Lady in the Van

of them leaves a bag on the back step of the van this morning. There are the inevitable ginger nuts and several packets of sanitary towels. I can see these would be difficult articles for her to ask me to get, though to ask a nun to get them would seem quite hard for her too. They form some part of her elaborate toilet arrangements and are occasionally to be seen laid drying across the soup-encrusted electric ring. As the postman says this morning, “the smell sometimes knocks you back a bit.”
May 1981
    Miss S. wants to spread a blanket over the roof (in addition to the bit of carpet) in order to deaden the sound of the rain. I point out that within a few weeks it will be dank and disgusting.
    “No,” she says. “Weather-beaten.”
    She has put a Conservative poster in the side window of the van. The only person who can see it is me.
    This morning she was sitting at the open door of the van and as I edge by she chucks out an empty packet of Ariel. The blanket hanging over the pushchair is covered in washing powder.
    “Have you spilt it?” I enquire.
    “No,” she says crossly, irritated at having to explain the obvious. “That’s washing powder. When it rains the blanket will get washed.”
    As I work at my table now I can see her bending over the pushchair, picking at bits of soap flakes and re-distributing them over the blanket. No rain is at the moment forecast.
June 1987
    Miss S. has persuaded the Social Services to allocate her a wheelchair, though what she’s really set her heart on is the electric version.
    Miss S.:
    That boy over the road has one, why not me?
    Me:
    He can’t walk.
    Miss S.:
    How does he know? He hasn’t tried.
    Me:
    Miss Shepherd, he has Spina Bifida.
    Miss S.:
    Well, I was round-shouldered as a child. That may not be serious now but it was quite serious then. I’ve gone through two wars, an infant in the first and not on full rations, in the ambulances in the second, besides being failed by the ATS. Why should old people be disregarded?
    ♦
    Thwarted in her ambition for a powered chair Miss S. compensated by acquiring (I never found out where from) a second wheelchair (“in case the other conks out, possibly”). The full inventory of her wheeled vehicles now read: one van; one Reliant Robin; two wheelchairs; one folding wheely; one folding (two-seater) wheely. Now and again I would thin out the wheelies by smuggling one onto a skip. She would put down this disappearance to children (never a favourite) and the number would shortly be made up by yet another wheely from Reg’s junk stall. Miss S. never mastered the technique of self-propulsion in the wheelchair because she refused to use the inner handwheel (“I can’t be doing with all that silliness”). Instead, she preferred to punt herself along with two walking-sticks, looking in the process rather like a skier on the flat. Eventually I had to remove the handwheel (“The extra weight affects my health”).
July 1981
    Miss S. (bright green visor, purple skirt, brown cardigan, turquoise fluorescent ankle socks) punts her way out through the gate in the wheelchair in a complicated manoeuvre which would be much simplified did she just push the chair out, as well she can. A passer-by takes pity on her and she is whisked down to the market. Except not quite whisked, because the journey is made more difficult than need be by Miss S.’s refusal to take her feet off the ground, so the Good Samaritan finds himself pushing a wheelchair continually slurred and braked by these large trailing carpet-slippered feet. Her legs are so thin now the feet are as slack and flat as those of a camel.
    ♦
    Still, there will be one moment to relish on this, as on all these journeys. When she has been pushed back from the market she will tell (and it is tell, there is never any thanks) whoever is pushing the chair to leave her opposite the gate but on the crown of the road. Then, when she thinks no one is looking, she lifts her feet, pushes herself off and freewheels the few yards down to the gate. The look on her face is one of pure pleasure.
October 1987
    I have been filming abroad.
    “When you were in Yugoslavia,” asks Miss S., “did you come across the Virgin Mary?”
    “No,” I say, “I don’t think so.”
    “Oh, well, she’s appearing there. She’s been appearing there every day for several years.”
    It’s as if I’ve missed the major tourist attraction.
January 1988
    I ask Miss S. if it was her birthday yesterday. She