Title: Bloomer
Author: Anne Schlebusch
Publisher: Modjaji
ISBN: 9781928433491
Bloomer is not Anne Schlebusch’s first foray into writing. Anne’s background is in teaching and education, and she is a co-author of language textbooks as well as a curriculum guide. Apart from the non-fiction, Anne has written three Young Adult novels, one of which was a 1995 joint winner of the Young Africa Award. In 2020 a short story Anne wrote was longlisted in the Kwela Corona Competition. She completed her MPhil in Applied Language Studies (cum laude) at UCT in 1995 and then left teaching to join the Western Cape Education Department. She spent a decade as the Director for Business Strategy before retiring. There is no doubt that Anne Schlebusch is a formidable woman who has achieved great things in her life. Her novel Bloomer adds yet another sparkling facet to a very luminous resumé.
Bloomer is a delight, perhaps even more so for people on the other side of 60. The story kicks off when Maggie and a number of fellow “inmates” at Hazyview Mansions Retirement Home are faced with lockdown in 2020. In March of that year, South Africa listened to Cyril Ramaphosa’s “family meeting” telling us that we were going into full-scale lockdown. The reality of facing lockdown in an old age home was terrifying for many. My uncle was put into an old age home when his wife died. He was still very active, very social, and loved going out into town every day to see his old work pals. The conditions imposed on him because of lockdown – no visitors, no physical interaction between residents, no visits off the premises – made him suicidal. Many times he tried to drive out of the complex and was turned back by the security guards. I phoned him regularly and he kept saying he couldn’t take it and was going to do himself in. Ironically, he caught Covid in 2021 and died soon after that. It broke my heart to know how unhappy he’d been when he died.
Therefore it was with great joy that I read of Maggie and her fellow residents’ response to the lockdown. Bloomer’s protagonist is 70 years old, which just happens to be the same age as Anne. Maggie questions everything. Her uncompromising attitude makes the characters around her (and readers of the novel) rethink everything they knew about the aging process. It is a joy to read about the Invictus group at Hazyview Mansions Retirement Home. In the opening pages of her novel the author mentions a community in Okinawa whose longevity has been attributed to their not only having a purpose in life but also having “informal groups of friends and peers who meet regularly and bond over shared interests”. These groups are known as a “moai” (p 5). The moai also look outside of their group to see where they can help other people. The residents of Hazyview Mansions Retirement Home form a strong bond between the feistiest members of the old age home as they believe they are “bloody but unbowed” (1) and call themselves the Invictus, after the famous poem by William Ernest Henley. They are Maggie’s moai.
During lockdown the Invictus become the Boomer Zoomers (Boomers, for those who don’t know, are people who were born in the 1950s) learning to use Zoom for the first time in some cases, keeping in touch with friends and family outside of the home and What’sApping like teenagers among themselves. They have the Invictus What’s App group as well as regular Zoom sessions where they challenge one another to break the rules, however small. In one of the first lockdown zooms, Maggie wears an old tea cosy on her head as a joke and Professor N sneaks a goldfish into her no-pets-allowed room. In small ways they keep their spirits up. However, as the lockdown rules become more draconian, they start to object to their complete lack of contact with the outside world, as well as their physical decline by staying in their rooms 24 hours a day. With the help of Maggie’s enterprising grandchildren they start a Boomers’ Rights Campaign which catches the attention of the press. They demand freedom of movement, among other things. “Solitary confinement and patronizing arsehole know-it-alls are just plain exhausting,” Maggie states (51). I wish Maggie had been in my uncle’s home to start something like this.
With the help of their very obliging grandchildren, the Boomer Zoomers’ plans go viral. The day of the demonstration at the home is glorious: Journalists of both print and television turn up, a Disco-Car arrives booming out “Jailhouse rock”, and placard-waving teenagers shaking their “Free Our Boomers!” banners. There is even an overhead plane streaming a banner with the same message. Boomers stand in their windows or on their balconies making their voices heard. Management cannot ignore their message. And this is how the Invictus become known for their new take on ageing.
As the novel progresses, Maggie’s world expands to a point where she has to make far-reaching decisions that will affect the rest of her life. Mags, as the author fondly calls her, becomes more emancipated, finding her own voice for the second time, if you count her first iteration as an artist at 53. Her desire and vision to create meaningful work which deals with real issues which distress her enormously, work which she hopes will have a global consequence, is another celebration of the strong older character. I love the sense of purpose, or Ikigai (translated from the Japanese into having “a unique purpose in life”), which Maggie finds, anew, at the age of 70. She embodies her own example of the Japanese community of Okinawa, where there is the hugest concentration of centenarians in the world. She reawakens her artistic skills which made her quite a sensation at 50-something and finds a way to make peace with her future in a way that celebrates her indomitable soul.
The novel is deeply satisfying and encouraging, and puts a whole new slant on the ageing process. One does not have to “go gentle into that good night”, but – like Maggie – one can choose to flounce out in a blaze of flamboyant glory while wearing a tea cosy on one’s head. The story is captivating and immersive. At one stage I found myself wanting to google the painting Maggie was describing which made her a cause célèbre in her fifties! Do yourself a favour, no matter how old you are, and read this book. It’s the best feel-good novel I’ve read in a long while.
Q and A with Anne Schlebusch
You aren’t in a facility like this yourself, Anne, so what gave you the idea for setting a novel in an old age home?
At the time old age homes worldwide were topping the Covid-risk headlines and characterised by rather tragic photos of old folk behind windows reaching out to touch the glass beyond which were their grandchildren. The plight of the isolated was somehow more poignant when they were in facilities where the risks seemed to be multiplied and the possibility for sadness ditto. I wanted to swing facilities away from being a petri dish for death to being a petri dish for revitalisation. Also, here was a natural community of oldies who could constitute a formidable unit and provide an interesting cast for a story. And, of course, I wanted the book to speak to universal truths, not just bucking Covid. In the end the Covid setting fades and the book is an any time book.
Footnote: The entire world was redesigning itself for a post-pandemic lifestyle, so it’s really pressing for the elderly to lead in the redesign era too. Will this book prompt something profound? People are buying copies for gerontologists, managers and policy makers – I think the setting in an old age home has created this kind of gravitas for the book.
The Invictus form a strong support group in the home and find ways to break rules and enjoy life as much as they can. In this way they keep one another’s spirits up and Maggie refers to them as her moai. Do you have your own moai?
Nice question! My book club has been going for over 35 years, so that’s quite a close crew! With shared reading comes a great insight into one another. I have a new and treasured moai, too, of writers. And a set of old school friends. I see my family as my chief moai, really.
Not only do the Invictus decide to take their lives back during lockdown through fun online meetings, but they decide to invest in their health and their freedom of movement by starting a Boomer Battle with a Boomers’ Rights Campaign. (I was so inspired by their walking regime alone that I managed to wangle a Fitbit-type of watch with my new phone contract and am trying to follow their example.) Do you manage to keep up a regime of fitness in your own life?
I did a huge amount of walking during Covid – definitely assisted by my step-measuring Fitbit. My cancer journey from mid-2021 was a big setback; that was followed by a fractured hip (likely a consequence of the radiation treatment), but whenever I can, I set off walking again to try keep my general fitness up. I was doing daily aquarobics this year till my recent pelvic fracture and hope to get back to that soon. Grr. Frustrating when I’d planned to be a fitness pin-up for Bloomer and had these unexpected trials instead. But maybe it’s OK to be human and vulnerable. Life ain’t exactly fiction!
Another element of the novel which intrigued me was that Maggie goes through a diary of sorts that she kept for a short while during 2002. In this she finds the “elements of the big strands of her life – the warp and weft of the Maggie cloth of 2020” (28). As Maggie reads through formative moments of her life at 53, we learn more about the “Maggie cloth” of her character. I loved the sense of a middle-aged Bridget Jones writing her diary, with her own aspirations, complaints, and wishes for her future. In real life, my guilty pleasure is romantic comedy. When I’ve had really tough days – which is often – I love the hope and sense of life being okay in the end that this genre delivers, whether in novel or in film. How did you decide on the device of the diary to tell your story from the past and show how it dictates her future?
It seemed to be a perfect way to reveal and explore the roots of the 70-year-old in 2020 through a novel use of a direct account, in her own words, of a milestone year in her past. The diary, being entertaining and frivolous and using Maggie’s own voice, gives another energy to the book. It’s frankly a multi-genre and multi-generational interweaving. For example, Maggie’s old dad and how she engages with him foreshadow and further explore her own feelings and observations once she reaches that age herself. The option to weave in slight diary excerpts allows for intriguing cross-references or juxtapositions between the two stages of their lives that are the focus of this book. There are variations in tone and life goals between the two, from 2002 and 2020, and these are echoed in the stylistic variations offered by the two forms of diary versus current. But then the fascinating thing (I think it’s fascinating anyway) is that there are also these abundant similarities with regard to energies, introspection, independence.
As I stated above, I love the romcom aspect of Maggie’s story. She even ends up with suitors. Can you describe why you think relationships in our later years can be even better than those in our youth?
Romcoms are cool and restful, aren’t they? I don’t think you can avoid some kind of consideration of the traditional relationships in a book looking at the senior years. But the older characters are not driven so strongly any more by societal pressures and that sense that you’ll be “complete” only if you have a life partner. You weigh up your autonomy versus being in a relationship more critically and dispassionately. The characters are all imagined. I daresay that in the end they all represent facets of being human and then, when you mesh them all together, that’s humanity. I hope that in the end my imagined world is a kindly one overall.
Another “best thing” about this novel for me is the fact that, as Maggie grows more attractive to the people around her – becoming an internet sensation on Instagram; being interviewed by Christiane Amanpour for CNN; having international journalists waiting for news of her latest activities; having suitors, as mentioned above. Is this a reflection of your own self finding your voice through your novel? Do you also hope to create work which may change the world for good? As I say in the review, I was so intrigued by Maggie’s artistic creations that I even thought of googling to look up the painting until I reminded myself I was reading fiction!
Thanks for installing yourself so comprehensively and imaginatively into my fictional world. I feel very heart-warmed to see you pulling out the essence. I think the answer is yes. Just as Maggie generates a sense of purpose for herself and is then almost taken aback when the Bloomer movement attracts such wide attention, so I am also in a “taken aback” mode. The way she mutters to herself that her voice has been magnified and that now she must use it for good resonates very profoundly in my head. There has been a very surprisingly warm and enthusiastic response to Bloomer. I was expecting all sorts of criticism of this and that, and none of that has happened. So, yes, I’d love it if the book could be a force for good. I’m keen for it to get into libraries and retirement homes and into the hands of policy makers. And for it to intrigue young people and middle-aged people as well as the elderly. I don’t see another book quite like it out in the world.
Are you a visual artist at all? I was so intrigued by the description of the cause célèbre painting mentioned in the earliest part of Maggie’s diary as one of Maggie’s seminal works in her fifties. You managed to describe the painting or collage of paintings in detail. It’s a gift for a writer to be able to describe a painting so vividly that the reader feels as if they have seen the work itself, and you did that. Hats off to you! Where does your love of art and the visual medium come from?
Thank you for trying to google it! That’s success! I worked really hard on the descriptions of the artworks. I needed someone to bother to read them and for them not to be so complicated that you skip on by, but also to try to literally paint the picture. I’m not a visual artist at all. My dad loved painting, though, and my home is full of his creations. I remember once when he was painting on a farm we were staying on and how we laughed when we realised that some random people thought he was going to include them – so they stood frozen in awkward stillness for ages, not realising that he was, of course, looking right through them to what he wanted to see.
Tell me about the tea cosy phenomenon that happens at all your book launches.
Right at the start of lockdown Maggie pops a favourite tea cosy on as hat. This is part of her revolution versus clothes that society wants her to wear but that are not necessary when you are alone in your room during a pandemic. The book cover pictures Maggie wearing this cosy. At my first launch I popped on my own grannie’s tea cosy for a sentimental joke and representation of Maggie’s free spirit. This turned out to be a lovely moment – relaxing both me and the attendees. After that, people who kindly attended more than one event knew this was coming and a bunch of phones appeared in front of me for people to take snaps! Rather charming. I’d been a bit scathing about knitting pastimes in retirement homes in my book, so I decided it was only right to show respect and went to a nearby retirement home to donate a copy of Bloomer and to ask their knitting group to knit me a few. Popping on a cosy per event has become a highlight and great fun. I now have an amazing and beautiful collection of cosy treasures and hope to get more. A tea cosy revolution is hovering on the horizon!
Lastly, the dreaded question: Do you have another novel up your sleeve or are you taking a break from writing for a bit?
Thanks for this question. I have two works about to be published – maybe as early as August: a youth novel as part of a series (the publishers will have to make the announcement) and a short story that will be part of a brilliant series that Joanne Hichens will have to announce. I was almost more excited to hear that the short story had been chosen than when Bloomer got accepted. It made me feel, “OK, sounds like I’m really into this author business now.” I’m thinking about various options now, for example polishing up a crime fiction book I wrote earlier, or even (not sure about this) writing a Bloomer sequel. I didn’t intend it to have a sequel at all, but there is some little pressure at least to think about this. So, no, not retiring as a writer yet. There are things to do and time is short!
Thank you so much for the lovely book. It’s been inspirational, enjoyable and uplifting all at once. Here is a clip of the wonderful Michael Sheen’s version of Dylan Thomas’s poem as a thank you: “Do not go gentle into that good night.
Invictus
By William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.