The reassuring Face of Old age

The reassuring face of old age by Liz Hunt


I find little reason to celebrate news this week that fashion designers and manufacturers of luxury goods are shunning instantly forgettable teenage waifs in favour of real women of a certain age to promote their goods.

First off, they are not using real women. Fiftysomethings like Jerry Hall and Marie Helvin, and fortysomethings such as Helena Christensen and Linda Evangelista, remain what they were in their heyday: beautiful freaks of nature whose idiosyncratic angles and curves are enhanced by the lens of a camera. The airbrush and photographic manipulation may be needed to further gild the illusion now, but their vintage alone does not bring them any closer to us lesser mortals. They are, in fact, a denial of age, and their return to favour is not the blow against ageism it is portrayed to be.

There is, however, plenty to celebrate in Diana Athill's triumph in the Costa Book of the Year (formerly the Whitbread) awards in the biography category – the oldest writer to be so honoured – for the sixth in her series of memoirs, titled Somewhere Towards the End. Yesterday, the 91-year-old author and publisher's strong, serene features gazed boldly out from the pages of every newspaper, giving no hint that they belonged to a woman who was anywhere near her end just yet. Nor did her feisty comments betray any desire for it. "If I don't win, I won't really mind not having the acclaim," she told an interviewer. "It's not getting the money that I will mind. Because I'm always terribly broke, and how wonderful it would be to get that lovely cheque."

Much of Athill's notoriety prior to the award focused on her detailed accounts of her sex life, the affairs of her youth and middle-age in which she was frequently the "other woman", and her frank description of how age diminished her libido. Yet this volume – the most popular and critically acclaimed to date – was described by the judges as "a perfect memoir of old age – candid, detailed, charming, totally lacking in self-pity or sentimentality...".

It is surely the latter qualities – the absence of self-pity or sentimentality – that are the reasons for its critical success and acceptance by a wider audience. We are an ageing population, haunted by the horrors of physical and mental decline, from incontinence to Alzheimer's, and troubled by the question of who will care for us when they strike. There seems to be no good news about being old. Its realities are taboo, and we hide away those afflicted by them, or dispense with their services, rejecting the wisdom and experience of their years.

Yes, Athill is, in her own way, a freak of nature too, I suppose – but more of us face life as healthy nonogenarians and beyond. In telling it like it is, with humour and compassion, she makes it seem not quite that bad after all. That's a real blow against ageism.

By Liz Hunt