Lady in the Van

was, I suppose, conscious of what the workmen were thinking), I very boldly said there was a smell of urine.
    “Well, what can you expect when they’re raining bricks down on me all day? And then I think there’s a mouse. So that would make a cheesy smell, possibly.”
    Miss S.’s daily emergence from the van was highly dramatic. Suddenly and without warning the rear door would be flung open to reveal the tattered draperies that masked the terrible interior. There was a pause, then through the veils would be hurled several bulging plastic sacks. Another pause, before slowly and with great caution one sturdy slippered leg came feeling for the floor before the other followed and one had the first sight of the day’s wardrobe. Hats were always a feature: a black railwayman’s hat with a long neb worn slightly on the skew so that she looked like a drunken signalman or a French guardsman of the 1880 s ; there was her Charlie Brown pitcher’s hat; and in June 1977 an octagonal straw table mat, tied on with a chiffon scarf and a bit of cardboard for the peak. She also went in for green eyeshades. Her skirts had a telescopic appearance as they had often been lengthened many times over by the simple expedient of sewing a strip of extra cloth around the hem, though with no attempt at matching. One skirt was made by sewing several orange dusters together. When she fell foul of authority she put it down to her clothes. Once late at night the police rang me from Tunbridge Wells. They had picked her up on the station, thinking her dress was a nighty. She was indignant.
    “Does it look like a nighty? You see lots of people wearing dresses like this. I don’t think this style can have got to Tunbridge Wells yet.”
    Miss S. seldom wore stockings and alternated between black pumps and brown carpet slippers. Her hands and feet were large and she was what my grandmother would have called ‘a big-boned woman’. She was middle-class and spoke in a middle-class way, though her querulous and often resentful demeanour tended to obscure this; it wasn’t a gentle or a genteel voice. Running through her vocabulary was a streak of schoolgirl slang. She wouldn’t say she was tired, she was ‘all done up’; petrol was ‘juice’ and if she wasn’t keen on doing something she’d say “I’m darned if I will.”
    All her conversation was impregnated with the vocabulary of her peculiar brand of Catholic fanaticism (“the dire importance of justice deeds”). It was the language of the leaflets she wrote, the ‘possibly’ with which she ended so many of her sentences an echo of the ‘Subject to the Roman Catholic Church in her rights etc’ with which she headed every leaflet.
May 1976
    I have had some manure delivered for the garden and since the manure heap is not far from the van, Miss S. is concerned that people passing might think the smell is coming from there. She wants me to put a notice on the gate to the effect that the smell is the manure not her. I say no, without adding, as I could, that the manure actually smells much nicer. I am working in the garden when Miss B., the social worker, comes with a boxful of clothes. Miss S. is reluctant to open the van door as she is listening to Any answers , but eventually she slides on her bottom to the door of the van and examines the clothes. She is unimpressed.
    Miss S.:
    I only asked for one coat.
    Miss B.:
    Well, I brought three just in case you wanted a change.
    Miss S.:
    I haven’t got room for three. Besides, I was planning to wash this coat in the near-future. That makes four.
    Miss B.:
    This is my old nursing mac.
    Miss S.:
    I have a mac. Besides, green doesn’t suit me. Have you got the stick?
    Miss B.:
    No. That’s being sent down. It had to be made specially.
    Miss S.:
    Will it be long enough?
    Miss B.:
    Yes. It’s a special stick.
    Miss S.:
    I don’t want a special stick. I want an ordinary stick. Only longer. Does it have a rubber thing on it?
    When Miss B. has gone Miss S. sits at the door of the van slowly turning over the contents of the box like a chimpanzee, sniffing them and holding them up and muttering to herself.
June 1976
    I am sitting on the steps mending my bike when Miss S. emerges for her evening stroll.
    “I went to Devon on Saturday,” she said. “On this frisbee.”
    I suppose she means freebee, a countrywide concession to pensioners that BR ran last weekend.
    “Dawlish I went to. People very nice. The man over the loudspeaker called us