90+ | June 18th 2008

Jillian Edelstein

In the fourth and final instalment of "Bright Old Things", our feature on 90-somethings with storied and contented lives, Maureen Cleave talks to Brian Power, altar boy, war hero, Buddhist and tennis player. "Age is relative", he says ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Summer 2008

Sixty-five years ago, Brian Power was left for dead near Mount Etna in Sicily. A lieutenant in the Royal Irish Fusiliers, he was leading a company of men in a river crossing when he was hit by a bullet above the heart; the pack of Verey light cartridges on his back exploded like fireworks, setting fire to his clothes, a bullet went into his thigh and out the other side, and both lungs filled with blood. "Just leave him," said the medical officer, but Barney, the sergeant in charge of the stretcher bearers, disobeyed orders, loaded him on to an armoured carrier and drove back into the hills. Two months later Power was back in England. It took a year to patch him up, whereupon he asked to return to his battalion in Austria.

He is now 90 and married to the beautiful Prunella Stack, who is 93 and president of the Women's Fitness League, founded by her mother in 1930. They saw me in their sunny sitting room in London. "Prunella and I laugh a lot," Brian said. Once a week he cycles to the Hurlingham Club to play tennis in a four with an average age of 84. He is writing his first novel.

He has a colourful past. Of Catholic Irish stock, he was born in Tianjin, China, where he lived for 18 years with two brothers and a discontented mother (his father, who was in the Imperial Chinese Customs Service, had died). Chinese is his first language. He wrote a lovely book about this childhood called "The Ford of Heaven".

Educated first by the Marist Brothers and then the Jesuits, who rather hoped he might have a vocation, he was acolyte to the Jesuit palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin, who took part in the discovery of Peking Man. "I was his altar boy. I served Mass and sang in the choir. Teilhard was very charming in a slightly lofty way but I learnt nothing from him. For me, God happened outside church, never inside. I learnt everything from my amah, Yi Jieh: love, affection, balance, calmness in feverish surroundings, every sort of religious instinct came from her--peasant wisdom.

"What I became good at was living in the imagination. You invent things as you go along. If someone drops in, I listen to the conversation for a bit and then I drift into another realm. I start imagining things: they talk about Chelsea, I think of Venice. I might compose a poem about what they're wearing. It prevents life being boring." He deliberately forgets his hearing aid because it interferes with the imagination.

When he came back to England, he was never to see Yi Jieh again. He writes in his memoir, "She took my face in her two hands and pressed them firmly, as if it would help her to remember me."

He read history at King's College, London, and, after the war, became a barrister. He has reassuring news here: "A lot more crimes and murders were committed then, nastier and more frequent. Now the news is a diet of horrors. They do anything to put a crime in front of us, when in fact things have got better."

He then came up with something called Advocacy for the Layman. "Rules on how to present a case, how to be brief yet leave nothing vital out. Time is precious; no one wants to listen to your homework. It went like a bomb. I taught all over the place, politicians, medical people, in the army, ICI, the House of Lords, the Foreign Office..." It's also useful when giving advice to the young. "Two sentences is too much--their eyes glaze over and you can see them thinking: "Is there a window I can get out of?"

Ageing, he says, takes one by surprise. "There's no point at which I say I am old. I've always believed in relativity: you can feel incredibly old one moment, middle-aged in the afternoon, young again at tea-time to the point of being skittish, and then very old by 11. I don't think about death much. I think more and more of the idea that God is nature. Spinoza and Einstein both said God is nature--God is in a butterfly that lives for the afternoon; Blake saw a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. A matter-of-fact attitude to the body seems to take over. After all, it doesn't occur to the butterfly to worry about dying. I've gone back full circle to what my amah taught." (The irony is Prunella converted to Catholicism.)

But what happened to Barney? Apparently he ended his days happily in the Chelsea Hospital down the road and often came to tea. When he died in 1992, Brian Power gave the address at his funeral.

Editor's note: Brian Power died on May 16th, suddenly but peacefully, after the print version of this piece had gone to press. He had played his regular game of tennis that morning. Our deepest condolences go to his wife, Prunella, and their family.

(Maureen Cleave was one of the first feature writers on the London Evening Standard. Her last feature was "Beggars can be orators" for the Spring issue of Intelligent Life. Jillian Edelstein, who took the portraits for this series, is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker and Vogue.)