In search of a good carer

When her father needed looking after, Lucy Deedes, a carer herself, discovered that foreigners were kinder than the British Who really cares?

The country and the government are much exercised, and rightly so, on the issue of social care. Our increasingly ageing population has literally nowhere to go and nobody to look after them.

Other nations – such as India, where my son lives – are astonished that we don’t revere our old people and gather them under our roofs. It occurs to me that you can chuck all the money in the world at this problem and still not find the right calibre of person to nurture the old through their final years.

Admittedly, elderly people – like all people – can be difficult. They may be bereaved, lonely, depressed, regretful for lost opportunities, irritable or in pain. And that’s even without dementia – the onset of which is subtle enough for the early stages to be mistaken for sheer cussedness.

For my sister in Australia, caring is a vocation. ‘You need a sense of humour in bucketloads, but also respect. They weren’t always old.’ Aged ten, she used to help our aged neighbours in Kent, paid in Fry’s Chocolate Cream bars.

I knew a widow who was sharp as a tack but immobile. One Nurse Ratched-like carer left early in a seething huff; the next never spoke to her at all. The old lady wilted in the strained atmosphere, but her family just said, ‘Stop being difficult, Mother.’

Yes, she was fortunate in being wealthy enough to remain in her own house, but was still bullied because she was small and old and they were big and young. She’d have settled for a nice chat and some hand cream rubbed into her bent fingers. After all, isn’t dealing with a certain amount of deafness, tactlessness and incontinence part of the job description? These are old people, not kittens.

It’s not just the end of life where help can be a problem, as anyone who has ever despaired of finding childcare will know. Even the best nannies can be competitive – one otherwise saintly nanny of ours used to relish putting my toddler to bed while I was feeding the baby, then forbid me from disturbing her to say goodnight. Still, there are training colleges and diplomas required for those we entrust with our babies; not so much for our grandparents.

It may be easier for an elderly man to attract good carers. It may be 2021, but many women (about 84 per cent of the UK’s carers are women) appear to find looking after – and taking orders from – a man more palatable than a woman. When my mother, beginning her descent into muddledom, would potter outside to see to her chickens, the female housekeeper immediately clicked the latch and locked her out. She would confuse our mother by unnecessarily unplugging the kettle and toaster. My mother retaliated by throwing a brick through the locked glass door, and quite right, too.

Later on, for the three years that my widowed father, Bill – WF Deedes (1913-2007), the former editor of the Daily Telegraph – was bedridden, the agency sent a new carer each fortnight.

They varied massively; the best by miles came from overseas. They bore no resentment at the repetitive domestic and personal tasks, whereas the homegrown carers struggled – not very hard – to contain their apparent feelings of affront.

I plucked up the courage to ask the agency, ‘Could we … is it possible … um, not to have any British ladies?’ We established a rotation of three exceptional women – two from South Africa and one from Poland – under whose care he bloomed. They were generous, good-humoured and impossible to offend. Can the quality of mercy be taught? Some years ago, I worked as a carer in a cottage hospital, the only work I could find at age 50-something. With no qualifications, I learnt on the job, found it rewarding and decided to do an NVQ. The questions were so full of bonkers jargon and devoid of common sense that I gave up any idea of a qualification. If I had wanted to be a caregiver in the USA, I would first have had to acquire more than 75 hours of clinical experience.

Even in the public space of a care home with vigilant matrons, alarm bells rang. A frightened lady who hated sudden movement was rocked on the hoist so she squealed in terror; an unreachable lunch tray was dumped in front of a recumbent patient. Yes, the pay was rotten and there was never enough time, but it was disquieting to see a small number of people relishing their power over the frail.

There are thousands of devoted and unsung carers slogging away on low wages and ready to make a difference. But there is a need to recruit many more and increasingly, probably, from the UK. We owe it to our old people to realise that looking after them is a privilege, and shouldn’t be the job of last resort – the final bastion of the minimum wage.

But then neither should it just be about money. It’s about kindness and imagination, and I wonder whether those qualities can be bought or taught.

Dear Bill: WF Deedes (1913-2007), Lucy’s father