Lady in the Van Read Online Free PDF

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,