The Lady In The Van

January 1982. ‘Do you see he’s been found, that American soldier?’ This is Colonel Dozo, kidnapped by the Red Brigade and found after a shoot-out in a flat in Padua. ‘Yes, he’s been found,’ she says triumphantly, ‘and I know who found him.’ Thinking it unlikely she has an acquaintance in the Italian version of the SAS, I ask whom she means. ‘St Anthony of course. The patron saint of lost things. St Anthony of Padua.’ ‘Well,’ I want to say, ‘he didn’t have far to look.’

her idiosyncratic view

She was passionately anti-Communist, and as long ago as 1945 had written a letter to Jesus ‘concerning the dreadful situation feared from the Yalta agreement’.

And I’ve got good topography. I always have had. I knew Kensington in the blackout

just to be on the safe side