by Alan Bennett
‘Some post, Miss Shepherd.’ I would knock on the window and wait for the scrawny hand to come out (nails long and grey; fingers ochre-stained as if she had been handling clay). The brochure would be drawn back into the dim and fetid interior, where it would be a while before it was opened, the packet turned over and over in her dubious hands, the Society’s latest exciting offer waiting until she was sure it was not from the IRA. ‘Another bomb, possibly. They’ve heard my views.’
In 1988 the Abbey National were preparing to turn themselves from a building society into a bank, a proposal to which Miss Shepherd for some reason (novelty, possibly) was very much opposed. Before filling in her ballot form, she asked me (and she was careful to couch the question impersonally) if a vote would be valid had the purchaser of the shares changed their name. I said, fairly obviously, that if the shares had been bought in one name then it would be in order to vote in that name. ‘Why?’ I asked. But I should have known better, and, as so often, having given a teasing hint of some revelation, she refused to follow it up, just shook her head mutely, and snapped shut the window. Except (and this was standard procedure too) as I was passing the van next day her hand came out.
‘Mr Bennett. What I said about change of name, don’t mention it to anybody. It was just in theory, possibly.’
For some days after Miss Shepherd’s death I left the van as it was, not from piety or anything to do with decorum but because I couldn’t face getting into it, and though I put on a new padlock I made no attempt to extract her bank books or locate the necessary envelope. But the news had got round, and when one afternoon I came home to find a scrap dealer nosing about I realised I had to grit my teeth (or hold my nose) and go through Miss Shepherd’s possessions.
To do the job properly would have required a team of archaeologists. Every surface was covered in layers of old clothes, frocks, blankets and accumulated papers, some of them undisturbed for years and all lying under a crust of ancient talcum powder. Sprinkled impartially over wet slippers, used incontinence pads and half-eaten tins of baked beans, it was of a virulence that supplemented rather than obliterated the distinctive odour of the van. The narrow aisle between the two banks of seats where Miss Shepherd had knelt, prayed and slept was trodden six inches deep in sodden debris, on which lay a top dressing of old food, Mr Kipling cakes, wrinkled apples, rotten oranges and everywhere batteries – batteries loose, batteries in packets, batteries that had split and oozed black gum on to the prehistoric sponge cakes and ubiquitous sherbet lemons that they lay among. A handkerchief round my face, I lifted one of the banquettes where in the hollow beneath she had told me her bank books were hidden. The underside of the seat was alive with moths and maggots, but the books were there, together with other documents she considered valuable: an MOT certificate for her Reliant, long expired; a receipt for some repairs to it done three years before; an offer of a fortnight of sun and sea in the Seychelles that came with some car wax. What there was not was the envelope. So there was nothing for it but to excavate the van, to go through the festering debris in the hope of finding the note she had promised to leave, and with it perhaps her history.
Searching the van, I was not just looking for the envelope; sifting the accumulated refuse of fifteen years, I was hoping for some clue as to what it was that had happened to make Miss Shepherd want to live like this. Except that I kept coming across items that suggested that living ‘like this’ wasn’t all that different from the way people ordinarily lived. There was a set of matching kitchen utensils, for instance – a ladle, a spatula, a masher for potatoes – all of them unused. They were the kind of thing my mother bought and hung up in the kitchen, just for show, while she went on using the battered old-faithfuls kept in the knife drawer. There were boxes of cheap soap and, of course, talcum powder, the cellophane wrapping unbreached; they too had counterparts in the dressing-table drawer at home. Another item my mother hoarded was toilet rolls, and here were a dozen. There was a condiment set, still in its box. When, amid such chaos, can she have hoped to use that particular appurtenance of gentility? But when did we ever use ours, stuck permanently in the sideboard cupboard in readiness for the social life my parents never had or ever really wanted? The more I laboured, the less peculiar the van seemed – its proprieties and aspirations no different from those with which I had been brought up.
There was cash here too. In a bag Miss Shepherd carried round her neck there had been nearly £500, and peeling off the soggy layers from the van floor I collected about £100 more. Taking into account the money in various building societies and her National Savings certificates, Miss Shepherd had managed to save some £6,000. Since she was not entitled to a pension, most of this must have been gleaned from the meagre allowance she got from the DHSS. I am not sure whether under the present regime she would have been praised for her thrift or singled out as a sponger. Arch-Tory though she was, she seems a prime candidate for Mr Lilley’s little list, a paid-up member of the Something for Nothing society. I would just like to have seen him tell her so.
Modest though Miss Shepherd’s estate was, it was more than I’d been expecting and made the finding of the envelope more urgent. So I went through the old clothes again, this time feeling gingerly in the pockets and shaking out the greasy blankets in a blizzard of moth and ‘French Fern’. But there was nothing, only her bus-pass, the grim photograph looking as if it were taken during the siege of Stalingrad and hardly auguring well for the comedy series she had once suggested I write on the subject. I was about to give up, having decided that she must have kept the envelope on her and that it had been taken away with the body, when I came upon it, stiff with old soup and tucked into the glove compartment along with another cache of batteries and sherbet lemons, and marked ‘Mr Bennett, if necessary’.
Still looking for some explanation (‘I am like this, possibly, because …’), I opened the envelope. True to form, even in this her final communication Miss Shepherd wasn’t prepared to give away any more than she had to. There was just a man’s name, which was not her own, and a phone number in Sussex.
I finished cleaning out the van, scraped down the aisle, and opened all the windows and doors so that for the first time since she had moved in it was almost sweet-smelling – only not, because sweet in an awful way was how she had made it smell. My neighbour, the artist David Gentleman, who ten years before had done a lightning sketch of Miss Shepherd watching the removal of an earlier van, now came and did a romantic drawing of this her last vehicle, the grass growing high around it and the tattered curtains blowing in the spring breeze.
2 May 1989. This afternoon comes a rather dapper salvage man who, fifteen years ago, refused to execute a council order for the removal of one of Miss Shepherd’s earlier vans on the grounds that someone was living in it. So he says anyway, though it’s perhaps just to establish his claim. He stands there on the doorstep, maybe waiting to see if I am going to mention a price; I wait too, wondering if he is going to mention a charge. Silence on both sides seems to indicate that the transaction is over with no payment on either side, and within the hour he is back with his lifting-gear. Tom M. takes photographs as the van is hauled like an elephant’s carcass through the gate and up the ramp, the miraculous tyres still happily inflated; the salvage man scrawls ‘On Tow’ in the thick dirt on the windscreen; stood by the bonnet I pose for a final photograph (which doesn’t come out); and the van goes off for the last time up the Crescent, leaving the drive feeling as wide and empty as the Piazza San Marco.
5 May 1989. ‘Mr Bennett?’ The voice is a touch military and quite sharp, though with no accent to speak of and nothing to indicate this a man who must be over eighty. ‘You’ve sent me a letter about a Miss Shepherd, who seems to have died in your drive. I have to tell you I have no knowledge of such a person.’ A bit nonplussed, I describe Miss Shepherd and her circumstances and give her date of birth. There is a slight pause.
‘Yes. Well it’s obviously my sister.’
He tells
me her history and how, returning from Africa just after the war, he found her persecuting their mother, telling her how wicked she was and what she should and shouldn’t eat, the upshot being that he finally had his sister committed to a mental hospital in Hayward’s Heath. He gives her subsequent history, or as much of it as he knows, saying that the last time he had seen her was three years ago. He’s direct and straightforward and doesn’t disguise the fact that he feels guilty – about having her committed yet cannot see how he could have done otherwise, how they never got on, and how he cannot see how I have managed to put up with her all these years. I tell him about the money, slightly expecting him to change his tune and stress how close they had really been. But not a bit of it. Since they hadn’t got on he wants none of it, saying I should have it. When I disclaim it too, he tells me to give it to charity.
Anna Haycraft (Alice Thomas Ellis) had mentioned Miss S.’s death in her Spectator column, and I tell him about this, really to show that his sister did have a place in people’s affections and wasn’t simply a cantankerous old woman. ‘Cantankerous is not the word,’ he says, and laughs. I sense a wife there, and after I put the phone down I imagine them mulling over the call.
I mull it over too, wondering at the bold life she has had and how it contrasts with my own timid way of going on – living, as Camus said, slightly the opposite of expressing. And I see how the location of Miss Shepherd and the van in front but to the side of where I write is the location of most of the stuff I write about; that too is to the side and never what faces me.
Over a year later, finding myself near the village in Sussex where Mr F. lived, I telephoned and asked if I could call. In the meantime I’d written about Miss Shepherd in the London Review of Books and broadcast a series of talks about her on Radio 4.
17 June 1990. Mr and Mrs F. live in a little bungalow in a modern estate just off the main road. I suppose it was because of the unhesitating fashion in which he’d turned down her legacy that I was expecting something grander; in fact Mrs F. is disabled and their circumstances are obviously quite modest, which makes his refusal more creditable than I’d thought. From his phone manner I’d been expecting someone brisk and businesslike, but he’s a plumpish, jolly man, and both he and his wife are full of laughs. They give me some lovely cake, which he’s baked (Mrs F. being crippled with arthritis) and then patiently answer my questions.
The most interesting revelation is that as a girl Miss S. was a talented pianist and had studied in Paris under Cortot, who had told her she should have a concert career. Her decision to become a nun put an end to the piano, ‘and that can’t have helped her state of mind,’ says Mr F.
He recalls her occasional visits, when she would never come in by the front door but lope across the field at the back of the house and climb over the fence. She never took any notice of Mrs F., suspecting, rightly, that women were likely to be less tolerant of her than men.
He says all the fiancé stuff, which came via the nuns, is nonsense; she had no interest in men, and never had. When she was in the ambulance service she used to be ribbed by the other drivers, who asked her once why she had never married. She drew herself up and said, ‘Because I’ve never found the man who could satisfy me.’ Mystified by their laughter she went home and told her mother, who laughed too.
Mr F. has made no secret of the situation to his friends, particularly since the broadcasts, and keeps telling people he’s spent his life trying to make his mark and here she is, having lived like a tramp, more famous than he’ll ever be. But he talks about his career in Africa, how he still works as a part-time vet, and I come away thinking what an admirable pair he and his wife are, funny and kind and as good in practice as she was in theory – the brother Martha to his sister’s Mary.
Sometimes now hearing a van door I think, ‘There’s Miss Shepherd’, instinctively looking up to see what outfit she’s wearing this morning. But the oil patch that marked the site of the van has long since gone, and the flecks of yellow paint on the pavement have all but faded. She has left a more permanent legacy, though, and not only to me. Like diphtheria and Brylcreem, I associate moths with the forties, and until Miss Shepherd took up residence in the drive I thought them firmly confined to the past. But just as it was clothes in which the plague was reputedly spread to the Derbyshire village of Eyam so it was a bundle of Miss Shepherd’s clothes, for all they were firmly done up in a black plastic bag, that brought the plague to my house, spreading from the bag to the wardrobe and from the wardrobe to the carpets, the appearance of a moth the signal for frantic clapping and savage stamping. On her death my vigorous cleaning of the van broadcast the plague more widely, so that now many of my neighbours have come to share in this unwanted legacy.
Her grave in the Islington St Pancras Cemetery is scarcely less commodious than the narrow space she slept in the previous twenty years. It is unmarked, but I think as someone so reluctant to admit her name or divulge any information about herself, she would not have been displeased by that.
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