he Ransomes had been burgled. "Robbed," Mrs. Ransome said. "Burgled," Mr. Ransome corrected. Premises were burgled; persons were robbed. Mr. Ransome was a solicitor by profession and thought words mattered. Though "burgled" was the wrong word too. Burglars select; they pick; they remove one item and ignore others. There is a limit to what burglars can take: they seldom take easy chairs, for example, and even more seldom settees. These burglars did. They took everything.

The Ransomes had been to the opera, to Così fan tutte (or Così as Mrs. Ransome had learned to call it). Mozart played an important part in their marriage. They had no children and but for Mozart would probably have split up years ago. Mr. Ransome always took a bath when he came home from work and then he had his supper. After supper he took another bath, this time in Mozart. He wallowed in Mozart; he luxuriated in him; he let the little Viennese soak away all the dirt and disgustingness he had had to sit through in his office all day. On this particular evening he had been to the public baths, Covent Garden, where their seats were immediately behind the Home Secretary. He too was taking a bath and washing away the cares of his day, cares, if only in the form of a statistic, that were about to include the Ransomes.

On a normal evening, though, Mr. Ransome shared his bath with no one, Mozart coming personalized via his headphones and a stack of complex and finely balanced stereo equipment that Mrs. Ransome was never allowed to touch. She blamed the stereo for the burglary as that was what the robbers were probably after in the first place. The theft of stereos is common; the theft of fitted carpets is not.

"Perhaps they wrapped the stereo in the carpet," said Mrs. Ransome.

Mr. Ransome shuddered and said her fur coat was more likely, whereupon Mrs. Ransome started crying again.

It had not been much of a Così. Mrs. Ransome could not follow the plot and Mr. Ransome, who never tried, found the performance did not compare with the four recordings he possessed of the work. The acting he invariably found distracting. "None of them knows what to do with their arms," he said to his wife in the interval. Mrs. Ransome thought it probably went further than their arms but did not say so. She was wondering if the casserole she had left in the oven would get too dry at Gas Mark 4. Perhaps 3 would have been better. Dry it may well have been but there was no need to have worried. The thieves took the oven and the casserole with it.

The Ransomes lived in an Edwardian block of flats the color of ox blood not far from Regent's Park. It was handy for the City, though Mrs. Ransome would have preferred something farther out, seeing herself with a trug in a garden, vaguely. But she was not gifted in that direction. An African violet that her cleaning lady had given her at Christmas had finally given up the ghost that very morning and she had been forced to hide it in the wardrobe out of Mrs. Clegg's way. More wasted effort. The wardrobe had gone too.

They had no neighbors to speak of, or seldom to. Occasionally they ran into people in the lift and both parties would smile cautiously. Once they had asked some newcomers on their floor around to sherry, but he had turned out to be what he called "a big band freak" and she had been a dental receptionist with a timeshare in Portugal, so one way and another it had been an awkward evening and they had never repeated the experience. These days the turnover of tenants seemed increasingly rapid and the lift more and more wayward. People were always moving in and out again, some of them Arabs.

"I mean," said Mrs. Ransome, "it's getting like a hotel."

"I wish you wouldn't keep saying 'I mean,'" said Mr. Ransome. "It adds nothing to the sense."

He got enough of what he called "this sloppy way of talking" at work; the least he could ask for at home, he felt, was correct English. So Mrs. Ransome, who normally had very little to say, now tended to say even less.

When the Ransomes had moved into Naseby Mansions the flats boasted a commissionaire in a plum-colored uniform that matched the color of the building. He had died one afternoon in 1982 as he was hailing a taxi for Mrs. Brabourne on the second floor, who had forgone it in order to let it take him to hospital. None of his successors had shown the same zeal in office or pride in the uniform and eventually the function of commissionaire had merged with that of the caretaker, who was never to be found on the door and seldom to be found anywhere, his lair a hot scullery behind the boiler room where he slept much of the day in an armchair that had been thrown out by one of the tenants.

On the night in question the caretaker was asleep, though unusually for him not in the armchair but at the theater. On the lookout for a classier type of girl he had decided to attend an adult education course where he had opted to study English; given the opportunity, he had told the lecturer, he would like to become a voracious reader. The lecturer had some exciting though not very well formulated ideas about art and the workplace, and learning he was a caretaker had got him tickets for the play of the same name, thinking the resultant insights would be a stimulant to group interaction. It was an evening the caretaker found no more satisfying than the Ransomes did Così and the insights he gleaned limited: "So far as your actual caretaking was concerned," he reported to the class, "it was bollocks." The lecturer consoled himself with the hope that, unknown to the caretaker, the evening might have opened doors. In this he was right: the doors in question belonged to the Ransomes' flat.

The police came around eventually, though there was more to it than picking up the phone. The thieves had done that anyway, all three phones in fact, neatly snipping off the wire flush with the skirting board so that, with no answer from the flat opposite ("Sharing time in Portugal, probably," Mr. Ransome said, "or at a big band concert"), he was forced to sally forth in search of a phone box. "No joke," as he said to Mrs. Ransome now that phone boxes doubled as public conveniences. The first two Mr. Ransome tried didn't even do that, urinals solely, the phone long since ripped out. A mobile would have been the answer, of course, but Mr. Ransome had resisted this innovation ("Betrays a lack of organization"), as he resisted most innovations except those in the sphere of stereophonic reproduction.

He wandered on through deserted streets, wondering how people managed. The pubs had closed, the only place open a launderette with, in the window, a pay phone. This struck Mr. Ransome as a stroke of luck; never having had cause to use such an establishment he had not realized that washing clothes ran to such a facility; but being new to launderettes meant also that he was not certain if someone who was not actually washing clothes was permitted to take advantage of it. However, the phone was currently being used by the sole occupant of the place, an old lady in two overcoats who had plainly not laundered her clothes in some time, so Mr. Ransome took courage.

She was standing with the phone pressed to her dirty ear, not talking, but not really listening either.

"Could you hurry, please," Mr. Ransome said. "This is an emergency.

"So is this, dear," said the woman. "I'm calling Padstow, only they're not answering."

"I want to call the police," said Mr. Ransome.

"Been attacked, have you?" said the woman. "I was attacked last week. It's par for the course these days. He was only a toddler. It's ringing but there's a long corridor. They tend to have a hot drink about this time. They're nuns," she said explanatorily.

"Nuns?" said Mr. Ransome. "Are you sure they won't have gone to bed?"

"No. They're up and down all night having the services. There's always somebody about."

She went on listening to the phone ringing in Cornwall.

"Can't it wait?" asked Mr. Ransome, seeing his effects halfway up the M1. "Speed is of the essence."

"I know," said the old lady, "whereas nuns have got all the time in the world. That's the beauty of it except when it comes to answering the phone. I aim to go on retreat there in May."

"But it's only February," Mr. Ransome said. "I..."

"They get booked up," explained the old lady. "There's no talking and three meals a day so do you wonder? They use it as a holiday home for religious of both sexes. You wouldn't think nuns needed holidays. Prayer doesn't take it out of you. Not like bus conducting. Still ringing. They've maybe finished their hot drink and adjourned to the chapel. I suppose I could ring later, only..." She looked at the coins waiting in Mr. Ransome's hand. "I've put my money in now."

Mr. Ransome gave her a pound and she took the other 50p besides, saying, "You don't need money for 999."

She put the receiver down and her money came back of its own accord, but Mr. Ransome was so anxious to get on with his call he scarcely noticed. It was only later, sitting on the floor of what had been their bedroom, that he said out loud, "Do you remember Button A and Button B? They've gone, you know. I never noticed."

"Everything's gone," said Mrs. Ransome, not catching his drift, "the air freshener, the soap dish. They can't be human; I mean they've even taken the lavatory brush.

"Fire, police, or ambulance?" said a woman's voice.

"Police," said Mr. Ransome. There was a pause.

"I feel better for that banana," said a man's voice. "Yes? Police." Mr. Ransome began to explain but the man cut him short. "Anyone in danger?" He was chewing.

"No," said Mr. Ransome, "but..."

"Any threat to the person?"

"No," said Mr. Ransome, "only..."

"Slight bottleneck at the moment, chief," said the voice. "Bear with me while I put you on hold."

Mr. Ransome found himself listening to a Strauss waltz.

"They're probably having a hot drink," said the old lady, who he could smell was still at his elbow.

"Sorry about that," the voice said five minutes later.

"We're on manual at the moment. The computer's got hiccups. How may I help you?"

Mr. Ransome explained there had been a burglary and gave the address.

"Are you on the phone?"

"Of course," said Mr. Ransome, "only..."

"And the number is?"

"They've taken the phone," said Mr. Ransome.

"Nothing new there," said the voice. "Cordless job?"

"No," said Mr. Ransome. "One was in the sitting room, one was by the bed...."

"We don't want to get bogged down in detail," said the voice. "Besides, the theft of a phone isn't the end of the world. What was the number again?"

It was after one o'clock when Mr. Ransome got back and Mrs. Ransome, already beginning to pick up the threads, was in what had been their bedroom, sitting with her back to the wall in the place where she would have been in bed had there been a bed to be in. She had done a lot of crying while Mr. Ransome was out but had now wiped her eyes, having decided she was going to make the best of things.

"I thought you might be dead," she said.

"Why dead?"

"Well, it never rains but it pours."

"I was in one of these launderettes if you want to know. It was terrible. What are you eating?"

"A cough sweet. I found it in my bag." This was one of the sweets Mr. Ransome insisted she take with her whenever they went to the opera ever since she had had a snuffle all the way through Fidelio.

"Is there another?"

"No," said Mrs. Ransome, sucking. "This is the last."

Mr. Ransome went to the lavatory, only realizing when it was too late that the burglary had been so comprehensive as to have taken in both the toilet roll and its holder.

"There's no paper," called Mrs. Ransome.

The only paper in the flat was the program from Così and passing it around the door Mrs. Ransome saw, not without satisfaction, that Mr. Ransome was going to have to wipe his bottom on a picture of Mozart.

Both unwieldy and unyielding the glossy brochure (sponsored by Barclays Bank PLC) was uncomfortable to use and unsinkable afterwards, and three flushes notwithstanding, the fierce eye of Sir Georg Solti still came squinting resentfully around the bend of the pan.

"Better?" said Mrs. Ransome.

"No," said her husband and settled down beside her against the wall. However, finding the skirting board dug into her back Mrs. Ransome changed her position to lie at right angles to her husband so that her head now rested on his thigh, a situation it had not been in for many a long year. While telling himself this was an emergency it was a conjunction Mr. Ransome found both uncomfortable and embarrassing, but which seemed to suit his wife as she straightaway went off to sleep, leaving Mr. Ransome staring glumly at the wall opposite and its now uncurtained window, from which, he noted wonderingly, the burglars had even stolen the curtain rings.

It was four o'clock before the police arrived, a big middle-aged man in a raincoat, who said he was a detective sergeant, and a sensitive-looking young constable in uniform, who didn't say anything at all.

"You've taken your time," said Mr. Ransome.

"Yes," said the sergeant. "We would have been earlier but there was a slight...ah, glitch as they say. Rang the wrong doorbell. The fault of mi-laddo here. Saw the name Hanson and..."

"No," said Mr. Ransome. "Ransome."

"Yes. We established that...eventually. Just moved in, have you?" said the sergeant, surveying the bare boards.

"No," said Mr. Ransome. "We've been here for thirty years."

"Fully furnished, was it?"

"Of course," said Mr. Ransome. "It was a normal home."

"A settee, easy chairs, a clock," said Mrs. Ransome. "We had everything."

"Television?" said the constable, timidly.

"Yes," said Mrs. Ransome.

"Only we didn't watch it much," said Mr. Ransome.

"Video recorder?"

"No," said Mr. Ransome. "Life's complicated enough."

"CD player?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Ransome and Mr. Ransome together.

"And my wife had a fur coat," said Mr. Ransome. "My insurers have a list of the valuables."

"In that case," said the sergeant, "you are laughing. I'll just have a little wander round if you don't mind, while Constable Partridge takes down the details. People opposite see the intruder?"

"Away in Portugal," said Mr. Ransome.

"Caretaker?"

"Probably in Portugal too," said Mr. Ransome, "for all we see of him."

"Is it Ransom as in king's?" said the constable. "Or Ransome as in Arthur?"

"Partridge is one of our graduate entrants," said the sergeant, examining the front door. "Lock not forced, I see. He's just climbing the ladder. There wouldn't be such a thing as a cup of tea, would there?"

"No," said Mr. Ransome shortly, "because there wouldn't be such a thing as a teapot. Not to mention a tea bag to put in it."

"I take it you'll want counseling," said the constable.

"What?"

"Someone comes along and holds your hand," said the sergeant, looking at the window. "Partridge thinks it's important."

"We're all human," said the constable.

"I'm a solicitor," said Mr. Ransome.

"Well," said the sergeant, "perhaps your missus could give it a try. We like to keep Partridge happy."

Mrs. Ransome smiled helpfully.

"I'll put yes," said the constable.

"They didn't leave anything behind, did they?" asked the sergeant, sniffing and reaching up to run his hand along the picture-rail.

"No," said Mr. Ransome testily. "Not a thing. As you can see."

"I didn't mean something of yours," said the sergeant. "I meant something of theirs." He sniffed again, inquiringly. "A calling card."

"A calling card?" said Mrs. Ransome.

"Excrement," said the sergeant. "Burglary is a nervous business. They often feel the need to open their bowels when doing a job."

"Which is another way of saying it, sergeant," said the constable.

"Another way of saying what, Partridge?"

"Doing a job is another way of saying opening the bowels. In France," said the constable, "it's known as posting a sentry."

"Oh, teach you that at Leatherhead, did they?" said the sergeant. "Partridge is a graduate of the police college."

"It's like a university," explained the constable, "only they don't have scarves."

"Anyway," said the sergeant, "have a scout around. For the excrement, I mean. They can be very creative about it. Burglary in Pangbourne I attended once where they done it halfway up the wall in an eighteenth-century light fitting. Any other sphere and they'd have got the Duke of Edinburgh's Award."

"You've perhaps not noticed," Mr. Ransome said grimly, "but we don't have any light fittings."

"Another one in Guildford did it in a bowl of this potpourri."

"That would be irony," said the constable.

"Oh would it?" said the sergeant. "And there was me thinking it was just some foul-assed, light-fingered little smackhead afflicted with incontinence. Still, while we're talking about bodily functions, before we take our leave I'll just pay a visit myself."

Too late Mr. Ransome realized he should have warned him and took refuge in the kitchen.

The sergeant came out shaking his head.

"Well, at least our friends had the decency to use the toilet but they've left it in a disgusting state. I never thought I'd have to do a Jimmy Riddle over Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. Her recording of West Side Story is one of the gems of my record collection."

"To be fair," said Mrs. Ransome, "that was my husband."

"Dear me," said the sergeant.

"What was?" said Mr. Ransome, coming back into the room.

"Nothing," said his wife.

"Do you think you'll catch them?" said Mr. Ransome as he stood at the door with the two policemen.

The sergeant laughed.

"Well, miracles do happen, even in the world of law enforcement. Nobody got a grudge against you, have they?"

"I'm a solicitor," said Mr. Ransome. "It's possible."

"And it's not somebody's idea of a joke?"

"A joke?" said Mr. Ransome.

"Just a thought," said the sergeant. "But if it's your genuine burglar, I'll say this: he always comes back.

The constable nodded in sage confirmation; even Leatherhead was agreed on this. "Come back?" said Mr. Ransome bitterly, looking at the empty flat. "Come back? What the fuck for?"

"I ran into a snake this afternoon," Miss Shepherd said. "It was coming up Parkway. It was a long, gray snake—a boa constrictor possibly. It looked poisonous. It was keeping close to the wall and seemed to know its way. I've a feeling it may have been heading for the van." I was relieved that on this occasion she didn't demand that I ring the police, as she regularly did if anything out of the ordinary occurred. Perhaps this was too out of the ordinary (though it turned out the pet shop in Parkway had been broken into the previous night, so she may have seen a snake). She brought her mug over and I made her a drink, which she took back to the van. "I thought I'd better tell you," she said, "just to be on the safe side. I've had some close shaves with snakes."

This encounter with the putative boa constrictor was in the summer of 1971, when Miss Shepherd and her van had for some months been at a permanent halt opposite my house in Camden Town. I had first come across her a few years previously, stood by her van, stalled as usual, near the convent at the top of the street. The convent (which was to have a subsequent career as the Japanese School) was a gaunt reformatory-like building that housed a dwindling garrison of aged nuns and was notable for a striking crucifix attached to the wall overlooking the traffic lights. There was something about the position of Christ, pressing himself against the grim pebble dash beneath the barred windows of the convent, that called up visions of the Stalag and the searchlight and which had caused us to dub him "The Christ of Colditz." Miss Shepherd, not looking uncrucified herself, was standing by her vehicle in an attitude with which I was to become very familiar, left arm extended with the palm flat against the side of the van indicating ownership, the right arm summoning anyone who was fool enough to take notice of her, on this occasion me. Nearly six foot, she was a commanding figure, and would have been more so had she not been kitted out in greasy raincoat, orange skirt, Ben Hogan golfing cap and carpet slippers. She would be going on sixty at this time.

She must have prevailed on me to push the van as far as Albany Street, though I recall nothing of the exchange. What I do remember was being overtaken by two policemen in a panda car as I trundled the van across Gloucester Bridge; I thought that, as the van was certainly holding up the traffic, they might have lent a hand. They were wiser than I knew. The other feature of this first run-in with Miss Shepherd was her driving technique. Scarcely had I put my shoulder to the back of the van, an old Bedford, than a long arm was stretched elegantly out of the driver's window to indicate in textbook fashion that she (or rather I) was moving off. A few yards further on, as we were about to turn into Albany Street, the arm emerged again, twirling elaborately in the air to indicate that we were branching left, the movement done with such boneless grace that this section of the Highway Code might have been choreographed by Petipa with Ulanova at the wheel. Her "I am coming to a halt" was less poised, as she had plainly not expected me to give up pushing and shouted angrily back that it was the other end of Albany Street she wanted, a mile further on. But I had had enough by this time and left her there, with no thanks for my trouble. Far from it. She even climbed out of the van and came running after me, shouting that I had no business abandoning her, so that passers-by looked at me as if I had done some injury to this pathetic scarecrow. "Some people!" I suppose I thought, feeling foolish that I'd been taken for a ride (or taken her for one) and cross that I'd fared worse than if I'd never lifted a finger, these mixed feelings to be the invariable aftermath of any transaction involving Miss Shepherd. One seldom was able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation.

It must have been a year or so after this, and so some time in the late sixties, that the van first appeared in Gloucester Crescent. In those days the street was still a bit of a mixture. Its large semi-detached villas had originally been built to house the Victorian middle class, then it had gone down in the world, and, though it had never entirely decayed, many of the villas degenerated into rooming houses and so were among the earliest candidates for what is now called "gentrification' but which was then called "knocking through." Young professional couples, many of them in journalism or television, bought up the houses, converted them and (an invariable feature of such conversions) knocked the basement rooms together to form a large kitchen/dining room. In the mid-sixties I wrote a BBC TV series, Life in NW1, based on one such family, the Stringalongs, whom Mark Boxer then took over to people a cartoon strip in the Listener, and who kept cropping up in his drawings for the rest of his life. What made the social setup funny was the disparity between the style in which the new arrivals found themselves able to live and their progressive opinions: guilt, put simply, which today's gentrifiers are said famously not to feel (or "not to have a problem about"). We did have a problem, though I'm not sure we were any better for it. There was a gap between our social position and our social obligations. It was in this gap that Miss Shepherd (in her van) was able to live.

October 1969. When she is not in the van Miss S. spends much of her day sitting on the pavement in Parkway, where she has a pitch outside Williams & Glyn's Bank. She sells tracts, entitled "True View: Mattering Things," which she writes herself, though this isn't something she will admit. "I sell them, but so far as the authorship is concerned I'll say they are anonymous and that's as tar as I'm prepared to go." She generally chalks the gist of the current pamphlet on the pavement, though with no attempt at artistry. "St. Francis FLUNG money from him" is today's message, and prospective customers have to step over it to get into the bank. She also makes a few coppers selling pencils. "A gentleman came the other day and said that the pencil he had bought from me was the best pencil on the market at the present time. It lasted him three months. He'll be back for another one shortly." D., one of the more conventional neighbors (and not a knocker-through), stops me and says, "Tell me, is she a genuine eccentric?"

April 1970. Today we moved the old lady's van. An obstruction order has been put under the windscreen wiper, stating that it was stationed outside number 63 and is a danger to public health. This order, Miss S. insists, is a statutory order: "And statutory means standing—in this case standing outside number 63—so, if the van is moved on, the order will be invalid." Nobody ventures to argue with this, but she can't decide whether her next pitch should be outside number 61 or further on. Eventually she decides there is "a nice space" outside 62 and plumps for that. My neighbor Nick Tomalin and I heave away at the back of the van, but while she is gracefully indicating that she is moving off (for all of the fifteen feet) the van doesn't budge. "Have you let the hand brake off?" Nick Tomalin asks. There is a pause. "I'm just in the process of taking it off." As we are poised for the move, another Camden Town eccentric materializes, a tall, elderly figure in long overcoat and homburg hat, with a distinguished gray mustache and in his buttonhole a flag for the Primrose League. He takes off a grubby canary glove and leans a shaking hand against the rear of the van (OLU246), and when we have moved it forward the few statutory feet he puts on his glove again, saying, "If you should need me I'm just round the corner" (i.e., in Arlington House, the workingmen's hostel).

I ask Miss S. how long she has had the van. "Since 1965," she says, "though don't spread that around. I got it to put my things in. I came down from St. Albans in it, and plan to go back there eventually. I'm just pedaling water at the moment. I've always been in the transport line. Chiefly delivery and chauffeuring. You know," she says mysteriously—"renovated army vehicles. And I've got good topography. I always have had. I knew Kensington in the blackout."

This van (there were to be three others in the course of the next twenty years) was originally brown, but by the time it had reached the Crescent it had been given a coat of yellow. Miss S. was fond of yellow ("It's the papal color") and was never content to leave her vehicles long in their original trim. Sooner or later she could be seen moving slowly round her immobile home, thoughtfully touching up the rust from a tiny tin of primrose paint, looking, in her long dress and sun hat, much as Vanessa Bell would have looked had she gone in for painting Bedford vans. Miss S. never appreciated the difference between car enamel and ordinary gloss paint, and even this she never bothered to mix. The result was that all her vehicles ended up looking as if they had been given a coat of badly made custard or plastered with scrambled egg. Still, there were few occasions on which one saw Miss Shepherd genuinely happy and one of them was when she was putting paint on. A few years before she died she went in for a Reliant Robin (to put more of her things in). It was actually yellow to start with, but that didn't save it from an additional coat, which she applied as Monet might have done, standing back to judge the effect of each brushstroke. The Reliant stood outside my gate. It was towed away earlier this year, a scatter of yellow drops on the curb all that remains to mark its final parking place.