I’ve just finished my final novel, The End of the Line. I’m eighty years old, at the upper end of this magazine’s target audience, and the intimations of mortality are now flashing up for me to read in fully-formed sentences on whatever screen I happen to be viewing.
I came to writing in my sixties, but it has been a godsend to me, the most fulfilling thing I’ve done in my life apart from having a family. With grandchildren too, I’m not the end of that line. But, having finished this last book, I do feel like I’m steaming down an overgrown track towards the buffers. I’m trying to make the journey as slow as possible, recognising the beauty both of the wild flowers and the weeds, before bringing the engine to rest, leaving it for posterity to examine or to ignore.
This last book stands on its own, something I felt important in order to give the future a chance be heard.The previous three formed a trilogy, an unholy trinity: “Holy, holy, holy, two full backs and a goalie”, as naughty children would sing in infant school. That now sounds like good theology to me. I thank God that I never quite grew up. In those books, I eventually killed off the main protagonists. To do that in the last book would somehow be like writing my own death scene, something I think it would be too presumptuous even to attempt.
Why am I giving up now? After all, writing these novels after a long business career, when my ‘best before’ date had been well and truly reached, gave me a new lease of life. It’s that I think my shelf life in writing has now expired too. I know I won’t write better than I’ve already managed. Whereas a 250 page novel used to be too short, now it’s daunting. The technology gets me down too. I’m using my newish Mac to write this. My old desktop, on which I wrote everything else, has gone to the place where the good computers go. I’m right now wondering how I’m meant to save this. I do still have new story ideas but the medium of the technology has become the message and most people seem to prefer to play with that. God knows what AI is doing to their minds.
But I’m the self-styled first of the baby boomers and the last of the Victorians. Shouldn’t I put the morbidity of the nineteenth century behind me for the cheerful beat of rock and roll? It’s got a back beat, you can’t lose it. You can’t blues it either. Life’s been good. It still is. And will remain so until my health gives out. We’ve been the blessed generation, still available on Spotify. I plan to reminisce about the past and enjoy the family in equal measure. Today’s young folk still make programmes and play sport worth watching. That should keep me busy enough. I’m not sure about the music! I think this second retirement, if not the end of the story, is an epilogue where loose ends are either brought together or left for posterity to work with. Good stories are eternal. They last through the generations. I know my stories won’t.
But what I felt as I wrote them will be felt by others as they tell their tales.
I’ve learnt so much about the folk I’ve known through the characters I’ve created. I’ve intended there to have been no stereotypes, only individuals. The bit of writing I was most uncertain about was when I wrote a play within a play in the second book. Whatever Shakespeare can do… Or perhaps not. That did seem like caricature, although others liked it. Or so they said! Whatever, it was good to be out of my comfort zone. Does what I do next need to do that for me too? Or does there come an age when you’re better off staying at home? I think I’ll leave that for my body to decide.
Only a few decades ago, people did retire from their only job at 65 and be dead before they were 70. Some of us do get quite a bit longer now. It can be difficult to keep a sense of purpose over the length of a retirement like mine, not a lot shorter than the career that inadequately provided the pension for it, leaving our children to pick up the tab. We can’t live forever and shouldn’t want to.
Every life is made up of chapters. We don’t quite know how each one started, but we do need to recognise when this strange and eventful history has ended. Let’s hope we’re not sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. But if we are, we can still go gentle into that good night. I think that the greatest joy to be had when old is managing to make sense of the past as a story.
Publishing, 30th July 20226 https://www.johnuttleyauthor.com/