A van in the drive at 23 Gloucester Crescent

Gloucester Crescent is an Italianate terrace of the 1840s by the architect Henry Bassett, curving off Oval Road in Camden Town, NW1. Number 23 is Grade II listed, and Alan Bennett lived in it for some forty years. For roughly fifteen of those years an elderly woman lived in a van parked in its front drive.

She called herself Miss Mary Shepherd. She had been parked on the crescent itself from the late 1960s, shifting from space to space, and by 1971 her yellow Bedford van was standing outside number 23. The date usually given for her move off the road and into Bennett's drive is 1974, after Camden council introduced residents' parking on the street and left her nowhere legal to stop. Bennett offered the drive as a temporary expedient. She died there on 28 April 1989.

Margaret Fairchild, before she was Miss Shepherd

Bennett learned who she had actually been only after her death, from her brother.

She was born Margaret Fairchild on 4 January 1911 at Hellingly in Sussex. Around 1932 she studied at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris under the pianist Alfred Cortot, and was described as a gifted pianist; the claim, often repeated, that she performed at the promenade concerts has not been confirmed in BBC archives and should be treated as unverified.

In 1936, as Mary Teresa, she entered as a novice at the Convent of the Society of the Helpers of the Holy Souls on Gloucester Avenue, a few hundred yards from where she would eventually park. By 1939 she was teaching at a Catholic school in Yeovil. Her brother's account was that she had been made to give up music for her faith; she left the order after a breakdown, and fellow nuns had found her argumentative. The convent building later became the Japanese School in London and afterwards North Bridge House School.

She trained as an ambulance driver with the Auxiliary Territorial Service. She was subsequently involved in an accident in which a motorcyclist died. Believing herself responsible, she left the scene without giving her name, and afterwards changed her surname to Sheppard, apparently to avoid arrest. The rest of her life was lived under that altered name.

Fifteen years of an awkward arrangement

The arrangement in the drive was not sentimental on either side. Bennett ran an electric cable out to the van so that she could have heating and a television. Nuns from the neighbourhood supplemented the diet she could buy on social security. She wrote political pamphlets for her own right-wing party, Fidelis, which Bennett had typed and copied locally, and she once asked him whether, when elected, she would have to live in Downing Street or could run things from the van.

Bennett has been consistently unflattering about the experience, describing her as being there in full view of his window, and as difficult to like: she never smiled and had no sense of humour. That candour is part of why the account has lasted. He wrote about her throughout, keeping a diary of the encounters as they happened.

She was buried in an unmarked grave in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery.

From a London Review of Books diary to Maggie Smith

The material became, in sequence:

Other productions have followed, including stagings at Theatre by the Lake in Keswick in 2008, Hull Truck in 2011, the Theatre Royal, Bath in 2017 and the Melbourne Theatre Company in 2019. Bennett's collection of her pamphlets, handwritten notes and shopping lists is now held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Why the story could only have happened on this street

The episode is inseparable from the specific fabric of NW1. It required a mid-nineteenth-century crescent whose houses were built with front gardens deep enough to take a van off the highway; a neighbourhood that had filled up with writers and broadcasters, people at home during the working day and professionally inclined to observe; a Catholic convent within walking distance to supply informal support; and a local-authority parking scheme to force the decision in the first place.

It also required a particular kind of tolerance from the street. Miss Shepherd was a fixture of Gloucester Crescent for two decades before she was a literary subject, and for most of that time she was simply a neighbour that the crescent had absorbed. The van is long gone. The drive at number 23 is still there, and so is the terrace, essentially unaltered since the 1840s.