Nosy neighbour who became fairy my godmother
She was incorrigible, divisive and rude. But after she passed away, the woman who lived downstairs left ARIFA AKBAR the most wonderful surprise ...
Before i met Rosalind Hibbins, i had heard about her. i was buying an attic flat in North-West london and i had just exchanged contracts with its former owner, Holly, when she mentioned the woman who lived downstairs. she spoke of Rosalind with such strained diplomacy. ‘she’s a character!’ she said with a nervous laugh. ‘every street’s got one.’
i was moving from a large Thirties block where my neighbours had been too many and too fluid to get to know beyond the briefest of hellos in the lift. it suited me that way. i had grown up on a housing estate in Primrose Hill, after my parents returned to london from Pakistan, and as the only non-white family in our council block, we tried to live as quietly as we could amid the curiosity and occasional hostility.
as the post-war generation died off, our neighbours became far more unknown and indifferent to us, and we to them.
Rosalind introduced herself the day i arrived. she was a strapping woman with tidy red hair cut short, and a way of speaking that quickly travelled the scale from genial to spiky. The furniture was still being hauled up when she emerged with a box of organic tea. ‘i’m so pleased to finally meet you,’ she said. ‘i looked up your name. i didn’t know if you’d come veiled.’
Oh god, i thought, but she was full of neighbourly spirit after that. she asked me what else i needed, and when i spoke of a housewarming party, she saw my bare room and said she’d lend me her corner tables.
she was in her early 60s, with no husband or children. she had been a librarian at the British library but found, after retirement, that her true passion was stone-carving.
i also discovered she had a knack for friendship, but for fall-outs too. she received floods of birthday cards and had friends forever doing her favours. Yet the other two flatowners in the house spoke of her in the same nervous way as Holly when they took me out to the pub. a few drinks in, they spoke in plainer language: she had fallen out with them dramatically over the years.
Rosalind called on me for small tasks — watering her plants while she was away, buying milk, vacuuming the hallway. Then, one day, she caught me on the stairs when i was in a troubled mood about work, and over tea she listened in such a way that i felt the possibility of a solution, even though she hadn’t given any outright advice.
We’d bump into each other along the stairs and talk about life over tea — her joy at finally renting a studio and becoming a bona fide artist ‘at my age!’, her dislike of the new pope and, ultimately, of all organised religion. she held equally outspoken views on islam, which she had volubly expressed to me in the past, knowing i was a muslim. Now i figured it was nothing personal.
she caught me exhausted one time and craving escape from the city. ‘You should go and see the bluebells,’ she said, giving me a map to a copse on the outskirts of london. as a British asian urbanite, i hadn’t even known bluebell season existed. i trekked there and the bobbing sea of flowers were so joyful that they breathed new life into me.
it became a friendship of sorts, with its confidences, rows and appeasements. Or perhaps a kinship in which she saw something of herself in me, and i, for my part, recognised my inability to compromise in her, and imagined it leading me to the same future — a woman without family, alone in older age.
YeT her life offered reassurance, too, because it showed me how i could live fruitfully this way. i never felt sorry for her because she emanated great strength of will.
so, when she sent us a house email three years ago to announce that she had ovarian cancer, she made it clear she’d be fighting it all the way. she got herself on a drugs trial, and a year later she was just as alive, even though she wore scarves now where her hair had been.
a stark email arrived last spring: the drugs had stopped working and they had given her ‘a few weeks, maybe more’. a few weeks earlier, my sister had died suddenly and it had left me poleaxed. Now, here was death again on my doorstep.
it took all my strength to go two floors down, and then i was uncontrollably tearful at how vulnerable Rosalind looked. Her hair had grown back in tufts of white and she’d lost so much weight that she looked frail. she moved slowly and gasped for breath. We sat in awkward silence until she looked around the room in shock and said: ‘What will happen to all my things?’
i saw her at the house once more after that, with a cluster of women around her who must have helped her down the stairs. she was leaning on her walking frame and she told me in a whispering voice that she was going to visit her studio.
WHaT struck me was how free and happy she looked in that moment. i knew it was because she loved the studio and the things she had made with her own hands inside it.
We heard that she’d been taken to a hospice. i wanted to say goodbye, but felt too shy to visit. Facing death, i had observed through my sister, was such an intimate thing and i didn’t want to intrude on hers.
so i texted her, saying i would remember our conversations, particularly the first one when i’d been thinking of finding an alternative career to writing.
Rosalind had talked about learning to navigate two things, and conjured an image of the woman who rides two horses at the circus. she has learned to slip from one horse to another and be in control of the manoeuvre so that it is not frightening for her, she had said — suggesting i might try being her, metaphorically.
The image had stayed with me, and i spoke of the woman, perhaps because i saw Rosalind was poised for the ultimate transition from life to death, and i wanted to remind her of the sliding manoeuvre.
i got a voicemail inviting me to visit her. she had a big, bright room at the hospice, one wall covered with cards. she asked after my sister, the details of how she died, and how i felt.
‘Don’t hold on to her too tightly — she’ll come back to you in other people you meet,’ she said, which wasn’t exactly a comfort, but like the circus lady on two horses, it stayed with me as a possibility.
‘Did she die alone?’ Rosalind asked quietly, and when i said yes, she grew grave. she was not afraid of death, but she was afraid of dying alone. The hospice didn’t have enough staff to allocate her a nurse overnight. What would happen if she found herself heading towards the end in the dark with no one beside her?
i knew the answer to that. my father’s care home in Kentish Town had plenty of nurses, who i knew
would do extra night shifts if Rosalind wanted it. I asked my father’s favourite nurse, Bobby, to stay with her over several nights. Rosalind was comforted by his presence and they had interesting conversations, he told me afterwards, but he had booked a trip to his family in the Philippines.
I couldn’t find another replacement that Rosalind liked, and finally she left me a message to say that friends were staying with her overnight in rotation so I shouldn’t worry. Her sister emailed the house in early September to tell us Rosalind had died and invited us to the funeral. I knew I couldn’t go. One funeral that summer had been enough.
In the months afterwards, a certain hardness set in within me, or perhaps it was grief disguised as disappointment. She hadn’t properly thanked me for the jobs I had done for her, I said petulantly to my mother, who didn’t indulge me for a minute and reminded me to give and then to forget about it.
That was too Buddhist for me, I told her. I was always giving, but the world never noticed. A year passed and I got a letter Rosalind’s solicitors. Inside was her death certificate, her will and a list of legal charges. They must have accidentally sent me them.
I re-read the covering letter. Rosalind’s estate was being settled and her flat had sold for not much short of £1 million. And I was entitled to a percentage, because Rosalind had put me in her will. I read the letter again in disbelief. Other feelings came afterwards — guilt for having judged her harshly, and gratitude, too. The sum I got in the end wasn’t life changing, but I had left a job without another one to go to, and I was now filled with an irrational fear about money and running out of it.
Her gift calmed me, and it also reminded me of how small acts of kindness leave such great, lifeaffirming marks on the world.
Rosalind, I thought: a neighbour who lived two floors beneath me. A cancer sufferer whose medicine I collected from Boots. An adversary with whom I occasionally butted heads. A friend, who gave me solace and whose grave I still hadn’t sat beside.
And she had, a month before dying, considered my future and perhaps worried about it, knowing that I’d lost my sister and that a job of 15 years had also come to an end.
And then she had put me in her will and a year later, on a day when I felt especially grumpy, she had reminded me of the cups of teas and the bluebells. This wasn’t the thank you that I had so craved. It was a show of love.
EXTRACTED from tales Of two Londons: Stories From a Fractured city (Or Books).