The Tao of Lambeth Lil

Bertram Nicholls 'Lambeth Bridge' 1949

Dressed in a woollen blue coat fastened with nappy pins and stained down the front with tinned ravioli. A straw bonnet during the summer, the top of a sawn-off kettle in winter. Support tights, no knickers, one blue shoe, one brown welly. Speckled with sticking plasters. Lil went back and forth over Lambeth Bridge all day, day in, day out, pushing a supermarket trolley filled with china ornaments wrapped in newspaper, curtains with the hooks half off and a display halibut late of the fish shop in The Cut.

On his way to work at Myer's Beds each day Big Sid, who lived round the balcony from us, took her a flask of tea. He collected the empty flask from her on his way home each evening, saying, 'Same again tomorrow, then, Lil?'

'If you'd be so kind, Sidney. I wouldn't want anyone to go to any trouble just for me.'

'No trouble, Lil.'

On winter mornings, Big Sid put a tot of sherry in the tea.

Lil wasn't an object of fun to local children. We said Hello, Mrs Lillian, very respectfully when we crossed Lambeth Bridge on our way to the Marsham Street Baths. She replied, 'On with you, on with you - and don't cause a florry!' And we were never taunting, as we were with Funny Brian, the Tinworth House witch woman, or stinky Mr Lingwood whose glass eye scooped out and laid in his palm never impressed us.

According to local rumour, Lil was a retired head of MI5, an ex-windmill Girl, or heiress to an unimaginable fortune from an insurance business owned by her father, who paid her an allowance to stay away. My mother thought she may have lived in one of the prefabs this side of the Archbishop's Park.

A reporter on the South London Press went to interview Lil.

'Just the single bridge, now,' he said. 'Five hundred yards down that way you’ve got Vauxhall Bridge. Five hundred yards down the other way you’ve got Westminster Bridge. Have you not thought of varying your walk by going over either of those other two? Variety, they say, is the spice of life.'

Briefly holding her trolley at a stand still, Lil replied, 'Young man, you will hopefully one day learn. In life it doesn’t do to spread oneself too thinly.'

Comments

Some Favourite Books - But Please don't Lesbify Dame Agatha's Denouements

I'm too tired to read anything new so have been round the libraries taking out my default-setting books to read over Christmas. These include: The Pursuit of Love , Nancy Mitford. The blood-stained entrenching tool displayed above the fireplace, child-hunting over Shenley Common, Jassy traumatising the local children telling them the facts of life. The scene at the Gare du Nord where Linda sits on her luggage to cry and meets Fabrice always takes me back to the first reading of the novel, sitting wrapped in my Welsh Tweed shawl, in a tiny bedroom on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise in Kennington. The Pursuit of Love is romantic, hilarious and bleakly eccentric. Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady , Florence King. When I entertained troops on the American base in Kandahar, four South Carolina army captains made me an Honorary Southern Belle. Madame Galina, they said, in all her unreasonable, high-blooded,...

My Mate Jamie-Ray Hartshorne

I've been noticing that alongside photos of Jamie-Ray being a lead in Altar Boys , creating Change My Body UK TM , working the door at Freedom - and clearly asking people passing by wherever that rockpool may be to snap a double-bicep - this sort of thing is cropping up on his social media: We're in The Diner, Jamestown Road, Camden. He's between tour dates of The Bodyguard, and meetings to discuss sportswear and creatine endorsements. The latter, he says, being all about making his product better. Between sips of his peanut butter milkshake (he's allowing himself dairy today in my honour - I don't quite know how to take that) he says in his soft Brum, 'I've signed up for a major Muay Thai event in Thailand next February. I'm going up against one of the Thai fighters. That's the only real way to gain any respect in the fighting world. That's why you've been noticing the combat photos. I...

Where do Babies Come From? How we Learn about Sex...Book Just Launched on Amazon Kindle

Click to buy the book 'My spoken material is about the facts of life,' I was explaining to the Mother Superior. 'I've been asking people what they were told, how they were told it and did they ask questions. Terribly funny...' During my Where do Babies Come From? talk at the Metrodeco Café, Brighton, a superfluity of nuns stopped at the window to listen. In the street later that week one of them glided up and said how much they had enjoyed hearing me sing. ' And we wonder, might you please sing something for our charity evening?' I said, of course, sister. The nun nodded. 'That's very good to hear. But just to correct you: not sister - but Mother Superior.' She then ...

Iestyn Edwards Wonders...is it Lumpy or Runny?

Search This Blog