Lady in the Van

‘gentrification’, but which was then called ‘knocking through’. Young professional couples, many of them in journalism or television, bought up the houses, converted them and (an invariable feature of such conversions) knocked the basement rooms together to form a large kitchen-dining-room. In the mid-Sixties I wrote a BBC TV series, Life in NW1 , based on one such family, the Stringalongs, whom Mark Boxer then took over to people a cartoon strip in the Listener , and who kept cropping up in his drawings for the rest of his life. What made the social set-up funny was the disparity between the style in which the new arrivals found themselves able to live and their progressive opinions: guilt, put simply, which today’s gentrifiers are said famously not to feel (or ‘not to have a problem about’). We did have a problem, though I’m not sure we were any better for it. There was a gap between our social position and our social obligations. It was in this gap that Miss Shepherd (in her van) was able to live.
October 1969
    When she is not in the van Miss S. spends much of her day sitting on the pavement in Parkway, where she has a pitch outside Williams and Glyn’s Bank. She sells tracts, entitled ‘True View: Mattering Things’, which she writes herself though this isn’t something she will admit.
    “I sell them but so far as the authorship is concerned, I’ll say they are anonymous and that’s as far as I’m prepared to go.”
    She generally chalks the gist of the current pamphlet on the pavement, though with no attempt at artistry. ‘St Francis FLUNG money from him’ is today’s message and prospective customers have to step over it to get into the bank. She also makes a few coppers selling pencils.
    “A gentleman came the other day and said that the pencil he had bought from me was the best pencil on the market at the present time. It lasted him three months. He’ll be back for another one shortly.”
    D., one of the more conventional neighbours (and not a Knocker-Through), stops me and says: “Tell me, is she a genuine eccentric?”
April 1970
    Today we moved the old lady’s van. An obstruction order has been put under the windscreen wiper, stating that it was stationed outside N°63 and is a danger to public health. This order, Miss S. insists, is a statutory order:
    “And statutory means standing, in this case standing outside N°63, so if the van is moved on, the order will be invalid.”
    Nobody ventures to argue with this but she can’t decide whether her next pitch should be outside N°61 or further on. Eventually she decides there is ‘a nice space’ outside 62 and plumps for that. Nick Tomalin and I heave away at the back of the van but while she is gracefully indicating that she is moving off (for all of the fifteen feet) the van doesn’t budge.
    “Have you let the handbrake off?”
    Nick Tomalin asks. There is a pause.
    “I’m just in the process of taking it off.”
    As we are poised for the move, another Camden Town eccentric materialises, a tall elderly figure in long overcoat and Homburg hat, with a distinguished grey moustache and in his buttonhole a flag for the Primrose League. He takes off a grubby canary glove and leans a shaking hand against the rear of the van (OLU 246), and when we have moved it forward the few statutory feet, he puts on his glove again, saying:
    “If you should need me I’m just round the corner.” (i.e. in Arlington House).
    I ask Miss S. how long she has had the van.
    “Since 1965,” she says, “though don’t spread that around. I got it to put my things in. I came down from St Albans in it and plan to go back there eventually. I’m just pedalling water at the moment. I’ve always been in the transport line. Chiefly delivery and chauffeuring. You know,” she says mysteriously, “renovated army vehicles. And I’ve got good topography. I always have had. I knew Kensington in the black-out.”
    ♦
    This van (there were to be three others in the course of the next twenty years) was originally brown but by the time it had reached the Crescent it had been given a coat of yellow. Miss S. was fond of yellow (“It’s the Papal colour”) and was never content to leave her vehicles long in their original trim. Sooner or later she could be seen moving slowly round her immobile home, thoughtfully touching up the rust from a tiny tin of primrose paint, looking, in her long dress and sun hat, much as Vanessa Bell would have looked had she