Should you live to be old, God willing, the State currently decrees that you should be able to get by on £87 a week, all in. That's your Old Age pension plus anything else you might have been careful enough to save for your old age itself, by yourself. Private arrangements and all that.

Prudence, they used to call it.

They used to call it that when Phyll Heller met Ernest Hutchinson in 1946. Phyll was a WREN serving in the Royal Navy who had been at Scapa Flow when the Royal Oak had gone down. Ernest was a Gunnery Instructor who'd seen action in the Far East.

They married in 1947 and eventually ended up in Oxford, after Ernest had spent 26 years serving his country. In Oxford, he went to work at Pressed Steel and the couple were blessed with two girls, Marion and Linda. Ernest died in 1969. Today, at 82, Phyll, as she's always been called, lives in sheltered accommodation in Oxford and lives on the proceeds of her state pension, her tiny widow's pension and the pension she worked for herself.

It works out at £103 a week. And that's £16 too much for Phyll to qualify for what she refers to as the 'perks' of the old. By 'perks', she means things like dentures and transport to the hospitals and, God help us, walking frames to help her get around until the hip replacement operation she requires and has been requiring for almost a year now actually takes place.

Phyll paid for her walking frame, £16, cash. It sits in the corner of her neat as a pin council flat which is dominated by photographs of her late husband and their family. Phyll Hutchinson is neither a twisted or a bitter woman. But there's a spark of anger in her which flares every time she thinks of how being careful and working hard led to her being worse off than many others who had neither the prudence or the inclination to make allowances for the trials of old age.

"I don't want charity," she tells you firmly, in this country which needs at least one national registered charity to help ensure that some of its old people do not still face the choice between starving and freezing each winter.

And, in truth, Phyll is better off than some. Her daughter, Marion Evans, herself a mother of three, visits her regularly and Phyll's story is hardly unique. But that hardly makes it any less pitiful. "What grieves me is the perks that people on Income Support are entitled to, while I'm not," she says. "I've been a widow now for 30 years and I've never asked anyone for anything. When my husband was alive, we never had to want for anything - we worked for it."

Indeed, Marion says that one of her earliest memories is being looked after her by her night-shift working father in the mornings and by her mother at night.

"Both Linda and I always knew that if we wanted something, we had to earn it. That's how we were brought up." Linda lives abroad these days but Phyll has clear memories of what it took to raise two bright, intelligent girls: "They both passed their 11-Plus, so that meant school uniforms and whatever, so I got another part-time job," she recalls.

"We worked for everything and saved and now I think if I hadn't paid the pension, I wouldn't be any worse off and I've had had the money then."

"I don't regret having a private pension - because I don't want charity - but now if I need a new cooker, I've got to pay for it and I know a lot of people who don't deserve to be on Income Support."

Aware that her remarks might annoy some of her contemporaries, she adds, "The old can be very malicious." The old can be many things, but they can never be fashionable, or cute and suffer accordingly.

Marion Evans listens to her mother and asks a simple question: "Can someone tell me how I teach my teenage children that they should work for what they want in life when their grandmother's experience demonstrates the opposite?"

Phyll Hutchinson was a 'Career Woman' before they ever thought of the phrase. She became one not to 'Have it all', but to secure a decent life for her family. Failing health and the rising cost of maintenance forced her to sell that family's former home, well before the 1980s property boom. "I tried to make allowances for my old age," she says, "but sometimes I think I shouldn't have bothered."

When she tells me she's due to receive a rise soon, I mistake '73p' for '£73'.

"Seventy-three pounds?," she laughs, "I'd be off to Florida!"

Later, Marion will tell me that her mother never used to fret as much. "All she does now is sit and worry, because she can't get about like she used to anymore. She's due for her hip replacement next February at the Nuffield and so she has so much time to sit and think - before, she'd have gone shopping or walked her worries off But she's 82 now, and things are going wrong with her," she shrugs, sadly. Usually, Phyll's various visits to Oxford's various hospitals - for treatment for cataracts, her heart and her hip - have been necessarily been made by taxi and paid for by herself. Despite Marion's devotion, she has a living to earn herself and can't always be on hand.

Still, next year, Phyll will have her £5 TV licence fee knocked off and she's due that 73p a week rise in April. So that's all right then, isn't it? After all, she's been careful over the years and financially prudent. And as Phyll Hutchinson will tell you, the last thing she wants is charity...

Story date: Tuesday 30 November

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.