Working among older people

Below, Zelda speaking at older people's forum, and above, at Grey Power workshops drumming and Indian dancing.


After leaving East End News life took anothe twist, pushing me ino a new area of work. Somebody somewhere must love me, as they say, because yet again I landed on my feet in a very interesting job and with some very fine colleagues. In November 1981 I became one of the four-woman team of Camden Task Force, a voluntary sector organisation working with older people. My team mates were nicky Jane and Susan and when I was first introduced to Nicky she showed me the double headed axe hanging from her silver neck chain and asked if I knew its significance. Not wishing to show ignorance I just nodded. however, it didn't take me long to realise that she was a lesbian. The four of us became good friends and we often would go out together to try out a new restaurant for dinner. The table talk spanned feminism, homophobia and party politics, interspersed with friendly gossop about other Task Force staff in other local boroughs. We met up with them regularly at staff meetings and union meetings. They were a lively bunch.
I worked in Area 1 and 2 of Camden which took me from Kings Cross to Swiss Cottage and most of the time I walked to my visits to housebound pensioners or to groups and luncheon clubs. We had an office care and a bike but I couldn't drive and I found London traffic terrifying when I ventured on the bike.
Our tasks involved making sure the older people in our patch had the information and the services esential for their independent living. We encouraged them to join social and camaigning groups, organised health courses, tarted up yoga classes and set up reminiscence groups. We also encouraged young people from the local schools to befriend an elderly person who was housebound, and facilitated discussions in the schools on ageism. At one school I was talking to 11 year olds about the stereotypes of older people and mentioned that many young people thought that old people were no longer secually active. Straightaway a boy's arm shot up, I nodded toward him and he said, "Please Miss, my grandma's never had sex!"
What first attracted me to the job at Task Force was their emphasis on self-help groups and collective ways of working in teams. I was not disappointed either in the work or in my team. I found our weekly team meetings both helpful and interesting. There were always new ideas to discuss. I had a lot to learn and especially about the gerentological philsophy underpinning the work we did. New ideas were permeating the voluntary sector and affecting the ways of working. Language was changing, too. No longer was patronising behaviour or language to be tolerated and we were challenging the too prevalent dismissal by some doctors of the treatable complaints of older women with the phrase "it's your age". They fobbed them off with sleeping tablets. Still today there are those who have no time to treat older people as human beings, and others, too, who want to fit them into a mould they can work with more easily. As one woman complained: "I dread being forced to sing music hall songs and wear a paper hat while I drink my tea." Changes don't come quickly or easily and still too often they are treated like children.
We worked with Pensioners' Action Groups and in Camden the Pensioners' Liaison Committee was set up to meet regularly with an officer fro the Social Services Department, and a councillor on the Social Services Committee, to tell them what the pensioners said they needed. Their persistence influenced the Council to give much-needed special services to some of the frail elderly people. The Liaison Committee was the forerunner of today's Local Forum.
Inevitably changes began to affect the Task Force itself. A new director decided it needed a new image and therefore a change of name. Thus it became Pensioners Link and I was asked to set it up as a membership organisation with a quarterly magazine called Link Up. Then I was given fund-raising responsibilities to enable us to expand our work. I true "Pensioners Link" fashion, representatives of each team worked on applications to the GLC for new projects, such as the two successful ones, the Health issues of Black and other inority ethnic communities and an Older Women's project. The one worker on this latter project was Pam, who launched it with a weekend festival for older women. With hard work and showing great initiative she made it into a successful project. I was on the Working Group right from the start, and later, when Pam moved on, I becae the worker and have been associated with the project ever since. It is now autonomous and renamed AGLOW - the Association of greater London older women -[Zelda herself coined this title], of which I am the Chairperson.

Comment from Sue - Zelda was writing this in the early 1990s, but I am pleased to say, that long after she ceased her own involvement, the project still thrives and many women from the project attended Zelda's funeral and still remember her fondly.