Some things get better. When I was born – in 1933 – my life expectancy was about 65 years; if I were born today, it would be 84 and a half. I am currently 91, and my life expectancy as of now is for four and a half more years. My mother died at 57, weakened by long years of leukaemia, then untreatable. I have already outlived her by 34 years. My father died at 87 after 30 years of retirement filled with gin and golf.
According to the latest research, however, some things are getting worse for the generations that followed mine. While life expectancy is still increasing for baby boomers and people in their 50s, they are living for longer with worse health than previous generations.
Baby boomers always steal the headlines, perhaps because they arrived in the postwar years of hope. But things were tougher for my parents’ generation. Then, you only survived into old age if you had a robust constitution or inherited genes that saw you through. There was no National Health Service. As children, each lost younger siblings to ill health. Doctors charged a fee to see them, and the social services we know today simply didn’t exist. They both started work straight from school at 13 – he in a modest managerial job in a small engineering company and she as a tracer (copying engineering plans) in the same firm. They had both grown up in Coronation Street-style terrace houses with no bathrooms and only outside loos, and their highest hopes were for jobs that left them with clean hands, regular wages and two weeks’ holiday a year. Their hopes were realised.
To my parents’ generation, the medical and social care we have today would have seemed beyond their wildest imaginings – the utopian vision of political radicals and religious idealists. A wonderfully benign and generous social state has come into being, prompted by postwar optimism and the triumph of the Labour party at the 1945 polls. It brought the revolution so many hoped for: There it was! It is! And yet, and yet … I’m now beginning to see the downside. Knowing the state is there to offer medical and social help – all of it free, if you know how the system works – creates a different kind of world from the one I knew: one of assumed help, leading to dependence and entitlement (and why not?). The assumption for many people is that they will live a long and healthy life. Why wouldn’t it be, with the NHS there to patch us up when things go wrong?
Growing older gives me a different perspective on what we call “quality of life”. I’m fortunate: quality of life for me means being able to get to the opera. At 91, I also appreciate the value of the smaller things: friendship, digestion, good eyesight. Some of these things I even have some power to maintain.
But there is a sad paradox here: the paradox of growing old. It means I have seen many of my idealistic hopes realised: a health service, local government provision, an abundance of voluntary services and a network of resources easy to reach through your own GP or local library. But we’ve also seen widening health disparities.
Those baby boomers who were born into a world of postwar hope are the generation that is now running things. They still have the chance to make good on that sense of possibility. I see a world coming into being – although it has far to go – that will care for all its citizens and one day ensure that no one suffers poverty, destitution or mental grief, that strives to reach even homeless people and those with addictions. I see people living longer and society addressing the ailments and stresses they will inevitably face: weakened limbs, hair loss, difficulties walking, failing hearing.
Resources must be directed at the social welfare of the old. But while we do, it is worth rejoicing in how far we have come. I have travelled much of that road myself – and while my life heads to the sunset, I want that of the next generation to look towards a new dawn.
Joan Bakewell is a broadcaster, writer and Labour peer. Between 2008 and 2010, she acted as a government-appointed Voice of Older People
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