Dear LPG, 

When I left school way back in 1970, I was one of those people who just fell into a job in spite of all the career advice that I was offered.   I wonder if any other readers remember being in the 5th form of secondary school back then and being asked what they wanted to be when they left.  They advised that I should look for a career as a milliner, and I have to say that I will never work out how they thought that hat-making was the way forward for me. 

I ended up working for the Civil Service in what was then the DHSS and my job was to arrange to have passports, birth, marriage and death certificates translated so that their authenticity could be proved by our English-speaking authorities.  

Even then, I thought the office I worked in to be more than a bit old-fashioned, and my boss was a lady nearing retirement who, though she had spent her entire working life in the department, thought she was an authority on nearly every subject.    

I will always remember one discussion we had not long after I started working there.  Many of the birth certificates were translated to validate their owners’ age for retirement purposes, and on this occasion, we ended up discussing pensioners and how they squandered their money.  

My boss started this exchange by telling me that, in her opinion, the older people of the 1970s spent too much money on bingo, tobacco and purple rinses; money that many of them could ill afford.  She went on to say that the results of their National Insurance should be spent more frugally, and I dared to disagree.    

I was only 18, and my perception of old people was formed at a time when they looked a lot older than they (we) do now, but even I had worked out that everyone has to be able to do more than just survive whatever stage of life they have reached.   I remember telling my boss that I saw bingo as a waste of money too, but nearly every pursuit that one person thinks to be good will be thought of as silly by another.   
I perceived my boss to be a lady near enough to retirement herself. She was a lady who worked in the one department all her working life, had holidayed in nearly every part of the world at one time or another and she somehow gave the impression that she saw her upcoming retirement as very different to that of the people whose documents we were processing.  

I remember there being two sorts of pensioners when I was young.  The older people I knew as friends and family members who just happened to be old in addition to all the other things that defined them, while the ones depicted in the media often appeared to be people to feel sorry for.  Any older person who had celebrity status was like the ones I knew.  Their age was way down the list of words that I would use to introduce them.   I think that my civil service boss’s idea of ‘them and us’ was much like that of politicians.  Have you noticed that they do a lot of referring to pensioners as ‘them’ even though many of those politicians are well and truly past retirement age themselves?    

After a year there, I came to the realisation that I was not cut out to be a civil servant and changed jobs, but for the remainder of my time employed in that office, I don’t think that my boss ever saw me in the same light.  

I wonder if the world has moved on and what our present grandchildren really see when they look at today’s oldies …? 


LY, Downham.