A Whole Generation of Mrs Duffys

For anyone raised in the North, something had happened that defied the natural order. My childhood was run by redoubtable matriarchs like Mrs Duffy: their judgments were to be feared, not tossed aside. Their tongues were as eye-watering as the sudden slaps they could administer to the backs of your legs.

Mrs Duffy, 66, is a remnant of a once formidable female army: women who didn’t worry that they were disappearing as their sexual allure faded because they knew that in their families and communities they wielded real clout. Vanity flowered briefly and ended after courtship, youth wasn’t chased in vain through the Pilates studios and magazine pages. Instead of diminishing with age they grew both in social stature and girth: a dress size with every decade yet compressed into rock hardness by the pantygirdle, a garment that would snort with derision at its flimsy modern rival, Spandex.

They relished how the decline of oestrogen excused them from the hurly-burly of sexual congress. They weren’t cougars, but battle-scarred lionesses. They’d sniff at the news that sexed-up fiftysomething women are boosting the lingerie business as they pulled on a pair of drawers. Their lives were all elbow grease and varicose veins, but with menopause came an entitlement to speak, a magnificent, life-changing unembarrassability: the right to admonish complete strangers in the street.

Seeing Mrs Duffy’s irreproachable front step, watching her toddle off to the shops for a loaf in her indestructible coat, with her shampoo and set — more a lifestyle than a hairstyle — I was reminded of my Auntie Edie who died in the no-nonsense manner in which she’d lived — in her sleep after finishing her batch of summer jam, a meal for my uncle under a plate in the fridge.

Tolerating flakey husbands, picking up the emotional detritus of flakier children, enduring without rancour widowhood as long as marriage itself, they earned respect for their frankness. The novelist Hilary Mantel said of the women from her Derbyshire childhood: “They’d been nowhere, but they’d seen everything.”

Janice Turner, The Times 1 May 2010

In the aftermath of the Election and Gordon Brown’s gaffe after an interview, I loved this description by Janice Turner of a whole generation of women who are slowly becoming lost to us.

From Ena Sharples in Coronation Street through to Dot Cotton in EastEnders, they were the old bags of comedies but the lifeblood of this country when the chips were down.

I can remember my nan, my great aunt and another lady who was nanny to an entire street full of children. They didn’t care much about their appearance, their focus was home and family.

There wasn’t much money but they worked bloody hard all the time ensuring that their homes were neat as a pin and often doing another two ‘little cleaning jobs’ for local offices to make their pensions run a little bit further.

They weren’t afraid of hard work or life or anyone really.

They took it on the chin and said their piece when they felt the need demanded it.

Today’s grandmas are a whole different ballgame. Brought up on the need to stay young forever and have it all in every sphere of life,  so many are too busy having a good time to get down on their hands and knees and play with their grandchildren.

And what will tomorrow’s be like? Nipped and tucked until their pubes are on their chins and they look as if they’ve been through a wind tunnel? Looking at their children’s offspring through siamese cat-like slits as their faces age at a variety of different rates depending on how much work they’ve had done. And grinning lasciviously at boys a quarter of their age now that it’s almost de rigeur to have a toyboy.

I promise to grow old disgracefully but I really will try not to stray too far from the straight and narrow when it comes to aging with decorum.

I can’t promise not to wink occasionally at toyboys tho.