Dame Sheila Hancock, actress, singer, author, decided to write a book about the pleasures of old age. When a series of disasters – Brexit and illness amongst them – threatened to overwhelm her, she added an ‘r’ to the title: Old Age became Old Rage, she tells Katie Jarvis
Cheltenham Literature Festival, October 7-16
Let’s begin with this. Two stories I absolutely love (and this is merely the opening handful of pages) from Sheila Hancock’s bristling, blood-boiling, blowing-a-fuse, fuming seething, gloriously off-the-deep-end book, Old Rage.
But, hush. We’ll come onto the (simmering, incensed, smouldering) fury in a moment.
These two anecdotes, by contrast, are of the kind she fully intended to write when she embarked on a book about aging gracefully, back in 2016.
First off: Sheila’s late sister, Billie (‘No one demonstrates the resilience of the old better…’), who spent a lifetime working in variety and cabaret with husband, Roy, until he could no longer use stilts that were part of their act. On her 90th birthday, Billie fell disastrously on her way to a celebration dinner. A solemn doctor (bravely, as it turned out) informed Billie she was highly unlikely to walk again.
Wrong.
Within a month, Billie was slow-footing it round the grounds of her rehabilitation centre, following twice-daily sessions in the gym.
Staff termed it a miracle; family preferred ‘bloody-mindedness’.
In the second anecdote (and this is only page nine), it’s 2016 and Sheila Hancock – aged 83 – is appearing in the hugely successful musical Grey Gardens at the Theatre Royal, Oldham. (Full circle: it was the first theatre to which she was contracted, fresh from drama school, in 1951.)
Based around the lives of estranged, eccentrically squalid relations of Jackie Kennedy, this musical wows its audiences; people queue round the block for returns from a sell-out run. Sheila’s performance goes down a storm.
One night, she dries mid-song.
The solution – to Sheila – is obvious. ‘I’ve no idea what comes next,’ she calmly informs a stranger in the front row. He – having seen the show several times – obliges with the lyrics.
I mean, that’s what old age is about, surely. Determination; stoicism; defying expectations; confidence; and telling embarrassment exactly where to stick it.
And that was the kind of book Sheila Hancock was going to write. Until life intervened.
UNLIKE COOL, collected Sheila Hancock, I’m in a blind panic. I know she’s super-busy, about to begin a programme of filming. But when I call her at the strictly allotted time - ‘the only window we can see’, her team tells me (11am, UK; noon in France, where she currently is) – I discover it’s the wrong number.
I try randomising in the mindless belief that it’s possible to stumble across the correct combination of 13 digits in mere seconds, through sheer determination.
Which, apparently (sort of), it is.
‘Oh, I’d forgotten! Sorry,’ Sheila Hancock apologises. ‘I was in the middle of something.’
‘Something’ is selling the house she and John Thaw, her husband, bought some 30-odd years ago, in a hamlet in rural Provence. She adores the close community they found there: the friendly boules matches that take place on a ramshackle pitch; the simple warmth offered when John died in 2002; the secret 80th birthday party for Denis whose Provençal accent still demi-baffles her after all these years.
It’s breaking her heart to part with this home-from-home, deep within the fresh-scented lavender and pinky-white cherry blossom of the sun-kissed Sud.
The house where John would to ask her to join him outside, staring up at the stars, visible in a way London could only dream of; where the two of them – British stage and screen icons – would disappear into microscopic dots in an infinite universe.
The French, she thinks, have got an awful lot right. ‘They love chatting. They love conversation. They love communicating. In the market the other day, I didn’t see a single phone. Not one! When my grandchildren are here, they’re never off their phones.
‘I think those are the things we have to look at, because children are losing the ability to have a conversation if we’re not careful.’
And it’s more than that. So much more.
Sheila Hancock might be reluctantly selling up in France: mountains, forest, and deep azure sky. But, in her view, it’s England that has been sold down the river.
DAME SHEILA HANCOCK was commissioned to write a nice book about growing old. And who better? No retirement age for her. She might even – she reluctantly admits – be considered a national treasure for her ability to remember words ‘or stumble across the stage or set without bumping into scenery’. (An ability untranslatable in terms of car insurance: it doubles the day she reaches 80.)
In 2016 – at the start of her book – she’s climbing a mountain in Scotland for the film Edie, about an elderly widow who’s spent years caring for her unlovable husband. When Sheila first met the producer and director, she blithely assumed they’d tell her the climbing would be done with green screen.
Nope.
Three months later, she’s halfway up a real ‘bloody mountain’ – Suilven in Lochinver. The worst bits, she discovers, aren’t the drops with nowhere for a helicopter to land (‘Don’t look down, for God’s sake…’); more, the absence of toilets. That, and the night she thought she’d die, camping on a freezing ledge above the clouds, clad in infinite layers and still bone-shakingly cold.
But – weeping with whimpering fear – Sheila did it.
And then far, far more frightening things happened. Brexit, Covid, her own diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, and her daughter’s cancer.
No wonder she added an ‘r’ to her book about age.
‘I had to restart because I’d begun rather benevolently, saying: Don’t worry; it’s not as bad as people say it is. And then all these bad things were so life-changing; epic, all of them. And I thought: You can’t ignore it; you’ve just got to come to grips with it.’
She didn’t tell her publishers of the change of plan.
‘And when I did show my first draft, they went, ‘Oh, my god! That wasn’t what we were expecting’.’
Old Rage is written in semi-diary form; what strikes me, as I see events unfold beneath her pen, is how prescient Sheila Hancock is. She instantly has the measure of Johnson with his ‘second-rate’ Cabinet picks; and Svengali Cummings. She tells it like it is when it comes to food banks, arms sales, the mistreatment of immigrants, ‘bloody Brexit’.
‘I am a grumpy old woman,’ she writes.
Yet she doesn’t oversimplify arguments. Instead – in a way that history-savvy politicians once used to – she draws from the past to make her points; often, from her own experience. She’s now a Quaker who does not believe in Just Wars – not even the one she lived through as a child. Pre-emptive action, as soon as mad despots show their cards, is one of her solutions.
Reading her angry words feels, somehow, strangely liberating. Do we wrongly malign rage?
‘I think we do in the old; it’s expected of us to be rather lovely.’
It’s not just the old who are rebelling. There’s a whole crowd of the unexpectedly furious. ‘Including middle-class women who get things done’.
At a talk Sheila gave, one stood up. ‘I thought, oh, hello. I’m going to get a bit of ‘Oh, Brexit isn’t so bad’, business.
‘And she said: ‘Do you know? Everything I have been brought up to believe in and did believe in, I no longer do. The government; the police; the church… ‘And she went through this list of the pillars our society, ending with the post office. And I thought, that is so true.’
Gone are the days when you could believe politicians, even whilst disagreeing with them.
‘I’ll give you an example: Macmillan. I believed he was a gentleman and was telling the truth. Now, when any kind of politician says anything, you think: Is that true or is it a lie? How shocking is that?’
THERE’S a danger (a courage) in being famous and exposing your thoughts in this way. Yet I can see no treacherous hypocrisy. Alongside being a Quaker, she’s vegan; an admirer of Extinction Rebellion. And she’s a doer. An ideological realist, perhaps.
The Quaker Meeting House Sheila attends opens for people newly arrived from Ukraine.
‘We direct them towards jobs; towards what money they can get; schools. Some of them arrive here with a sponsor who thought they were being lovely. And then, of course, they’re lumbered with a lot of very disturbed children, and wives who have had to leave their husbands behind.
‘It’s very complex.’
Sheila is one of a team that helps the children; plays games with them; teaches them to say, ‘How are you?’ in English to their mummies. ‘It’s just a way of getting through because most are so scared, bless ’em. Some have come to us five days after having fled. Their dads are back fighting and they don’t know what the hell’s going on.
‘But we must not forget that we also have hotels full of other refugees. There are going to be massive movements of countries because of climate-change – countries that can’t be lived in. All of our attitudes – our fear of the unknown; our fear of strangers – all that’s got to go or we won’t survive.’
THERE ARE wonderful stories in Old Rage. Not for the sake of being showy-offy or name-droppy. Just people she’s known and worked with and thought about. Her working relationship with Harold Pinter – or David Baron, as he was known in the early days – and her initial misgivings about his ‘pauses’ that went against everything she’d ever been taught, by the likes of Cyril Fletcher and Frankie Howerd, about timing. ‘And of course [Harold] was right.’
Harold who, shortly before he died, asked her, ‘Are you still angry, Sheila?’
‘More than ever.’
‘Good girl.’
There’s a poignant scene with a widowed Brian Rix, (‘Like many comics, Brian was an intensely serious man’), who tearfully longs for his life to end. Yet, there’s always a giggle, such as the aged John Gielgud attending yet another funeral, saying, ‘It’s hardly worth going home’. And thoughts of her own possible exit line. She toys with, ‘Bugger Brexit’.
Indeed, despite her original remit for a fuzzily warm book about age, she’s stone-cold-sober, clear-eyed about its failings, too. As we speak, the Tories are preparing to elect a new Prime Minister, the two remaining candidates shifting further and further right ‘to appeal to the older generation. I am expecting whipping and capital punishment to be promised at any moment.
‘I quite look forward to when we [the elderly] all die out and a new lot take over with new ideas. I don’t think there’s necessarily wisdom in age – and certainly not me.’
There are uplifting insights in our conversation, too. Such as when she brings up the women’s Euro football victory. ‘One of my favourite moments was that girl taking her top off and running round in that rather unattractive sports bra at the end of the match. [Apparently], it was a tribute to somebody who got penalised for that several years ago, which I didn’t know.’
Sheila’s own short-lived time as a Bunny Girl was cut short by her disgust at the exploitation. ‘Girls are called upon so often to pose in sexy underwear. But this [footballer] girl was saying, No; I’m healthy and lovely and skilled.’
What I particularly like about Old Rage – and our chat – is the way everyday pragmatism (not fame or fortune) lies at the heart of all she says and does.
Never more apparent than in her suggestions of how we can try to combat the horrors of 2022.
Swamp MPs with letters.
Educate children (as the French do) to understand government and finance – and to detect lies.
Stand up to bullies.
‘It’s like when you get trapped in a taxi with somebody spouting a load of racist nonsense. It’s so much easier to say, ‘Yeah, sure’. But I do force myself sometimes to argue back, because we have to.’
Oh, and teach children Shakespeare, poetry – and music, just like her grandson, a teacher (of whom she is rightly proud) is doing. As the John Thaw Foundation does.
Music has always been her solace, her joy; hers and John’s. Even during the most turbulent parts of their relationship, classical music would bring them together.
‘Selling my French house is breaking my heart,’ she says. ‘I have to keep putting music on to calm myself down.’
Just as Brexit, and politics, and war, and refugees are breaking her heart, too.
‘I would die without my music; listening to my music. Without it, I couldn’t get through all this.’
SORRY – one more thing. I’d never heard this before. It’s a story she cites. One that, in many ways, sums it all up.
It involves Picasso’s portrayal of the bombing of Guernica. The artist was staying in occupied Paris during the war, when a German officer saw a photo of the painting. ‘Did you do that?’ the officer asked him.
‘No,’ Picasso replied. ‘You did.’
Sheila Hancock will be talking about Old Rage on Tuesday, October 11 at Cheltenham Literature Festival: cheltenhamfestivals.com/literature
Old Rage, by Sheila Hancock, is published by Bloomsbury.
