Beloved Old Age and What to Do About it

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Margery Allingham was a Golden Age detective novelist, a “Queen of Crime” alongside Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers. However her last completed book The Relay was not a novel but an account of the practical and emotional ways in which she and her sister approached the end-of-life care for three elderly relatives in 1959-61. Words like “carer”, “sheltered housing”, “granny annex” were not even in the language when Margery wrote this ground-breaking little book. It was tragic that she herself died in June 1966 before it could be included in one of the first-ever UK campaigns for improvements in the care of the elderly. The Relay has never previously been published.Julia Jones, Margery’s biographer and co-founder of the nationally successful John’s Campaign, believes the ideas in The Relay are as relevant today as when it was first conceived. Julia is a dementia carer and has interspersed reflections on her current experience with Margery’s conclusions 50 years ago. There are currently 850,000 people living with dementia in the UK, many (though not all) of them old. There are hundreds of thousands of families, friends, neighbours and colleagues who are experiencing the effects of this disease as well as increasing frailty and the other difficulties of age. Many, like Julia Jones, will be asking themselves how they can care as well for their loved ones at the end of their lives as we try to do at the beginning.