Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  This van (and its successor, bought in 1983) now occupied a paved area between my front door and the garden gate, the bonnet of the van hard by my front step, its rear door, which Miss S. always used to get in and out of, a few feet from the gate. Callers at the house had to squeeze past the back of the van and come down the side, and while they waited for my door to be opened they would be scrutinized from behind the murky windscreen by Miss Shepherd. If they were unlucky, they would find the rear door open with Miss S. dangling her large white legs over the back. The interior of the van, a midden of old clothes, plastic bags and half-eaten food, was not easy to ignore, but should anyone Miss S. did not know venture to speak to her she would promptly tuck her legs back and wordlessly shut the door. For the first few years of her sojourn in the garden I would try and explain to mystified callers how this situation had arisen, but after a while I ceased to care, and when I didn’t mention it nor did anyone else.

  At night the impression was haunting. I had run a cable out from the house to give her light and heating, and through the ragged draperies that hung over the windows of the van a visitor would glimpse Miss S.’s spectral figure, often bent over in prayer or lying on her side like an effigy on a tomb, her face resting on one hand, listening to Radio 4. Did she hear any movements she would straightaway switch off the light and wait, like an animal that has been disturbed, until she was sure the coast was clear and could put the light on again. She retired early and would complain if anyone called or left late at night. On one occasion Coral Browne was coming away from the house with her husband, Vincent Price, and they were talking quietly. ‘Pipe down,’ snapped the voice from the van, ‘I’m trying to sleep.’ For someone who had brought terror to millions it was an unexpected taste of his own medicine.

  December 1974. Miss S. has been explaining to me why the old Bedford (the van not the music-hall) ceased to go, ‘possibly’. She had put in some of her home-made petrol, based on a recipe for petrol substitute she read about several years ago in a newspaper. ‘It was a spoonful of petrol, a gallon of water and a pinch of something you could get in every High Street. Well, I got it into my head, I don’t know why, that it was bicarbonate of soda, only I think I was mistaken. It must be either sodium chloride or sodium nitrate, only I’ve since been told sodium chloride is salt and the man in Boots wouldn’t sell me the other, saying it might cause explosions. Though I think me being anolder person he knew I would be more responsible. Though not all old ladies perhaps.’

  February 1975. Miss S. rings, and when I open the door she makes a bee-line for the kitchen stairs. ‘I’d like to see you. I’ve called several times. I wonder whether I can use the toilet first.’ I say I think this is pushing it a bit. ‘I’m not pushing it at all. I just will do the interview better if I can use the toilet first.’ Afterwards she sits down in her green mac and purple headscarf, the knuckles of one large mottled hand resting on the clean, scrubbed table and explains how she has devised a method of ‘getting on the wireless’. I was to ask the BBC to give me a phone-in programme (‘something someone like you could get put on in a jiffy’) and then she would ring me up from the house. ‘Either that or I could get on Petticoat Line. I know a darn sight more on moral matters than most of them. I could sing my song over the telephone. It’s a lovely song, called “The End of the World”’ (which is pure Beyond the Fringe). ‘I won’t commit myself to singing it – not at this moment – but I probably would. Some sense should be said and knowledge known. It could all be anonymous. I could be called The Lady Behind the Curtain. Or A Woman of Britain. You could take a nom-de-plume view of it.’ This idea of The Woman Behind the Curtain has obviously taken her fancy and she begins to expand on it, demonstrating where the curtain could be, her side of it coincidentally taking in the television and the easy chair. She could be behind the curtain, she explains, do her periodic broadcasts, and the rest of the time ‘be a guest at the television and take in some civilization. Perhaps there would be gaps filled with nice classical music. I know one: Prelude and “Liebestraum” by Liszt. I believe he was a Catholic priest. It means “love’s dream”, only not the sexy stuff. It’s the love of God and the sanctification of labour and so on, which would recommend it tocelibates like you and me, possibly.’ Shocked at this tentative bracketing of our conditions, I quickly get rid of her and, though it’s a bitter cold night, open the windows wide to get rid of the smell.

  The Woman Behind the Curtain remained a favourite project of hers, and in 1976 she wrote to Aiman (sic) Andrews: ‘Now that This is Your Life is ended, having cost too much etc., I might be able to do a bit as The Lady Behind the Curtain. All you need do is put a curtain up to hide me but permit words of sense to come forth in answer to some questions. Sense is needed.’ Hygiene was needed too, but possibly in an effort to persuade me about being behind the curtain she brought the subject up herself: ‘I’m by nature a very clean person. I have a testimonial for a Clean Room, awarded me some years ago, and my aunt, herself spotless, said I was the cleanest of my mother’s children, particularly in the unseen places.’ I never fathomed her toilet arrangements. She only once asked me to buy her toilet rolls (‘I use them to wipe my face’), but whatever happened in that department I took to be part of some complicated arrangement involving the plastic bags she used to hurl from the van every morning. When she could still manage stairs she did very occasionally use my loo, but I didn’t encourage it; it was here, on the threshold of the toilet, that my charity stopped short. Once when I was having some building work done (and 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 1880s; 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 nightie. She was indignant. ‘Does it look like a nightie? 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 middleclass 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.

  M
ay 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 freebie, a countrywide concession to pensioners that BR ran last weekend. ‘Dawlish I went to. People very nice. The man over the loudspeaker called us 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 was 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 twenty-one or twenty-two. 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 cooperative 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 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 Τ. 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 are 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.’