For Old Time’s Sake
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday July 19, 2014

He’s wearing a pale grey tracksuit with darker cable-knit panels decorating his shoulders like epaulettes. An emergency buzzer is looped around his neck. Dangling off the silver chain is a plastic likeness of Walt Disney’s Goofy, painted orange. His name is Jim. He’s 85.

We’re settled into a small lounge curtained off from the dining hall of an aged care home. A bookshelf is lined with a well-thumbed collection of Robert Ludlums and Frederick Forsyths. Someone has lit the fire in the brick fireplace.

Jim’s wheelchair is one of several parked together to gather a small knot of elderly male residents. I’m the only visitor amongst this clique of men. “One of the ways to rejuvenate is to tell your stories,” the invitation said. “Women stay connected as they age, but men can forget how to talk.”

These old blokes, marshalled by a devoted handful of volunteers – all male – meet once a fortnight, encouraged to reminisce about the past and find comfort in the present.

Jim is keen to introduce himself. He fiddles with his hearing aid and grins at me: “Two years ago, I had a stroke on Monday, a stroke on Wednesday and lost the use of my legs on Friday. I’d never been in the sick-house all my life, and here I was being told I’d be living in one.”

I lean towards him to better decipher his Glaswegian accent. He adjusts his lower dentures, which have slipped from their mooring. He tells me his wife, Millie, of 65 years standing, lives in another apartment a few minutes walk down the winding driveway of this village.

“There are no shared rooms here,” he says. “My Millie has dinner with me every evening. Afterwards, I wave her good night through the window.” He raises his arm and mimics a cheeky wave for me. “When I’m separated from her I worry myself sick. Millie’s part of me and I’ve become part of her.”

He turns his head to survey the other gents, who are deep in conversation around us. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “Now it’s loneliness who comes at night, instead of sleep, to sit beside my bed.” His eyes are growing watery. I look away so he can compose himself. I feel like an imposter, parading my sturdy health.

Bill is 89 and dressed in his tennis gear. He wears a white Nike cap pulled low over his forehead. He’s painfully thin, though I can still make out the ropey muscularity of his arms. He tells me he gave up the game at 87 after forty years of being a coach. “Arthritis,” he tells me. “Stole my grip. I’ve been on my own for fifteen years. My wife died from an aneurism. She was only 63.” He pauses, then brightens and begins regaling me with a colourful tale about how he lost his middle finger in 1937.

“I was 22. Strapping lad I was. My brother and I were cutting trees when a hollow log threw my hand against the saw. ’Look, Tommy!’ I said, and I showed him my finger swinging loose. Nothing to do but cut it free. One snip and it fell into the grass!”

He chuckles at the memory. I laugh too, trying not to sound too gleeful at this gruesome tale. Bill examines the lonely knuckle between his remaining fingers. I notice the road map of purple veins at his temple, his skin papery and translucent.  

I can’t help but admire these long lives. But fertile minds are now imprisoned in decrepit bodies. In their stories I hear old men nostalgic for their working years, a lament for what they can no longer be: farmer, plumber, soldier, truck driver.

“If only my mates in Glasgow could see me now, dressed in a pair of big knickers!” Jim says, and slaps his thigh. “I grew up in Kinning Park without a dunny, a fridge, or a bath. Lucky I forked out tuppence for a public bath the day I met my Millie! It was New Year’s Eve, 1950.” He grins. “We got married seven weeks later and I shipped us to Australia. We been living in Utopia ever since.”

At his right, 94-year-old George nods his agreement. “I made tyres on an assembly line. My boss says to me: ‘Had a barbecue yet mate?’ Course I hadn’t, so he sent out for some chops and snags. He cleared a bit of ground, collected some sticks and cooked my first barbecue on a shovel!”

I place my teacup back on the tray, quietly push back my chair and smile my goodbyes. The conversation turns towards musical theatre. As I slip behind the curtain, I hear the unmistakeable sound of yodelling. Quavery but with a tuneful falsetto, the yodel peters out to a faint chorus of applause. Another talent re-discovered!

Contact Peter Fry, Circle of Men – volunteer coordinator – pjfry@iinet.net.au