Free No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses! by Virginia Ironside

daffodils. God knows when I planted them. Probably that funny collection that Penny gave me last year that she’d got free with some gardening order. What with a few crocuses, the whole thing down the end looked like a spring glade.
    And I suddenly thought of an idea. I’d do a painting of part of my garden every month, for a year. The David Hockney of Shepherd’s Bush.
    Pouncer was looking contemplative, too, but he was probably thinking about birds. Then I heard someone yelling. Looking round rather irritatedly, I saw my Polish neighbour, Mrs Vladek, who’d come out into her garden and was shouting over the wall. She’s a widow who must be at least ninety, and she always has to walk very carefully in her garden as there’s not much room on her path because she still collects and hoards driftwood there, an old wartime habit.
    â€˜I want you to know, I am selling house.’
    â€˜What!’ I said. For some reason I thought she’d be living there forever. ‘But why?’ For a brief moment I imagined that she’d somehow eavesdropped on my ghastly dream and had decided she couldn’t carry on living next to such a foul and devious neighbour.
    â€˜I go to live with my sister in Poland,’ she said. ‘And I have offer on house. From very nice people. He is American. Lawyer, very big.’ I immediately imagined a grossly fat legal eagle, having to be winched up to his room through the window, along with the grand piano. ‘They have plan for house. I leave next month. I will be sad.’
    Thinking about this,
I
felt rather sad as well. And
particularly
sad that I’d never made proper friends with this old lady. She’d clearly had a bad war, since she still spent her days scavenging for bits of wood for emergency heating. Once, during the biggest storm in recent history, a storm that felled a quarter of London’s trees, I looked out of my bedroom window at three in the morning and saw her wrestling with a piece of tarpaulin on her roof, a tiny, game, wizened creature struggling to keep her balance in the gale, clutching on to the chimney pot while desperately trying to fix the billowing fabric in place.
    With great difficulty I had managed to get the window open, waved liked a maniac, yelled at the top of my voice, and finally caught her attention.
    â€˜Get inside!’ I shouted. ‘It’s dangerous!’
    But she couldn’t hear a word I said and, blow me, when I next looked out, she was still there with a hammer, banging nails into the tarpaulin as the wind howled around her, leaves and branches and birds tumbling past her. I shut the window, crept back into bed, pulled the duvet over my head and prayed.
    I sometimes wonder if our generation isn’t rather weedy.True, we survived the sixties, which was a dreadful stress as it was a time of such social change. But these old birds who lived through the war! What they must have suffered! Presumably all the men were away fighting, so no doubt everything at home was left to the women – sweeping away the rubble from the streets after bombing raids, boiling up weeds for soup and, without a crumb of coal for heating, just pulling on another jersey made out of the front-room carpet and getting on with it.
    We’re a pampered generation.
    But to be honest, after the news she’d just given me, I felt rather like my neighbour herself, struggling on the roof in the middle of the night. I felt I was trying to hammer down some kind of psychic tarpaulin on my feelings. It’s the strain of the family going away, I know. I suppose change is much easier to bear when you’re young. But now, I only have to find my local butcher has gone away for a holiday and his daughter is serving behind the counter for two weeks instead, and I start to feel as if my whole world is falling apart. It’s absolutely pathetic. I try not to show it, of course.
10 March
    Have had the most horrifying morning