Lady in the Van

late at night. On one occasion Coral Browne was coming away from the house with her husband, Vincent Price, and they were talking quietly.
    “Pipe down,” snapped the voice from the van, “I’m trying to sleep.”
    For someone who had brought terror to millions it was an unexpected taste of his own medicine.
December 1974
    Miss S. has been explaining to me why the old Bedford (the van not the music-hall) ceased to go ‘possibly’. She had put in some of her home-made petrol, based on a recipe for petrol substitute she read about several years ago in a newspaper.
    “It was a spoonful of petrol, a gallon of water and a pinch of something you could get in every High Street. Well, I got it into my head, I don’t know why, that it was bicarbonate of soda, only I think I was mistaken. It must be either sodium chloride or sodium nitrate, only I’ve since been told sodium chloride is salt and the man in Boots wouldn’t sell me the other, saying it might cause explosions. Though I think me being an older person he knew I would be more responsible. Though not all old ladies perhaps.”
February 1915
    Miss S. rings and when I open the door she makes a bee-line for the kitchen stairs.
    “I’d like to see you. I’ve called several times. I wonder whether I can use the toilet first.”
    I say I think this is pushing it a bit.
    “I’m not pushing it at all. I just will do the interview better if I can use the toilet first.”
    Afterwards she sits down in her green mac and purple headscarf, the knuckles of one large mottled hand resting on the clean scrubbed table, and explains how she has devised a method of ‘getting on the wireless’. I was to ask the BBC to give me a phone-in programme (“something someone like you could get put on in a jiffy”) and then she would ring me up from the house.
    “Either that or I could get on Petticoat Line. I know a darn sight more on moral matters than most of them. I could sing my song over the telephone. It’s a lovely song, called ‘The End of the World’.” (Which is pure Beyond the Fringe.) “I won’t commit myself to singing it, not at this moment, but I probably would. Some sense should be said and knowledge known. It could all be anonymous. I could be called The Lady Behind the Curtain. Or A Woman of Britain. You could take a nom-de-plume view of it.”
    This idea of The Woman Behind the Curtain has obviously taken her fancy and she begins to expand on it, demonstrating where the curtain could be, her side of it coincidentally taking in the television and the easy chair. She could be behind the curtain, she explains, do her periodic broadcasts and the rest of the time “be a guest at the television and take in some civilisation. Perhaps there could be gaps filled with nice classical music. I know one: Prelude and ‘Liebestraum’ by Liszt. I believe he was a Catholic priest. It means ‘love’s dream’, only not the sexy stuff. It’s the love of God and the sanctification of labour and so on, which would recommend it to celibates like you and me, possibly.”
    Shocked at this tentative bracketing of our conditions, I quickly get rid of her and, though it’s a bitter cold night, open the windows wide to get rid of the smell.
    ♦
    The Women Behind the Curtain remained a favourite project of hers and in 1976 she wrote to Aiman (sic) Andrews:
    “Now that This is your life is ended, having cost too much etc, I might be able to do a bit as The Lady Behind the Curtain. All you need do is put a curtain up to hide me but permit words of sense to come forth in answer to some questions. Sense is needed.”
    Hygiene was needed too, but possibly in an effort to persuade me about being behind the curtain she brought the subject up herself:
    “I’m by nature a very clean person. I have a testimonial for a Clean Room, awarded me some years ago and my aunt, herself spotless, said I was the cleanest of my mother’s children particularly in the unseen places.”
    I never fathomed her toilet arrangements. She only once asked me to buy her toilet rolls (“I use them to wipe my face”), but whatever happened in that department I took to be part of some complicated arrangement involving the plastic bags she used to hurl from the van every morning. When she could still manage stairs she did very occasionally use my loo but I didn’t encourage it; it was here on the threshold of the toilet that my charity stopped short. Once when I was having some building work done (and