MANY old people had an unpleasant surprise on reading about the coronavirus.

There are going to be a lot of deaths and most of them will be among the sick and ancient.

We are the first generation in Britain that has generally enjoyed a prolonged and often active old age. Money and medicine have enabled more people than ever before to live into their nineties and record numbers to reach their centuries.

The average marriage lasted 16 years in the Victorian era. It is the same today but only because divorce has replaced death as the main factor. Some oldies think it unfair that they should be the main targets of the new virus.

Death is the last great taboo in western society. Many people have never seen a dead body or talked much about it. Yet those Victorians almost always had at least one premature death in their families and few lived long.

Previous generations were even more prone to endure lives which were nasty, brutish and short.

The Victorians were the first to reduce the death rate. By cleaning up their act, they got rid of killer diseases like cholera.

Pioneers such as Sir Arthur Newsholme, first medial officer of health for Brighton, saw clearly that poor public sanitation was largely to blame.

The magnificent sewage system in Brighton, which still operates today, solved that problem.

Tackling diseases continued throughout the 20th century with diphtheria and smallpox among those more or less completely eradicated.

Next came polio, a disease that left many victims dead and even more paralysed or crippled.

A boy in my class at school got it and I remember how frightened we all were when the headteacher said there was nothing we could do because if we were infected, it would already have happened.

Other nasties still abound in poorer countries and jabs against diseases like typhoid and yellow fever remind us of their perils when visiting these countries.

Occasionally we bring them back and I did just that with malaria 30 years ago despite taking all proper precautions.

It was the worst form of malaria called blackwater fever and it is often deadly. I wondered several times whether I would get through and it was a close call.

I had another brush with death when camping at Runnymede in Surrey back in 1959. My two friends and I could not put up the tent on open ground during a great gale, so we used the shelter of a large tree to do so even though we knew the danger.

In the middle of the night, the top of the tree fell on the tent. Between the tree trunk and the biggest branch my head was trapped face down and the branch curved round to pin down my legs.

One friend had a fractured pelvis and the other was lucky to get out uninjured. He flagged down a car which happened to be a police vehicle.

Firefighters arrived to remove the tree from me and when they dragged me out, both they and my friend dared not look at me, so sure were they that I must be maimed. In fact I did not suffer a single scratch.

Later on as a reporter I covered hundreds of inquests and was well acquainted with the many and varied ways in which death can strike.

At the time of the camping accident, I was 17 and too young to die but now I’m 77 with Parkinson’s disease, I am ripe for removal. I still think I can make a contribution, however minor, towards society and hope my time is not yet quite finished. I still enjoy many aspects of it hugely.

But if a choice had to be made between a young child and me as to who should be given medical priority, it would not be me.

And if there are large numbers of casualties from the virus, these sorts of choices may have to be made.

My family is long lived. Both my parents lived to be over 90. I had an aunt and an uncle aged 98 and a cousin who reached 101.

Most people easily make their allotted three score years and ten. If life were a soccer match, my family play extra time and often penalty shootouts. Perhaps it was because death came so slowly it was seldom mentioned. The only time I ever recall it coming up was when I overheard my Uncle Inigo say he was terribly frightened by it. How I wish I could have talked to him about his fear.

Far too many folk are like that and they must be having a torrid time now. They are being forced to see that the Grim Reaper is about to have a field day. There are few merits about this virus but one may be to make us face death with more equanimity.