Old spark's gone with old homes

Here, a well-known local commentator gives a different and very personal view.

Jessie was sitting in the same chair in the same room among the same dozen or more old ladies when we visited her this week.

She wore the same look of utter and deep boredom and despair. She smiled faintly and brightened ever so slightly when she saw my wife and me.

But the spark that had stayed with her through her years in one of Southend Council's old folk's homes, until they chucked her out as a Christmas gift from Authority, hasn't returned now she is in a private care home.

Jessie and the pals from whom she has been separated used to have space to wander around in the council place, with corridors and lounges to visit on their zimmers or with their walking sticks.

The more with-it could find a quiet place for a game of cards or to sit and paint in watercolours or oils, maybe do a jigsaw puzzle or put together a few knitted squares to make blankets.

There were lots of staff to share jokes with residents, to give hugs and cuddles, paint the old girls' fingernails, do their hair, call the numbers for a game of bingo.

It all added up to quite a bit of expense for the council, of course, but some of us outside Civic Centre and paying our council taxes felt it small price to repay old people who had given their lives to the community, the society, the country.

Little, occasional treats for the more able, such as a minibus ride to a fish restaurant or a visit to a supermarket or even to a pub for a glass of stout, were pleasing and plausible punctuation marks in this sentence of the last years of life in communal care.

But then Southend's councillors, of all colours including the one that professes to care most about social priorities and loving care, said the piggybank was bare, some of the homes had to go. So did the residents.

Now, it must be stressed that there surely are some highly-commendable private homes with owners or management's who do plenty to make paying guests feel truly happy; who plan programmes and little events to keep boredom at bay.

The place where Jessie was sent, when she was a mere number on a sheet of names of people to be planted elsewhere in the great Southend Council scheme of things for the town's elderly, apparently encourages its residents to sit in chairs.

From when they rise in the morning until when they go to bed early evening.

We went with Jessie along the corridor from the room where the residents sit in a semi-circle, gazing at each other or into space. She took my arm and, with her stick, shuffled slowly beside me to her bedroom.

"I loved the other place," she said, "But it's so boring here. We just sit. Every day is the same. We sit at a table for breakfast, lunch and supper. The rest of the time we sit in our armchairs, looking at the TV or at each other."

Jessie told us that a social worker had called in on a recent day.

This officer would have noted that the old ladies in this home were physically being cared for. The mental anguish suffered in the name of political and financial expediency can only be surmised.

I wonder if every councillor who voted for closing several local authority homes a few months ago has visited every registered private home in the town - or even one of them.

I wonder if any happened to call this past Christmas Day at any home. My wife and I went to see Jessie, who is a family acquaintance, at seven that evening.

A woman who answered our knock said: "Jessie? Oh, she's in bed. They're all in bed now, dear."

All in bed, at seven o'clock on Christmas Day. Still, if they can fall asleep nice and early, it shortens yet another day and cuts the boredom, doesn't it?

Protest march - people took to the streets against the homes' closure in July but their efforts were in vain

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.