Profile: The Old Lady From Downstairs Who Didn’t Know I Was Making Fun Of Her
My elderly neighbour Eloise was a strange type of neighbour, she was an elderly one. But that wasn’t the only strange thing about her. Another unusual trait was that she liked to talk to me, clearly not understanding that she was in a block of ex-council flats in London and believing, instead, that she was in the 1960s still, when speaking to you neighbours was the equivalent of what today’s youth would call “TikTok”. Of course, I didn’t mind her natterings all too much, I thought they were somewhat endearing and I was often able to drift away and think how useful this kind of thing would be for me to write and publish on some future date. Unfortunately, I would be thinking this for quite some time before realising that I hadn’t been taking in almost any of what she was actually saying, meaning a large amount of what you are about to read is completely made up.
One thing she would often tell me, while I wasn’t paying attention, is what the block of flats we lived in used to be like when she was young. Now, this was a very long time ago, I don’t know exactly how old Eloise was. She always took great pride in claiming to be born on the same day that Eva Braun dumped Hitler. Though apparently a week later Eva Braun came to her senses and got back together with him. This didn’t seem to bother Eloise, who saw at is confirmation of the autonomy of women that they could choose to return to, and be taken back by, a genocidal tyrant. I could never find any sources to back up this Eva Braun story, so it got me no closer to determining Eloise’s age, presumably she was born sometime before 1945, if she claimed it was after 1945 then there have been some serious wires got crossed in the passing down of this birth day story.
Apparently her family had moved to London when she was only five years old and she had been living in this flat ever since. She remembered running up and down the stairs at some grim post-war attempt at a childhood game, I would often try and ask her to recount the details of the game, if there was a scoring system, when would it end etc., but this would merely elongate her tirade. Perhaps this could have been a lesson to me, to no longer get so hung up on rules and discipline but just enjoy playing for what it is. It’s just a symptom of the modern society that I was raised in, convincing me that every situation had to have a winner and a loser. Maybe my childhood, as a result, was more joyless than Eloise’s life, but then all she amounted to was sitting on the porch and boring some young writer with stories of her life when he wasn’t even listening. And I’ve amounted to the greater success of making up substitute stories for the ones I didn’t hear and having an undiscerning audience who don’t care to tell the difference. Other than the stair game, she told me that she used to love to throw a ball into the street and challenge her little brother Tommy to go and catch it as a car was going by.
Oh yes… Tommy. Eloise spoke about Tommy a lot, was still alive last I heard, farming over in Norfolk. He had been a terrible burden on the family from a young age after a traffic accident had left him mentally debilitated. Doctors did say that it could have been a lot worse and that they were “lucky it is the 1950s and cars can’t go fast enough to kill a child yet.” I could never figure for why, but Eloise always blamed herself for Tommy’s difficulties, and it resulted in the two of them becoming somewhat estranged for a lot of their life. I suppose this partially explains why Tommy fucked off to farm potatoes once their parents died. It didn’t stop Eloise from talking about him, and she would write to him every Christmas and ask him how the harvest had gone. In all the years I lived by Eloise, Tommy only wrote back once, bitterly telling her that the only thing more poisonous to him than his family was that year’s potato haul. I assume he didn’t have a wife or children, or else I imagine they would have been much offended by the letter as well. I privately thought that he ought to find himself a woman, if only to give him someone to complain about sub-par potatoes to, save him the trouble of writing to his estranged sister. Eloise continued to write though, she would constantly wonder out loud to me about him, what he looks like now, whether he had a big house, whether he was happy. Of course, this being the 21st century I looked him up online the very first time and found that he was an ugly, decrepit miser living in a shack with no roof, and spending his free time discrediting so called “superfoods” by adding information of spurious origins to Wikipedia articles. I didn’t tell Eloise any of this however, I was merely there to listen respectfully.
It was a wondrous transition going from bemused passer-by, rolling my eyes at her greetings, to eventually finding myself sitting cross-legged in front of her on the porch, eagerly taking in the folk wisdom so generously dispensed. She had a way of speaking that was supremely confident. Almost every other word was followed by a pause and an inquisitive look, challenging me to challenge her. If she managed to go a full five minutes without my saying anything I took issue with, she would resort to insulting my character, calling me a hateful person. There was nothing conscious in this, she probably didn’t even realise why she was doing it, but her way of speaking naturally worked up to an oppositional stance against whomever she was talking. She would get quite red in the face and tell me I was a charlatan, wasting her time with my fanciful stories (I never told her a story) and stealing her purse as she walked down the street (in this instance I’m fairly certain she had me confused for somebody else). I learned after the first few times when she got into a state like this to just turn around and head into my flat.
A mildly more pragmatic approach was just not to let her get into that state to begin with. It was wise to maybe throw in a few “I don’t think that’s true”s at random points when, as we have established, I’m not even listening. Granted, this resulted in various faux pas, such as shortly after a recounting of the Eva Braun story when she told me how many people had died in the holocaust. Although they caused me some minor embarrassment, at least these faux pas allowed her to blow off steam. She would rush into her flat and tear through her encyclopaedias at mach speed to prove me wrong. She would then emerge back onto the porch with an armful of volumes 30 minutes later, ready to fact-check me, by which time I was long gone, having accepted the label of Eloise-certified holocaust-denier.
Eloise was quite pleasant if you ignored most of the things she said. She would always sign for my packages and make sure she caught me on the way in. She even occasionally baked oatmeal cookies for me to eat while she told her stories. This is the side of Eloise that most people don’t recognise, probably because it is so alien in this modern, alienated world of ours. While I may be using this article to paint a very grim portrait of her, it won’t be a shock to admit that she was by far the person in the flat block that I spent the most time conversing with. You just don’t get that from most people these days. Which is why it’s a shame what happened to her in the end. But I feel confident that I had nothing to do with it.
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