The secret of longevity

The dog days are on us. The jungle heat and the streets piled with garbage bags, all that suffocating charm of New York City in summer. This I think is no time to talk about the United Nations or inflation. I was at Kennedy airport the other day and after milling around one of the huge buildings that belonged to single airlines I’d forgotten the roasting oven into which I would have to plunge once the baggage had been cleared. I came out on the sidewalk and resisted a strong impulse to take the first plane to Iceland or Scotland or some other northern country that goes into panic when the thermometer edges up in the 70s. A cab driver waved at me and to my joy, his taxi was air-conditioned. He was accordingly an affable man.

As we whisked along I said to the driver, ‘don’t you find air-conditioning makes a terrific difference to your job in the summer time?’ He flung an arm over his seat and he looked back over it, ‘Brother’, he said, ‘in my book it’s the third greatest invention’. I didn’t rise to him and he said, ‘in case you’re wondering about the second, it’s a lobster dinner’. He gave me a knowing smile and we went on our way to Manhattan in comfort, and wishing no ill to man, woman or beast.

The heat which pounds away at you on the streets like a throbbing pulse must certainly be responsible for all sorts of odd behaviour. I wondered that the psychologists have not gone into it more thoroughly. The police department, which, like all the others services in this nearly bankrupt city, is holding talks with our distracted little mayor. The police department put out a study of street crime and finds that it’s at its worst in July and August because of the heat and in December and January because of the cold. I don’t know if this has always been so and even the most sociologically-minded of us can only guess, because the mania for statistics on such things is a comparatively new one. It may explain our periodic alarm about such general afflictions as crime, drug abuse, poverty, hazards to health.

I came on a book, out recently, about a period that the movies, musicals usually, were very fond of, what in England was called the Edwardian era and what over here was known as the ‘gay nineties’. The book… even though the gay nineties were in Victorian times. The book has a thesis, well-documented with news and pictures, and the thesis is that the good old days were awful. The writer is unable to make comparisons between crime in New York then and now because very many crimes that must now be prosecuted were not even required to be reported in those days. There was a district of New York City called the Five Points and it’s impossible to do more than guess at the crime rate in such a cesspool since it was well understood by orderly people that the district was practically forbidden to anybody who cherished a life and a limb. The police rarely went in there and then only armed and in twos and threes, but there’s enough random evidence to show that it was a sink of crime and vice and poverty so unimaginable that people simply rotted and were officially unknown to be ill or even to exist until there were found by some neighbour to be immobile and then they were carted off to Potters Field. Even the identity of the dead was a nicety not always gone into.

It reminds me, by an association you will soon appreciate, of those farmers in remote corners of the Soviet Union who in single paragraphs printed to fill out a short column are reported to have died at the age of 139. I have a friend who came into this country from Poland in 1913 and he’s fairly certain that he’s now in his early 70s, but when I once asked him how old his mother and father were when they died, he said casually ’90 maybe, mother was possibly 95, I guess’. I said ‘What do you mean, “you guess?”’ ‘My dear boy’, he said – he’s the kind of man born with the secret of perpetual old age who had been in his seventies for the past 30 years – ‘My dear boy, how would I know, how would she know? In our village there was no such thing as a registrar of births, at least it hadn’t come in before I left’. There was a very lively business at the ports of immigration to America with guys who would sell you a birth certificate. They behaved very like those characters at Coney Island who feel your biceps and look at the pigment on the back of your hands and then tell you that you’re 55 and weigh 170 pounds.

‘The trouble with people who went to Cambridge,’ said my waggish friend, ‘is that they think everything’s recorded or provable. I never heard of a birth certificate until I was 12 years old.’ Well, in more places around the world than we can guess I suspect, old people claim a couple of years every year they endure until by the time they’re 80 the whole village is convinced that they must be pushing a hundred. But the way, did I ever tell you about the oldest man in the world? Maybe I did, but some people who didn’t hear it may relish the story, because I met him and he was about as big and hardy as a sick chicken. He was in fact four feet four inches tall, Javier Pereira from Colombia – the country, not the university. He had hunched shoulders and a complexion like alligator hide. He was brought up to New York by the promoters of one of those newspaper strips that illustrate incredible marvels of our planet, called something like ‘This Fabulous World of Ours’ or ‘You’ll Never Believe It’.

They got the word from South America that there was a man down there just going into his 168th year; this must have been, by the way, about 20 years ago. Anyway, they bagged him because he said he’d been born in the year that George Washington died. George Washington being without doubt the only North American he’d ever heard of. There was obviously no sure way to check on this boast so they thought they’d haul him up here, set the doctors on him and see what they found. He’d spent a lifetime never travelling more than a mile or two away from his village but he’d also never been offered a free airplane trip anywhere and the prospect of a junket to New York was too much for his old conservative instincts. Well he came and they put him into the New York Hospital and called on the experts from Cornell Medical School, who used the New York Hospital as a teaching centre. He went in one day and the next day the press was called in and we stood around and waited for Javier. He came out in the late afternoon of the second day fully dressed and in a kind of angry daze, like a witch doctor interrupted in the middle of a favourite spell. He glowered at us, glowered up at us and a few people backed away but the promoter who had called the press conference began with the fatuous introduction ‘My friend Javier loves everybody and everything,’ at which point Javier swung at the promoter. A photographer crouched for the focus and he took a side swipe at him. A laughing girl, born yesterday, went to soothe him and he landed a right on her nose. That was all the press conference we got out of him and he muttered in a guttural and incomprehensible Spanish that he wanted to get out of here and on his way home.

So we had to fall back on the medicine men of Cornell. Eventually they came out and one of them looked at a file and solemnly announced that they had weighed him and tapped him and pumped him and injected him and photographed his arteries and timed his coagulation rate and chemically analysed all his juices and submitted him to the marvellous new tests then just devised by the specialists in old age. Their report said, which was something we had almost guessed at, ‘that he was vigorous, alert and observing’. His hands which we spotted as having a strange grizzled life of their own like frogs writhing in a death agony, ‘his hands,’ the report said, ‘suffered from degenerative arthritis,’ as sooner or later don’t we all. ‘His bones,’ we hung on this one, ‘his bones were in a condition many a young man might envy’. Well the conclusion of this famous medical document was that he weighed five stone ten, and was four fee four inches tall and he was also alive.

This left us a little nervous, rocking from foot to foot, after all we weren’t medical men and it wasn’t for us to anticipate the sort of findings available to men who’ve gone through medical school, done years of interning and spent many engrossing years tapping and weighing old men. What, some brash reporter wanted to know, did the medical evidence show about his age? ‘Well,’ the spokesman replied, ‘we’d heard all that. But,’ he added, and this was the punch line, ‘non-medical evidence indicates that Mr Pereira is indeed a very old man and quite possibly he may be more than a hundred and fifty years of age.’ Not having seen many people over a hundred, the doctors implied, how were they to know? We needled them to define ‘non-medical evidence’. They wouldn’t say. The last sentence we got out of them before we were dismissed was this: ‘medical science possesses at present no methods of determining the exact age of any adult’. Well you could have knocked us over with an uppercut from a Colombian peasant. I’d never felt such a rude blow to the expertise of the medical profession since I caught some germ roaming around London in 1936 and when the radiologist’s x-rays came back they carried a note saying ‘the costal calcification’ - that’s the degree of calcium deposited by advancing years on the rib cage – ‘the costal calcification of this patient is that of a man of about 55. However, the admission card gives the patient’s age as 27. We attach no pathological significance to this discrepancy.’ I memorised that and I can only say that if I now possess the costal calcification of a man of 167 I hope they still find nothing pathological in it.

It gives me renewed faith in those old gaffers who are interviewed on their 90th birthday or their diamond wedding anniversary and asked for their explanation of their longevity say, something like, ‘living clean, eating lots of vegetables and not worrying’. Though I must say I do look back with affection on old John Nance Garner, former Vice President of the United States, who received the usual question on the eve of his 99th birthday and all he said was ‘bourbon and branch water. And then more bourbon’. I guess my favourite is an old baseball player named Satchel Page. He was pulled out of retirement to pitch a game when he was in his late 60s, and he did very well, and the radio interviewer said, ‘Satchel, to what do you attribute your longevity?’ ‘How’s that?’ he asked. ‘I mean, why can you perform like this at your age?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I put it down to my diet; I eat nothing but strictly fried foods’.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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