Lady in the Van

by Alan Bennett

  As I am leaving for Yorkshire Miss S.’s hand comes out like the Ancient Mariner’s: do I know if there are any steps at Leeds Station?

  “Why?” I ask warily, thinking she may be having thoughts of camping on my other doorstep. It turns out she just wants somewhere to go for a ride, so I suggest Bristol.

  “Yes, I’ve been to Bristol. On the way back I came through Bath. That looked nice. Some beautifully parked cars.”

  She then recalls driving her reconditioned Army vehicles and taking them up to Derbyshire.

  “I did it in the war,” she says. “Actually I overdid it in the war,” and somehow that is the thin end of the wedge that has landed her up here, yearning for travel on this May morning forty years later.

  ‘Land’ is a word Miss S. prefers to ‘country’. ‘This land’. Used in this sense, it’s part of the rhetoric, if not of madness at any rate of obsession. Jehovah’s Witnesses talk of ‘this land’ and the National Front. Land is country plus destiny, country in the sight of God. Mrs Thatcher talks of ‘this land’.

  February 1983

  A. telephones me in Yorkshire to say that the basement is under three inches of water, the boiler having burst. When told that the basement has been flooded, Miss S.’s only comment is:

  “What a waste of water.”

  April 1983

  “I’ve been having bad nights,” says Miss S., “but if I were elected I might have better nights.”

  She wants me to get her nomination papers so that she can stand for Parliament in the coming election. She would be the Fidelis Party candidate. The party, never very numerous, is now considerably reduced. Once she could count on five votes but now there are only two, one of whom is me, and I don’t like to tell her I’m in the SDP. Still, I promise to write to the Town Hall for nomination papers.

  “There’s no kitty as yet,” she says, “and I wouldn’t want to do any of that meeting people. I’d be no good at that. The secretaries can do that (you get expenses). But I’d be very good at voting, better than they are, probably.”

  May 1983

  Miss S. asks me to witness her signature on the nomination form.

  “I’m signing,” she says, “Are you witnessing?”

  She has approached various nuns to be her nominees.

  “One sister I know would have signed but I haven’t seen her for some years and she’s got rather confused in the interim. I don’t know what I’ll do about leaflets. It would have to be an economy job, I couldn’t run to the expense. Maybe I’ll just write my manifesto on the pavement, that goes round like wildfire.”

  May 1983

  Miss S. has received her nomination papers.

  “What should describe myself as?” she asks through the window slit. “I thought Elderly Spinster possibly. It also says Title. Well my title is” – and she laughs one of her rare laughs – “Mrs Shepherd. That’s what some people call me out of politeness. And I don’t deny it. Mother Teresa always says she’s married to God. I could say I was married to the Good Shepherd, and that’s what it’s to do with, Parliament, looking after the flock. When I’m elected, do you think I shall have to live in Downing Street or could I run things from the van?”

  I speak to her later in the day and the nomination business is beginning to get her down.

  “Do you know anything about the Act of 1974? It refers to disqualifications under it. Anyway, it’s all giving me a headache. I think there may be another election soon after this one, so it’ll have been good preparation anyway.”

  June 1984

  Miss S. has been looking in Exchange and Mart again and has answered an advert for a white Morris Minor.

  “It’s the kind of car I’m used to – or I used to be used to. I feel the need to be mobile.”

  I raise the matter of a licence and insurance, which she always treats as tiresome formalities.

  “What you don’t understand is that I am insured. I am insured in heaven.”

  She claims that since she has been insured in heaven there has not been a scratch on the van. I point out that this is less to do with the celestial insurance tlian with the fact that the van is parked the whole time in my garden. She concedes that when she was on the road the van did used to get the occasional knock.

  “Somebody came up behind me once and scratched the van. I wanted him to pay something, half-a-crown I think it was. He wouldn’t.”

  October 1984

  Some new staircarpet fitted today. Spotting the old carpet being thrown out, Miss S. says it would be just the thing to put on the roof of the van to deaden the sound of rain. This exchange comes just as I am leaving for work, but I say that I do not want the van festooned with bits of old carpet – it looks bad enough as it is. When I come back in the evening I find half the carpet remnants slung over the roof. I ask Miss S. who has put them there as she can’t have done it herself.

  “A friend,” she says mysteriously. “A well-wisher.”

  Enraged I pull down a token piece but the majority of it stays put.

  April 1985

  Miss S. has written to Mrs Thatcher applying for a post in ‘the Ministry of Transport advisory, to do with drink and driving and that’. She also shows me the text of a letter she is proposing to send to the Argentinian Embassy on behalf of General Galtieri.

  “What he doesn’t understand is that Mrs Thatcher isn’t the Iron Lady. It’s me.”

  To Someone in Charge of Argentina. 19 April 1985

  Dear Sir,

  I am writing to help mercy towards the poor general who led your forces in the war actually as a person of true knowledge more than might be. I was concerned with Justice, Love and, in a manner of speaking, I was in the war, as it were, shaking hands with your then leader, welcoming him in spirit (it may have been to do with love of Catholic education for Malvinas for instance) greatly meaning kindly negotiators etc…but I fear that he may have thought it was Mrs Thatcher welcoming him in that way and it may hence have unduly influenced him.

  Therefore I beg you to have mercy on him indeed. Let him go, reinstate him, if feasible. You may read publicly this letter if you wish to explain mercy etc. I remain.

  Yours truly

  A Member of the Fidelis Party (Servants of Justice)

  P.S. Others may have contributed to undue influence also.

  P.P.S. Possibly without realising it.

  Translate into Argentinian if you shd wish.

  Sometime in 1980 Miss S. acquired a car, but before she’d managed to get more than a jaunt or two in it (“It’s a real goer!”) it was stolen and later found stripped and abandoned in the basement of the council flats in Maiden Lane. I went to collect what was left (“though the police may require it for evidence, possibly”) and found that even in the short time she’d had the Mini she’d managed to stuff it with the usual quota of plastic bags, kitchen rolls and old blankets, all plentifully doused in talcum powder. When she got a Reliant Robin in 1984 it was much the same, a second wardrobe as much as a second car. Miss Shepherd could afford to splash out on these vehicles because being parked in the garden meant that she had a permanent address, and so qualified for full social security and its various allowances. Since her only outgoings were on food, she was able to put by something and had an account in the Halifax and quite a few savings certificates. Indeed I heard people passing say, “You know she’s a millionaire,” the inference being no one in their right mind would let her live there if she weren’t.

  Her Reliant saw more action than the Mini and she would tootle off in it on a Sunday morning, park on Primrose Hill (“The air is better”) and even got as far as Hounslow. More often than not, though, she was happy (and I think she was happy then) just to sit in the Reliant and rev the engine. However, since she generally chose to do this first thing on Sunday morning, it didn’t endear her to the neighbours. Besides, what she described as ‘a lifetime with motors’ had failed to teach her that revving a car does not charge the battery, so that when it regularly ran down I had
to take it out and recharge it, knowing full well this would just mean more revving. (“No,” she insisted, “I may be going to Cornwall next week, possibly.”) This recharging of the battery wasn’t really the issue: I was just ashamed to be seen delving under the bonnet of such a joke car.

  March 1987

  The nuns up the road, or as Miss S. always refers to them ‘the sisters’, have taken to doing some of her shopping.

  One of them leaves a bag on the back step of the van this morning. There are the inevitable ginger nuts and several packets of sanitary towels. I can see these would be difficult articles for her to ask me to get, though to ask a nun to get them would seem quite hard for her too. They form some part of her elaborate toilet arrangements and are occasionally to be seen laid drying across the soup-encrusted electric ring. As the postman says this morning, “the smell sometimes knocks you back a bit.”

  May 1981

  Miss S. wants to spread a blanket over the roof (in addition to the bit of carpet) in order to deaden the sound of the rain. I point out that within a few weeks it will be dank and disgusting.

  “No,” she says. “Weather-beaten.”

  She has put a Conservative poster in the side window of the van. The only person who can see it is me.

  This morning she was sitting at the open door of the van and as I edge by she chucks out an empty packet of Ariel. The blanket hanging over the pushchair is covered in washing powder.

  “Have you spilt it?” I enquire.

  “No,” she says crossly, irritated at having to explain the obvious. “That’s washing powder. When it rains the blanket will get washed.”

  As I work at my table now I can see her bending over the pushchair, picking at bits of soap flakes and re-distributing them over the blanket. No rain is at the moment forecast.

  June 1987

  Miss S. has persuaded the Social Services to allocate her a wheelchair, though what she’s really set her heart on is the electric version.

  Miss S.:

  That boy over the road has one, why not me?

  Me:

  He can’t walk.

  Miss S.:

  How does he know? He hasn’t tried.

  Me:

  Miss Shepherd, he has Spina Bifida.

  Miss S.:

  Well, I was round-shouldered as a child. That may not be serious now but it was quite serious then. I’ve gone through two wars, an infant in the first and not on full rations, in the ambulances in the second, besides being failed by the ATS. Why should old people be disregarded?

  ♦

  Thwarted in her ambition for a powered chair Miss S. compensated by acquiring (I never found out where from) a second wheelchair (“in case the other conks out, possibly”). The full inventory of her wheeled vehicles now read: one van; one Reliant Robin; two wheelchairs; one folding wheely; one folding (two-seater) wheely. Now and again I would thin out the wheelies by smuggling one onto a skip. She would put down this disappearance to children (never a favourite) and the number would shortly be made up by yet another wheely from Reg’s junk stall. Miss S. never mastered the technique of self-propulsion in the wheelchair because she refused to use the inner handwheel (“I can’t be doing with all that silliness”). Instead, she preferred to punt herself along with two walking-sticks, looking in the process rather like a skier on the flat. Eventually I had to remove the handwheel (“The extra weight affects my health”).

  July 1981

  Miss S. (bright green visor, purple skirt, brown cardigan, turquoise fluorescent ankle socks) punts her way out through the gate in the wheelchair in a complicated manoeuvre which would be much simplified did she just push the chair out, as well she can. A passer-by takes pity on her and she is whisked down to the market. Except not quite whisked, because the journey is made more difficult than need be by Miss S.’s refusal to take her feet off the ground, so the Good Samaritan finds himself pushing a wheelchair continually slurred and braked by these large trailing carpet-slippered feet. Her legs are so thin now the feet are as slack and flat as those of a camel.

  ♦

  Still, there will be one moment to relish on this, as on all these journeys. When she has been pushed back from the market she will tell (and it is tell, there is never any thanks) whoever is pushing the chair to leave her opposite the gate but on the crown of the road. Then, when she thinks no one is looking, she lifts her feet, pushes herself off and freewheels the few yards down to the gate. The look on her face is one of pure pleasure.

  October 1987

  I have been filming abroad.

  “When you were in Yugoslavia,” asks Miss S., “did you come across the Virgin Mary?”

  “No,” I say, “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, well, she’s appearing there. She’s been appearing there every day for several years.”

  It’s as if I’ve missed the major tourist attraction.

  January 1988

  I ask Miss S. if it was her birthday yesterday. She agrees guardedly.

  “So you’re 77.”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “I saw it once when you filled out the census form.”

  I give her a bottle of whisky, explaining that it’s just to rub on.

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  Pause.

  “Mr Bennett. Don’t tell anybody.”

  “About the whisky?”

  “No. About my birthday.”

  Pause.

  “Mr Bennett.”

  “Yes?”

  “About the whisky either.”

  March 1988

  “I’ve been doing a bit of spring cleaning,” says Miss S. kneeling in front of a Kienholz-like tableau of filth and decay.

  She says she has been discussing the possibility of a bungalow with the social worker to which she would be prepared to contribute ‘a few hundred or so’. It’s possible that the bungalow might be made of asbestos, “but I could wear a mask. I wouldn’t mind that and of course it would be much better from the fire point of view.”

  Hands in mittens made from old socks. A sanitary towel drying over the ring and a glossy leaflet from the Halifax offering ‘fabulous investment opportunities’.

  April 1988

  Miss S. asks me to get Tom M. to take a photograph of her for her new bus-pass.

  “That would make a comedy, you know. Sitting on a bus and your bus-pass out of date. You could make a fortune out of that with very little work involved, possibly. I was a born tragedian,” she says, “or a comedian possibly. One or the other anyway. But I didn’t realise it at the time. Big feet.”

  She pushes out her red unstockinged ankles.

  “Big hands.”

  The fingers stained brown.

  “Tall. People trip over me. That’s comedy. I wish they didn’t, of course. I’d like it easier but there it is. I’m not suggesting you do it,” she says hastily, feeling perhaps she’s come too near self-revelation, “only it might make people laugh.”

  All of this is said with a straight face and no hint of a smile, sitting in the wheelchair with her hands pressed between her knees and her baseball cap on.

  May 1988

  Miss S. sits in her wheelchair in the road, paintpot in hand, dabbing at the bodywork of the Reliant which she will shortly enter, start and rev for a contented half-hour before switching off and paddling down the road in her wheelchair. She has been nattering at Tom M. to mend the clutch, but there are conditions: it mustn’t be on Sunday, which is the feast of St Peter and St Paul and a day of obligation. Nor can it be the following Sunday apparently, through the Feast of the Assumption falling on the Monday and being transferred back to the previous day. Amid all the chaos of her life and now, I think, more or less incontinent she trips with fanatical precision through this liturgical minefield.

  September 1988

  Miss S. has started thinking about a flat again, though not the one the Council offered her a few years ago. This time she has her eye on something much closer to home. My home
. We had been talking in the hall and I left her sitting on the step in the hall while I came back to work. This is often what happens, me sitting at my table, wanting to get on, Miss S. sitting outside rambling. This time she goes on talking about the flat, soliloquising almost, but knowing that I can hear:

  “It need only be a little flat, even a room possibly. Of course, I can’t manage stairs, so it would have to be on the ground floor. Though I’d pay to have a lift put in.” (Louder.) “And the lift wouldn’t be wasted. They’d have it for their old age. And they’ll have to be thinking about their old age quite soon.”

  The tone of it is somehow familiar from years ago. Then I realise it’s like one of the meant-to-be-overheard soliloquies of Richmal Crompton’s William.

  Her outfit this morning: orange skirt, made out of three or four large dusters; a striped blue satin jacket; a green headscarf, blue eyeshield topped off by a khaki peaked cap with a skull-and-crossbones badge and Rambo across the peak.

  February 1989

  Miss S.’s religion is an odd mixture of traditional faith and a belief in the power of positive thinking. This morning, as ever, the Reliant battery is running low and she asks me to fix it. The usual argument takes place:

  Me:

  Well, of course it’s run down. It will run down unless you run the car. Revving up doesn’t charge it. The wheels have to go round.

  Miss S.:

  Stop talking like that. This car is not the same. There are miracles. There is faith. Negative thoughts don’t help. She presses the starter again and it coughs weakly. There, you see. The devil’s heard you. You shouldn’t say negative things.