Lady in the Van by Alan Bennett Read Free Book Online

briefly a novice; a woman in a green straw hat like an upturned plant pot who eats toffees throughout; and another lady who plays the harmonium in tan slacks and a tea-cosy wig. The server, a middle-aged man with white hair, doesn’t wear a surplice, just ordinary clothes with an open-necked shirt, and but for knowing all the sacred drill, might have been roped in from the group on the corner outside The Good Mixer. The priest is a young Irish boy with a big red peasant face and sandy hair and he, too, stripped of his cream-coloured cassock, could be wielding a pneumatic drill in the roadworks outside. I keep thinking about these characters during the terrible service and it reinforces what I have always known: that I could never be a Catholic because I’m such a snob and that the biggest sacrifice Newman made when he turned his back on the C of E was the social one.
    Yet kindness abounds. In front of us is a thin old man who knows the service backwards, and seeing we have no prayer-books, he lays down his own on top of his copy of the Sun , goes back up the aisle to fetch us some and hands them round, all the time saying the responses without faltering. The first hymn is Newman’s ‘Lead Kindly Light’ which I try and sing, while making no attempt at the second hymn, which is ‘Kum Ba Ya’. The priest turns out to have a good strong voice, though its tone is more suited to ‘Kum Ba Ya’ than Newman and J.B. Dykes. The service itself is wet and wandering, even more so than the current Anglican equivalent, though occasionally one catches in the watered-down language a distant echo of 1662. Now, though, arrives the bit I dread, the celebration of fellowship, which always reminded me of the warm-up Ned Sherrin insisted on inflicting on the studio audience before Not so much a programme , when everyone had to shake hands with their neighbour. But again the nice man who fetched us the prayer-books shames me when he turns round without any fuss or embarrassment and smilingly shakes my hand. Then it is the Mass proper, the priest distributing the wafers to the 99-year-old nun and the lady with the plant pot on her head, as Miss S. lies in her coffin at his elbow.
    Finally there is another hymn, this one by the (to me) unknown hymnodist Kevin Norton, who’s obviously reworked it from his unsuccessful entry for the Eurovision Song Contest; and with the young priest acting as lead singer and the congregation a rather subdued backing group, Miss Shepherd is carried out.
    The neighbours, who are not quite mourners, wait on the pavement outside as the coffin is hoisted onto the hearse.
    “A cut above her previous vehicle,” remarks Colin H.; and comedy persists when the car accompanying the hearse to the cemetery refuses to start. It’s a familiar scene and one which I’ve played many times, with Miss S. waiting inside her vehicle as well-wishers lift the bonnet, fetch leads and give it a jump start. Except this time she’s dead.
    Only A. and I and Clare, the ex-nurse who lately befriended Miss S., accompany the body, swept over Hampstead Heath at a less than funereal pace, down Bishop’s Avenue and up to the St Pancras Cemetery, green and lush this warm sunny day. We drive beyond the scattered woods to the furthest edge where stand long lines of new gravestones, mostly in black polished granite. Appropriately, in view of her lifelong love of the car, Miss S. is being buried within sight and sound of the North Circular Road, one carriageway the other side of the hedge with juggernauts drowning the words of the priest as he commits the body to the earth. He gives us each a go with his little plastic bottle of holy water, we throw some soil into the grave, and then everybody leaves me to whatever solitary thoughts I might have, which are not many, before we are driven back to Camden Town, life reasserted when the undertaker drops us handily outside Salisbury’s.
    In the interval between Miss Shepherd’s death and her