Lady in the Van

appliances into the attachment. I sit on the steps fiddling with the fuse while she squats on her haunches in the hut.
    “Aren’t you cold? You could come in here. I could light a candle and then it would be a bit warmer. The toad’s been in once or twice. He was in here with a slug. I think he may be in love with the slug. I tried to turn it out and it got very disturbed. I thought he was going to go for me.”
    She complains that there is not enough room in the shed and suggests I get her a tent which she could then use to store some of her things.
    “It would only be three feet high and by rights ought to be erected in a meadow. Then there are these shatterproof greenhouses. Or something could be done with old raincoats possibly.”
March 1974
    The Council are introducing parking restrictions in the Crescent. Residents’ bays have been provided and yellow lines drawn up the rest of the street. To begin with, the workmen are very understanding, painting the yellow line as far as the van, then beginning again on the other side so that technically it is still legally parked. However, a higher official has now stepped in and served a removal order on it, so all this week there has been a great deal of activity as Miss S. transports cargoes of plastic bags across the road, through the garden and into the hut. While professing faith in divine protection for the van, she is prudently clearing out her belongings against its possible removal. A notice she has written declaring the Council’s action illegal twirls idly under the windscreen wiper.
    “The notice was served on a Sunday. I believe you can serve search warrants on a Sunday but nothing else, possibly. I should have the Freedom of the Land for the good articles I’ve sold on the economy.”
    She is particularly concerned about the tyres of the van which “may be miraculous. They’ve only been pumped up twice since 1964. If I get another vehicle” – and Lady W. is threatening to buy her one – “I’d like them transferred.”
    ♦
    The old van was towed away in April 1974 and another one provided by Lady W. (‘a titled Catholic lady’, as Miss S. always referred to her). Happy to run to a new (albeit old) van, Lady W. was understandably not anxious to have it parked outside her front door and eventually, and perhaps by now inevitably, the van and Miss S. ended up in my garden. This van was road-worthy and Miss S. insisted on being the one to drive it through the gate into the garden, a manoeuvre which once again enabled her to go through her full repertoire of hand signals. Once the van was on site Miss S. applied the handbrake with such determination that like Excalibur it could never thereafter be released, rusting so firmly into place that when the van came to be moved ten years later it had to be hoisted over the wall by the council crane.
    This van (and its successor, bought in 1983) now occupied a paved area between my front door and the garden gate, the bonnet of the van hard by my front step, its rear door, which Miss S. always used to get in and out of, a few feet from the gate. Callers at the house had to squeeze past the back of the van and come down the side and while they waited for my door to be opened they would be scrutinised from behind the murky windscreen by Miss Shepherd. If they were unlucky, they would find the rear door open with Miss S. dangling her large white legs over the back. The interior of the van, a midden of old clothes, plastic bags and half-eaten food, was not easy to ignore but should anyone Miss S. did not know venture to speak to her she would promptly tuck her legs back and wordlessly shut the door. For the first few years of her sojourn in the garden I would try and explain to mystified callers how this situation had arisen, but after a while I ceased to care and when I didn’t mention it nor did anyone else.
    At night the impression was haunting. I had run a cable out from the house to give her light and heating and through the ragged draperies that hung over the windows of the van a visitor would glimpse Miss S.’s spectral figure, often bent over in prayer or lying on her side like an effigy on a tomb, her face resting on one hand, listening to Radio 4. Did she hear any movement she would straightaway switch off the light and wait like an animal that has been disturbed until she was sure the coast was clear and could put the light on again. She retired early and would complain if anyone called or left