Never too old, never too young!

My eighty year old mother was off-loading her growing anxiety about the new one-act play we are due to start rehearsing shortly: “darling you, don’t understand! It’s my short-term memory that’s going. Even when I’m giving talks, I can’t seem to find the right words anymore.” Most people would be filled with compassion at this complaint which conjures up images of poor Iris Murdoch as portrayed by Judi Dench in the film about the writer’s tragic loss of memory in later life struggling to understand straight-forward questions in a television interview. I, however, am my mother’s son and share with her an impatience towards the moans and groans of others. Moreover, although I am approaching fifty I am still relatively fit and healthy and find it hard to appreciate how the brain gradually loses some of its basic functions in advancing years. In fairness, I also know my mother from of old and am used to her initial resistance to stepping out of her comfort zone. “Just you wait to till you’re eighty,” she declaimed. “I would be delighted if my children still wanted to work with me by then,” I reposted. We shall see, we shall see. This new play is about the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti, and is written by my friend Simon Machin. Simon is around the same age as me and has spent most of his life dealing with numbers as an accountant, despite reading English at Oxford. He feels as though he’s buried his literary talent in the earth for too many years, and having completed the play, “Poison in the Blood” Simon declared he had at last found his vocation. “You’re never too old,” I replied, sharing his enthusiasm. His play is partly about the realities of old age as Rossetti faces her final ‘bleak mid-winter’ in her house in Bloomsbury. Knowing death is imminent, the poet is concerned to protect her legacy from prying biographers (yes, I suppose we are guilty here, too!) and thus she is destroying old letters which might be misinterpreted. More importantly, Rossetti is concerned to preserve her soul from the intrusions of predatory priests keen on extracting death-bed confessions from such an eminent public figure. The poet was by all accounts a somewhat haunted figure right up to her death in spite of her robust Christian faith, and this is reflected in much of her brooding, melancholy verse throughout her life. Poems such as ‘Think of me when I am gone,” are often read at funerals. Simon’s play sensitively depicts Rossetti’s ultimate triumph over her dark side without ducking the complex factors which contributed to much of her unhappiness. At the end of the play, having politely declined the reserved sacrament for the sick and dying offered by the intrusive priest Rev. Gutch, Rossetti bites into a juicy ripe peach allowing the syrupy juice to trickle down her neck in a most inappropriate way for a Victorian lady. This fleeting gesture graphically symbolizes the character’s ultimate discovery of the sheer sensual joy of life once she has freed herself from the binding constraints of a censorious society. Such a world as this with its rigid, moral codes and religious fundamentalism suffocates the soul like a whale-boned corset. If the play has a simple message at its heart, it might be: “you are never too old to find salvation, you are never too old.” The reminder that we are never too old for all sorts of things, was beautifully captured in a recent documentary presented by Alan Yentob about ‘The Company of Elders,’ a dance troupe funded by Sadler’s Wells Theatre whose members range from sixty-one to eighty-five. This company travels around the world performing complex modern choreography in internationally renowned arenas, as well as off-beat community venues such as a gay bar. The choreographer working with them on their current piece remarked how these elderly dancers brought a quality onto the stage which younger performers in their prime found elusive. This was perhaps a generosity of soul ripened through good times and bad. This was most apparent when they work-shopped a scene about their memory of the blitz and the reality of evacuation. The stooped figures with those deeply-lined faces lit by haunting, sunken eyes captured an image of childhood vulnerability relived from a distance of many years. The choreographer could hardly speak when he debriefed the exercise; he was extremely moved. One of the many follies particular to our age is to assume that only the young and beautiful can reflect the power and the glory of life. This is often apparent in Hollywood especially for female performers who are discarded as soon as their skin sags. It is also implicit in many other walks of life today such as in politics where each of the current leaders of our main parties are still learning how to raise young families. God reveals his majesty and might (which includes his child-like vulnerability and profound wisdom) through the whole spectrum of humanity and often most poignantly at the extremes. “Out of the mouths of infants you have ordained praise” declared the psalmist. Never was this more powerfully demonstrated to me than by a choir of seven year olds from Southwater Infants School in Sussex. They were performing in the chapel of Christ’s Hospital School along with some older children. I was particularly struck by their rendition of an up-beat version of “The Lord’s My Shepherd.” They sung the refrain ‘And I will trust in him alone’ with such disarming conviction that I am sure the most militant atheist would have melted in their pew. At the end of the concert the choir filed out of the chapel to a spontaneous standing ovation. I spoke with the director of music at Christ’s Hospital about the infants from Southwater and he highlighted the sheer visceral impact of untrained (though not untutored) voices singing for the sheer joy of being alive. You’re never too old, and you’re never too young to serve the living God.