Skip to main content

A Life Lesson from Lambeth Bridge Lill

 


                                                      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. This was Lill, in her early seventies, I imagine, going 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 my family, took her a flask of tea. He collected the empty flask from her on his way home each evening, saying, 'Same again tomorrow, then,  Lill?'

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

'No trouble, Lill.'

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

Lill 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, Lill 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 might have lived in one of the prefabs this side of the Archbishop's Park.


A reporter on the South London Press went to interview Lill

'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, Lill replied, 'Young man, you will hopefully one day learn. In life it doesn’t do to spread oneself too thinly.'

There. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
1 comment
Read more

Psychic Readings

  As it's Summer Solstice, let's revisit my mother's lodge for a seance.  We know from a previous blog entry that lodge members are asked only to heal, and to have no truck with past lives and spirit guides.  See:   Previous blog featuring the lodge...   On the QT they have seances, at which the medium tunes in to great mysteries of the past.  Here are some of the readings.  I've taken out anything that explicitly reveals the subject of the reading.  Then we can play at guessing what it might be...      'There's something to do with a pile of tied up newspapers.  Was there an evening paper delivery?  They need to talk to the paper boy from back then as he saw something relevant but didn't understand at the time what it was he was seeing. There's also something to do with the plants by the front door.  The leaves of one of them were too dark to have been real.  Put there on purpose to deflect attention from ...
6 comments
Read more

How to...Self-Assessment Tax

   As we near the end of the year a performer's thoughts will turn to the dreaded self assessment tax return.  Eight years ago I made a pact with myself never again to put myself through those two days of surfing receipts; forging official contracts for looking after Lady Carter's pug Mr Timothy; wondering if I would get away with claiming for two pints of Fullers Honeydew, bought to silence a city boy smoking outside the Rising Sun in Cloth Fair, after he saw me help myself to some of the festive flora on the railings of St Barts church to arrange in my hair having forgotten my tiara for a Christmas gig at Club Kabaret .    I now do a mini-tax return each month when my bank statements come, and simply tot up the running total on April 6th when I submit my HMRC self-assessment return.    Of all the self-employed professions, performers and cab drivers most frequently underpay tax; ergo they are the two professions most likely to be audited by HMRC ...
4 comments
Read more