Jeremy Clarke
Already a subscriber? Log in
Instead of moving aside, she detained me with one of her diatribes against 21st-century Britain. ‘Look at that!’ she said, gesturing contemptuously at the linoleum floor. I looked down. ‘Look at all that grass he’s brought in.’ She was referring to the doctor, and to some blades of grass he’d brought in when he last visited. This led to a general denunciation of doctors, of workmen, of politicians, and finally to a lowering of standards generally. We have sunk so low so quickly I can’t believe it, she said. Before she got on to immigration, as she normally does, I said, ‘Can I go now? I have to drive someone to the hospital.’ ‘Well you’re a bloody fool, too, for standing there,’ she said.
It’s a 40-minute round trip to the hospital. This woman, another neighbour, had an appointment with a consultant. On the way there she gave me a detailed account of a sequence of gynaecological repairs she has recently undergone, which had ruled out the bus, and a graphic description of a fistula that was yet to be dealt with, which may or may not be operable. The fistula was what she was seeing the consultant about. She was a state registered nurse of the old school, this woman, trained in the 1950s, and spoke about her reproductive system knowledgeably and dispassionately.
On the way back she relayed the latest information on the fistula. The consultant had drawn a helpful diagram. His advice was that they should wait and meanwhile she should keep an eye on it. Then she changed the subject to the standard of nursing care I should expect when my own health failed, which she predicted would be any time soon. She’d been reading newspaper reports of how elderly patients had died of thirst in some NHS hospitals. Yes, it was outrageous, she said. But more than that, she found it amazing that anyone lacking in the basic principles of humanity and common decency should want to be a nurse in the first place. If a nurse in a hospital can’t help an elderly patient to sip from a glass of water, she said, what hope is there for the rest of society?
‘What is happening to everybody, Jeremy?’ she said, turning round in her seat to face me, as though I might have a sensible answer. ‘The world’s gone mad.’ As I pulled up outside her house, she eyed me speculatively. Then she said if I knew of anyone wanting a relationship, sexual or otherwise, with a 69-year-old woman who was falling apart at the seams, could I pass on their name and phone number.
When I got home the line-up around the kitchen table was this: my mother, my mother’s brother, and my mother’s sister. They are all in their eighties. Every day for the last week my mother’s brother has been sitting at the table and reading aloud the most outrageous or depressing articles from the Daily Mail. He’s been doing it all week. The Daily Mail is where he gets all his information. And the others have all been sadly shaking their heads or gasping with incredulity at how quickly civilisation has collapsed.
Now I have been called a reactionary bigot in the past and quite rightly so. But sometimes I get a little tired of being told how bad things are by people ‘aweary of the sun’ who ‘wish the estate o’ the world were now undone’. And after a day of hearing how bad things are, I unfortunately lost it. So your generation was good and decent and hard-working, I said angrily. And mine and my son’s and my grandson’s are absolute rubbish, I said. Can any of you explain what happened in between?
‘The teachers stopped wearing ties,’ said my mother’s brother calmly and without batting an eyelid. ‘Simple. How can you look up to a teacher who isn’t wearing a tie?’ I looked at my watch, hoping that the Rapture would occur shortly, and that either I was taken up, or they were, I didn’t mind which.
Also in Society
Also by Jeremy Clarke
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in