A pensioner’s guide to being broke

I’m a broke pensioner – quite a jolly one – not like those people Age Concern show wrapped in blankets, the caption informing viewers that she daren’t put the heating on. I’m not like those pathetic old people, I tell myself (untruthfully). I do put the heating on but, like the poor old dears in shabby armchairs, I worry about how I’m going to pay my heating bill – especially now Labour has taken away my wonderful winter fuel allowance.

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Being broke at 68 is humiliating. But it is also only to be expected, given how little money I’ve managed to make in my quite long life. Sometimes I get resentful and start to do a Cleopatra’s Nose on my life: what if I’d stayed married to the father of my children? He was rich (but terminally unfaithful) – couldn’t I just have waited the 30 years or so it would take him to die? Or what if my mother hadn’t lost all her family money in the Lloyd’s of London debacle in the nineties?

‘You’ll never have to worry about money,’ she used to say to me when I was a child. At that point, she herself was still waiting for her mother, Australian Granny, to snuff it and come into her own. Which she did but the time was all too short for my mother, alas. That was a period of bounty, I remember it well: holidays, new sofas, expensive clothes for the children, a newer car. But it soon ground to a halt and my poor mother had to take another menial job.

I have had moments of being flush – all too few, unfortunately. The odd advance for a book bought an almost-new Golf, which a friend kindly informed me made me look like a German butcher’s wife. I was quite happy with that description. Film rights for another book were sold, generating electric dreams of success and plenty, which never came to pass. The last time I had any serious money was when I divorced my third husband and suddenly found myself with several hundred thousand pounds in my bank account. Oh, the head rush! I remember going to John Lewis in the appropriately named High Wycombe. ‘I’ll have that… and that… and that…’ I bought so much stuff I left half of it behind at customer collection and had to return in a more sober mood.

I recall announcing at an AA meeting that I was going to see a financial adviser and being roundly told off by an older member that I shouldn’t make such statements at meetings. ‘Gives people the wrong impression,’ she told me, reprovingly. I felt suitably chastened. There was no use looking for a rich husband there. ‘The odds are good, but the goods are odd,’ is a favourite AA saying.

Now, as I look over the edge of the precipice at the end of my sixties, I find myself thinking: oh well, only another few years and then I can stop worrying, as I’ll be dead. Why bother saving for a facelift? But there are also many compensations for a life lived perpetually on the financial edge. I am lucky enough to have learnt the urgent necessity of counting my blessings, which, in a way, is a lesson in what matters: love, friendship, books, thinking, writing, having as good a time as possible whatever the circumstances, and, fortunately so far, my excellent health.

I turn the sound down when adverts for Co-op funeral plans come up on the telly, usually after the sad photos of cold, old people. Being broke is, in some ways, a study in denial, which I am a world expert in. How will my children pay for my funeral? I don’t know and, perhaps in my seventies, I’ll take out one of those ghoulish (sorry, sensible) plans to cover costs. An old boyfriend said of his own death: ‘Just roll me into a ditch and leave me to dry out,’ which would be fine in Spain, but not wet old Britain. If I were allowed, I would choose a peat bog in Jutland – a few thousand years in one of those and you don’t even need a facelift.