Polly Toynbee’s article about old age neatly exposes the contradictions and paradoxes of contemporary old age (How old is too old? I’m 77 and I don’t know yet. But I will when I get there, 4 May). I am now in my 90th year, nimble of mind but disintegrating in body as cancer and heart conditions take their bows in the theatre of my aged body. Old age is no longer God’s time of threescore years and ten – modern medicine and better social conditions have subverted God.
I was born in the mid-1930s. My working-class forebears were all members of the labouring classes when it was a matter of luck to reach 60 years of age. I had one grandmother left when I was born, who died in 1947 at 66 years of age. Very old for those times. In my late teens and during national service, I began to resist the idea of being a general labourer and took an opportunity, provided by the much-mourned London county council, to make my own social mobility journey into the professional classes.
