My granny and the greatest scandal of our age

My WELSH grandmother was a tough old bird. When I was five, on holiday in Mumbles, she used to scoop me up early in the morning and take me to the beach while my parents slept.

I remember the salty wind, the dark, wet sand, the towels as stiff as cardboard.

I remember her bare feet and rockhard calves, the bunions that made her wince as she ascended, with bandy gait, to her beach hut.

There, with the smell of the Bunsen burner brewing tea in metal mugs, sand in our sandwiches and bad Uncle Tom smoking and telling tales of life in the Merchant Navy, we sat until afternoon began to fade.

Then home for fish and chips and a spot of Mozart in the conservatory. Later, I’d drift off to sleep between her pink nylon sheets, listening to the starlings nesting in the eaves.

She was not a rich woman, not a beautiful woman, although she had a strength and handsomeness to her face that lasted well beyond her youth.

But she was, like so many who lived through the war, magnificent in her own quiet way.

WHy am I telling you all this? Because our society so easily forgets that today’s older people were once strong and virile, golden and invincible. They were the kind of people who took life by the scruff of the neck and shook so hard it begged for mercy.

And that the dimming of memory or the weariness of the bones does not strip them of what they once were. That they still need and deserve to be part of the human race.

The treatment of the elderly in Britain is one of the greatest scandals of our time.

But do they protest? Do they rant and rave? Do they sue for compensation like so many of our younger citizens who hang like dead weights around the neck of the NHS?

Of course they don’t. They put up and shut up.

Too polite — or scared — to complain, is how Dame Julie Mellor, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, put it in Monday’s Daily Mail.

Having investigated scores of complaints, she concluded: ‘Often older people fear negative repercussions when they make a complaint, or they simply don’t like to “make a fuss”.’

One of the last times I saw my grandmother, she was in hospital with pneumonia. This rock of a woman had crumbled into someone unrecognisable. Her long hair was unkempt, her nightdress was awry, her eyes were sunken. She was struggling to breath.

The ward was empty, not a nurse in sight.

I sat gingerly on the edge of her bed. She opened her eyes and made an effort to sit up, but she was too weak. I sprang up to adjust her pillows and recoiled in horror.

Her mouth was full of phlegm. Full of it. Every breath she drew dragged through a curtain of mucus. It was horrible, humiliating, dehumanising.

She had been like that for hours, judging by the amount of it. But no one had cared enough to notice and, of course, she hadn’t wanted to make a fuss.

I grabbed a box of tissues and lifted her off her back, trying to get the matter out of her mouth and lungs. Her body heaved with the effort of it.

Having made her slightly more comfortable, I went to find a nurse. I explained the problem. The woman, with all the compassion of an SS guard, told me there wasn’t ‘much point’ in clearing her lungs, since they just kept filling up again.

Today, I would have brought the roof down on her. But I was younger and less bolshie then, so I just returned to my grandmother’s bedside and sat with her some more.

She dozed for a while, then opened her eyes and beckoned me close.

At first I couldn’t quite hear. I leaned in closer, closed my eyes. She said: ‘I want to die.’