The Lady in the Van

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  Preface

  I MOVED TO GLOUCESTER CRESCENT, Camden Town, in 1969. At £11,500, so then hardly a snip, no. 23 was cheaper than some of the other houses because, imposing and double-fronted though it was and built in 1840, it was smaller than most of the villas in the Crescent and so was unsuitable for the young couples with children who were beginning to colonise this part of North London. Built as superior dwellings for the Victorian middle class, the street coincided with the railways that were then being driven through Camden Town (as in Dombey and Son) and, partly as a result, the neighbourhood had gone steadily downhill since, particularly during the Second World War, when many of the villas had been turned into rooming houses. My own house had gas meters in all the upstairs rooms that were a relic of its lodging past and which could still overlap with the present. Early on in my occupancy I opened the door one evening to an old man who was looking for a room there, where he had lodged years ago. At that time I was doing a weekly stint on Ned Sherrin’s TV programme The Late Show and the old man (played by John Bird) became the central character in a film in which gentrified neighbours with the relics of a social conscience toured Camden Town (in, absurdly, a Rolls-Royce) trying to find other as yet ungentrified lodgings where he would find a welcome. He ended up in the local Rowton House, buildings put up in the nineteenth century to provide respectable working men with bed and board at a reasonable rate.

  Though in 1969 there were no longer any lodging houses in the Crescent some council properties survived (which they happily still do), except that given the Thatcherite policy of selling off council tenancies, plus the current financial pressures on local authorities, the status of such properties can hardly be secure. It’s a form of social cleansing that has been to the detriment of the street, which is these days more homogenous … and homogenously rich … than it has ever been.

  When I moved in the residents were a mixed bag, with among the earliest to put down roots the artist David Gentleman and his wife, who are still there more than fifty years later. There were journalists like the late Nicholas Tomalin and Claire, his biographer wife, novelists like Nicholas Mosley and Alice Thomas Ellis with her publisher husband, Colin Haycraft, together with Jonathan Miller and his wife, Rachel, who had first seen the For Sale sign go up on no. 23 and alerted me. There was an ex-Yugoslav diplomat, a retired naval commander, the widow of Vaughan Williams, the composer, and round the corner in Regent’s Park Terrace the novelist Angus Wilson and his partner, Tony Garrett, who were a few doors along from perhaps the most distinguished denizen of all, the writer and critic V. S. Pritchett. Oh and there was also a bishop, the Anglican Bishop of Edmonton.

  What had brought them to this corner of London was that it was unsmart, relatively quiet and handy for Regent’s Park and the West End. When I was acting in the theatre I could cycle down to Shaftesbury Avenue in twenty minutes and to the BBC in Portland Place even more quickly. The shopping was good, Inverness Street market just round the corner with a dairy, a bakery and a cobbler’s all in the same parade and a nearby assortment of Italian and Asian grocers, a wet fish shop, a couple of bookshops and half a dozen second-hand furniture and junk shops. What there was not was Camden Lock, which in the intervening years has swallowed up the indigenous shops and made the area simply a tourist venue.

  Included now are excerpts from my diary for 2014 leading up to the making of the film of The Lady in the Van that October, with some interpolations from the introduction to the stage play (1999).

  Film Diary

  6 January 2014

  I’ve learned never entirely to believe in a film until it actually happens but it does seem likely that this autumn we will be shooting The Lady in the Van. This is the story of Miss Mary Shepherd, the elderly eccentric who took up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death fifteen years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and all being well will star in the film with Nicholas Hytner directing. To date I’ve written two drafts of the script and am halfway through a third.

  The house where the story happened is currently lived in by the photographer Antony Crolla though many of my belongings are still in situ. This afternoon I go round to start the lengthy process of clearing out some of the books and papers so that it can be used for filming.

  I first saw the house in 1968. It belonged to an American woman who kept parrots and there were perches in the downstairs room and also in its small garden.

  I did most of the decorating myself, picking out the blurred and whitewashed frieze in the drawing room with a nail file, a job that these days would be done by steam cleaning, whereas then I was helped by some of the actors in my first play, Forty Years On, which was running in the West End. One of the actors was George Fenton, who is doing the music for the film, and another was Keith McNally, the proprietor of Balthazar.

  20 February

  The walls of the sitting room and the study in Gloucester Crescent are just as I decorated them nearly half a century ago. I have always been quite proud of my efforts, though aware over the years that the finish I achieved has often been thought eccentric.

  In 1969, having stripped the walls down to the plaster, I stained the sitting room blue using a polyurethane stain. The plaster was the original lime plaster put on when the house was built in 1840. Lime plaster has many advantages: it’s grainy and doesn’t soak up the stain like blotting paper as modern plaster tends to do (and which is often brown or pink). All the blemishes of the lime plaster showed through, including the notes to themselves made by the builders and their occasional graffiti. None of this I minded, but blue was not a good colour; it was too cold and for a while I felt I had ruined the room and would have to paper it, which was the last thing I wanted. Then, as an experiment, I tried some yellow stain on a small patch and this turned the wall a vibrant green, too strong I’m sure for many people but for me ideal, so that’s how I did the whole room. The study next door I did differently using water-based stains and as the walls here were lime plaster too I painted them in a mixture of umber and orange, yellow and green. This I then washed down and sealed so that the room ended up far better than I could have imagined, taking on the warm shades of the walls of an Italian palazzo (I thought anyway). I am sure a competent scene painter would have been able to achieve the same effects with much less trouble but I’m happy I did it myself. And in the intervening years the colour has not faded and will I trust continue to glow as long as any new owner suffers the original plaster to remain, which is not long probably as there are few houses on the street left in their original trim, today’s newcomers seldom moving in until they have ripped the guts out of these decent Victorian villas to turn them into models of white and modish minimalism.

  In the colourful and variegated background of Camden Town Miss Mary Shepherd, whose strange story the film tells, seems in some respects not unusual. She was a vagrant but a stationary one, resident f
or the last fifteen years of her life a few feet from my front door where there was a paved area … the architect had wishfully called it a patio … just big enough to take a car. Or, as it transpired, a van.

  The neighbourhood has never been without its eccentrics, a steady assortment of which were supplied by Arlington House, one of the Rowton Houses put up in the nineteenth century to provide respectable working men with bed and board at a reasonable rate. And so it admirably did though it also housed some unusual characters, one or two of them straight out of Samuel Beckett. Roaming the streets besides was a cast of itinerant alcoholics who roosted on the steps of any empty premises or the vicinity of any warm-air outlet. If Miss Shepherd stood out in this company it was not as she perhaps imagined on account of some degree of social superiority but because she had, however decrepit, a place of her own in the shape of the van. She never had to sleep in a doorway, for instance, as many of the men did who had not managed to be taken in at Arlington House.

  If, at the foot of the slope of Gloucester Crescent, Arlington House was a secular refuge for the poor and homeless, its spiritual counterpart was the convent opposite the top of the street. This unlovely building, now North Bridge House School, was then still a convent which, though I did not know it, had briefly housed Miss Shepherd herself. For much of the time I lived in the Crescent there was a crucifix on its pebble-dashed wall that overlooked the traffic lights of Gloucester Gate and Parkway. Some time in the 1980s the convent was transmuted into a Japanese school, in the process, understandably perhaps, losing the crucifix. Then it became a private school. Though no fan of private education what made me cross was the selfish parking habits of the parents, particularly when retrieving their children. As they park, I used to think, so do they educate.

  My decision to invite Miss S. to put the van in my drive in 1974 was taken reluctantly but the construction put upon it in the film seems to me true to the facts. In the street the van was parked directly opposite the table in the bay window where I did my work. Anything that happened to Miss Shepherd … from the everyday skirmishes she had with neighbours and passers-by to the more serious provocations regularly visited on her by hooligans or the malevolent … all these were a distraction to me when I was trying to write. Moving Miss S. into the garden got her out of the way of passers-by and the curious so that both of us could thereby have a quieter life and I could for much of the time forget about her—much, as AB points out, like a marriage.

  But it was this element of self-interest or self-concern about the move which has always made me reluctant to consider it an act of charity. I was looking after myself, Miss Shepherd only incidentally; kindness didn’t really come into it.

  The idea that marrying is sometimes the way men choose to forget someone is a (rather crude) Proustian notion, with Swann wedding Odette in order to do just that. And there are a cluster of related aphorisms.

  ‘Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all the virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition.’

  This is a quotation from William Hazlitt’s ‘On the Knowledge of Character’ (1822) but I didn’t find it from reading Hazlitt, whom I’ve never managed to get into, but quoted in John Osborne’s autobiography, Almost a Gentleman.

  A similar note is struck by George Eliot in Romola (1862–3): ‘The elements of kindness and self-indulgence are hard to distinguish in a soft nature’, which is another quotation I did not find at source but quoted in the Notebooks of Geoffrey Madan.

  ‘No man deserves to be praised for his goodness unless he has the strength of character to be wicked. All other goodness is generally nothing but indolence or impotence of will.’ (La Rochefoucauld)

  The person who never felt the need to go in for such moral analysis and who I’m sure didn’t think it was kindness if she ever gave it a thought was, of course, Miss Shepherd herself, parking in my drive a favour she was doing me not the other way round. To have allowed herself to feel in the least bit grateful would have been a chink in her necessary armour, braced as she always was against the world.

  ‘It wasn’t a marriage. She wasn’t my life,’ AB says in one exchange, later cut, though the van always came in handy as a conversation piece. I don’t have much small talk so for anyone landed with me at a party, say, ‘How’s your old lady?’ was a good standby. That she had become even in her lifetime something of a celebrity would not have surprised her and she would also consider it entirely fitting that some of her pamphlets are now deposited in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, where Maggie Smith was able to consult them before doing the film.

  Miss Shepherd’s presence in the garden didn’t, of course, stop me jotting things down, making notes on her activities and chronicling her various comic encounters. Indeed, in my bleaker moments it sometimes seemed that this was all there was to note down since nothing else was happening to me.

  Still, there was no question of writing or publishing anything about her until she was dead or gone from the garden, and as time passed the two came to seem the same thing. Occasionally newspapers took an interest and tried to blow the situation up into a jolly news item, but the ramparts of privacy were more impregnable in those pre-Murdoch days and she was generally left to herself. Even journalists who came to interview me were often too polite to ask what an (increasingly whiffy) old van was doing parked a few feet from my door. If they did enquire I would explain, while asking them to keep it to themselves, which they invariably did. I can’t think that these days there would be similar discretion.

  Miss Shepherd helped, lying low if anybody came to my door, and at night straightaway switching off her light whenever she heard a footstep. But though she was undoubtedly a recluse, Miss Shepherd was not averse to the occasional bout of celebrity. I came back one day to find her posing beside the van for a woman columnist (gender did count with Miss S.) who had somehow sweet-talked her into giving an interview, Miss Shepherd managing in the process to imply that I had over the years systematically stifled her voice. If she has since achieved any fame or notoriety through my having written about her, I suspect she would think it no more than her due and that her position as writer of pamphlets and political commentator entitled her to public recognition or, as she says in the play, ‘the freedom of the land’.

  It was imaginary celebrity—I think the psychological term for it is ‘delusion of reference’—that made her assume with every IRA bomb that she was next on the list. A disastrous fire in the Isle of Man meant, she was certain, that the culprit would now target her, and had she been alive at the time of Princess Diana’s death she would have taken it as a personal warning to avoid travelling (in the van as distinct from a high-powered Mercedes) under the Pont de l’Alma. In the first (and much longer) draft of the play this obsession was examined in more detail:

  MISS S.: Mr Bennett. Will you look under the van?

  AB: What for?

  MISS S.: One of these explosive devices. There was another bomb last night and I think I may be the next on the list.

  AB: Why you?

  MISS S.: Because of Fidelis Party. The IRA may have got wind of it with a view to thwarting of reconciliation attempts, possibly. Look under the van.

  AB: I can’t see anything because of all your plastic bags.

  MISS S.: Yes and the explosive’s plastic so it wouldn’t show, possibly. Are there any wires? The wireless tells you to look for wires. Nothing that looks like a timing device?

  AB: There’s an old biscuit tin.

  MISS S.: No. That’s not a bomb. It’s just something that was on offer at Finefare. I ought to have special protection with being a party leader, increased risk through subverting of democracy, possibly.

  AB: Nobody knows that you’re a leader of a party.

  MISS S.: Well, it was on an anonymous footing but somebody may have spilled the beans. No organisation is watertight.

  It’s said of Robert Lowell that when he regularly went off his head it took the form of thinkin
g he could rub shoulders with Beethoven, Voltaire and other all-time greats, with whom he considered himself to be on equal terms. (Actually, Isaiah Berlin, about whose sanity there was no doubt, made exactly the same assumption but that’s by the way.) The Virgin Mary excepted, Miss Shepherd’s sights were set rather lower. Her assumed equals were political figures such as former Prime Ministers Harold Wilson, Mr Heath and the Conservative Parliament member Enoch Powell, or as she always called him ‘Enoch’. I was constantly being badgered to find out their private addresses so that they could be sent the latest copy of True View. Atypically for someone unbalanced, Miss Shepherd never seemed to take much interest in the Royal Family, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh never thought of as potential readers.

  Miss Shepherd would be no more happy with the notion of AB as her carer than I was … and not because ‘He’s a Communist, possibly’. God apart, she would not presumably have thought herself beholden to anybody … hence her seeming ingratitude for any form of benevolence; clothes, vans, crème brulée … they all involved obligations for which she had no time. The only obligation that counted was the forgiveness of sin … her sin.

  We shared, though, a distrust of caring and perhaps the most heartfelt statement I put into the mouth of AB in the film is his diatribe against caring. He does not like the word; is uncomfortable in the role, which it never occurs to him can be so called until it is suggested by the social worker. The word carries an implication of feeling, a coating of concern not just caring but caring for, whereas with me, feeling scarcely entered into it and this may well not be uncommon. Caring, as often as not, is coping with, being landed with, being stuck with, having no choice about. How seldom is it gladly or willingly undertaken? Caring all too often is grudging. Nor is it, as the word implies, a gentle business. ‘We have to do everything for her/him means we have to do one thing for them.’ Caring is about piss and shit … shit on AB’s shoes when walking past the van, shit on the path when one of the bags Miss S. hurls out hits the ground and bursts. And these are the most minor inconveniences. I never had to haul down her many contoured underthings to wipe her bum, or haul off her sodden knickers … I never had to unfurl her terrible stockings; still less breach the inner citadel of her castle of clothes … the routine menialities of real carers, which, we console ourselves, are made tolerable by the love they bear their charges. But one thinks, too, of ageing offspring who are forced into caring for their even more aged parents when all too often they have long since ceased to care for them much or even at all … or are only caring for them now in grudging recompense for the caring they themselves received long ago.