Angela Neustatter, septuagenarian and author of a new book on ageing, talks to Sheena Grant about dress fascism and her unconventional schooling in Suffolk

East Anglian Daily Times: Angela NeustatterAngela Neustatter (Image: Archant)

“I very much feel that if I want to dress in leopard-skin tights, I will,” she says. “If you want to be a certain way, providing you are not harming anyone else, why shouldn’t you? And I like wearing little skirts with black tights and high boots. Why shouldn’t I?”

East Anglian Daily Times: The cover of Angela Neustatter's book, The Year I Turn ....The cover of Angela Neustatter's book, The Year I Turn .... (Image: Archant)

Why indeed.

Angela turned 70 last September and decided to mark that milestone in her life in the same way she’s marked many others over the years - by writing about it. Her books and articles are breathtakingly open and honest about her own experiences and feelings, dealing with everything from ageing to motherhood, feminism and cosmetic surgery. In one article for a national newspaper she even focused on pictures of herself from every decade from her 20s onwards, analysing what everything from her hairstyle to skin tone revealed about her life at any given time.

For her latest book, Angela takes the vexed subject of ageing and casts a relentlessly positive eye over what it means - or could mean - for those growing older in a world that is radically different to the one their parents and grandparents had to contend with.

The Year I Turn... a quirky A-Z of age, draws on Angela’s own life experience along with research and advice from experts to offer a humorous insight into growing older, aiming to show what is possible when we finally have time to do what we have always put off, whether it’s becoming more active, eating more healthily, learning to dance or finding a new hobby.

Angela is, quite possibly, the perfect person to write an upbeat book challenging the received doom and gloom wisdom that all too often accompanies our attitudes to ageing.

For a start, there is little about her that conforms to the stereotype of your average 70-year-old. With her bobbed blonde hair, aforementioned wardrobe of choice, rapid-fire conversation and determination to live life on her own terms she should serve as an inspirational breath of fresh air to anyone approaching a significant birthday.

But then, she has had a good, early grounding in free thinking and non-conformity. Her grandmother, Lilian Neustatter, co-founded the progressive Summerhill School in 1921, along with AS Neill. The school moved to its present site in Leiston in 1927, the same year Lilian divorced Angela’s grandfather and became Neill’s wife. She died around the time Angela was born but her family continued its links with Summerhill.

Between the ages of 11 and 15 Angela herself was a pupil at the school, where lessons are controversially optional and children help make the rules. She has happy memories of her time as one of the“do-as-yer-like-kids”, as, she says, locals called pupils, but she also craved more structure than the school offered.

“Neill, who was my step-grandfather, was wonderful,” she says. “I adored him, for all his brusqueness. Michael Gove (the current education secretary) would probably have had him boiled in oil. It was a happy time but I love structure and order. I longed for more organisation and more being told what I should do. I was also rather a tubby child but it was a place that if you were fabulously athletic and gregarious and confident, you would be more suited to. I wasn’t like that. I went to lessons, although there were not huge numbers of them when I was there.

“To this day even simple maths defeats me but on the plus side, it taught me resilience and self-sufficiency to go out and find things I wanted to do and do them. It also gave me a fundamental optimism and belief that people were on your side. One of the tragedies of what is happening now (in education) is that we are not allowing children a sense of freedom and space and opportunity to learn about the world. We misunderstand the nature of human beings.”

Angela can vividly recall her introduction to Summerhill before she became a pupil in 1954.

“We went down to visit when I was 11 and I was taken under the wing of a gorgeous girl,” she says. “I remember she had a pink angora cardigan and she was called Wendy. She was very sweet to me and so I badgered my parents to send me there. Of course, when I became a pupil Wendy wanted nothing to do with me.”

Angela left the school after doing O’Levels and made her way to London to train as a journalist. She went on to work for the Sunday Telegraph and the Guardian, where she was fashion editor. But Summerhill wasn’t her only association with Suffolk. Her parents also had a holiday cottage in King Street, close to the beach at Aldeburgh.

“Suffolk has been hugely formative in my life,” she says. “I had most memorable holidays on that freezing beach in Aldeburgh. I remember swimming when it was cold and feeling pleased with myself afterwards.”

But when her own children came along she wasn’t tempted to send them to her old alma mater.

“I think we need more understanding of children,” she says. “I don’t know if we need more Summerhills. It’s an extreme and as much as I support it and think it is a good thing it is not what everyone needs. Living at home is a good thing when you are a child and learning about order is a good thing. My kids went to a progressive state primary school in Islington where they did lots of music and arts. What we need is imaginative education. If children come from a home where they are watching their father beating their mother - or vice versa - they are not going to be able to learn as Mr Gove wants. He doesn’t get that. Kids from those homes are seen as bad or a nuisance. They are rarely seen as sad.”

Social issues and “the human condition” have always concerned Angela and are something she has written about throughout her career.

“I am interested in what being human means,” she says. “When you look at families where terrible things have happened, the back story, in almost every case, is one where someone needed help. But these kinds of people are seen as expensive and trouble. As long as we go on making life intolerable for the so-called lower classes the longer we will go on having trouble. The thing about Summerhill that was conspicuous was that there was very little real bullying and nastiness. There wasn’t the hardline nastiness you get when people are desperate.”

Her previous books have centred on some of these wider social issues - including one focusing on young offenders - while others have embraced family life, parenting and dealing with middle age. One of them, A Home for the Heart: 11 ideas to balance your life, caused a bit of a furore when she found herself accused of attacking working mothers (something she denies) for, as she puts it, mentioning home, women and children on the same page. She felt stung by the criticism.

“I didn’t say mothers shouldn’t work,” she says. “I said the needs of children and feelings of attachment should come into it. Maybe having children comes with sacrifice. I do disapprove of people who go back to work a few days after their child is born. If children are not given any sense they matter it is a bit much. It damages their life quite badly.”

Like so many things about which she writes, this is another area where Angela has personal experience. She went freelance 35 years ago when the strain of trying to hold down a demanding job and raise children got too much.

“It wasn’t so great trying to do everything,” she says. “I was perpetually exhausted and felt I wasn’t seeing my son, who was then two-and-a-half. I was lucky to be in the position where I could go freelance and I know it’s not that easy for others but it shouldn’t be such an impossible world. The working world needs restructuring radically. If you had a job where the accepted working day was five hours it would work.

“The idea that we can have it all, in a balanced and harmonious way, is a misconception. All you hear from people who try it is what a stress and a strain it is. It is a real problem, especially because in many firms it is no longer enough to do your eight hours. They expect you to do extra to prove that you are that keen. Fine. But if that’s the case don’t have children. I think they deserve more than that.”

Her two children are now long grown up and she and Olly, her husband of 40 years, are grandparents but home continues to be an important part of her world, particularly as she now shares hers with one of her sons and his family, something she has also written about.

The Year I Turn... is also unashamedly based on Angela’s personal experience and she is the first to admit that much of the book’s upbeat message won’t apply to people who are in poor health, have demanding caring responsibilities or other challenging life experiences. But it reflects the optimism she and others she knows feel about this stage of their lives.

“I was reaching 70 and thinking that you hear so much about how awful it is to be get old,” she says. “The author Anthony Powell summed it up by saying: ‘I feel like I am being punished for a crime I haven’t committed’. There is a lot of shame in society about getting old. It involves deterioration and probably being lonely.

“I know it does involve that for a lot of people but it is not everybody’s script. I found myself thinking: ‘My life doesn’t feel like that’. I am well, I have lots I want to do. Of course, you are facing the end in the future. That is a given but it’s not all bad. It focuses your mind on making the most of what’s left. I look around and see so many of my contemporaries living full lives.

“There are many positives about growing older. You can draw on skills learned in the earlier part of your life, such as learning how to deal with people and controlling your own behaviour and moods.”

Angela, whose father was a forensic psychiatrist, admits she has an advantage over many people when it comes to challenging convention because of her upbringing.

“With my education and unconventional parents I have never felt deeply conventional,” she says. “The only time I worried about being more conventional was when I first left Summerhill and felt I had to prove I wasn’t as weird as people thought I would be, having been there. I care what people think about the way I live in as much as I would hate to hurt people’s feelings. But I don’t want a blue rinse, although I’ve no problem with anyone who does. You should be allowed to be true to yourself and if that involves having a blue rinse, that is fine.”

But anyone running away with the idea that absolutely anything goes as far as Angela is concerned would be wrong. Her book includes a section entitled “Bunkum”, on the things she objects to, as an older person.

“There is also a reasonably chunky chapter on health,” she says. “There is so much information around about the difference you can make to the ageing body these days. My husband and I took up pilates 10 years ago and do yoga too. My body is in much better condition than when I started. That is a real gain.”

Although she has had cosmetic surgery in the past she now feels more comfortable in her own skin and doesn’t plan to have any more, although she thinks it’s possible to be a feminist and go under the knife.

“My feeling about feminism is that it should be about supporting women in their choices,” she says. “I had an eye job when I was in my 40s because my eyes seemed to be sinking into reptilian layers of skin. I felt better afterwards. There is a degree of confidence that women get from it that empowers them in different ways. On the other hand, having young people rushing off to have boob jobs is worrying. I don’t think I will do any more surgery. I quite like myself now.”

Growing older has also given Angela the confidence to go back to her beloved “trademark” leopard-skin tights, which she previously abandoned at 50.

“I suppose there are people who will say wearing leopard-skin tights is inappropriate for my age but I just ask myself who are these people and do I value their opinion,” she says. “I think we write our own script.”