Lady in the Van

security, so it would come cheap for her. I might ask her for some perks though. Like a caravan. I would write to her but she’s away. I know what’s required. It’s perfectly simple: justice.”
    ♦
    No political party quite catered to Miss S.’s views, though the National Front came close. She was passionately anti-Communist and as long ago as 1945 had written a letter to Jesus ‘concerning the dreadful situation feared from the Yalta agreement’. The trouble was that her political opinions, while never moderate, were always tempered by her idiosyncratic view of the human physiognomy. Older was invariably wiser, which is fair if debatable, except that with Miss S. taller was wiser too. But height had its drawbacks and it was perhaps because she was tall herself that she believed a person’s height added to their burdens, put them under some strain. Hence, though she was in sympathy with Mr Heath on everything except the Common Market, “I do think that Mr Wilson, personally, may have seen better in regard to Europe being on the opposition bench with less salary and being older, smaller and under less strain.”
    She was vehemently opposed to the Common Market, the ‘common’ always underlined when she wrote about it on the pavement as if it were the sheer vulgarity of the economic union she particularly objected to. Never very lucid in her leaflets, she got especially confused over the EEC.
    “Not long ago a soul wrote, or else was considering writing (she cannot recall as to which and it may have been something of either) that she disassociated from the Common Market entry and the injustices feared concerning it, or something like that.”
    ‘Enoch’, as she invariably called Mr Powell, had got it right and she wrote him several letters telling him so, but in the absence of a wholly congenial party she founded her own, the Fidelis Party.
    “It will be a party caring for Justice (and as such not needing opposition). Justice in the world today with its gigantic ignorant conduct requires the rule of a Good Dictator, possibly.”
    Miss S. never regarded herself as being at the bottom of the social heap. That place was occupied by ‘the desperate poor’ – i.e. those with no roof over their heads. She herself was ‘a cut above those in dire need’ and one of her responsibilities in society she saw as interceding for them and for those whose plight she thought Mrs Thatcher had overlooked. Could it be brought to her attention (and she wrote Mrs T. several letters on the subject) alleviation would surely follow.
    Occasionally she would write letters to other public figures. In August 1978 it was to the College of Cardinals, then busy electing a Pope.
    “Your Eminences. I would like to suggest humbly that an older Pope might be admirable. Height can count towards knowledge too probably.”
    However this older (and hopefully taller) Pope she was recommending might find the ceremony a bit of a trial so, ever the expert on headgear, she suggests that; “at the Coronation there could be a not so heavy crown, of light plastic possibly or cardboard for instance.”
February 1981
    Miss S. has flu so I am doing her shopping. I wait every morning by the side window of the van and, with the dark interior and her grimy hand holding back the tattered purple curtain, it is as if I am at the Confessional. The chief items this morning were ginger nuts (“very warming”) and grape juice.
    “I think this is what they must have been drinking at Cana,” she says as I hand her the bottle. “Jesus wouldn’t have wanted them rolling about drunk and this is non-alcoholic. It wouldn’t do for everyone but in my opinion it’s better than champagne.”
October 1981
    The curtain is drawn aside this morning and Miss S. still in what I take to be her nightclothes talks of ‘the discernment of spirits’ that enabled her to sense an angelic presence near her when she was ill. At an earlier period, when she had her pitch outside the bank, she had sensed a similar angelic presence and now, having seen his campaign leaflet, who should this turn out to be, ‘possibly’, but Our Conservative Candidate Mr Pasley-Tyler. She embarks on a long disquisition on her well-worn theme of age in politics. Mrs Thatcher is too young and travels too much. Not like President Reagan.
    “You wouldn’t catch him making all those U-turns round Australia.”
January 1982
    “Do you see he’s been found, that American soldier?”
    This is