by Alan Bennett
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 was 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 1987
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 inquire. ‘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 redistributing 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 pushchair; one folding (two-seater) pushchair. Now and again I would thin out the pushchairs by smuggling one on to a skip. She would put down this disappearance to children (never a favourite), and the number would shortly be made up by yet another wheelie 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 1987
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 had 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 seventy-seven.’ ‘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 realize 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 outside, and I left her sittin
g 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, soliloquizing 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 realize 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.
The interior of the van now indescribable.
March 1989
Miss S. sits in the wheelchair trying to open the sneck of the gate with her walking-stick. She tries it with one end, then reverses the stick and tries with the other. Sitting at my table, trying to work, I watch her idly, much as one would watch an ant trying to get round some obstacle. Now she bangs on the gate to attract the attention of a passer-by. Now she is wailing. Banging and wailing. I go out. She stops wailing, and explains she has her washing to do. As I manoeuvre her through the gate, I ask her if she’s fit to go. Yes, only she will need help. I explain that I can’t push her there. (Why can’t I?) No, she doesn’t want that. Would I just push her as far as the corner? I do so. Would I just push her a bit further? I explain that I can’t take her to the launderette. (And anyway there is no launderette anymore, so which launderette is she going to?) Eventually, feeling like Fletcher Christian (only not Christian) abandoning Captain Bligh, I leave her in the wheelchair outside Mary H.’s. Someone will come along. I would be more ashamed if I did not feel, even when she is poorly, that she knows exactly what she’s about.
March 1989
There is a thin layer of talcum powder around the back door of the van and odd bits of screwed up tissues smeared with what may or may not be shit, though there is no doubt about the main item of litter, which is a stained incontinence pad. My method of retrieving these items would not be unfamiliar at Sellafield. I don rubber gloves, put each hand inside a plastic bag as an additional protection, then, having swept the faecal artefacts together, gingerly pick them up and put them in the bin. ‘Those aren’t all my rubbish,’ comes a voice from the van. ‘Some of them blow in under the gate.’
April 1989
Miss S. has asked me to telephone the social services, and I tell her that a social worker will be calling. ‘What time?’ ‘I don’t know. But you’re not going to be out. You haven’t been out for a week.’ ‘I might be. Miracles do happen. Besides, she may not be able to talk to me. I may not be at the door end of the van. I might be at the other end.’ ‘So she can talk to you there.’ ‘And what if I’m in the middle?’
Miss C. thinks her heart is failing. She calls her Mary. I find this strange, though it is of course her name.
April 1989
A staple of Miss S.’s shopping-list these days is sherbet lemons. I have a stock of them in the house, but she insists I invest in yet more so that a perpetual supply of sherbet lemons may never be in doubt. ‘I’m on them now. I don’t want to have to go off them.’
I ask her if she would like a cup of coffee. ‘Well, I wouldn’t want you to go to all that trouble. I’ll just have half a cup.’
Towards the end of her life Miss S. was befriended by an ex-nurse who lived locally. She put me in touch with a day centre who agreed to take Miss Shepherd in, give her a bath and a medical examination and even a bed in a single room where she could stay if she wanted. In retrospect I see I should have done something on the same lines years before, except that it was only when age and illness had weakened Miss Shepherd that she would accept such help. Even then it was not easy.
27 April 1989
A red ambulance calls to take Miss S. to the day centre. Miss B. talks to her for a while in the van, gradually coaxing her out and into the wheelchair, shit streaks over her swollen feet, a piece of toilet roll clinging to one scaly ankle. ‘And if I don’t like it,’ she keeps asking, ‘can I come back?’ I reassure her, but, looking at the inside of the van and trying to cope with the stench, I find it hard to see how she can go on living here much longer. Once she sees the room they are offering her, the bath, the clean sheets, I can’t imagine her wanting to come back. And indeed she makes more fuss than usual about locking the van door, which suggests she accepts that she may not be returning. I note how, with none of my distaste, the ambulance driver bends over her as he puts her on the hoist, his careful rearrangement of her greasy clothing, pulling her skirt down over her knees in the interests of modesty. The chair goes on the hoist, and slowly she rises and comes into view above the level of the garden wall and is wheeled into the ambulance. There is a certain distinction about her as she leaves, a Dorothy Hodgkin of vagabonds, a derelict Nobel Prize winner, the heavy folds of her grimy face set in a kind of resigned satisfaction. She may even be enjoying herself.
When she has gone I walk round the van noting the occasions of our battle: the carpet tiles she managed to smuggle on to the roof, the blanket strapped on to muffle the sound of the rain, the black bags under the van stuffed with her old clothes—sites of skirmishes all of which I’d lost. Now I imagine her bathed and bandaged and cleanly clothed and starting a new life. I even see myself visiting and taking flowers.
This fantasy rapidly fades when around 2.30 Miss S. reappears, washed and in clean clothes, it’s true, and with a long pair of white hospital socks over her shrunken legs, but obviously very pleased to be back. She has a telephone number where her new friends can be contacted, and she gives it to me. ‘They can be reached’, she says, ‘any time—even over the holiday. They’re on a long-distance bleep.’
As I am leaving for the theatre, she bangs on the door of the van with her stick. I open the door. She is lying wrapped in clean white sheets on a quilt laid over all the accumulated filth and rubbish of the van. She is still worrying that I will have her taken to hospital. I tell her there’s no question of it and that she can stay as long as she wants. I close the door, but there is another bang and I reassure her again. Once more I close the door, but she bangs again. ‘Mr Bennett.’ I have to strain to hear. ‘I’m sorry the van’s in such a state. I haven’t been able to do any spring cleaning.’
28 April
I am working at my table when I see Miss B. arrive with a pile of clean clothes for Miss Shepherd, which must have been washed for her at the day centre yesterday. Miss B. knocks at the door of the van, then opens it, looks inside and—something nobody has ever done before—gets in. It’s only a moment before she comes out, and I know what has happened before she rings the bell. We go back to the van where Miss Shepherd is dead, lying on her left side, flesh cold, face gaunt, the neck stretched out as if for the block, and a bee buzzing round her body.
It is a beautiful day, with the garden glittering in the sunshine, strong shadows by the nettles, and bluebells out under the wall, and I remember how in her occasional moments of contemplation she would sit in the wheelchair and gaze at the gard
en. I am filled with remorse for my harsh conduct towards her, though I know at the same time that it was not harsh. But still I never quite believed or chose to believe she was as ill as she was, and I regret too all the questions I never asked her. Not that she would have answered them. I have a strong impulse to stand at the gate and tell anyone who passes.
Miss B. meanwhile goes off and returns with a nice doctor from St Pancras who seems scarcely out of her teens. She gets into the van, takes the pulse in Miss S.’s outstretched neck, checks her with a stethoscope and, to save an autopsy, certifies death as from heart failure. Then comes the priest to bless her before she is taken to the funeral parlour, and he, too, gets into the van—the third person to do so this morning, and all of them without distaste or ado in what to me seem three small acts of heroism. Stooping over the body, his bright white hair brushing the top of the van, the priest murmurs an inaudible prayer and makes a cross on Miss S.’s hands and head. Then they all go off and I come inside to wait for the undertakers.
I have been sitting at my table for ten minutes before I realize that the undertakers have been here all the time, and that death nowadays comes (or goes) in a grey Ford transit van that is standing outside the gate. There are three undertakers, two young and burly, the third older and more experienced—a sergeant, as it were, and two corporals. They bring out a rough grey-painted coffin, like a prop a conjuror might use, and, making no comment on the surely extraordinary circumstances in which they find it, put a sheet of white plastic bin-liner over the body and manhandle it into their magic box, where it falls with a bit of a thud. Across the road, office workers stroll down from the Piano Factory for their lunch, but nobody stops or even looks much, and the Asian woman who has to wait while the box is carried over the pavement and put in the (other) van doesn’t give it a backward glance.
