As Ann Shearer has got older, she’s shrunk by more than two inches – but don’t call her a little old lady
For decades, I’ve bristled at the term ‘little old lady’. It’s so carelessly used – by broadcasters too – to bundle
up a whole spectrum of individual lives into a class that’s faintly risible and certainly dismissible.
When I think of the older women I’ve known, their very different interests honed by perspective, their accrued wisdoms and the witness they bring to history through memory, that implied assumption of equivalent shrinkage between body and wit is a downright insult.
But, now, I have to accept it. A little old lady is what I’ve become.
I was once 5 foot 41⁄2 – and more in heels. Now, at 81, I’m 5 foot 2 – on a good day.
This came to me with a shock of realisation the other day at the theatre, as I was jostled towards my seat in a surge of young people who suddenly seemed like giants.
Glasses in hand, laughing and chatting way above my head, they seemed totally unaware I was struggling among them.
Let’s not impute malice. I had to accept the real possibility that they didn’t even see me because I was so small. Come the interval, I obsessively confirmed this. Yes, it was true: I was the smallest person in the bar.
‘Well,’ my kind companion said, ‘there is that one woman who’s smaller.’
‘But not much,’ I said.
I should have been prepared. The young assistant in our local ironmongers gave me a nudge last year, when I left something to be collected without giving my name.
The only way he could define me to his colleagues, he told me, was as ‘the little lady’. Already I must have been his smallest customer! Though thank you, dear man, for your tactful omission of the ‘old’.
Years before that, the delightful anaesthetist, almost a friend after my third orthopaedic operation, had foretold the inevitable. ‘You’re a very healthy woman,’ she said. ‘But, oh, you’ve got a rubbish skeleton.’
I knew it, and we laughed. But knowing and true realisation are two different things. So now I feel a bit like Alice after she’d drunk that little bottle of shrinking mixture: on my way if not into Wonderland, at least into an unknown territory.
But she was young and, as young people must, she had many adventures ahead in search of her own proper size in an often bewildering world. I’m old, and this is the size I’ve got – I won’t grow. Will I soon have to carry a cushion so that I can be sure to reach other people’s dinner tables? Or a little stool to reach shop counters? Will stair treads seem higher as my legs get shorter?
It’s not easy to see the upsides of this shrinkage. I suppose I’m now a good size to wriggle to the front of a crowd massing to catch a glimpse of Taylor Swift at a concert.
But I’m not sure I’m limber enough to duck under the steward’s restraining arm, and I doubt that a visit to our little country town is on her schedule.
It may possibly be easier to get down to the weeding, now that there’s less far to go. But the same doesn’t seem to apply when it comes to getting up again.
In one of those group photos, I’m bound to be directed to a place near the front, but these days I really can’t think of an occasion to be glad of the chance.
Yet there are consolations. Thank goodness I can still haul the steps across the kitchen to reach the top cupboard shelves and confirm that the bag of lentils I knew was there indeed is. Thank goodness too for the footstool that enables me to reach for the remembered book just at the moment it’s needed.
I love these little triumphs of memory and capacity. See? I may be old and little but, just like so many others people write off, I’m not finished yet.
Such are the small encouragements of daily life. And there are larger consolations too. A stranger who, unbidden, hefts my suitcase up the railway steps; another who courteously stands aside to give me sight of a painting on the gallery wall; another yet, who puts aside his or her own shopping to stretch up the supermarket shelves for mine. When the daily news can make me
doubt it, all these and many others keep alive the precious truth: most human beings are also kind.
And there’s a larger consolation. When Alice drank that potion, she felt nervous that the shrinking would go on and on until, like a candle flame, she’d go out altogether.
She tried to fancy what the flame might look like then, but she couldn’t remember ever having seen such a thing.
That’s beyond my imagination too. But I like to hope that if that’s how I go out, shrunk to an invisible flame, I’ll go contentedly.
