Alan Bennett - The Lady in the Van
Author: Alan Bennett
ISBN: 9780571250752
Language: English
Publisher: Faber and Faber Ltd
Description: 
    The Lady in the Van
    The Lady in the Van-Title Page
    ALAN BENNETT
    The Lady in the Van
    The Lady in the Van
    to 
     Maggie Smith
     and 
     in memory of 
     Miss M. T. Sheppard
    (1911–1989)
    The Lady in the Van-Table of Contents
    Contents
    Introduction
    A Note on the Music
    A Note on the Vehicles
        
    The Lady in the Van
    The Lady in the Van-Introduction
    Introduction
    After Miss Shepherd drove her van into my garden in 1974 friends used to ask me if I was planning to write a play about her. I wasn’t, but twenty-five years later I have. There are plenty of reasons for the time-lag, the most obvious being that it would have been very difficult to write about her when she was alive and, as it were, on site.
    ‘How can I write about her?’ says one of the Alan Bennetts in the play. ‘She’s there.’ And although the line was later cut it remains true.
    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, hence, I suppose, the plaintive denials that make up the last speech in the play.
    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 again, as is said in the play, 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, of course, lying low if anybody came to my door, and at night straight away switching off her light whenever she heard a footstep. But though she was undoubtedly a recluse (‘Is she,’ a neighbour once asked, ‘a genuine eccentric?’), 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 that 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 this 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 d’Alma. In the first (and much longer) draft of the play this obsession was examined in more detail: 
    Miss Shepherd Mr Bennett. Will you look under the van?
    A. Bennett What for?
    Miss Shepherd One of these explosive devices. There was another bomb last night and I think I may be the next on the list.
    A. Bennett Why you?
    Miss Shepherd 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.
    A. Bennett I can’t see anything because of all your plastic bags.
    Miss Shepherd 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?
    A. Bennett There’s an old biscuit tin.
    Miss Shepherd 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.
    A. Bennett Nobody knows you’re leader of a party.
    Miss Shepherd Well, it was on an anonymous footing but somebody may have spilled the beans. No organization is watertight. 
    It’s said of Robert Lowell that when he regularly went off his head it took the form of thinking 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 Harold Wilson, Mr Heath and (as she always called him) ‘Enoch’ and 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. This did not mean, though, that she was a disloyal subject and on the occasion of the Queen’s Jubilee in 1977 there was only one flag to be seen in our well-to-do socialist street and that was in the back window of the van where only I could see it.
    To begin with I wrote the play in three acts, knowing, though, that these days this is not a popular format. Still, that’s how Miss Shepherd’s story seemed to present itself, the first act consisting of her life in the street and culminating with her driving the van into the garden; the second act was life in the garden (all fifteen years of it), and the third act the events leading to her death and departure. The trouble with this way of telling the story was that whereas there was movement built into the first act (the lead-up to her arrival) and movement in the third (her decline and death), Act Two simply consisted of her being there, parked in the garden and going nowhere, the only movement me occasionally going up the wall. A second draft condensed the material into two acts, and though the passage of time within the play was perhaps not as clear, the passage of time within the theatre was altogether more acceptable, an hour each way quite enough for me. As Churchill said, the mind cannot take in more than the seat will endure.
    Telling the truth crops up quite a bit in the play, what Miss Shepherd did or didn’t do a subject of some disagreement between ‘the boys’, as I tended to think of the two Alan Bennetts. They call not telling the truth ‘lying’, but ‘the imagination’ would be a kinder way of putting it, with Alan Bennett the writer finally winning through to make Miss Shepherd talk of her past (as she never actually did) and even to bring her back from the dead in order to take her bodily up to heaven (also imaginary). These departures from the facts were genuinely hard-won and took some coming to, causing me to reflect, not for the first time, that the biggest handicap for a writer is to have had a decent upbringing. Brought up not to lie or show off, I was temperamentally inclined to do both, particularly as a small child, and though reining me in perhaps improved my character it was no help in my future profession, where lying, or romancing anyway, is the essence of it. Nor did my education help. One of the difficulties I had in writing The Madness of George III was that, having been educated as a historian, I found it hard ever to take leave of the facts. With George III’s first bout of madness the facts needed scarcely any alteration to make them dramatic and only a little tweaking was required, but even that I found hard to do. It was still harder to play around with the facts of Miss Shepherd’s life, although the only person to know how much I may have doctored her history is me. And actually, while I’ve obviously had to compress a good deal, I haven’t had to alter much at all. It’s true, though, that a lengthier account of the events leading up to her moving into the garden with the van would make this development less dramatic, and less of a turning point.
    What happened was that one night several of the van’s windows were broken by two drunks, an incident that occurs in the play. This meant that Miss Shepherd was now much more at the mercy of the elements, the faded cretonne curtains which covered one or two of the windows her only protection from the weather and from prying eyes. I had a lean-to down some steps at the side of my house and now ran an electric lead out to this hut, so that on cold nights she could go in there to keep warm. Inevitably she began to spend the night there on a regular basis, the van becoming part office, part wardrobe, a repository for her pamphlets and her clothes and the place where she would spend what she saw as her working day. As I write I see Michael Frayn walking up the street en route from his home to his office nearby, where he writes. Miss Shepherd’s routine was not very different, in this instance as in others mentioned in the play her life not as dissimilar from that of her neighbours as they would have liked to think. They had offices to go to and so did she. They had second homes and, having acquired a Robin Reliant, so did she, a parallel which Miss Ferris, the irritatingly patient (and somewhat jargon-ridden) social worker in the play, is not slow to point out. But with Miss Shepherd going to and from her sleeping quarters in the hut to her office in the van it meant that I got used to her crossing the garden in front of my window, so that when she did finally move in, bags and all, it was neither the surprise nor the life-changing decision (for both of us) that the play perhaps implies.
    Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers, so Miss Ferris is a composite figure. To begin with the social workers got short shrift, their only function in Miss Shepherd’s view to procure her concessions from the council: another walking stick, an additional wheelchair ‘in case this one conks out, possibly’ and (a dream she never attained) the electrified chair in which she saw herself moving regally through the streets of Camden Town.
    A composite, too, are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s. Married to the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis, he regarded Miss Shepherd with a sceptical eye, never moderating his (not unpenetrating) voice when he was discussing her, though she might well be in the van only a few feet away. He, I’m sure, thought I was mad to let her stay. Still, he came to her funeral and as the coffin was slid into the hearse he remarked loudly as ever, ‘Well, it’s a cut above her previous vehicle.’ Like Rufus in the play, Colin had little time for feminism. I once asked him if he was jealous of his wife’s literary success. ‘Good God, no. One couldn’t be jealous of a woman, surely?’
    Though the character of Underwood is a fiction, invented in order to hint at something unexplained in Miss Shepherd’s past (and ultimately to explain it), he had, certainly as regards his appearance, a basis in fact. When the van was still parked in the street the late Nicholas Tomalin and I had been mobilized by Miss Shepherd to push it forward a few yards to a fresh location. I wrote in my diary:
    As we are poised for the move another Camden Town eccentric materializes, a tall, elderly figure in a long overcoat and Homburg hat with a distinguished grey moustache and in his buttonhole a flag for the Primrose League. Removing a grubby canary glove he leans a shaking hand against the rear of the van in a token gesture of assistance and when we have moved it the few statutory feet he puts the glove on again, saying grandly, ‘If you should need me in the future I’m just around the corner’ – i.e. in Arlington House.
    For all the doubts I voice about tramps in the play, when one comes across such a fugitive from Godot it’s hard not to think that Beckett’s role as social observer has been underestimated.
    I have allowed myself a little leeway in speculating about Miss Shepherd’s concert career, though if, as her brother said, she had studied with Cortot she must have been a pianist of some ability. Cortot was the leading French pianist between the wars, Miss Shepherd presumably studying with him at the height of his fame. Continuing to give concerts throughout the Occupation, he finished the war under a cloud and it was perhaps this that sent him on a concert tour to England, where I remember seeing his photograph on posters sometime in the late forties. Perhaps Miss Shepherd saw it too, though by this time her hopes of a concert career must have been fading, a vocation as a nun already her goal.
    Her war had been spent driving ambulances, a job for which she had presumably enlisted and been trained and which marked the beginning of her lifelong fascination with anything on wheels. Comically she figures in my mind alongside the Queen, who as Princess Elizabeth also did war service and as an ATS recruit was filmed in a famous piece of wartime propaganda changing the wheel on an army lorry, a vehicle my mother fondly believed HRH drove for the duration of hostilities.
    What with land girls, nurses, Waafs, the ATS and Wrens, these were years of cheerful, confident, seemingly carefree women and I’d like to think of Miss Shepherd as briefly one of them, having the time of her life: accompanying a singsong in the NAAFI perhaps, snatching a meal in a British restaurant, then going to the pictures to see Leslie Howard or Joan Fontaine. It was maybe this taste of wartime independence that later unsuited her for the veil, or it may be, as her brother suggested, that she suffered shellshock after a bomb exploded near her ambulance. At any rate she was invalided out and this was when her troubles began, with, in her brother’s view, the call of the convent a part of it.
    I would have liked her concert career to have outlasted the war or to have resumed after the duration, when the notion of a woman playing the piano against psychological odds was the theme of the film The Seventh Veil (1945), with Ann Todd as the pianist Francesca and James Mason her tyrannical stick-wielding Svengali. Enormously popular at the time (and with it the Grieg Piano Concerto), the film set the tone for a generation of glamorous pianists, best known of whom was Eileen Joyce, who was reputed to change her frock between movements.
    The Seventh Veil was subsequently adapted for the stage and I still have the programme of the matinée I saw at the Grand Theatre in Leeds in March 1951. The Grieg Concerto had by this time been replaced by Rachmaninov Number Two and James Mason by Leo Genn, but it was still Ann Todd, her guardian as ever bringing his stick down across her fingers as she cowered at the keyboard.
    If Miss Shepherd had ever made it to the concert circuit this would be when I might have seen her, as I was by now going every week to symphony concerts in Leeds Town Hall where Miss Shepherd would have taken her place alongside Daphne Spottiswoode or Phyllis Sellick, Moura Lympany, Valda Aveling and Gina Bachauer – artistes with their décolleté, shawl-collared gowns as glamorous and imposing in my fourteen-year- old eyes as fashion models, Barbara Goalens of the keyboard, brought to their feet by the conductor to acknowledge the applause then sinking in a curtsey to receive the obligatory flowers, just as, in memory anyway, Miss Shepherd does in the play.
    When I wrote the original account I glossed over the fact that Miss Shepherd’s death occurred the same night that, washed and in clean things, she returned from the day centre. I chose not to make this plain because for Miss Shepherd to die then seemed so handy and convenient, just when a writer would (if a little obviously) have chosen for her to die. So I note that I was nervous not only of altering the facts to suit the drama but of even seeming to have altered them. But that night or in the early hours of the morning was when she did die, the nurse who took her to the day centre (who wasn’t the social worker) saying that she had come across several cases when someone who had lived rough had seemed somehow to know that death was imminent and had made preparations accordingly, in Miss Shepherd’s case not merely seeing that she was washed and made more presentable but the previous week struggling to confession and Mass.
    A year or so earlier when Miss Shepherd had been ill I’d tried to get some help from what remained of the convent at the top of the street. I got nowhere but the visit confirmed me in my low opinion of nuns, or this particular order anyway. Another cut:
    A. Bennett 2 Nuns, it seems to me, took the wrong turning at the same time as British Rail. Around the same time that porters were forced to forsake their black serge waistcoats, monkey jackets and oilcloth caps, so some monastic Dr Beeching decreed that nuns lose their billowing wimpled innocence and come on like prison wardresses in grey tricel twinsets.
    Woman Yes?
    A. Bennett I live down the street.
    Woman You do. I’ve seen you. It’s you that has the van.
    A. Bennett Yes.
    Woman Difficult woman.
    A. Bennett A Catholic.
    Woman One of the sisters remembers her. You’re not? Catholic.
    A. Bennett No.
    Woman A novice. It may have been twice. Had two stabs at it. It takes a special type.
    A. Bennett 2 Cold brown lino on the floor, dimpled from being so often polished. Room spotless and uncomforting, the only ornament a crucifix.
    Woman It’s not an ornament at all.
    A. Bennett I’ve been told she was very argumentative.
    Woman Disputatious she was. I’ve had her pointed out to me on that account. Chalking on the pavement and so on.
    A. Bennett That’s all in the past. Did she play the piano?
    Woman She did not. This is a house of God. There is no piano here. Anyway what is it you want?
    A. Bennett She’s ill.
    Woman Who? The woman?
    A. Bennett I wondered if there was a nun available who could talk to her, do her some shopping.
    Woman We don’t have shopping nuns. It’s a strict order.
    A. Bennett I’ve seen them shopping. I saw one yesterday in Marks and Spencer. She was buying meringues.
    Woman The Bishop may have been coming.
    A. Bennett Does he like meringues?
    Woman What business is it of yours what the Monsignor likes? Who are you, coming round asking if the Bishop likes meringues? Are you a communist?
    A. Bennett I just thought there must be nuns with time on their hands.
    Woman They don’t have time on their hands. That’s what prayer is for.
    A. Bennett But she’s ill. She’s a Catholic. I think she may be dying.
    Woman They can pray for her, only you’ll have to fill in a form. She’ll probably pull her socks up once your back is turned. That’s been my experience where invalids are concerned.
    I make no apology for the fact that Miss Shepherd makes great play with place names: St Albans, Bodmin, Hounslow, Staines. Since the oddity of place names is a staple of English comedy I might be accused of introducing Dunstable, say, for an easy laugh. I was once taken to task by a critic for using Burgess Hill in a play, a name devoid of comic overtones for me but thought by the critic to be a sure indicator of my triviality of mind. I’d actually just been hard put to think of a place and asked the actor who had the line (it was Valentine Dyall) where he lived, hence Burgess Hill. But with Miss Shepherd the extended landscape of places she had known was very real to this now largely stationary wanderer and they were still vivid in her mind as the objects of journeys she was always planning (and sometimes threatening) to make.
    When our paths first crossed in the late sixties there was much less dereliction on the streets of London than there is today. Camden Town had its resident company of tramps and eccentrics, it’s true, by no means all of them homeless or beggars, but they were as an aristocracy compared with the dozens of young poor and homeless that nowadays sleep in its doorways and beg on the streets. Several of these ancient archetypal figures were long-time residents of Arlington House, among the last of the Rowton Houses that provided cheap accommodation for working men in London, the one in Camden Town still happily functioning today. Nowadays, though, the windows of its individual cubicles look across to spacious executive apartments and over the restaurants, clubs and all the tawdry chaos of Camden Lock, which to my mind is far more offensive and destructive of the area than the beggars have ever been.
    Another speech cut from the play:
    There is a community in dereliction even though it may not amount to much more than passing round a bottle. This seems especially apparent in Camden Town, where the doorway of the periodically defunct Odeon or the steps of the drop-in centre opposite are home to a band of social dysfuncts notable for their indiscriminate conviviality and sudden antipathies. Itinerant in that they periodically move on, or are made to do so, they do not go far, the premises of any enterprise that shows signs of faltering (‘Shocking Discounts’, ‘Everything Must Go’) likely to be immediately roosted by this crew of slurred and contentious intoxicates.
    Miss Shepherd, though, never thought of herself as a tramp. As a potential Prime Minister, how could she?
    A. Bennett 2 Our neighbourhood is peopled by several commanding widows and wives: there is Lady Pritchett, the wife of Sir Victor; there is Mrs Vaughan- Williams, the widow of the composer, and occasionally to be seen is Elizabeth Jane Howard, the novelist and sometime wife of Kingsley Amis. All tall, grand roost-ruling women possessed of great self-confidence and assured of their position in the world. It is of this substantial sisterhood that Miss Shepherd sees herself as a natural member.
    After Miss Shepherd died in April 1989 I had no immediate plans to write about her or any idea of the kind of thing I wanted to write but it was coming up to the tenth anniversary of the London Review of Books and I had promised Mary-Kay Wilmers that I would contribute something. So I put together an account of Miss Shepherd, using some of the material from my diaries and quoting from the pamphlets of hers that I had saved or rescued from the van. After this account had been published I had one or two stabs at turning it into a play but without success. Miss Shepherd’s story was not difficult to tell; it was my own story over the same period that defeated me. Not that there was a great deal to be said, but somehow the two stories had to interconnect. It was only when I had the notion of splitting myself into two that the problem seemed to solve itself.
    Still, very little of my own life is revealed, too little for one of the Alan Bennetts, who, having brought the play to a conclusion, breaks back to speak directly to the audience (a function he’s previously left to his partner):
    Look. This has been one path through my life … me and Miss Shepherd. Just one track. I wrote things; people used to come and stay the night, and of both sexes. What I mean to say is, it’s not as if it’s the whole picture. Lots of other stuff happened. No end of things. 
    The device of having two actors playing me isn’t just a bit of theatrical showing off and does, however crudely, correspond to the reality. There was one bit of me (often irritated and resentful) that had to deal with this unwelcome guest camped literally on my doorstep, but there was another bit of me that was amused by how cross this eccentric lodger made me and that took pleasure in Miss Shepherd’s absurdities and her outrageous demands.
    There is no satisfactory way of dubbing these two parts (I would not call them halves) of my personality, and even if ‘the writer’ would do for one, what is the other? The person? The householder? Or (a phrase from the courts) ‘the responsible adult’? As I wrote them first they were like an old married couple, complaining and finding fault with one another, nothing one thought or said a surprise to the other. I then started to find more fun in their relationship, made it teasing and even flirtatious, a line that the actors Nicholas Farrell and Kevin McNally made more of in rehearsal.
    Alan Bennett the author then became definitely more mischievous, more amoral than the Alan Bennett who goes out dutifully in his Marigold gloves in order to scoop his unsavoury lodger’s poop, so that in some sense the division between them illustrates Kafka’s remark that to write is to do the devil’s work. Of course Kafka doesn’t imply the converse, that scooping the poop (or fetching Miss Shepherd her sherbet lemons) is God’s work. I never felt it so and resented neighbours or well- wishers who cast me in the saintly role, preferring to be thought of as a fool. Still, there was no way of ducking these attributions of goodness, as the more I rebutted them the more selfless I seemed. ‘Kind is so tame,’ says Kevin McNally in the play and that at least comes from the heart.
    In one particular instance, I wish the part of me Kevin McNally plays had in life been more venturesome. The cheap commercialization of Camden High Street was just getting into its stride in 1989 when Miss Shepherd died but it was already far enough advanced for fliers about new boutiques and cafés to be put regularly through my door. At that time I let slip several opportunities that someone of a more mischievous temper than mine might well have taken up. Being on the electoral roll, Miss Shepherd was sent as many circulars as I was, including several from restaurants offering a free dinner (generally candlelit) to potential customers. I didn’t avail myself of any of these offers but I regret now that I didn’t pass on her vouchers to Miss Shepherd, as I would quite like to have seen the scene in such a restaurant with Miss Shepherd scowling and slurping (and smelling), surrounded by the appalled residents of Primrose Hill.
    We were fortunate with the play to have a long rehearsal period (five and a half weeks) plus two weeks of previews, a time in which the anticipated difficulties of getting the van on to the stage and hoisting it off could be dealt with. In the event there were few problems with the van or the Robin Reliant, which also does a tour of the stage. What took up the time was the text, in particular the presentation of the two selves. Should they be dressed alike, for instance, in sports coat, M&S corduroys, suede shoes, the clothes I like to think I just happened to be wearing when the designer, Mark Thompson, paid me a visit, but near enough, I suppose, to what I wear every day? But are these the proper garments of my inner voice? Should the other self be put into something more sophisticated and metropolitan, black trousers, perhaps, a black polo neck?
    In the end we decided that would be simplistic and so the two selves were dressed alike, and though this means that some of the audience are a bit slow to understand what is going on, it is probably better and sillier (which I like) to make them Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They were luckier than Maggie Smith, who as Miss Shepherd had to deck herself out in a variety of outfits, many of them quick changes, which had to be achieved in the cramped interior of the van.
    Over the years Miss Shepherd had four or five vans, of which in the stage production we see two: the one (donated by Lady Wiggin) which she drives on to the stage half-way through the first act, and another, supposedly the same, on which the curtain rises for Act Two, but since this is several years later now transformed by Miss Shepherd’s usual coat of scrambled egg or badly made custard. Miss Shepherd’s fascination with any aid to locomotion meant that she over-supplied herself not only with vans but even with walking sticks, of which she had many, one of which Maggie Smith uses in the play. It still bears traces of Miss Shepherd’s characteristic yellow paint, evidence of her last painting job done on the three-wheeler which she parked outside my gate, where (another relic) the kerb still shows a few tell-tale yellow spots.
    The three-wheeler had a predecessor, a battered Mini, but this was stolen only a month or two after Miss Shepherd acquired it and it was later found abandoned in the basement of the council flats in Maiden Lane near King’s Cross. Like the Reliant, its chief function had been as a supplementary wardrobe and it was thus heavily pervaded by Miss Shepherd’s characteristic odour. I felt slightly sorry for the thieves (who were never, of course, caught), imagining them making off with the vehicle and only as they sped illicitly through Camden Town being hit by the awfulness of what it contained, this realization signalled by expressions of vernacular fastidiousness such as ‘Do me a favour!’, ‘Cor, strike a light!’ or, as the scent took hold, ‘Jesus wept!’ So that when, having gone to Maiden Lane to recover some of her papers from the car, I found it bearing a Police Aware notice, I felt that it had, in this case, a heightened significance.
    I have always spelled her name Shepherd but I think the correct spelling, if an assumed name can have a correct spelling, was Sheppard, the difference, I suppose, distinguishing between the character whom I knew and the one I have written about. At one early stage, out of a courtesy which was probably even then old-fashioned, I called her Mrs Shepherd, a designation which she did not immediately correct. Nowadays, of course, such delicacy seems misplaced, and also fanciful, because if she was Mrs Shepherd there must have been a Mr Shepherd and he would be very hard to imagine.
    Miss Shepherd was solipsistic to a degree, and in her persistent refusal to take into account the concerns or feelings of anyone else except herself and her inability to see the world and what happened in it except as it affected her, she behaved more like a man than a woman. I took this undeviating selfishness to have something to do with staying alive. Gratitude, humility, forgiveness or fellow feelings were foreign to her nature or had become so over the years, but had she been otherwise she might not have survived as long as she did. She hated noise, though she made plenty, particularly when sitting in her three-wheeler on a Sunday morning revving the engine to recharge the battery. She hated children. Reluctant to have the police called when the van’s window had been broken and herself hurt, she would want the law summoning if there were children playing in the street and making what she considered too much noise or indeed any noise at all.
    She inhabited a different world from ordinary humanity, a world in which the Virgin Mary could be encountered outside the Post Office in Parkway and Mr Khruhchev higher up the street; a world in which her advice was welcomed by world leaders and the College of Cardinals took note of her opinion. Seeing herself as the centre of this world, she had great faith in the power of the individual voice, even though it could only be heard through pamphlets photocopied at Prontaprint or read on the pavement outside Williams and Glyns Bank.
    Though I never questioned Miss Shepherd on the subject, what intrigued me about the regular appearances put in by the Virgin Mary was that she seldom turned up in her traditional habiliments; no sky-blue veil for her, still less a halo. Before leaving heaven for earth the BVM always seemed to go through the dressing-up box so that she could come down as Queen Victoria, say, or dressed in what sounded very much like a sari. And not only her. One of my father’s posthumous appearances was as a Victorian statesman and an old tramp, grey-haired and not undistinguished, was confidently identified as St Joseph (though minus his donkey), just as I was taken briefly for St John.
    With their fancy dress and a good deal of gliding about, it was hard not to find Miss Shepherd’s visions comic, but they were evidence of a faith that manifestly sustained her and a component of her daily and difficult life. In one of her pamphlets she mentions the poet Francis Thompson, who was as Catholic as she was (and who lived in similar squalor). Her vision of the intermingling of this world and the next was not unlike his:
    But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
    Cry: – and upon thy so sore loss
    Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
    Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.
      
    Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
    Cry, – clinging Heaven by the hems;
    And lo, Christ walking on the water
    Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!
    It’s now ten years since Miss Shepherd died, but hearing a van door slide shut will still take me back to the time when she was in the garden. For Marcel, the narrator in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, the sound that took him back was that of the gate of his aunt’s idyllic garden; with me it’s the door of a broken- down Commer van. The discrepancy is depressing but then most writers discover quite early on that they’re not going to be Proust. Besides, I couldn’t have heard my own garden gate because in order to deaden the (to her) irritating noise Miss Shepherd had insisted on me putting a piece of chewing gum on the latch.
       
    This is the third of my plays to have been directed by Nicholas Hytner and designed by Mark Thompson and I am, as ever, greatly in their debt. Without Nicholas Hytner’s encouragement and his help with the text the play could not have been staged; he is an ideal collaborator and all any playwright could want in a director.
    I would like to thank the cast, too, for their help in shaping and animating the text, particularly, of course, Maggie Smith, who brought Miss Shepherd to the stage and whose wit, perception and sheer fun made the play a joy to do.
    A.B.
    The Lady in the Van-A Note On The Music
    A Note on the Music
    The hymn sung by the novices at the start of the play should be familiar and common to both Catholic and Anglican congregations and, if possible, Nonconformist congregations too, thus giving it the widest possible appeal. In this production we used As Pants the Hart (Tune: All Saints) partly because it was familiar but also because the notion of a chase seemed apt.
    The piano music which is repeated at various points in the play was originally intended to be Schubert’s Andante in Β Flat Major but this was perhaps too lyrical and we ended up using Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 27, Opus 90 in Ε Minor. The piano climax which ends Act One was also Beethoven, the end of Piano Sonata No. 23, Opus 57, the ‘Apassionata’.
    When Miss Shepherd is praying and the van takes on its unearthly aspect it was accompanied by faint spectral bells and when it gloriously ascends into heaven at the end of Act Two it does so to Richard Sisson’s celestial choir.
    A.B.
    The Lady in the Van-A Note On The Vehicles
    A Note on the Vehicles
    I am not sure how many vans Miss Shepherd had in the time that I knew her, but it was at least three and possibly five. In the play there are three vans, only two of which are actually seen. The first unseen vehicle is the one Miss Shepherd asks Alan Bennett to push down Albany Street at the start of the play and which she subsequently parks in his street. For the purposes of the action this is taken to be offstage left. Half-way through Act One this van is removed by the council and it is its replacement, still in its original trim that is driven on to the stage by Miss Shepherd and parked, as it were, in Alan Bennett’s garden.
    It is still there when the curtain rises on Act Two, but by now it is painted Miss Shepherd’s favourite scrambled-egg yellow. This in practical terms means that during the interval the first-act van has to be switched for an identical one painted in yellow. It is this switch which necessitates the use of a front cloth, because otherwise some element of surprise would be lost. And, of course, it’s not only that the van has been painted yellow; it’s also been festooned with odd bits of carpet and the underneath stuffed with bulging plastic bags, all of which have accumulated over the years.
    Not long into Act Two, Miss Shepherd drives her Robin Reliant on to the stage. This too is in its original trim and when she reverses it offstage it’s again notionally parked in the street offstage left, where she spends a good deal of time painting it and revving it up. This revving up, which was generally done on a Sunday morning, was intended to recharge the battery. I thought it useless as I was under the impression the wheels had to go round before the battery was charged. I said as much in the book of The Lady in the Van, and then had shoals of letters pointing out what a fool I was. So Miss Shepherd had the last laugh there too.
    The van was parked laterally across the stage with the bonnet stage centre so that facing the audience was the sliding door through which the audience got a glimpse of its festering interior. However, in the interludes when we see Miss Shepherd at prayer, which if not magical are at least unearthly, the van slowly revolved so that the bonnet was upstage and the rear doors faced the audience. These double doors then magically (and silently) opened to reveal Miss Shepherd at her devotions. I had hoped that we could have taken this magical element even further and split the van to form some kind of diptych, but if it could have been done it would have been ruinously expensive and (I tell myself) might not have worked.
    A.B.
    The Lady in the Van-The Lady In The VAN 
    THE LADY IN THE VAN
     
     The Lady in the Van was first performed at 
     The Queen’s Theatre, London, on 19 November 1999, 
     with the following cast:
       
    Miss Shepherd Maggie Smith
    Alan Bennett Nicholas Farrell
    Alan Bennett 2 Kevin McNally
    Mam Elizabeth Bradley
    Rufus Michael Culkin
    Pauline Geraldine Fitzgerald
    Social Worker Lorraine Brunning
    Underwood Michael Poole
    Mam’s Doctor/Leo Fairchild Ben Aris
    Lout/Ambulance Driver William Kettle
    Miss Shepherd’s Doctor Stephen Rashbrook
    Interviewer Jennifer Farnon
    Council workmen, Undertakers, etc. 
     William Kettle, Stephen Rashbrook, Chris Barritt, Alec Linstead
       
    Director Nicholas Hytner
    Designer Mark Thompson
    Lighting Designer Hugh Vanstone
    Sound Designer Scott Myers
    Music Composed and arranged by Richard Sisson
     
    The play is set on an open stage with scenery flown in from time to time to represent the street and the interior of the house, though not altogether naturalistically. There is a desk downstage right with a chair and a lamp and also an easy chair.
    Scenes are generally quite short and flow into one another. I have not indicated in the text where they begin and end, nor have I marked entrances and exits. Scenes occasionally begin with a slight pause (as in the social worker’s first meeting with Alan Bennett), the pause indicating that a question (which the audience knows is coming) has already been asked. One critic complained that this was a revue-style format, as if it were something I had overlooked rather than made a feature of the play’s construction. One sighs but goes on: a critic made exactly the same criticism of my first play more than thirty years ago.
    There are no doors or doorbells, so that when Miss Shepherd comes into the house or over to the desk she does not waste time by ringing the bell but walks straight in. This is a stage convention but it is not unlike Miss Shepherd’s usual behaviour when, though she had to ring the bell, she would try if she could not to linger on the doorstep (‘I can’t stand the noise. I’m a sick woman.’) but slip past me into the hall and sit on the stairs.
    Alan Bennett is played by two actors, Alan Bennett, who takes part in the action, and Alan Bennett 2, who describes and comments on it. They are dressed identically (sports coat, shirt, plain coloured tie, grey pullover and corduroy trousers with suede shoes) and though the play covers a period of twenty years during which there were some startling changes in fashion (flares, for instance), these changes are not reflected in the Alan Bennetts, who remain the same throughout. This too, I have to admit, is not just a production device but a fair reflection of the facts.
    To establish the difference in their roles Alan Bennett 2 should, to begin with at any rate, remain tethered to his desk so that his function as writer and observer is made plain. He is taken to be invisible to the other characters, nor does he talk, except to himself, as it were, and to the audience. It’s only after Miss Shepherd dies that he becomes visible to her and available for conversation, whereupon, true to form, she plays him off against his other self.
    The Lady in the Van-Act One

Act One

    A front cloth with, inset, the bay window of an early-nineteenth-century house. A hymn begins, sung by a chorus of young girls. Alan Bennett 2 looks through the window briefly then disappears. The hymn is cut off abruptly and the front cloth rises to reveal Alan Bennett 2 sitting at his desk. He reads from what he has been writing.
    A. Bennett 2 The smell is sweet, with urine only a minor component, the prevalent odour suggesting the inside of someone’s ear. Dank clothes are there too, wet wool and onions, which she eats raw, plus what for me has always been the essence of poverty, damp newspaper. Miss Shepherd’s multi-flavoured aroma is masked by a liberal application of various talcum powders, with Yardley’s Lavender always a favourite, and when she is sitting down it is this genteel fragrance that dominates, the second subject, as it were, in her odoriferous concerto. It is only when she rises that the original theme returns, the terrible primary odour now triumphantly restated and left to hang in the room long after she has departed.
    During this speech what appears to be a bundle of old coats stage left now reveals itself as Miss Shepherd, who slowly gets to her feet. She is tall and though her changes of costume will not be described in detail, she is generally dressed in an assortment of coats and headscarves but with a variety of other hats superimposed on the headscarves. Old raincoats figure, as do carpet slippers and skirts which have often been lengthened by the simple process of sewing on additional strips of material. She is about sixty-five.
    Miss Shepherd 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.
    A. Bennett 2 Having builders in the house means that I am more conscious of the situation so I determine to speak out.
    A. Bennett Miss Shepherd. There is a strong smell of urine.
    Miss Shepherd Well, what do you expect when they’re raining bricks down on me all day? And then I think I’ve got a mouse, so that would make for a cheesy smell, possibly.
    Mam, Alan Bennett’s mother, also in her sixties.
    Mam Alan. Can I ask you a question?
    A. Bennett The answer is, I’ve no idea.
    Mam You don’t know the question yet.
    A. Bennett I do know the question. The question is, where does she go to the lav?
    A. Bennett 2 Lavatories always loom large with my mother. What memory was to Proust the lavatory is to my mam.
    Mam Well, where?
    A. Bennett The answer is, I don’t know.
    Mam You don’t know, with that smell? Well, I know, and I haven’t been to Oxford. Her knickers. She does it in her britches.
    A. Bennett 2 Cut to five years earlier. I am standing by the convent in Camden Town looking up at the crucifix on the wall, trying to decide what’s odd about it. Normally when Jesus is on the cross he looks … well, relaxed. (Nothing more he can do about it, after all.) Here he looks tense, on edge … It’s as if he’s escaped through one of the barred windows and flattened himself on the cross in order to avoid the German searchlights. He’s the Christ of Colditz.
    Miss Shepherd You’re looking up at the cross. You’re not St John, are you?
    A. Bennett St John who?
    Miss Shepherd St John. The disciple whom Jesus loved.
    A. Bennett No. My name’s Bennett.
    Miss Shepherd Well, if you’re not St John I want a push for the van. It conked out, the battery possibly. I put some water in only it hasn’t done the trick.
    A. Bennett Was it distilled water?
    Miss Shepherd It was holy water so it doesn’t matter if it was distilled or not. The oil is another possibility.
    A. Bennett That’s not holy too?
    Miss Shepherd Holy oil in a van? Don’t be silly. It would be far too expensive. I want pushing to Albany Street.
    A. Bennett 2 Scarcely have I put my shoulder to the back of the van, an old Bedford, than in textbook fashion Miss Shepherd goes through her repertory of hand signals: ‘I am moving off … I am turning left’ … the movements done with such boneless grace this section of the Highway Code might have been choreographed by Balanchine with Ulanova at the wheel.
    Miss Shepherd What have we stopped for?
    A. Bennett This is Albany Street.
    Miss Shepherd The top of Albany Street. I want the bottom.
    A. Bennett That’s a mile away.
    Miss Shepherd So? You’re young. I’m in dire need of assistance. I’m a sick woman, dying possibly.
    A. Bennett It’s too far.
    Miss Shepherd You’re wicked.
    A. Bennett You thought I was St John.
    Miss Shepherd Anybody can make a mistake. I like to keep a low profile. I don’t want to take the eye of the police through being stationary on the carriageway.
    A. Bennett You can park anywhere.
    A. Bennett 2 Which you could of course in those unpenalized days.
    Miss Shepherd Where do you live?
    A. Bennett Just along the road.
    Miss Shepherd I could park there.
    A. Bennett I’ll help push you down Albany Street.
    A. Bennett 2 And out of my life, I thought. Were I a proper writer I would welcome such an encounter as constituting experience, but I have no curiosity. True, I have started noting down the odd things people say, but contact with the actual creatures themselves I keep to a minimum. Meanwhile I seem to be buying a house.
    Rufus and Pauline are neighbours.
    Rufus It’s a pretty house, smaller than ours, of course, but you’re unattached.
    A. Bennett No. It’s attached to the house next door.
    Rufus No, I meant you. You’re … single.
    A. Bennett Oh yes. Yes.
    Rufus Sickert once lived in the street, apparently; Dickens’s abandoned wife and in one of the houses I believe someone was murdered. Now it’s the usual north London medley: advertising, journalism, TV, the odd architect … Dare one ask how much?
    A. Bennett Well, there’s no back garden.
    Pauline We do have a back garden. And a front, of course.
    Rufus Quanta costa?
    A. Bennett £11,500.
    Rufus Oh my God!
    A. Bennett I know.
    Rufus Such a shame you’ve had to come in at the top of the market. And of course what I’m thinking is we’re opposite. So what is the value of our own little abode?
    Pauline (happily) Sad.
    Rufus Call me a socialist if you like, but I think that accommodation (which is what a house is, after all) ought to be within the reach of all classes in the country. I feel sorry for young people.
    Pauline I feel sorry for old people, too.
    A. Bennett At least I can fetch my car in.
    Rufus We’ve had a run-in made for ours. That will have upped the value again. Tragic.
    A. Bennett The van at the top.
    Rufus The woman? Yes, she seems to have settled outside number 42.
    A. Bennett Do they mind?
    Rufus I hope not. I like to think this is a community.
    A. Bennett 2 The woman in the van sells pamphlets. I came across her today outside Williams and Glyns Bank on the corner of Camden High Street. She’d chalked a picture of St Francis on the pavement. At least I took it to be St Francis … the cowled figure actually looked like Red Riding Hood; only one or two birds winging in for a bit of conversation gave the game away.
    Alan Bennett is reading a pamphlet and gives Miss Shepherd a coin.
    Miss Shepherd I also sell pencils. They only cost a copper but a gentleman came by the other day and said that the pencil he had bought from me was the best pencil on the market at the present time. It lasted him three months. He’ll be back for another shortly.
    A. Bennett You’re against the Common Market, I see.
    Miss Shepherd Not me. The soul in question.
    A. Bennett You’re not the writer?
    Miss Shepherd Not necessarily. I’ll go so far as to say this. They are anonymous. And they are a shilling. You only gave me a sixpence.
    A. Bennett It says in the pamphlet St Francis hurled money from him.
    Miss Shepherd Yes, but he was a saint. He could afford to.
    A. Bennett 2 (taking pamphlet) Can I have that?
    A. Bennett Why? Are you going to save it?
    A. Bennett 2 It might come in handy.
    Pauline Can you watch the house? Keys are in here. (She gives Alan Bennett an envelope) I hear madam’s been given the push from 42. She’s getting nearer. Outside number 70 now. Still, they’ve got a son at Bedales and the daughter’s a cello-fanatic; they’ll probably like her.
    A. Bennett Mrs Vaughan-Williams says her name is Shepherd. Been a nun at some point.
    Pauline Can you watch the house? We’re off to foreign parts. France.
    A. Bennett I didn’t know you could be an ex-nun. I thought once you’d signed on it was quite hard to kick the habit. Anywhere in particular? In France?
    Pauline No. We just let the trusty Volvo follow its nose. Wayfarers all!
    A. Bennett 2 My mother is on the phone.
    Mam I wish I was good.
    A. Bennett You are good.
    Mam No, the way other people are good.
    A. Bennett Where are you sitting?
    Mam On a chair in the passage.
    A. Bennett 2 That’s how her depressions always start, sitting on an unaccustomed chair. The doctor’s put her on tablets.
    A. Bennett They won’t work. They never do.
    Alan Bennett 2 is paying no attention, but looking up the street.
    We’re on the hospital trail again.
    Sound of the van starting up.
    Oh God, she’s on the move.
    A. Bennett 2 And out comes the undulating greasy- raincoated arm to indicate ‘I am moving off.’
    A. Bennett Whose turn will it be now?
    A. Bennett 2 Mrs Vaughan-Williams?
    A. Bennett No. Not the Birts?
    A. Bennett 2 58?
    A. Bennett No.
    A. Bennett 2 ‘I am coming to a halt.’
    A. Bennett No! Not there. She can’t park there. What will I tell them? I’m supposed to be watching the house.
    Miss Shepherd I want a ruler. A tape measure would do. I must measure the distance between the tyres and the kerb.
    A. Bennett What for?
    Miss Shepherd One and a half inches is the ideal gap. There needs to be proper circulation of air or decay might set in. I came across it once in a Catholic motoring magazine under tips on Christian parking. The tyres are sacred tyres. They haven’t been pumped up since 1964. Still, that doesn’t mean one should dispense with the necessary precautions.
    A. Bennett I’m not sure you should park there at all. They’re away in France.
    Miss Shepherd On pilgrimage?
    A. Bennett No.
    Miss Shepherd I went on pilgrimage once, not long after the war. Slept on the floor in a church hall.
    A. Bennett You didn’t stay long outside number 50.
    Miss Shepherd Because it was non-stop music. I had to ring the bell. The daughter said something about her Α-levels. I said it’s the noise levels I’m worried about. I’d seen him with an umbrella, I thought they were a nice family.
    A. Bennett 2 Ask her. Ask her how long she’s been in the van.
    A. Bennett How long have you been living in the van?
    Miss Shepherd Who says I live there? I may spend the night there on occasion but it’s only a pied-à-terre.
    A. Bennett Where do you live?
    Miss Shepherd I got it to put my things in, though don’t spread that around. I came down from St Albans and plan to go back there in due course. I’m just pedalling water at the moment but I’ve always been in the transport line. I drove ambulances in the war. I’ve got good topography. I knew Kensington in the blackout. Mr Bennett. They’re not musical, are they?
    A. Bennett Who?
    Miss Shepherd Opposite. 62.
    A. Bennett No. Though they go to the opera. What happened to Hello? Goodbye?
    A. Bennett 2 Well, She’s ‘a sick woman, dying possibly’.
    A. Bennett I was out when she moved down. I came back and there she was. Do you mind?
    Rufus Mind? My dear man! Why should we mind? We can only be grateful you didn’t land us with squatters. Ha ha.
    Alan Bennett goes.
    Pauline People have to live somewhere.
    Rufus Not outside our gate.
    Pauline We can’t move her on.
    Rufus Why? Everyone else has.
    Pauline She’s as much right to be here as we have.
    Rufus No she hasn’t. Still, I suppose we shan’t be here for ever. I see this as just the first rung on the ladder.
    Pauline Alan says she’s apparently trying to get back to St Albans. It’s like that man in The Caretaker, trying to get back to Sidcup.
    Rufus What caretaker?
    Pauline Pinter. He’s trying to get back to Sidcup. She’s trying to get back to St Albans.
    Rufus Well, maybe she could park outside his house?
    Pauline Who?
    Rufus Pinter.
    A. Bennett 2 I can’t work. And the van doesn’t help. When I can’t work I watch her.
    A. Bennett So write it down.
    A. Bennett 2 No. I write about one old woman as it is. Mam. The last thing I want to do is write about another. Besides, tramps these days need to be taken with a pinch of salt. Godot has a lot to answer for. With their gnomic wisdom and obligatory truth-telling, the vagabond these days is rather overdone, the threadbare somewhat threadbare.
    Interviewer What was your first play about?
    A. Bennett Public school.
    Interviewer But you didn’t go to public school.
    A. Bennett No, but I read about it.
    Interviewer And what’s your next play about?
    A. Bennett Sex. I read about that too.
    Interviewer Do you like living on your own?
    A. Bennett It’s always women who put that question. Men don’t even bother to ask.
    Interviewer Have you never lived with anybody?
    A. Bennett My parents.
    A. Bennett 2 This is 1971, when the ramparts of privacy were more impregnable than they are now. So this ‘anybody’ I have never lived with remains unsexed, a shadowy figure with the focus never sharp enough to reveal whether it is decked out in trousers or frock.
    A. Bennett I doubt that the house will ever ring with the sound of childish laughter. Other than mine, of course.
    Interviewer Oh, incidentally, does someone actually live in that van across the street? I saw a woman getting in.
    A. Bennett What van? (Looks) I don’t know. I’ve never noticed it before.
    She’s a journalist. She’d only have written about her. I thought you were wanting to do that.
    A. Bennett 2 No fear.
    A. Bennett You make notes.
    A. Bennett 2 Only as a diary. And on the Everest principle. She’s there.
    Lights change and suddenly all hell breaks loose. A man is banging on the side of the van offstage.
    A. Bennett (calling) Yes? Can I help you?
    Man (coming in) No. Why?
    A. Bennett What the fuck do you think you’re doing? An old lady lives there.
    Man I know that. What do you think I’m banging for? I want to have a look at her, don’t I?
    A. Bennett Why?
    Man Why not? You still on the telly then? You’re nervous. You’re trembling all over. Fucking cunt.
    He goes as Miss Shepherd appears, but not from the direction of the van.
    A. Bennett I thought you were in the van.
    Miss Shepherd No, I was in the terrace, on the pavement. The air’s better there.
    A. Bennett Somebody’s been banging on the side of the van.
    Miss Shepherd Oh yes? What did he want?
    A. Bennett I don’t know what he wanted. Thumping, probably.
    Miss Shepherd He wasn’t a Catholic gentleman of refined appearance?
    A. Bennett No. He was a lout.
    Miss Shepherd He may have been wanting a pencil. Or a pamphlet possibly. When you provide a service you do get these callers.
    A. Bennett Miss Shepherd. This was a hooligan.
    Miss Shepherd Some people might say I was a tramp. It’s just want of perception. You rub people up the wrong way. You should be like me, take people as they come.
    Alan Bennett goes as a woman appears carrying a bag of clothes.
    Social Worker Miss Shepherd. I’m Jane, the social worker.
    Miss Shepherd I don’t want the social worker. I’m about to listen to Any Answers.
    Social Worker I’ve brought you some clothes. You wrote asking for a coat.
    Miss Shepherd Not during Any Answers. I’m a busy woman. I only asked for one coat.
    Social Worker I brought three, in the event you fancied a change.
    Miss Shepherd Where am I supposed to put three coats? Besides, I was planning on washing this coat in the not too distant future, so that makes four. My wardrobe’s driving me mad.
    Social Worker This is my old nursing mac.
    Miss Shepherd I have a mac. Besides, green isn’t my colour. Have you got a stick?
    Social Worker The council have that in hand. It’s been precepted for.
    Miss Shepherd Will it be long enough?
    Social Worker Yes. It’s one of our special sticks.
    Miss Shepherd I don’t want a special stick. I want an ordinary stick. Only longer. Does it have one of those rubber things on it?
    Social Worker I imagine so.
    Miss Shepherd It has to have a rubber thing. It’s no earthly use to me without the rubber thing, as you’d know if you weren’t so young. I hope you’re bona fide. You have a look of someone foreign.
    Social Worker I’m just new. Is it all right if I call from time to time?
    Miss Shepherd Not during Any Answers. And Petticoat Line is another programme I tune in for. They’ll sometimes have discussion on the Common Market from a woman’s point of view.
    Social Worker If I should want to get in touch with you whom should I call?
    Miss Shepherd I don’t want to be got in touch with.
    Social Worker There must be someone.
    Miss Shepherd You can try Mr Bennett, only don’t take any notice of what he says. He’s a communist, possibly.
    A. Bennett Me? Did you ask the people opposite? They’re nearer.
    Social Worker They said they didn’t relate to her. You were the one she related to.
    A Bennett Is that what they said … ‘related to’?
    Social Worker No. That’s me. They said you were her pal. She was your girlfriend. They didn’t mean that, obviously.
    A. Bennett No.
    She seemed very understanding, the social worker.
    Miss Shepherd Not understanding enough. I ask for a wheelchair and what does she get me? A walking stick. It doesn’t matter. I may be going soon.
    A. Bennett Where to?
    Miss Shepherd Bodmin possibly. Or Hounslow. I’m undecided. Mr Bennett. I saw a snake this afternoon. It was coming up Parkway. It was a long grey snake, a boa constrictor possibly; it looked poisonous. It was keeping close to the wall and seemed to know the way. It looked as if it might be heading for the van. Mr Bennett – I thought I’d better tell you, just to be on the safe side. I’ve had some close shaves with snakes.
    A. Bennett 2 I do not believe in the snake, let alone the purposeful glint in its eye, but I do not say so, and when I find the next day that there has been a break-in at the pet shop in Parkway so there may have been a snake on the run, I feel some remorse.
    Visiting my mother, I find her depression has deepened, bringing with it delusions.
    Mam Alan.
    A. Bennett What?
    Mam Come down here.
    A. Bennett What for?
    Mam There’s some massive birds on the wall.
    A. Bennett There never are. There’s nothing on the wall. You’re imagining things.
    Mam There are. There are.
    A. Bennett 2 And there were, lined up on the garden wall, four peacocks from the hall. So, boa constrictors in the street, peacocks on the wall, it seems that both at the northern and southern gates of my life stands a deluded woman.
    A. Bennett Except you just said they aren’t.
    A. Bennett 2 Aren’t what?
    A. Bennett Deluded.
    A. Bennett 2 Well, not in this particular instance.
    A. Bennett And they’re not the same, Mam and Miss Shepherd.
    A. Bennett 2 No, Alan, they are not. But they are both old ladies. So who better fearlessly to chronicle their intrepid lives than me? That appears to be my niche, apparently. Old ladies are my bread and butter.
    Night and the sound of breaking glass. Two young men run on swearing with Miss Shepherd in pursuit. They run off.
    Miss Shepherd It was two young men. They may have been the worse for drink, by mistake. That does occur through not having eaten, possibly. I don’t want a case
    A. Bennett But your cheek’s cut. I ought to call the police.
    Miss Shepherd No, I don’t want that. I don’t want the police.
    A. Bennett Are you sure? You’re bleeding.
    Miss Shepherd I had a curry last week from the Taj Mahal and there’s a bit of onion left. If I put it on in poultice form that should do the trick. Have you heard anything of Mr Khrushchev recently?
    A. Bennett No.
    Miss Shepherd He hasn’t disappeared from Russia?
    A. Bennett I don’t think so. Why?
    Miss Shepherd I saw him in Parkway this afternoon, him and another feller, a bit on the ginger side with braces. I’m wondering if he’s been kidnapped. Perhaps you could just telephone the police, tell them about the windows then in passing as it were, I could steer it round to Mr Khrushchev.
    A. Bennett Let’s leave it, shall we?
    Miss Shepherd You were all for calling the police a minute or two ago and now you’ve gone off it. Do you know what your trouble is? You can’t make up your mind.
    Pauline You should have called the police.
    A. Bennett Why? They’re no better. I woke up at five the other morning and there’s two of them idly shining their torches in the windows, hoping she’ll wake up and enliven a dull hour of their beat.
    Rufus I’d like to shove red-hot knitting needles up their nostrils.
    Pauline The police?
    Rufus The louts. I just wish our caring Camden Council would find her a flat.
    A. Bennett They will, only they say if she keeps it like she does the van the other tenants would treat her worse than here.
    Rufus Ergo we should be nastier still. Joke. No. Sorry.
    Pauline It’s funny, though, we heard nothing. And she’s outside our house. She’s only opposite yours. But then you know us. We’re so relaxed. Laid back.
    Rufus Yes. You know us. We just do our own thing.
    A. Bennett I see her. You don’t.
    A workmen’s truck passes every morning about seven. It always slows down so the driver can bang on her window. Why?
    A. Bennett 2 I’ll tell you why. Because people are shits, that’s why.
    A. Bennett I wish she’d go.
    A. Bennett 2 Yes. But not yet.
    Miss Shepherd Mr Bennett, could you type me out a letter? It’s to the College of Cardinals. I was going to phone Mother Teresa but the woman at Directory Enquiries said she drew a blank. To the College of Cardinals, Rome. Your Eminences. Now it is coming up to the Papal election I would like to suggest that an older and taller Pope might be admirable (taller underlined), height counting towards knowledge too, probably.
    Might I humbly suggest that at the Papal Coronation there could be a not so heavy crown, of light plastic possibly, or cardboard, for instance? I went to Tunbridge Wells yesterday.
    A. Bennett Why Tunbridge Wells?
    Miss Shepherd I was told the air was better there. Only I got myself arrested. It was my clothes that did it. I was on the station and the policeman thought I was wearing a nightie. I don’t think this style can have got to Tunbridge Wells yet. Mr Bennett, une autre chose. Je crois que vous étiez en vacances en France.
    A. Bennett Yes. Er, oui.
    Miss Shepherd J’ai étudié en France il y a trente-cinq ans.
    A. Bennett Really? Vraiment?
    A. Bennett 2 You better ask her what. Qu’est ce qu’elle étudiait?
    A. Bennett Qu’est ce que vous étudiez? 		 		
    Miss Shepherd J’étudiais … What do you want to know for?
    A. Bennett 2 Because it’s interesting.
    A. Bennett Je m’intéresse.
    Miss Shepherd J’étais à Paris. 		
    A. Bennett Avant la guerre?
    Miss Shepherd What guerre?  		 		 	
    A. Bennett La guerre mondiale numéro deux.
    Miss Shepherd Oui. La deuxième guerre mondiale.
    A. Bennett Qu’est ce que vous étudiez?  		 		 		 		 	
    Miss Shepherd There you go again. I was studying incognito.
    A. Bennett But what? What were you studying?
    Miss Shepherd Music. The pianoforte, possibly. Have you got an old pan scrub? I’m thinking of painting the van. One of those little mop things they use to wash dishes with would do.
    A. Bennett How about a brush?
    Miss Shepherd I’ve got a brush. This is for the first coat.
    A. Bennett 2 She moves slowly round her mobile home thoughtfully touching up the rust patches, looking in her long dress and sun hat much as Vanessa Bell would have looked had she gone in for painting Bedford vans.
    A. Bennett What kind of paint are you using?
    Miss Shepherd The shade is crushed mimosa.
    A. Bennett But it’s gloss paint. You want car enamel.
    Miss Shepherd Don’t tell me about paint. I was in the infants’ school. I won a prize for painting.
    A. Bennett But it’s all lumps. You’ve got to mix it.
    Miss Shepherd I have mixed it, only I went and got some Madeira cake in it.
    A. Bennett 2 Cake or no cake, all Miss Shepherd’s vehicles ended up looking as if they’d been given a coat of badly made custard or plastered with scrambled egg. Still, there were few occasions on which one saw her genuinely happy and one of these was when she was putting paint on, which she applied as Monet might have done … and in much the same tones … standing back to judge the effect of each brush stroke.
    Alan Bennett is listening to some piano music.
    Miss Shepherd Stop the music. Stop it this minute.
    A. Bennett Why? What do you want?
    Miss Shepherd You’ve been away.
    A. Bennett Yes. In Yorkshire.
    A. Bennett Miss Shepherd, what is it?
    Miss Shepherd What is it? Yellow lines. In the street. They wanted me to shift the van so that they could make the lines continuous and I said I was disabled. Which I am. So now they’ve put the yellow lines as far as the van and started them the other side.
    A. Bennett So it’s still legally parked.
    Miss Shepherd For the moment. Only now they’ve put a removal order under the wiper.
    A. Bennett You could always drive on. Go somewhere else.
    Miss Shepherd There may not be enough juice.
    A. Bennett I can get you some up the road.
    Miss Shepherd I don’t like their petrol. Besides, there may be another problem.
    A. Bennett What problem?
    Miss Shepherd Some years ago I saw this recipe for petrol substitute in a church magazine. It was a spoonful of petrol, a gallon of water plus a pinch of something you could buy in every high street. Well, I got it into my head this was bicarbonate of soda. Only I may have remembered it wrong.
    A. Bennett And you put it in the van? Bicarbonate of soda?
    Miss Shepherd The recipe may have said sodium nitrate but the man in Boots wouldn’t sell me that as it can cause explosions.
    A. Bennett So that’s what’s in the van now … a spoonful of petrol, a gallon of water and a pinch of bicarbonate of soda?
    Miss Shepherd It might go. It might just need a bit of coaxing. In the meantime I want you to write to the council asking for special consideration re parking arrangements. Say you’re going to expose it on the BBC. Because I am disabled. People see me walking about perfectly normally but that’s because I am making a superhuman effort. Other people who don’t make the effort just flop into a wheelchair and their loved ones are foolish enough to push them. What I’m worried about particularly are the wheels. They’re under divine protection. If I do get this other vehicle I’d like the wheels transferred.
    She has two plastic sacks.
    A. Bennett Miss Shepherd. What other vehicle? (To Alan Bennett 2) Another vehicle!
    Miss Shepherd They may be miraculous, the tyres. They’ve only had to be pumped up once since 1964.
    A. Bennett Miss Shepherd. What ‘other vehicle’?
    Miss Shepherd They only cost me a fiver.
    A. Bennett Miss Shepherd, you said about another vehicle.
    Miss Shepherd A van.
    A. Bennett Another van?
    Miss Shepherd A titled Catholic lady in the terrace says she may get me one as an act of charity. It’s Lady Wiggin only she’d prefer to remain anonymous.
    A. Bennett I bet she would. Will she let you park outside her house?
    Miss Shepherd No. She was very specific about that. Meanwhile I thought I’d just give you some of my belongings to keep, just to be on the safe side.
    A. Bennett So where will you go in this new vehicle?
    Miss Shepherd I haven’t decided. I’ve got one or two irons in the fire. I may not go anywhere, though Dunstable is one option. I should have the freedom of the land for the pamphlets I’ve sold on the economy. The least I should have is residents’ parking. Of course, even if I did have residents’ parking and kept it in the street I’m liable to be attacked again. That would be the worry, possibly. Coming ringing your bell all the time. You never know what’s going to happen. What I need is off-street parking.
    A. Bennett So what are you going to do?
    Miss Shepherd Play it by ear.
    A. Bennett 2 The question now arises: how did she end up in the garden?
    A. Bennett Simple. You invited her.
    A. Bennett 2 Me? 		 		 		 	 	
    A. Bennett On what you called ‘the cork-lined room principle’. Her being attacked on the street all the time jeopardized your peace of mind so you couldn’t work. That’s what you said. I just thought you wanted something to write about.
    A. Bennett 2 I never wanted to write about her. ‘Oh, another old lady. Right up your street!’ Her coming into the garden was a question of will. It was what she wanted all along and you found it easier to say yes than no.
    A. Bennett People could say that was kind.
    A. Bennett 2 Kind is so tame. Come on, help me. Couldn’t it be anger? Social conscience? Guilt!
    A. Bennett No.
    A. Bennett 2 Well, whatever it might be let us be plain about one thing: it can’t be just being nice. Nice is dull.
    A. Bennett Yes. And anyway I’m not nice.
    Rufus You are a saint.
    Pauline An angel.
    Rufus Who else would do it?
    Pauline Well, we might.
    A. Bennett It’s not permanent.
    Rufus No, no, no.
    A. Bennett It’s only until she decides where she’s going to go. Three months at the outside.
    Rufus Quite. The open road. The distant highway. I can’t see her staying long.
    Pauline And it’s not as if your garden is much of a feature.
    A. Bennett It’s a wild garden.
    Pauline Of course it is. Darling. (She kisses him) She’ll be so grateful.
    Pause. 		
    Miss Shepherd Put it in your garden? I don’t know. It might not be convenient.
    A. Bennett No. I’ve thought it over. Believe me, Miss Shepherd. It’s all right
    Miss Shepherd Not convenient for you. Convenient for me. I may have other plans. Besides, the air may not be suitable.
    A. Bennett The air?
    Miss Shepherd There’s a lot of ivy in your garden. Ivy’s poison. I shall have to think about it. You’re not doing me a favour, you know. I’ve got other fish to fry. A man on the pavement told me that if I went south of the river I’d be welcomed with open arms.
    A. Bennett 2 I was to learn that to reject favours when offered was always Miss Shepherd’s way. Time had to pass to erase any sense of obligation or gratitude, so that when eventually she did avail herself of the offer and bring the van in the feeling was that she had done me the favour. One laughs, but international diplomacy proceeds along much the same lines. So for a while, the yellow lines still ending at the van and starting the other side, I waited.
    A workman brings on a wheelbarrow of manure.
    Miss Shepherd Mr Bennett. What is the manure doing?
    A. Bennett I got it for the garden.
    Miss Shepherd Well, could you move it or put up a notice saying that the smell is the manure. When I bring the van into the garden people may think the smell is me.
    A. Bennett So you’ve decided to bring it in?
    Miss Shepherd I hope I shall have enough room.
    A. Bennett What for?
    Miss Shepherd My things. I shall have to put some bags under it, clothes and suchlike, probably. If you don’t want all the bags lying about, you could get a tent.
    A. Bennett A tent?
    Miss Shepherd It need only be three foot high and by rights it ought to be erected in a meadow, only it would go by the van. Then there are these shatter-proof greenhouses.
    A. Bennett Miss Shepherd. It’s only a tiny garden. You’re only going to be here for a month or two.
    Miss Shepherd Or something could be done with old raincoats, possibly.
    A. Bennett 2 Gradually Miss Shepherd evacuates her belongings from the old van until, an empty windowless shell, the council tows it away. And on that same morning, invested by her anonymous donor, Lady Wiggin, with the keys and logbook of her new and as yet unpainted vehicle and once again employing her full repertoire of hand signals, Miss Shepherd drives it into the garden.
    Miss Shepherd slowly drives the van over the brow of the hill down to its position on the stage. Having come to a halt, the van begins to roll forward.
    A. Bennett Have you put on the handbrake?
    Miss Shepherd I am about to do so.
    A. Bennett 2 Whereupon she applies the handbrake with such determination that, like Excalibur, it can never afterwards be released.
    Pause. Night.
    Sometimes when the light is on I get a glimpse of Miss Shepherd praying, and it is seldom a tranquil or a meditative process. The posture of her prayers is more Muslim than Christian. She sits on her haunches, her head bent forward almost touching her knees, the fervour of her intercessions rocking her to and fro. And she prays as combatively as she talks, banging her fist into her hand, mouthing fierce words, God, I feel, as much on the receiving end as I am.
    Miss Shepherd The soul in question did not witness the incident, though there was hearing of it and seeing of the bodywork. The word accident was mentioned in a local newspaper, allegedly fatal, and a felony committed possibly, but towards the end of Holy Year 1950 I went to Rome on pilgrimage where I was told by an elderly priest of my acquaintance who has since died that a plenary indulgence does cover traffic matters, possibly, though a policeman may not always think it applies, through ignorance possibly.
    Light begins to grow, illuminating the van, making it magical and transparent.
    Ο Virgo Fidelis, first leader of all creatures, may evil draw back before thee. I hunger and thirst for the fulfilment of a just era and utterly trust in possible light received, subject always to the Roman Catholic Church in her rights and to amendment.
    The light fades.
        As it does we become aware of a dilapidated figure, tall, thin, trousers well above the ankles, shabby overcoat, Homburg hat and umbrella.
        For all his slipshod appearance, there is something both genteel and sinister about him.
        He inspects the van, peering in at the windows.
    Underwood Lady. (He taps lightly on the side of the van.) Lady. Are you there, lady? I like the new vehicle. A real spanker. Not a mark on it. Particularly as regards the bodywork. That’s clever, Margaret. That’s very clever. (He gives the van a great bang.) Not a fucking scratch. Are you saying your prayers still? How’s the piano?
    A. Bennett Can I help you?
    Underwood Good evening to you, sir. Finding myself in the vicinity, I am taking this opportunity to pay my compliments to Margaret.
    A. Bennett Margaret?
    Underwood I’ve been out of the game for a while … you know how it is.
    A. Bennett Miss Shepherd?
    Underwood Shepherd, is it?
    A. Bennett (tapping on van) Miss Shepherd!
    Underwood Shepherd. Very good.
    A. Bennett She’s not there.
    Underwood Of course. This isn’t the van, is it?
    A. Bennett She had another one.
    Underwood Very sensible. Very good. Very good. I will
    bid you good night then, sir. I will call again when my schedule permits. Good night, Margaret.
    A. Bennett She’s not there.
    Underwood goes and Alan Bennett goes back inside. 
        There is a pause. 
        Miss Shepherd appears from the van. She looks after the departing man and raises her stick. She stands threatening there with her stick raised as the light gradually comes back, revealing Mam standing with Alan Bennett watching her.
    A. Bennett 2 She’ll be wanting to move in next, said my mother.
    Mam I got a whiff of her when I came in. It’s a right nasty bad dishcloth smell. Well, she’s in the garden. Next it’ll be the house. What will folk think?
    A. Bennett This is London. Nobody thinks anything.
    Mam An educated woman and living like that. Mind you, you’re going down the same road.
    A. Bennett Me?
    Mam No cloth on the table. No holder for the toilet roll. Given time I could have this place spotless.
    A. Bennett You’ve got a home. You wouldn’t want to live here.
    A. Bennett 2 Yes, she would.
    Mam Where does she go to the lav?
    A. Bennett It’s something to do with plastic bags.
    Mam What sort of plastic bags?
    A. Bennett Stout ones, I hope. Do you want to meet her?
    Mam No. With her being educated I shouldn’t know what to say. Give us a kiss. When will you be coming up next?
    A. Bennett Soon.
    Mam Soon. The thing is, I keep seeing a car in the car park.
    A. Bennett That’s slightly to be expected, isn’t it?
    Mam At night. Watching.
    A. Bennett Are you taking your tablets?
    A. Bennett I told you.
    Mam Looked after. A place where they’ll wash her and make her presentable. I’m surprised they let her roam the streets.
    A. Bennett 2 It’s like a fairy story, a parable in which the guilty is gulled into devising a sentence for someone innocent, only to find it is their own doom they have pronounced. Because my mother is much closer to being put in a home than Miss Shepherd.
    Mam I do miss your Dad. Give us a kiss. I asked our Gordon when he was a pilot did he go behind the clouds?
    A. Bennett And did he?
    Mam I forget.
    Miss Shepherd Mr Bennett. I’ve worked out a way of getting on the wireless. You ask the BBC to give me one of those phone-in programmes, something someone like you could get put on in a jiffy, then I could come into your house and take the calls in 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.
    A. Bennett What song is that?
    He manages to slip a newspaper under Miss Shepherd before she sits down.
    Miss Shepherd It’s a lovely song called ‘The End of the World’. I won’t commit myself to singing it, not at this moment, but I probably would.
    A. Bennett 2 Miss Shepherd is not to know this, but Peter Cook had had a song called ‘The End of the World’. In 1960 I had thought it silly and fanciful but it had ended up as the finale of Beyond the Fringe. Now here it is in life, sung by a creature who makes Peter’s wittering park-bench philosophy seem like sober realism. Nor did the similarity end there.
    Miss Shepherd Oh, Mr Bennett.
    A. Bennett 2 At one point a toad had found its way into the van and a slug.
    Miss Shepherd I think that toad may be in love with the slug. I tried to turn it out and it got very disturbed. I thought at one point it was going to go for me. This phone-in programme, 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. I see the curtain as being here, possibly. Some greeny material would do.
    A. Bennett I thought this was a phone-in.
    Miss Shepherd Well?
    A. Bennett It’s radio. There’s no need for a curtain at all.
    Miss Shepherd Yes, well, we can iron out these hiccups when the time comes. I used to listen to Woman’s Hour only now it’s nothing but birth control. I could live behind the curtain and do my broadcasts and the rest of the time be a guest at your television and take in some civilization.
    A. Bennett 2 Live?
    A. Bennett Live?
    Miss Shepherd Perhaps there could be gaps in between the talking and they could have quiet classical music. Once upon a time I could have reeled you off some though Liebestraum comes to mind. Liszt. I believe he was a Catholic priest.
    A. Bennett Miss Shepherd. Live? Here?
    Miss Shepherd Liebestraum 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 to celibates like us, possibly.
    A. Bennett 2 Us?
    He mimes disgust. 		
    Miss Shepherd Oh and Mr Bennett, in case I’m attacked again I’ve got this new alarm system.
    She sounds a very faint and squeaky horn.
    A. Bennett I shall never hear that.
    Miss Shepherd You will. It’s like bats, possibly. Once you’ve heard it a couple of times your ear will get attuned to it.
    A. Bennett Why is it that both the elderly women in my life want to move in on me?
    A. Bennett 2 They don’t like the single life, women. You see, Alan, one of the functions of women is to bring an element of trouble into the otherwise tranquil lives of men. And this is true even of a woman so far fallen from the concerns and competences of the gender as our friend here. Who, frustrated in her ambition to become the Isobel Barnett of her day, now falls back on a political career.
    Miss Shepherd Mr Bennett. When I’m elected Prime Minister, would I have to move into Downing Street or could I run things from the van?
    A. Bennett I believe Downing Street is customary.
    Miss Shepherd I could park it outside, I suppose. Does Downing Street have parking restrictions?
    A. Bennett I imagine so, but if you’re Prime Minister I would think an arrangement could be made.
    Miss Shepherd They’d provide me with secretarial help? I couldn’t write all the letters myself.
    A. Bennett There are secretaries, I’m sure.
    Miss Shepherd I don’t want them in the van. I can’t be providing room for secretaries. They could crouch outside, I suppose. Or just stand by the window. You do.
    A. Bennett Yes.
    Miss Shepherd Mr Bennett.
    A. Bennett Yes?
    Miss Shepherd This political party I’m founding. Will you join?
    A. Bennett Is it left or right?
    Miss Shepherd It’s not left. It’s definitely not left. I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag too soon about what it stands for in case the other parties pinch the policy.
    A. Bennett What is the policy?
    Miss Shepherd I’ll tell you so long as you keep it under your hat. Justice.
    A. Bennett Is that it?
    Miss Shepherd What more do you want? Everybody wants justice.
    A. Bennett But nothing more specific?
    Miss Shepherd Stopping noise is an adamant priority. Fidelis Party, Servants of Justice would jump heavily on drivers making a noise in the evening. Laws re inebriation is another plank of our policy and the able- bodied young called to lessen their occupation with non- mattering things. Plus – and this is crucial – plus the provision of electric chairs.
    A. Bennett Capital punishment?
    Miss Shepherd No … well, yes, but what I mean are those electric chair things that some old people have to run about it. I want one.
    A. Bennett Who’s going to be in it, the party, what’s it called?
    Miss Shepherd Fidelis Party, Servants of Justice. Everybody, once they know what it’s for.
    A. Bennett But you won’t tell them what it’s for.
    Miss Shepherd I will in due course. It’s such a vote-catcher I have to be careful.
    A. Bennett Who are the founder members?
    Miss Shepherd You are for one. Then there are one or two elderly nuns I know. There’s Mrs Vaughan-Williams up the street. There’s the man where I buy my batteries, possibly. He’s always very civil. And the gentleman who used to come to me for pencils, though I haven’t seen him lately. I hope he’s not dead. He may just have gone over to biros.
    Night and piano music is playing, though not especially loudly. Suddenly Miss Shepherd erupts from the van.
    Mr Bennett. Mr Bennett. Stop that. Stop that this minute.
    A. Bennett Stop what?
    Miss Shepherd This. The music. I’m a sick woman.
    A. Bennett Why? It’s not loud. You can hardly hear it.
    Miss Shepherd I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear it at all.
    A. Bennett Well, tough, because I do.
    Miss Shepherd Taking you along, turning you over. No.
    A. Bennett Don’t you like music?
    Miss Shepherd What’s that got to do with anything, what I like? Turn it off.
    A. Bennett I thought the Virgin Mary liked music.
    Miss Shepherd Not played at that pitch. Besides, I’ve got work to do. I’m preparing my manifesto. Mr Bennett, you know you said I wouldn’t be able to get nomination papers at the Town Hall.
    A. Bennett I didn’t say you wouldn’t be able to get them, I said there might be a problem.
    Miss Shepherd Mr Bennett.
    A. Bennett Yes?
    Miss Shepherd There wasn’t a problem. You always say there’s going to be a problem and there never is a problem.
    A. Bennett 2 This is true. Miss Shepherd is always mysteriously effective in dealing with officials. Every year she manages to persuade the Post Office to renew her vehicle licence, for instance, though she has no insurance and never submits it for MOT. This success with officials I put down either to her persistence or to their good nature. She puts it down to the intervention of the Holy Ghost. In fact it is none of these. It is the smell. One whiff and anyone with whom she is dealing falls over themselves in order to accommodate her the more speedily to be rid of her and the attendant aroma.
    Miss Shepherd Mr Bennett, did you get any more signatures for my nomination?
    A. Bennett I’m afraid I didn’t.
    Miss Shepherd Well, don’t bother. I ran into the Virgin again this afternoon. She was standing outside the Post Office in Parkway. She said three words. Watch and pray
    A. Bennett You weren’t waiting for a bus, were you?
    Miss Shepherd What she was meaning is that we should call off the election campaign for Fidelis Party.
    A. Bennett Why?
    Miss Shepherd It may be Mrs Thatcher is turning outbetter than the Virgin expected. She has a low, quiet voice.
    A. Bennett Mrs Thatcher?
    Miss Shepherd The Virgin.
    A. Bennett 2 Leading from the front, Mrs Thatcher is of course in the van too, and one in my view just as full of garbage as the other. Though the far-fetched notion of a van parked in Downing Street with cabinet ministers meekly queuing at the window for instructions from a wayward and ill-tempered woman would come in the course of the eighties to seem not unrelated to the truth.
    Night.
    Underwood Still here, I see, lady.
    The lights of the van instantly go out.
    What’s your name now, Margaret?
    Miss Shepherd My name’s Mary. Go away.
    Underwood Mary is it now? Mary what?
    Pause.
    Mary what?
    He gives a great bang on the side of the van.
    Miss Shepherd I’ll call the police.
    Underwood You’ve changed your tune, you two-faced pisshole. Because my understanding was that calling the police is just what you didn’t do. Apropos of which I think, madam, another contribution is due. Pay up.
    He gives the van another bang. Miss Shepherd starts squeezing her little motor horn. It’s a pathetic noise.
    What the fuck’s that?
    Miss Shepherd I’m alerting the home-owner.
    Alan Bennett comes out.
    A. Bennett What’s going on? … Good evening.
    Underwood Good evening to you, sir.
    A. Bennett What’s all this din?
    Underwood No din, sir. Margaret and I were just taking a stroll down memory lane.
    A. Bennett You came before once.
    Underwood I may have done, sir. I may have done. I had probably been attending one of my places of worship.
    Miss Shepherd He was banging.
    Underwood It’s so seldom one gets to the metropolis. One spends one’s time making the round of one’s acquaintances. Checking which are still, as it were, at their posts. Like Margaret here.
    Miss Shepherd Don’t Margaret me. That name is buried to sin.
    Underwood Friends need to be periodically reminded that one is still extant. Mending fences, as I believe it’s called.
    Miss Shepherd Not by banging. He was banging.
    Underwood A thankless soul. And not over-salubrious. To be quite honest, I don’t know how you can stand the Susie Wong.
    He raises his hat in farewell and goes.
    A. Bennett I thought your name was Mary.
    Miss Shepherd It is.
    A. Bennett Why does he call you Margaret?
    Miss Shepherd He’s taken too much to drink, on an empty stomach, possibly.
    A. Bennett Because I put Mary on the census form. And Shepherd. That’s right, isn’t it?
    Miss Shepherd Yes, yes.
    A. Bennett Mary Shepherd?
    Miss Shepherd Subject to the Roman Catholic Church in her rights and to amendment, yes. Mr Bennett. The alarm.
    A. Bennett What about it?
    Miss Shepherd You said you wouldn’t hear it. You did hear it.
    A. Bennett Yes.
    She sounds it again as Alan Bennett is going inside.
    Miss Shepherd Mr Bennett.
    A. Bennett What?
    Miss Shepherd There isn’t a Susie Wong.
    It’s this manure they keep delivering. That’s the Susie Wong.
    A. Bennett Is there anything else you want?
    Miss Shepherd No.
    A. Bennett Good night.
    Miss Shepherd sits by the van.
    A. Bennett 2 It’s obviously not her name. Mary Shepherd is not her name. She’s changed it. Not that I blame her. I’d change mine if I could.
    A. Bennett Alan?
    A. Bennett 2 Everything I’ve written has been an attempt to give some flavour to my name. Alan. It’s got as much flavour as a pebble.
    Alan Bennett puts some piano music on.
    Turn it up. Go on. Alan. Go on …
    Alan Bennett is reluctant but does so.
    Louder.
    Alan Bennett 2 raises his hand in expectation of Miss Shepherd appearing from the van, which she duly does.
    Miss Shepherd I can hear the music. I can hear it.
    A. Bennett 2 Leave it on.
    Miss Shepherd How many more times? I can hear it.
    Alan Bennett defers to Miss Shepherd and turns it down, to Alan Bennett 2’s disgust.
    A. Bennett How can you dislike music? You used to play the piano.
    Miss Shepherd How did you know that?
    A. Bennett You told me.
    Miss Shepherd I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I don’t want to hear it, that’s all.
    She goes back to the van and suddenly gives a cry that is both inarticulate and heart-rending, but which doesn’t seem to affect either Alan Bennett.
    A. Bennett 2 Does she speak now? Does she explain?
    A. Bennett She didn’t. She didn’t ever explain.
    A. Bennett 2 No. But perhaps she should.
    Miss Shepherd People are waiting at bus-stops and here is a soul in torment. I was once left alone in a room at the convent … They didn’t leave novices alone normally. I think the other novices had gone to the school to be vaccinated whereas I had been vaccinated already. The room was where we had hymn practice and our milk when it was raining and there was a piano there. I tried it and it was open.
    Music begins, played on a very poor piano.
    It wanted tuning and some of the notes were dead but it sounded more beautiful to me than any of the pianos I’d ever played. Then the mistress of the novices must have come in … crept in possibly, as I never heard her, and suddenly she shut the lid down on my fingers. Said that was what God wanted and I’d been told before. I said, Couldn’t I just play some hymns for us to sing to? She said that was arguing and I’d never make a nun if I argued.
    A. Bennett Dad used to play hymns on his violin.
    A. Bennett 2 He played the violin. Aunt Eveline played the piano.
    A. Bennett She was a pianist for the silent films.
    A. Bennett 2 For the silent films in Bradford.
    A. Bennett And Uncle George used to sing.
    A. Bennett 2 ‘Rose of England’. ‘Bless This House’.
    A. Bennett In the front room at Grandma’s just after the war.
    Faintly, growing louder, comes the conclusion of some spectacular piano piece … Schumann’s Carnaval, say, or the end of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 23 in F, Opus 57, The Appassionata. As it ends Miss Shepherd rises. There is a wave of applause. She sinks into an awkward curtsy as the sound cuts out and she kneels in prayer, her head nearly resting on the floor as the light fades.
    The Lady in the Van-Act Two

Act Two

     	Miss Shepherd Is she confined?
    A. Bennett She’s in hospital.
    Miss Shepherd Under lock and key? No wonder she’s depressed.
    A. Bennett She wanders the streets.
    Miss Shepherd Everybody likes a bit of fresh air.
    A. Bennett At four o’clock in the morning? She needed treatment.
    Miss Shepherd Are you next of kin?
    A. Bennett Yes.
    Miss Shepherd They’re the ones you’ve got to watch … the next of kin. They can’t touch you, legally. A year and a day. If you keep out of their clutches for a year and a day you’re free. That’s the law.
    A. Bennett Miss Shepherd. She’s not insane. She’s depressed.
    Miss Shepherd With you trying to put her away I’m not surprised.
    A. Bennett 2 So I get rid of one old lady and take in the other. These days it’s almost as if we’re married. ‘How’s your old lady?’ people say.
    A. Bennett ‘Still there.’
    A. Bennett 2 ‘Your mother died, didn’t she?’
    A. Bennett ‘No. She was in hospital, only now she’s in a home. Still, she doesn’t know where she is, so that’s a blessing.’
    A. Bennett 2 ‘And where is she?’
    A. Bennett ‘Weston-super-Mare.’
    A. Bennett 2 Except you’re seldom so frank as that. When people ask you don’t say she’s in a home; you lie and say she’s with my brother in Bristol.
    A. Bennett Putting her in a home seems some sort of failure.
    A. Bennett 2 And giving this one a home?
    A. Bennett That seems a failure too.
    A. Bennett 2 Actually that’s quite neat. I like that.
    A. Bennett (amiably) Oh, piss off.
    There is a distant sound getting nearer all the time. Suddenly (and possibly with a bang) Miss Shepherd erupts on to the stage in a three-wheeler Robin Reliant. Her hand signals still immaculate, she comes to a halt and gets out.
    Where will you park it?
    Miss Shepherd In the residents’ parking.
    A. Bennett You haven’t got a permit.
    Miss Shepherd I have. I got one yesterday.
    A. Bennett You never told me.
    Miss Shepherd You’d only have raised objections if I had.
    A. Bennett Have you insured it?
    Miss Shepherd I don’t need insuring. It’s like the van. I’m insured in heaven.
    A. Bennett So who pays if you have an accident? The Pope?
    Miss Shepherd I shan’t have an accident?
    A. Bennett What if you run into something?
    Miss Shepherd I shan’t run into anything. I’m an experienced driver. I drove ambulances in the blackout.
    A. Bennett What if someone runs into you?
    Pause.
    Miss Shepherd. What if someone runs into you?
    Miss Shepherd (fiercely) You’ve no business saying that.
    Pause.
    Why do you say that? No one is going to run into me. No one.
    She gets into her car. 
        Pause.  
    Where’s the key?
    A. Bennett What key?
    Miss Shepherd The car key. I put it down.
    A. Bennett I haven’t got it.
    She gets out of the car again.
    Miss Shepherd You have. You’ve taken it.
    A. Bennett I have not.
    Miss Shepherd You’re lying. You don’t want me to have the car so you’ve taken the key.
    A. Bennett Don’t shout.
    Miss Shepherd I have to shout because of your ignorance. The gate going bang bang all hours of the day and night, I’d be better off in a ditch. Give me the key.
    A. Bennett I haven’t got your sodding key. What’s that round your neck? This. This.
    He pushes her and she falls against the car.
    The key. The fucking key. Shouldn’t you say sorry?
    Miss Shepherd I’ve no time for sorry. Sorry is for God.
    She has got into the car and reverses off.
    A. Bennett 2 That was the first and practically the only time I ever touched her. It wasn’t her calling me a liar that made me, even in this scarcely injurious way, suddenly violent. It was that she was mad. I knew I had never had the key and her need to convince me that I had was like someone suffering from delusions who needs to convince you of their truth. It was my mother.
    A. Bennett (to Alan Bennett 2) It’s always Mam you compare her with. They’re not the same. I don’t like them even sharing the same sentence.
    A. Bennett 2 Miss Shepherd is painting her new vehicle with what seems not so much a brush as a hard stick and looking in her peaked cap like one of those disconsolate German generals surrendering at Stalingrad.
    Miss Shepherd Mr Bennett. I don’t like the three- wheeler standing in the street. If you pushed the van in front of your window I could get the Reliant in there beside it. There’s tons of room.
    A. Bennett You mean I have the van and the Reliant?
    Miss Shepherd It would mean easier access for the Reliant from a coming and going aspect.
    A. Bennett Not easier access for me. I can only just get to my own door as it is.
    Miss Shepherd I’ve had guidance that’s where the Reliant should go, in terms of vandals, possibly.
    A. Bennett Guidance from whom?
    Miss Shepherd I’m not at liberty to speak. I think I may contact my social worker.
    A. Bennett What for? You always say you don’t want the social worker.
    Miss Shepherd (getting back in the van) I’ve had guidance she might help.
    Social Worker Perhaps we should try and look at the situation in terms of Miss Shepherd’s needs.
    A. Bennett I prefer to call them wants.
    Social Worker She needs somewhere to live.
    A. Bennett She’s got somewhere to live. The van. She wants somewhere besides.
    Miss Shepherd (voice, from the van) There is room. Lashings of room. As a garden it’s a disgrace.
    A. Bennett I don’t want a used-car lot.
    Miss Shepherd He keeps getting all this manure but it never comes to anything.
    A. Bennett The van’s in front of my door. I don’t want the car in front of my window.
    Miss Shepherd Weeds, that’s all it is. Some of them  poisonous. I’d be doing him a service. A nice little yellow three-wheeler instead of loads of useless ivy.
    A. Bennett No.
    Miss Shepherd It’s like I said. He’ll always put scruples in the way. Through having been a communist possibly.
    She closes her window.
    A. Bennett She only wants the car to put her clothes in. It’s just a second home.
    Social Worker Do you have a second home?
    A. Bennett Yes. But not cheek by jowl with my first.
    Social Worker Everybody likes to get out. You see, I’ve talked to Mary …
    A. Bennett Mary who?
    Social Worker Mary, your Lady in the Van. Didn’t you know her name was Mary?
    A. Bennett I suppose I did. I always call her Miss Shepherd.
    Social Worker We all have names. Perhaps if you called her by her name and she called you by yours?
    A. Bennett What’s that?
    Social Worker Alan.
    A. Bennett Oh yes, that.
    Social Worker Alan, Mary. You never know, it might be easier to talk things through.
    A. Bennett Through? There is no through. How do you talk things through with someone who has conversations with the Virgin Mary? You talk things through with Isaiah Berlin, maybe, who in comparison with Miss Shepherd is a man of few words, but you do not talk things through with her because you don’t get through.
    Social Worker Alan. I’m getting a bit of hostility here. I realize that for you this may be a steep learning curve …
    A. Bennett No. It is not a steep learning curve. I have never been on a so-called learning curve. I am as likely to be found on a learning curve as I am on the ski slopes at Zermatt. And besides, her name isn’t Mary.
    Social Worker Oh? Why?
    A. Bennett I don’t know. Some people seem to think it’s Margaret. And that it isn’t even Shepherd.
    Social Worker I have her down as Mary.
    A. Bennett Yes, and you presumably have her down as a rational human being.
    Sound of Miss Shepherd revving the Reliant offstage.
    A. Bennett 2 The Reliant being, as the social worker points out, Miss Shepherd’s second home, what more natural than that Miss Shepherd should spend her weekends there? And so at 7.30 this Sunday morning her slippered foot toys with the accelerator, bringing a breath of Brands Hatch to the Sunday morning street and otherwise decent liberals curse her under their breath as they stagger from their beds to retrieve the papers from the doormat.
    The revving slows down and stops.
    Putting some rubbish out, I see what I take to be a snail or slug clinging to the side of the bin. It is a small brown turd with one hair clinging to it, presumably an escapee from one of Miss Shepherd’s plastic bags.
    Sound of Miss Shepherd trying to start the car and not managing it.
    Miss Shepherd Mr Bennett … Mr Bennett. My battery seems to be flat. I’ll pay for the electricity. I’ll pay for your time.
    A. Bennett I don’t want paying for my time.
    A. Bennett 2 What I want paying for is the pitying smiles of passers-by when they see me fiddling under the bonnet of such a motorized joke.
    Alan Bennett carries the battery inside.
    Miss Shepherd Make sure it’s good electricity. I think the electricity in the afternoon is better quality than that in the evening, possibly. It used to be better, just after the war. These days they dilute it.
    A. Bennett 2 The wing of the car, I see today, is made of papier mâché. Someone has put their fist through it, Miss Shepherd’s repair job consisting of stuffing the hole with Kleenex, which she trims with a pair of nail scissors before giving it a coat of crushed mimosa.
    Alan Bennett carries the battery out and offstage to the car.
    Miss Shepherd When you put it back, see you screw the nuts tight.
    A. Bennett No need for that. Only connect, that’s all that’s required.
    A. Bennett 2 Though catch Ε. Μ. Forster taking time off from writing Howards End in order to fit an Exide battery into a clapped-out three-wheeler.
    Miss Shepherd Mr Bennett. I may go away any time. Brighton possibly. Or St Albans. I need the air. So don’t worry if you don’t see me. Or I may go on retreat in Cornwall with some nuns I know. I’ve got one or two irons in the fire. Though, Mr Bennett …
    A. Bennett Yes?
    Miss Shepherd I’m not committing myself. I may not go at all.
    A. Bennett 2 In her mind, Miss Shepherd was a frequent traveller, a figure of unexplained absences and abrupt departures. She was always threatening to go away but seldom did. This time, though, it seemed she had.
    The van is dark and silent, Alan Bennett looks at it.
    A. Bennett Miss Shepherd? Miss Shepherd?
    Rufus What’s happened to Stirling Moss? I haven’t seen her at the wheel recently.
    A. Bennett Taking a well-earned break, I imagine. The Dordogne possibly.
    Pauline Really?
    Rufus Pauline.
    Pauline Oh, sorry. Only it’s one of the places we’d thought of moving to.
    Rufus Yes, though that includes most localities this side of the Arctic Circle. I take it she’s been in a mental hospital?
    A. Bennett Why?
    Rufus She asked me the other day if I had the Pope’s private address. I said I thought Rome would probably get him.
    A. Bennett Was that recently?

Rufus Three or four weeks ago.

    A. Bennett It’s just that I haven’t seen her around for a bit.
    Rufus I’m right in thinking that large many-contoured stain on the back of her frock denotes incontinence?
    A. Bennett Well, I don’t think it’s a fashion statement.
    Pauline Oh, darling. What you must be hoping is that one of these days she’ll just slip away.
    Rufus Don’t you believe it. That’s what happens in plays. In life going downhill is an uphill job.
    Pauline How’s your mother?
    A. Bennett Same. Sits. Smiles. Sleeps.
    Pauline nods caringly.
    Pauline Are you all right?
    A. Bennett Me? Yes, why?
    Pauline Not upset about your play?
    A. Bennett No.
    Pauline I saw a good review the other day.
    A. Bennett I was told they were all good.
    Pauline Oh, they are, I’m sure.
    Rufus We enjoyed it. I’m amazed how you remember it all.
    Pauline The one I saw was particularly perceptive about you.
    A. Bennett Really? Saying what?
    Pauline That you couldn’t make your mind up.
    A. Bennett What about?
    Pauline Anything really. It meant in a good way.
    Alan Bennett stares at the van. He has his bike.
    Are you on tonight?
    A. Bennett Yes. I’m just going down there now.
    He stops and knocks tentatively on the side of the van.
    A. Bennett 2 Can I put an idea into your head?
    A. Bennett No. I’m going down to the theatre.
    A. Bennett 2 I think she’s either dying or dead.
    A. Bennett No. She’s away.
    He taps on the window.
    Miss Shepherd. Miss Shepherd.
    A. Bennett 2 ‘Did you know she was dead?’ the coroner will ask. ‘Was there no smell?’ ‘Oh, there was always a smell.’
    A. Bennett I’m thinking of Mam, who is neither dead nor alive. Dying is better.
    A. Bennett 2 Yes. So look in.
    A. Bennett No.
    A. Bennett 2 Are you scared?
    A. Bennett No.
    A. Bennett 2 Not of the body. You’re scared this may be the end of the story and now I’m going to have to tell it.
    A. Bennett I’m scared, maybe, but you’re pleased.
    A. Bennett 2 No. I’m fascinated.
    A. Bennett You’re contemptible.
    He cycles off.
    A. Bennett 2 I think of her at the wheel of her khaki ambulance; dodging the craters and the heaps of rubble; seeing the dusty dead brought out and kneeling sometimes in packed churches; sitting around in the canteen waiting for the siren to go. Love once, even, maybe. The time of her life.
    Distant sirens and the sound of the blitz, which fade leaving a faint light which grows. The van begins to glow with light, even splits in two perhaps, forming a kind of diptych with Miss Shepherd illuminated by a shaft of light.
    Miss Shepherd No, there was never love. But the soul in question, frustrated in her vocation through want of seeing by the sisters, has loved thee and striven to serve thee as a nun on her own, as it were, solo, living under a rule, with diet restricted, her cell this van, sustained only by supplementary benefit and the sale of the occasional pencil.
    The prayer becomes an argument, Miss Shepherd banging her fist etc.
    If sin there was it was by omission only, as on the day in question the lady-seller was stationary in her vehicle and scrupulous as thy servant has always been in the employment of hand signals and the correct use of the mirror, nevertheless the young man in question, through having had too much to drink, on an empty stomach, possibly, contrives to collide with the van. As was claimed, fatally. The lady-seller was blameless, though she did make her confession later … in France, it was, and even if the priest was well stricken in years and deaf, he did understand English, possibly. And even if he didn’t, being a consecrated priest the words of his mouth alone would suffice to absolve me, the lady-seller, of this offence of which in any case she is innocent not only by the laws of God but also by the Highway Code. So, Ο Blessed Mother, untaint me of all sin so that I may stand before thee undefiled … Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy –
    The prayer turns into a mutter (possibly in Latin). 
        The light fades and Alan Bennett arrives back from the theatre on his bike. He stops and listens to the now dark van, 
        Alan Bennett 2 comes up behind him and puts his hand on his shoulder.
    A. Bennett Should I look now, do you think?
    A. Bennett 2 It’ll wait. Besides, it’s too dark. Tomorrow would be better. Perhaps then you should take some photographs.
    A. Bennett Of the van? She never liked that.
    A. Bennett 2 Of the van … and if she’s taken away, all that. As a personal record?
    A. Bennett There were so many things I should have asked her.
    A. Bennett 2 She wouldn’t have answered. Still, now she’s gone you can make it up. Invent. You see, Alan …
    A. Bennett Yes, Alan?
    A. Bennett 2 You must learn to lie a little. Not long dead is Bruce Chatwin. (To Alan Bennett) Now he could lie.
    A. Bennett Yes. But Bruce Chatwin worked for Sotheby’s.
    A. Bennett 2 People like it when you lie.
    A. Bennett Do you want to go to bed?
    A. Bennett 2 Why not? You know this is only a metaphor.
    A. Bennett That’s what they all say.
    It is morning. The van is closed and dark.
        Alan Bennett approaches the van followed by Alan Bennett 2.
    Miss Shepherd.
    A. Bennett 2 It is over. She is dead.
    Pause.
    A. Bennett Miss Shepherd.
    A. Bennett 2 Go on. Open the door.
    A. Bennett Hold on.
    A. Bennett 2 She’s either dead or she’s in a coma.
    He pushes Alan Bennett.
    A. Bennett Give over. This could be really sad.
    A. Bennett 2 I know. I can’t wait.
    Alan Bennett very nervously opens the back door of the van, face screwed up in disgust and anticipation, with Alan Bennett 2 peering over his shoulder. 
        At which point Miss Shepherd materializes on the other side of the stage and bears down on them at full speed in her wheelchair.
    Miss Shepherd What are you doing?
    Alan Bennett 2 leaps back, startled.
    A. Bennett 2 Fuck!
    Miss Shepherd Looking at my things.
    A. Bennett I thought you were ill.
    A. Bennett 2 (prompting him) Dead.
    A. Bennett Dead.
    Miss Shepherd Dead? Me?
    A. Bennett 2 You were concerned.
    A. Bennett I was concerned.
    Miss Shepherd You were nosy.
    A. Bennett I hadn’t seen you.
    Miss Shepherd Of course you hadn’t seen me. I told you I was on retreat. I’m not dead. You’ll know when I’m dead.
    A. Bennett I’m sorry. (Then, rounding on Alan Bennett 2) Though you’re not, are you?
    A. Bennett 2 I didn’t know it was just a retreat. I thought she’d abandoned the struggle altogether.
    Miss Shepherd Me! Dead!
    A. Bennett 2 Anyway, think of it as a dry run. After all, one day it’ll happen.
    Miss Shepherd I shan’t die in a hurry, I can tell you.
    A. Bennett 2 And she didn’t. So for the time being, years even, we went on much as before. There were occasional rows, like the saga of the eiderdown she wanted put on the van roof.
    A. Bennett Miss Shepherd, it’ll get all soggy.
    Miss Shepherd Not soggy. Weather-beaten.
    A. Bennett 2 And there was always the banging of the gate. One of her remedies, some chewing gum she wanted sticking on the latch to deaden the noise.
    A. Bennett Chewing gum?
    Miss Shepherd It doesn’t matter which flavour.
    A. Bennett 2 But now it is evening, say, and warm. With a fan made from a cornflakes packet, Miss Shepherd is taking the air.
    Alan Bennett 2 takes the wheelchair in which Miss Shepherd is sitting, puts Alan Bennett behind it and indicates he push it centre stage.
    Miss Shepherd How’s your mother?
    A. Bennett The same. Doesn’t remember me now.
    Miss Shepherd I’m not surprised. She doesn’t see you very often. Will you write about me?
    Alan Bennett looks enquiringly at Alan Bennett 2.
    A. Bennett I don’t know. She never said this.
    A. Bennett 2 So?
    Miss Shepherd You write about your mother.
    A. Bennett She didn’t say that either.
    A. Bennett 2 No, but why shouldn’t she?
    Miss Shepherd You write about her all the time, one way and another. You use your mother.
    A. Bennett (looking at Alan Bennett 2) That’s what writers do.
    Miss Shepherd Me next, I suppose.
    A. Bennett Y … possibly.
    Miss Shepherd Does she know you write about her?
    A. Bennett How can she? She doesn’t know who she is.
    Miss Shepherd I prefer that.
    A. Bennett What?
    Miss Shepherd The incognito position.
    A. Bennett Mum’s the word.
    Miss Shepherd Yes. Mum is always the word. I’m all for mum. Mr Bennett. Push me up there a bit.
    He pushes her upstage.
    Let go.
    He does so and the chair rolls slowly downstage with Miss Shepherd smiling slightly.
    Miss Shepherd Mr Bennett.
    A. Bennett What?
    Miss Shepherd Will you do it again?
    A. Bennett (tο Alan Bennett 2) It’s supposed to be half past eleven at night.
    A. Bennett 2 So what? It makes a nice ending to the scene.
    He pushes her up again and lets go and she rolls slowly down, smiling and obviously enjoying herself.
        Alan Bennett and Alan Bennett 2 are smiling too as Alan Bennett 2 pushes her offstage.
    Doctor As you can appreciate, it’s difficult to take a history but I’m right in thinking she hasn’t been a smoker?
    A. Bennett No.
    Doctor Not been a smoker, doesn’t drink, all things considered a very healthy woman.
    A. Bennett You think?
    Doctor She’s beginning to be incontinent, of course, but she has a good appetite and could, I imagine … and in the right circumstances … go on for years. The question is, are these the right circumstances?
    There is an awkward silence.
    Let me put it another way. This is a woman who has broken her hip and developed pneumonia. At this age it is what one expects. And of course in someone younger and in better circumstances we would give them antibiotics. At your mother’s age and in her state of mind, one wonders if this is altogether kind.
    A. Bennett If you don’t give her antibiotics what will happen?
    Doctor She may recover or not. She could just sleep away.
    A. Bennett Is it my decision?
    Doctor Is there anyone else?
    A. Bennett Can we not wait and see if she improves?
    Doctor Certainly. With or without the antibiotics?
    Alan Bennett says nothing.
    No. Well, we’ll play it by ear. You mustn’t reproach yourself. You’ve done all … more than could be expected.
    He goes as Miss Shepherd comes on slowly in her chair.
    Miss Shepherd Mr Bennett. Where’ve you been? I’ve rung the bell twice.
    A. Bennett Seeing my mother.
    Miss Shepherd How is she?
    A. Bennett She’s very poorly.
    Miss Shepherd Yes? Well, I’ve not been well again myself.
    A. Bennett She’s in a coma.
    Miss Shepherd Probably just having forty winks.
    A. Bennett Miss Shepherd. She is dying.
    Miss Shepherd Can’t be doing with company, probably. She should be grateful she doesn’t have to cope with letters from Mr Campbell Adamson.
    A. Bennett The Chairman of the CBI?
    Miss Shepherd He’s wanting to change the Abbey National from being a building society into a bank and he needs my consent. I have voting rights, apparently.
    A. Bennett Do you have something in the Abbey National then?
    Miss Shepherd If a person had put money on deposit in one name and that was the name the vote was in, but that wasn’t their real name, would that be against the law?
    A. Bennett Why, did you do that?
    Miss Shepherd (banging her hand) I did not say that. If a soul did. A creature. Not me. It is not me.
    A. Bennett What other name?
    Miss Shepherd How many more times? I am in an incognito position. Take an anonymous view of it. Anyway, now you’re here I want some shopping done.
    A. Bennett You ought to go yourself. You should try and walk more.
    Miss Shepherd I do walk.
    A. Bennett I never see you.
    Miss Shepherd That’s because you’re not about in the middle of the night. I want some batteries and some sherbet lemons.
    A. Bennett I got you sherbet lemons last time.
    Miss Shepherd You never know when you’ll run out. I’m on them again now. I don’t want to have to go off them.
    A. Bennett Is there anything else?
    Miss Shepherd No.
    A. Bennett Do you want some towels?
    Miss Shepherd Towels? What do I want towels for?
    A. Bennett 2 I did not mean towels. I meant the kind of towels my mother used to send me next door to the draper’s and babies’ knitwear shop for when I was a boy; towels that came in plain brown-paper parcels; towels that could not be mentioned. And the reason why I am mentioning them is because I can see one such towel (probably an incontinence pad) drying by the electric ring inside the van. The stench is staggering.
    Miss Shepherd Can you smell a smell?
    A. Bennett I can, yes.
    Miss Shepherd It isn’t me. It’s that Greek restaurant. They do things on sticks.
    A. Bennett You’re not planning on going back to bed? I don’t think you should. The longer you stay in bed the weaker you get. You were in bed all last week.
    Miss Shepherd I was not in bed. I might appear to be lying down with the blankets over me and my eyes may be closed and at a casual glance ill-disposed persons might think it was bed. But they are wrong. I can’t afford to be in bed with my schedule. I’ve got a hundred and one things to do.
    A. Bennett What I’m trying to say …
    Miss Shepherd You put your mother in a home, that’s what you’re trying to say. And now it’s my turn. You want me taken away again.
    A. Bennett Again? How do you mean, again?
    Miss Shepherd won’t answer. She shakes her head and gets into the van.
    Would you like me to make you a cup of coffee?
    Miss Shepherd No. I don’t want you to go to all that trouble. I’ll just have half a cup.
    Alan Bennett sees something on the path. He goes off and returns, puts on kitchen gloves then over the gloves two plastic shopping bags, picks whatever it is up and puts it in the bin.
    A. Bennett Sorry … There’s something wrong with her face as well. Her face is all swollen but she won’t see a doctor.
    Rufus Wise woman. Look at it from her point of view. Doctor calls, he takes one look.
    Pauline Or she.
    Rufus Say again, my love?
    Pauline The doctor. He or she.
    Rufus (controlling himself with an effort) Doctor, gender unspecified, takes one look at the ailing derelict and promptly despatches her to whatever hospital/stroke bin can be browbeaten into accommodating her. Result: dead inside six months. Winkle her out of her vehicles and she will snuff it, no question. Which is what you want, of course! Ah, uncle, I see the plan. Then quite agree. Urge doctor on her by all means.
    A. Bennett Actually her face isn’t exactly swollen. It’s as if there are little sacs of fluid attached to her cheek. I suppose what they really look like are used contraceptives.
    There is a shocked silence.
    Rufus Now I’ve seen it all. Forget Mother Teresa. This is our neighbour who thinks nothing of going out in rubber gloves to retrieve the discarded faeces of an evil- smelling old bat who now has used condoms dangling from her cheeks. Pauline, my dear, this is goodness.
    A. Bennett (apologetically) Actually they’re not as long as condoms; that’s just what they remind me of.
    Social Worker I’ve talked to Mary.
    A. Bennett Or Margaret.
    Social Worker Or Margaret. Miss Shepherd anyway. She isn’t too well and you’re right to be concerned about her, though we ought, I think, to look at her all-round well-being.
    She smiles but Alan Bennett says nothing.
    She tells me you don’t encourage her to get out and lead a more purposeful life and put obstacles in her way.
    A. Bennett I don’t encourage her to think she can become Prime Minister; I do encourage her to try and get to the supermarket.
    Social Worker These days women have other needs. They can do both.
    A. Bennett Become Prime Minister?
    Social Worker No. They can pursue a career or whatever. Homemaking is not the only option. Because her chosen lifestyle is less conventional than yours … we must try not to be too judgmental. You see, a carer will often feel that he or she has the right to dictate …
    A. Bennett Excuse me. May I stop you? Do not call me the carer. I am not the carer. I hate caring. I hate the thought. I hate the word. I do not care and I do not care for. I am here; she is there. There is no caring.
    Social Worker It’s interesting that she irritates you and yet she stays. When you are saying she should be in hospital, is it really a way of saying something you can’t admit: namely that you want to be rid of her? Unmarried daughters, single sons … they often have this problem …
    A. Bennett She is not my mother.
    Social Worker … and it isn’t one a doctor can always solve.
    A. Bennett I don’t particularly want to be rid of her.
    Social Worker Why? It would be entirely natural if you did.
    A. Bennett You’re saying that the problem is I want her to go, and when I say I don’t want her to go you say that’s a problem too. Is this what’s called counselling?
    Social Worker Alan, I’m sensing that hostility again.
    Pause.
    You see, I am wondering whether, having cared for Mary as it were single-handed all these years, you don’t, understandably, resent it when the professionals lend a hand.
    A. Bennett No. Though I resent it when the professionals, as you call it, turn up every three months or so and try to tell me what this woman, whom I have coped with on a daily basis for fifteen years, is like.
    Social Worker What is she like?
    A. Bennett Mary, as you call her, is a bigoted, blinkered, cantankerous, devious, unforgiving, self-centred, rank, rude, car-mad cow. Which, Miss Aileen McNiff Naff, is to say nothing of her flying faeces and her ability to extrude from her withered buttocks turds of such force that they land a yard from the back of the van and their presumed point of exit.
    A. Bennett 2 Though of course you didn’t say a word of that.
    A. Bennett No.
    A. Bennett 2 People would think that was because you were too nice. It’s actually because you’re too timid.
    A. Bennett Yes. Only this being England, timid is good too.
    Social Worker I think this has been very helpful. I’ll see about getting a doctor.
    Doctor I gather she’s lived in the van for some time.
    A. Bennett Yes.
    Doctor Don’t you mind that?
    A. Bennett Me? Sometimes.
    Doctor And how old now?
    A. Bennett Seventy-eight.
    Pause. 
           They go up to the van. 
    Hello. Hello. Miss Shepherd. The doctor has come.
    Miss Shepherd Is it a man doctor?
    A. Bennett Yes.
    Miss Shepherd I don’t want a man doctor. Don’t they have a woman?
    Doctor I only want to take your pulse.
    Miss Shepherd Which hand? Do you have a preference?
    Doctor No.
    She puts her hand through the window.
    Miss Shepherd It’s normally cleaner than that.
    The doctor peers in to try and look at her face.
    Have you finished with this hand?
    Doctor Miss Shepherd. I’d like to take you into hospital for a day or so, just to run some tests.
    Miss Shepherd I’ve always had great faith in onions.
    Doctor Yes. Onions can only take you so far, medically speaking.
    A. Bennett She won’t go to hospital.
    Social Worker How do you know?
    A. Bennett Ask her.
    The social worker is about to do so.
    Social Worker Would she go to the day centre? She could be looked at there.
    A. Bennett She won’t go to the day centre.
    Social Worker Are you sure? Have you asked her?
    A. Bennett I know.
    The social worker has a brief word with Miss Shepherd and comes back.
    Social Worker She’ll go.
    The doctor and the social worker leave.
    Miss Shepherd Mr Bennett. The social worker was wanting to know my next of kin. I don’t want my next of kin broadcast so I said I didn’t have any. Only I’ve left an envelope in the van. But keep that under your hat. Mr Bennett. They won’t keep me in?
    A. Bennett No. They’re going to give you a bath and put you in clean clothes and do some tests.
    Miss Shepherd Will they leave me to it?
    A. Bennett Where?
    Miss Shepherd In the bath. I can bath myself. I won awards for that.
    A. Bennett Yes. I remember.
    Miss Shepherd Mr Bennett.
    A. Bennett Yes?
    Miss Shepherd It won’t look as if I’m being taken away?
    A. Bennett Taken away where?
    Miss Shepherd Where they take people because they’re not right, possibly. Do they do that still?
    A. Bennett Sometimes, though you need a lot of signatures.
    Miss Shepherd They pretend things to get you there sometimes. That’s the danger with next of kin. It’s one of their tricks. They might just be pretending it’s a day centre.
    A. Bennett No.
    Miss Shepherd I was had like that once before.
    A. Bennett 2 She kept on about next of kin. Did you not wonder about it?
    A. Bennett I used to wonder if she died whether the next of kin would all come crawling out of the woodwork.
    A. Bennett 2 Well, let’s see. Perhaps they should.
    Ambulance Man Miss Shepherd.
    The ambulance man comes with a van with a hoist, plus the social worker. He lifts her out of the van.
    Miss Shepherd I’m a bit behindhand with things so there may be a bit of a Susie Wong.
    Ambulance Man Put your arm round my neck.
    Miss Shepherd Oh. I’ve never gone in for this kind of thing much.
    A. Bennett 2 I note how with none of my own distaste the ambulance driver does not hesitate to touch her and put his arm round her as he lowers her into the chair. I note too his careful rearrangement of her greasy clothing, pulling the skirt down over her knees in the interest of modesty.
    Miss Shepherd I’m coming back, you know. It’s not a toe in the water job.
    Social Worker Is there anything you want to take and have us wash?
    Miss Shepherd Why? Most of my things are clean. Mr Bennett. Keep an eye on the van. It’s got all my papers in it. And if I don’t like it, I can come back?
    Social Worker Of course.
    Ambulance Man I’ll just take you to the ambulance.
    Miss Shepherd I was an ambulance driver myself once. During the war. I knew Kensington in the blackout.
    A. Bennett 2 The chair goes up on the lift and in this small ascension when she slowly rises above the level of the garden wall there is a vagabond nobility about her, a derelict Nobel Prize-winner she looks, her grimy face set in a kind of resigned satisfaction.
    Miss Shepherd Could we do that again? I’d like another go.
    Ambulance Man When you come back.
    Social Worker I don’t think she will come back.
    A. Bennett No?
    Social Worker She’s quite frail.
    A. Bennett Can you visit?
    Social Worker Why?
    A. Bennett I thought I could take her some flowers. That is, if she decides to stay. Nobody can ever have given her flowers in her life.
    Social Worker She won’t stay at the day centre, of course. Once she’s been assessed she’ll go on somewhere else. A council home, possibly, or a hospital.
    A. Bennett Will she not have a choice?
    Social Worker In theory, but people are generally quite sensible.
    She goes.
    A. Bennett 2 What are the flowers about? Guilt?
    A. Bennett Maybe.
    A. Bennett 2 I don’t see why. She’s been a cow.
    A. Bennett (laughing) Yes.
    A. Bennett 2 Has she, in all these years, ever said thank you?
    A. Bennett No. Which is a kind of triumph, really. I wouldn’t want her to break her duck now. But I don’t want to lose touch.
    A. Bennett 2 Oh no. Nor do I. I want to follow her to the finish, wherever that might be.
    A. Bennett That wouldn’t be guilt?
    A. Bennett 2 God, no. That, one must hope, might be art.
    Alan Bennett goes, leaving Alan Bennett 2.
        It gets dark, with the van seemingly empty and isolated. Alan Bennett returns with some flowers and is about to go into the house when there is the squeaking of Miss Shepherd’s alarm horn, but so faintly he is not certain he’s heard it.
    A. Bennett Miss Shepherd?
    She opens the door and sits up.
    Miss Shepherd I’m a bit done up. I came back under my own steam.
    A. Bennett Came back? What for?
    Miss Shepherd I wasn’t stopping in that place. A woman said my face rang a bell, was I ever in Holloway? And wouldn’t give over. They gave me some mince. She said, You’ll find the mince here is a step up from the mince in Holloway. I don’t know about the mince in Holloway, or anywhere else.
    A. Bennett You look nice and clean.
    Miss Shepherd That will be the bath. They let me do it myself, only the nurse came and gave me some finishing touches. She said I’d come up a treat. The soap they use comes in a bottle. I might invest in some of it myself. I mean, what would I be doing in Holloway?
    A. Bennett 2 Give her the flowers.
    A. Bennett I nearly forgot. I bought you these.
    Miss Shepherd Flowers? What do I want with flowers? They only die. I’ve enough on my plate without flowers.
    A. Bennett (to Alan Bennett 2) Thanks very much. You won’t often have been given flowers.
    Miss Shepherd Who says? I’ve had bigger flowers than these and with ribbons on. They don’t compare.
    A. Bennett I can give you something to put them in.
    Miss Shepherd I’ve got a Horlicks jar they’ll go in. There’s some old Horlicks in it still but it won’t do them any harm. Here. If you want water there’s generally some collects in the dustbin lid.
    He puts the flowers in a jar.
    Not been given flowers. There were always flowers. Flowers were routine. And I’d smile and curtsy. There was a piano at the day centre. (She says this as if she has just been talking about the piano, as in a way she has) I didn’t try and play it. I don’t know that my fingers will run to it now. They had the wireless on all the time. Music. How are people supposed to avoid it?
    A. Bennett Do you want to avoid it?
    Miss Shepherd (vehemently) The soul in question was instructed to avoid it. Directions were given, sacrifices made, possibly. It was my mother I got it from. She was keenly ardent in her appreciation of classical music. I was just a girl, though older than my years in point of knowledge known and seeings of the spirit. Only I had it at my fingertips. I had it in my bones. Look. (She shows her hands) It’s not what it looks like, the piano. To the uninitiated the notes look the same. To me, no. Different, all of them. I could tell them in the dark. I could play in the dark, had to sometimes, possibly. And the keys were like rooms. C Major. D Minor. Dark rooms. Light rooms, going up or down a step into another room. It was a mansion to me, music. Heard in the spirit, possibly.
    Pause.
    Only it worried me that playing came easier to me than praying. And I said that, which may have been an error.
    A. Bennett Said it to whom?
    Miss Shepherd An ordained priest of great reverence. My confessor. I loved my frocks. Long white arms.
    People clapping. The flowers brought on. He said that was another vent the devil could creep through. I asked, was there a middle way? Before I sat down at the keyboard I could possibly say, ‘I dedicate this performance to God.’ Or any saint my confessor might choose to nominate. Because it was God-given, I knew that. He said God-given was easily mistaken for devil- sent. So he outlawed the piano. Put paid to music generally. Said that dividends would accrue in terms of growth of the spirit. Which they did. They did. They did. I was good enough to be on the wireless. Earn a living. Offer it to God, Mary. Offer it to God. Cortot. Alfred Cortot. Have you heard of him?
    A. Bennett He was famous.
    Miss Shepherd Yes. He was my teacher.
    Pause.
    You play something sometimes that I knew.
    She sings part of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 27, Opus 90, in Ε minor, which is the music that has been played throughout the play. After a bit Alan Bennett joins in and they sing together.
    How is your mother?
    A. Bennett The same.
    Miss Shepherd Still in the coma?
    A. Bennett No.
    Miss Shepherd Just having a bit of shut-eye. People do.
    A. Bennett 2 Say good night.
    A. Bennett Good night. True to form, she does not reply. There has been some talk about lying.
    He glances at Alan Bennett 2, who is a little shamefaced.
    Still, I do not lie when I say that it was on the morning after Miss Shepherd returned from the day centre, when she lay in the van, her hair washed and braided and between clean sheets, that in that same morning comes the social worker into the garden, bearing clean clothes, linen and ointment, and she knocks on the door of the van.
    Social Worker Mary. (She knocks) Mary?
    She opens the door, looks in and gets into the van.
    A. Bennett No one has ever done that before, got into the van.
    A. Bennett 2 She is dead. It is a van no longer. It is a sepulchre.
    The social worker gets out and Alan Bennett goes and looks in.
    Even now I do not venture into this evil-smelling tomb but just glimpse her neck stretched out across the new clean pillow as if ready for the block.
    A. Bennett I feel cheated that the discovery of the body has not actually been mine and that, having observed so much for so long, I am not the first to witness her death.
    A. Bennett 2 Now in quick succession come the doctor, the priest and men from the undertaker’s, all of whom this bright spring morning do what no one else has done for twenty years: namely without pause and seemingly without distaste step inside the van.
    Pauline Oh, heart.
    A. Bennett 2 Professionals all, I suppose … one definition of the professional: the absence (or the non-expression) of disgust. Actually you can take this.
    Rufus, pointing to himself with a query, now goes on with the speech.
    Rufus Surgeons. Lawyers. Even … I lower the stakes … even the gentlemen in brown overalls polishing the faucets in the stalls of the lavatory at the bottom of Parkway. What have they in common? Composure. Control.
    Pauline I prefer it when there is some feeling.
    Rufus No. Be lofty, be sceptical, be serene. By unfeeling we are saved.
    Alan Bennett is almost giving dictation to Alan Bennett 2, holding up items as he clears out the van.
    A. Bennett Her Rambo cap. Two bottles of Woodland Glade Moisturizer and After Bath Splash. Many packets of Options, which ought to be a business magazine or a brochure of leisure opportunities but is actually an incontinence pad. Many nasty spotted creeping insects. And a note: ‘Please arrange funeral’, in brackets ‘if needed’. But no envelope. No next of kin. But there is money. Round her withered neck a bag containing £500. Bank books and building society deposits to the tune of £6,000 and trodden into the layers of sodden, urine-  stained newspaper and old clothes that carpet the van there is another £900.
    Underwood She’s gone then?
    A. Bennett Yes. On Wednesday.
    Underwood Do a bunk, did she?
    A. Bennett In that she died, yes.
    Underwood Elbow job, is it? The van?
    A. Bennett Not yet.
    Underwood Margaret was very lucky if you ask me. Because they never caught up with her.
    A. Bennett Who?
    Underwood The law.
    A. Bennett What had she done?
    Underwood It’s what she didn’t do. A crossroads. Stop. Give way, you know the kind of thing. Major road ahead anyway. Banstead or thereabouts. Our lady at the wheel. Motor bike comes up, too fast maybe. Raining. Brakes, skids, hits the side of the van. Nobody’s fault. His, maybe, but not hers. She’s stationary at a junction. Gets out. Looks. He’s dead. Only young. Dead on the road. Thinks: licence? No. Insurance? No. Sees it all coming. So in a moment of panic … and sin … our holy lady drives off. Skedaddles. Does a bunk. A boy dead on the road and she fucks off. Thereby, you see, committing a felony. And you too, of course. This was an offence. Harbouring a felon.
    A. Bennett What was her real name? Margaret what?
    The man indicates he wants some money.
    Of course. That’s why you came round. You were blackmailing her?
    Underwood I am grieved, sir, that my attempts at elucidation have been so vulgarly misconstrued and since my presence is shortly required in Lisson Grove I will bid you good afternoon.
    Alan Bennett is back inside the van, looking.
        As Underwood goes Alan Bennett comes out with an envelope, which he opens.
    A. Bennett Fairchild. (Calling after him) Was her name Fairchild? Storrington, Sussex?
    There is no answer.
    Leo Fairchild Mr Bennett?
    A. Bennett Yes?
    Leo Fairchild You’ve written to me about a Mary Teresa Shepherd, a seventy-nine-year-old woman who has died. I have to tell you I know no such person.
    A. Bennett She names you as her next of kin. She has left some £7,000.
    Leo Fairchild It’s obviously my sister. Though Shepherd was not her name. She was born Margaret Fairchild. I am Leo Fairchild, her brother. Her brother who had her put away. In Banstead, which was, of course, an asylum. £7,000!
    A. Bennett Why did you have her put away?
    Leo Fairchild God. God, sin, hell. The whole bag of tricks. Morning, noon and night. My poor mother took refuge in the attic. I don’t regret it. Though in any case first chance she got she was over the wall and out. And, the important point, stayed free for a year and a day, which meant they couldn’t put her back. Odd length of time. A year and a day. Like a fairy story. Well, let me set your mind at rest. I don’t want the money. Give it away. Or keep it, why not?
    A. Bennett I couldn’t.
    Leo Fairchild Think of it as rent. You had her for years. An hour was long enough for me.
    He walks round the van.
    A. Bennett 2 He’s a big disappointment.
    A. Bennett I think he’s nice.
    A. Bennett 2 Exactly. Much better for the story if he’d been a money-grabbing shit.
    A. Bennett We could always … pretend?
    A. Bennett 2 No we can’t. He’s still alive.
    Leo Fairchild Should have stuck to the piano and maybe none of this would have happened.
    A. Bennett Did she play well?
    Leo Fairchild Superbly. Bold and muscular and more like a man would play, I imagine. Great … dash. No, when she was playing you could forgive Margaret everything.
    Music.
    A. Bennett All those years stood on my doorstep she was all the time on the run. Self-sacrifice, incarceration, escape and violent death … a life … this is what I keep thinking … a life beside which mine is just dull.
    The coffin is carried on by four undertaker’s men followed by a priest. They lay it down and he blesses and sprinkles the coffin as it sinks below the level of the stage.
    A. Bennett 2 I gaze down on her coffin and reflect that her new quarters are rather more commodious (and certainly sweeter) than that narrow stretch of floor on which she had slept these last twenty years. One of the undertaker’s men takes the eye though scarcely more than a boy. Not an occupation one drifts into, I imagine, undertaking, and one that, like becoming a policeman, implies a certain impatience with ordinary slipshod humanity … and in particular this piece of humanity that has got so slipshod as actually to die. The object of my speculations looks at me briefly and were I Joe Orton, I reflect, I would be able to turn even this bored, impersonal glance across a grave to some sexual advantage. Orton would have found some excuse to absent himself from the graveside a while, have a Jimmy Riddle in the bushes and a quick funereal feel.
    Suddenly Miss Shepherd rises from the grave.
    Miss Shepherd Excuse me, I’m supposed to be the centrepiece here. You should be fighting back the tears, not eyeing up the talent.
    Alan Bennett is taken aback.
    A. Bennett 2 Well, it’s a thought. (To Miss Shepherd) What do you think?
    Miss Shepherd (catching sight of Alan Bennett 2) Oh, hello. Two of you now. Is that because you’re in two minds?
    A. Bennett 2 Yes.
    A. Bennett No.
    Miss Shepherd I’ve been wondering. Would either of you object if the van were to become a place of pilgrimage, possibly?
    A. Bennett 2 No.
    They should probably be on either side of her.
    A. Bennett I’m getting rid of the van. The van is going.
    Miss Shepherd I am thinking of the car that Catholic priest was murdered in in Poland. That became a place of pilgrimage.
    A. Bennett 2 It did, yes.
    A. Bennett Yes. Only you haven’t been murdered.
    Miss Shepherd (she’s playing them off against each other) I haven’t been murdered strictly speaking, but I have gone through so much deprivation and want of necessities over a prolonged period, I would have been overjoyed if I had been murdered sometimes.
    A. Bennett 2 Quite.
    Miss Shepherd Say the van were left on site, that would encourage a cult. Healing might take place and any proceeds … donations, jewellery and so forth … could go towards the nuns.
    A. Bennett The nuns! What did the nuns ever do for you?
    Miss Shepherd Not much, but you could take a coals of fire view of it … When the donations start rolling in they’ll realize what a catch I would have been. Of course, it was the same with St Bernadette. They only realized with her when it was too late. That’s one of the drawbacks of sanctity, that it’s generally posthumous. (To Alan Bennett 2) That’s something you could do. This play you’re writing, pump it up a bit. If it were along the lines of The Song of Bernadette it would make you a packet.
    A. Bennett The Song of Bernadette?
    Miss Shepherd Do you know what your trouble is? Too many scruples in the way. It’s always been no all along the line. I’ve had a much more adventurous life than you, because I got on with it. You, you just sit there. You want to take a leaf out of my book. Be bold.
    A. Bennett 2 How?
    Miss Shepherd Why do you just let me die? I’d like to go up into heaven. An ascension. A transfiguration, possibly.
    A. Bennett 2 That’s not really my kind of play.
    Miss Shepherd Oh, don’t you start. You’re both as bad as one another. Why not try it, for a change? I came into the garden for three months and stayed for fifteen years.
    She laughs.
    Mr Bennett.
    A. Bennett (both) Yes.
    Miss Shepherd Do you know what that is?
    A. Bennett (both) No.
    Miss Shepherd It’s the last laugh.
    Still laughing, she gets into the van.
        Workmen in hard hats now come on and with a good deal of ‘All right your end?’-type dialogue which I shan’t attempt to transcribe they attach cables to the van, a flashing orange light offstage indicating the presence of the council truck. Slowly the van is hoisted up and as it ascends the workmen remove their hats, gazing upwards in reverence as, to celestial music and even a heavenly choir, the van disappears from view, leaving the stage dark and desolate and the two Alan Bennetts alone.
    A. Bennett 2 Starting out as someone incidental to my life, she remained on the edge of it so long she became not incidental to it at all. As homebound sons and daughter looking after their parents think of it as just marking time before their lives start, so like them I learned there is no such thing as marking time, and that time marks you. In accommodating her and accommodating to her, I find twenty years of my life has gone. This broken-down old woman, her delusions and the slow abridgement of her life with all its vehicular permutations … these have been given me to record as others record journeys across Tibet or Patagonia or the thighs of a dozen women. Actually her only permanent legacy is moths … or moth, as the upper classes say. Moths, which I thought went out with my childhood, Mr Attlee, utility furniture and Cremola pudding, now infest my home and the houses of all my neighbours, their eggs like a smudge on the fabric, clustered on the edge of the papers that I sift through for this play.
    A. Bennett I suppose I’m in it?
    A. Bennett 2 Well, what do you think?
    They are going off when Alan Bennett breaks back to address the audience.
    A. Bennett Look. This has been one path through my life … me and Miss Shepherd. Just one track. I wrote things; people used to come and stay the night, and of both sexes. What I mean to say is, it’s not as if it’s the whole picture. Lots of other stuff happened. No end of things.
    A. Bennett 2 They know that.
    A. Bennett And that’s true. I’m not making it up.
    A. Bennett 2 Of course you’re not.
    He puts his arm around him and they go off together.
    The Lady in the Van-About the Author
    Author biography
    Alan Bennett first appeared on the stage in 1960 as one of the authors and performers of the revue Beyond the Fringe. His stage plays include Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus, The Old Country and The Lady in the Van, and he has written many television plays, notably A Day Out, Sunset Across the Bay, A Woman of No Importance and the series of monologues Talking Heads. An adaptation of his television play, An Englishman Abroad, was paired with A Question of Attribution in the double-bill Single Spies, first produced at the National Theatre in 1988. This was followed in 1990 by his adaptation of The Wind in the Willows and in 1991 by The Madness of George III.
       
    His most recent play, The History Boys, won the Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle awards for Best Play, The Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, and The South Bank Award. Alan Bennett’s latest collection of prose, Untold Stories, was published in 2005 by Faber and Faber and Profile Books.
    The Lady in the Van-By The Same Author
    by the same author
    plays
    PLAYS ONE (Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus, Enjoy)
    PLAYS TWO (Kafka’s Dick, The Insurance Man, The Old Country,
    An Englishman Abroad, A Question of Attribution)
    OFFICE SUITE
    THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS
    THE MADNESS OF GEORGE III
       
    television plays
    THE WRITER IN DISGUISE
    OBJECTS OF AFFECTION (BBC)
    TALKING HEADS (BBC)
        
    screenplays
    A PRIVATE FUNCTION
    PRICK UP YOUR EARS
    THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE
       
    autobiography
    THE LADY IN THE VAN (LRB)
    WRITING HOME
    The Lady in the Van-Copyright
    Copyright
    First published in 2000
     by Faber and Faber Limited
     Bloomsbury House 
     74-77 Great Russell Street
     London WC1B 3DA
     This ebook edition first published in 2009
    All rights reserved
     © Forelake Ltd, 2000
    Alan Bennett is hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
    All rights whatsoever in this work are strictly reserved. Applications for permission for any use whatsoever including performance rights must be made in advance, prior to any such proposed use, to United Agents Ltd, 12-26 Lexington Street, London W1F 0LE.
    ISBN 978—0—571—25075—2 [epub edition]
    This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.