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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