will break out, and with it that nasty little squeezy feeling in the chest which people of my age do not relish at all. It’s time. To get up close and personal with the past.
2013 is the year when I will closet myself with boxes of papers, cuttings, letters, unfinished novels, court judgments (all in my favour in case you think I am a mug), marginalia, memorable quotes… the detritus of a writer’s life. Yellowing newsprint is the most interesting; past written threats to my life and wellbeing are the scariest (one of the things that really got some men going ape in the 80s was the proposal to admit women to the fire brigade). And there are the lovely ones. These belong to pre-internet days, when people who liked what you wrote picked up a pen, some nice notepaper and wrote, without benefit of hashtags. It was a deliberative act, not an impulsive sign-in to Facebook with something like: “Kool wot U wrote, hugs XXX.”
Yes, enough of that. All this paper I must sort through tells a bigger story. It chronicles my contact with the social and political changes of 50 or so years. Julian Barnes has one of his characters, not the brightest of a bunch of pretentious schoolboys in The Sense of an Ending claim that history is the memory of survivors. People of my age are survivors of some of the most radical, concentrated changes ever. We survived the wars our fathers and mothers went to, the wars our fathers and mothers engaged in at home, political fights about education (free? private? religious? secular? tertiary fees?), advocacy for women in the work force, for women everywhere, the outing of criminal assault in the home; the gradual, perilous uncovering of the prevalence of incest, and later on, the discovery that people could finally talk out loud about sexual abuse, especially of children. These are just a few of the changes. We went from pretty young things with hats and gloves to tough women in jeans; from people who largely did what they were told, to people who questioned everything.
But history is more than memories. Documentation is necessary. Another of Barnes’s smartarse schoolboys says that history is “that certainty produced where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” It’s clumsy and his teacher shoots holes in it, but the story of the protagonist’s life – a 60-ish over-cautious, self-regarding man – takes off from there in a riveting novel about ageing, memory, missing documentation, regret, and the horrible truth that the lessons you learn about yourself in old age come too late to be useful.
The points made about needing documentation stand up.
I know that some of us wake in the night with the thought: I must tell my daughter/son/grandchild that. Before we fall back to sleep we recognise that what seems so important to us will not likely catch the attention of the younger person. If siblings cannot agree on their family history, people separated by generations will likely regard our memories as at least part fiction. What we need is documentation to back up our stories.
As Barnes’s ageing narrator says, “as witnesses to your life diminish” there is “less certainty as to what you are or have been.” Even if you have kept records, they may prove to be wrong or inadequate.
Perhaps I am talking myself out of getting my papers in order. But someone has to do it, I suppose, even if it proves to be just an inadequate record of my past, totally fallible as history and makes me have a little cry.
***
When I heard of Dame Elisabeth Murdoch’s death at the age of 103 in December, and read many tributes to her intelligence and understanding – observable in TV interviews late in her life – I recalled that about 18 months ago Peter Coleman, a columnist for the Australian segment of The Spectator, expressed regret that Dame Elisabeth had co-signed a letter to The Age supporting the carbon tax. He wrote: “She is a grand old lady and a great Australian. But there is no evidence that she has made or can make an independent assessment of the issue. At 102 it is not surprising that she has had some difficulty in following the debates or always staying awake during discussions.”
Breathtakingly patronising, but that is not the point I am making; which is that Peter Coleman was 83 when he wrote this.
He appears to believe in a hierarchy of the old. Are you young enough to have an opinion at 83, but not at 102 (as the great Dame was at the time this was published)? She must have wanted to box his ears.
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