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I grew up in the tradition that working life ended for women at 60 and for men at 65. Then followed a few years when older people were entitled to rest after their labours until terminal decrepitude finally released them from this weary world. It is on this assumption that the provision of care for older people is apparently still based.

There is no recognition of the fact that instead of dying off before we reach our mid-70s, it is much more likely that many of us will live until we are 90 or even 100. The implications of this for housing, pensions, welfare and family life are simply ignored. There is a gap, a black hole, in our concept of community care.


At first, retirement is for many a happy release from regular employment - an opportunity to travel, take up voluntary work or go fishing. But inevitably, for all of us decrepitude relentlessly overtakes us. In my own case it came with an abruptness that was shocking. I had led a happy life as a voluntary worker and councillor until my 90s. I tripped on a paving stone and my subsequent state of dependency brought home to me the startling realisation that I had fallen into the gap.

Unable to bathe myself, I applied to the ever-helpful social services for assistance only to be told that there was a two-year waiting list for domiciliary care because the funds for that service had been spent. I had outlived the available resources. What an experience this life in the gap is proving to be. Social services has organised transport to take me to a day centre for a weekly bath.

A plethora of caring services are offered to me, for which I am deeply grateful. Yet I remain dissatisfied, hungry for something, I know not what. Despairing sociologists beg me and my kind to tell them what we need or want. Struggling to articulate what it is that I hanker after, I have come to realise that my trouble is that all this concern focuses on my physical needs. The well-being of me, Margaret, is nobody's business.


What, then, do I want? It is assumed that I must be lonely and that being lonely means a lack of company. In fact, I am fortunate in having so many visitors that my son proposes to stick a notice on my door saying: "Do not disturb. Keep out".

Peel away the assumptions and what is left is, in fact, a deep sense of exclusion. I don't belong. I am not one of "them". I have no role, no place in our community. "They" come to do "good" to me. My relationship with "them" is all get and no give, a sad and demeaning experience.

The clue to the problem of the exclusion of older people lies in the relationship between those who run the services and those who are supposed to benefit from them. Older people must be emancipated from their present state of helpless dependency. They must be allowed their fair share of responsibility for their own well-being and that of the community to which they belong. Here is the last cause I mean to fight.

Margaret Simey is 96, a former county and city councillor in Liverpool and a community activist.