Lady in the Van

Ladies and Gentlemen, and so he should. There was one person shouted, only he wasn’t one of us, the son of somebody I think.”
    And almost for the first time ever she smiled, and said how they had all been bunched up trying to get into this one carriage, a great crowd, and how she had been hoisted up.
    “It would have made a film,” she said. “I thought of you.”
    And she stands there in her grimy raincoat, strands of lank grey hair escaping from under her headscarf. I am thankful people had been nice to her and wonder what the carriage must have been like all that hot afternoon. She then tells me about a programme on Francis Thompson she’d heard on the wireless, how he had tried to become a priest but had felt he had failed in his vocation, and had become a tramp. Then, unusually, she told me a little of her own life, and how she tried to become a nun on two occasions, had undergone instruction as a novice but was forced to give it up on account of ill-health, and that she had felt for many years that she had failed. But that this was wrong, and it was not a failure.
    “If I could have had more modern clothes, longer sleep and better air, possibly, I would have made it.”
    “A bit of a spree,” she called her trip to Dawlish. “My spree.”
June 1977
    On this the day of the Jubilee Miss S. has stuck a paper Union Jack in the cracked back window of the van. It is the only one in the Crescent. Yesterday she was wearing a headscarf and pinned across the front of it a blue Spontex sponge fastened at each side with a large safety pin, the sponge meant to form some kind of peak against the (very watery) sun. It looked like a favour worn by a Medieval knight or a fillet to ward off evil spirits. Still, it’s better than last week’s effort, an Afrika Korps cap from Lawrence Corner: Miss Shepherd – Desert Fox.
September 1979
    Miss S. shows me a photograph she has taken of herself in a cubicle at Waterloo. She is very low in the frame, her mouth pulled down, the photo looking as if it has been taken after death. She is very pleased with it.
    “I don’t take a good photograph usually. That’s the only photograph I’ve seen looks anything like me.”
    She wants two copies making of it. I say that it would be easier for her to go back to Waterloo and do two more. No. That would ‘take it out of her’.
    “I had one taken in France once when I was 21 or 22. Had to go into the next village for it. I came out cross-eyed. I saw someone else’s photo on their bus-pass and she’d come out looking like a nigger. You don’t want to come out like a nigger if you can help it, do you?”
June 1980
    Miss S. has gone into her summer rig: a raincoat turned inside out with brown canvas panels and a large label declaring it the Emerald Weatherproof. This is topped off with a lavender chiffon scarf tied round a sun visor made from an old cornflakes packet. She asks me to do her some shopping.
    “I want a small packet of Eno’s, some milk and some jelly babies. The jelly babies aren’t urgent. Oh and Mr Bennett. Could you get me one of those little bottles of whisky. I believe Bell’s is very good. I don’t drink it. I just use it to rub on.”
August 1980
    I am filming and Miss S. sees me leaving early each morning and returning late. Tonight her scrawny hand comes out with a letter marked ‘Please consider carefully’:
    An easier way for Mr Bennett to earn could be possibly with my co-operative part. Two young men could follow me in a car, one with a camera to get a funny film like ‘Old Mother Riley Joins Up’ possibly. If the car stalls they could then push it. Or they could go on the buses with her at a distance. Comedy happens without trying sometimes, or at least an interesting film covering a Senior Citizen’s use of the buses can occur. One day to Hounslow, another to Reading or Heathrow. The bus people ought to be pleased, but it might need their permission. Then Mr Bennett could put his feet up more and rake it in, possibly.
October 1980
    Miss S. has started hankering after a caravan trailer and has just missed one she saw in Exchange and Mart : ‘little net curtains all round, three bunks’.
    “I wouldn’t use them all, except,” she says ominously, “to put things on. Nice little windows – £275. They said it was sold only they may have thought I was just an old tramp…I was thinking of offering to help Mrs Thatcher with the economy. I wouldn’t ask any money as I’m on social