farewell to Sally

I had been waiting for the inevitable. And yesterday it began, the sound of feet clumping up and down the stairs, laughing they carried sacks and threw them crashing into the back of the van. A life - a life in sacks. She died as she lived, marginalised, neglected, isolated. The cancer she refused to treat spread across her whole body and doubtless she was in a great deal of pain as her life ended. Cowardly, I did not visit her in her final weeks - but then nor was I invited to- I wanted to remember the vibrant, nutty Sally. She's been my neighbour for nearly twenty years, the batty lady upstairs who'd return home with 'objects trouvees' : flowers discarded by a Mayfair florist, odd and 'unsual' pieces of wood, and occasionally tables, chairs, picture frames, the detritius of the affluent. These OT's would then be added to 'mount stufu'   pile which, when I first met her had been a small pile in the centre of her living room and became, by the end of her life, the four foot high mound filling the whole room and spreading like lava into the hallway and the kitchen, turning the corner and filling up the passage and trickling into the bedroom. It became impossible to sit down in the living room and then stand in the hallway until finally the only place to carry on any conversation at all was to stand very still behind the front door and make no sudden movements. Being a bit of a closet neat freak I was desperate to clear mount stufu  offered to-but there was always a reason, quoted volubly and a great length why it could not be done. I tried once, picking up the flotsum at the edges and saw how anxious Sally became, I stopped. It was not just stuff - she needed the bulk and clutter as a kind of buffer against the world. Her hoarding of random objects, eccentric behaviour and, as it transpired, wilful self neglect developed from mild, lifelong eccentricity.
She was a woman of wide and varied interests. Growing up in a patrician Philadelphia family, by all accounts she ran a bit wild on the early death of her mother, ended up in Art school and rubbed shoulders with Rothko and other edgy artists. Divorcing her husband, she became an artist's model and she moved to London in 1968 to see Fonteyn dance and tracked the ballet to Varna and beyond. An enthusiast for Kibuki she followed a troupe touring in England and was adopted as a mascot. Lifelong devotee of opera and ballet she had encyclopediac knowledge of both or so it appeared to an outsider. Her forebears escaped the pogrums of Eastern Europe and she read obscure and detailed histories of Russia and Eastern Europe and could quote facts about the Polish death camps or the Stalin's famines. Conversations with Sally often begun with, 'I am very worried about the Chinese water table', followed by a long discourse or printing methods or hydroelectric dams or natural medicine. A passionate bibilophile one of her diversions was selling second hand books for the old Commies of Russel Square, where well meaning relics from the glory days of the Soviets, a sprinkling of East German spies and various trades union activists rubbed shoulders, inevitably returning home with armfulls of the more obscure histories of WW2 to add to the three deep, wall lined bookshelves. We went to the Socilaist film co op together, enjoying such delights as Bunel's les Hurdes and talks but old soldiers from the International Brigades. A passionate sauna user, she introduced me to the steamy claustrophobic delights of damp steam. Through these lengthy sweats, any personal enquiry was ignored and replaced with diatribes which eventually became rants as her grip on reality unravelled - like the balls of wool stacked high in her flat, together with birds to hang on the christmas tree, ribbons of every conceivable colour which she used to tie the bouquets she threw onto ballet and opera stages; paint brushes, bubblewrap, kimonos, baskets, empty cardboard boxes, piles of free newspapers and beautiful crystal champagne glasses, for she was after all a lady and had many exquistite objects.

When my daughter went to Summerhill, she was delighted, she had read all of Neal's books and was so excited when 'princess longlegs' came back at weekends. A helpful if slightly dangerous babysitter, once setting fire to some rice cakes the two of them decided to put under the grill.
Endlessly obliging, I have piles of small notes she posted through my letter box with all the lastest news: special offers on essential oils, books I was looking for, interesting radio programmes, tit-bits on the comings and goings of the residents: she was a bush telegraph for Great Titchfield Street, a Fitzrovia farandula.
Always eccentric, in the last five years the rambing got worse. Caught by her, I felt less like a rabbit frozen in the headlights than a butterfly pinned to a board. For my own sanity I had to crawl out under the tsunami of words - an hour was all I could take.
Then a series of disasters knocked her back. First, the gas board changed her gas meter and demanded a huge back payment which she fought over the course of two years. Eventually sorted, Sally never used her heating again, she had learned to live with the cold and now suffered the freezing winters stoically. Next, her handbag was stolen, together with her door keys at the Commie book sale. Breaking down her door after an eight hour wait saw her crouched on the floor wailing in despair.  Around this time I found out by persistent questioning that she had been living on a fixed income which had now run out. She joked about living in shop doorways, but her passivity terrified me. Homelessness, bagladydom are terrifying to me.  Only at the eleventh hour was she persuaded to ask for help. I was impressed, given she was a US citizen, had no passport and no right to remain and had only paid one week of income tax in her forty year residence, she was gathered up in the wide arms of the Welfare State.
Sadly, not even this this good news could shift her doom mongering, she was a fount of misery statistics, anectodotes and warning stories on any topic.  But always good for a laugh, well meaning and open minded  she pounded the streets of Fitzrovia, trailing her voluminous hand knitted bottle green shawls her flip flops slapping unforgiving pavements chatting with anyone who had the time of day. Impish and curious to the end, she sat on the chair lift lifting her into the ambulance grinning with delight as though she were going to her first day at school not an appointment with the grim reaper.

As the bags drag and clatter down the staircase a thick dust of book mites, dust bunnies, broken pens and drawing pins cover every surface - her life is discarded in the same messy, untramelled way she lived. Hail and farewell another London eccentric - goodbye Sally and God speed.