High drama at Dragon Lady’s

Directly opposite us across the main road lives Dragon Lady. She’s not really called Dragon Lady, infact yesterday I found out she is actually called Rita but in the style of having given most of our neighbours names before we cunningly exchanged Christmas cards with them to find out what they are actually called (or indeed the selection of names some of them have to go with their selection of personalities) she has long been Dragon Lady to us.

This is because when we first moved here some 14 years ago she was always nagging at the man she lived with. Back then they were both clearly of retirement-ish age but fairly sprightly and had a car they went out in most days. We would see her navigating his driving and reversing in and out of their drive with exagerrated arm movements and shouted instructions. For a while we speculated that they might actually be brother and sister rather than husband and wife – I found out yesterday they are indeed husband and wife though.

So he always seemed to have the role of henpecked meek man and she the role of overbearing bossy woman to the casual (and indeed not so casual ;)) observer. We never really had much direct contact with them until she was the person who came hammering on our front door one Sunday evening to tell us our cat had just been run over by a van. I was utterly devastated, doing the whole weeping and wailing over the cat in the middle of the road with a big audience so I still didn’t talk to her much but Ady did exchange a few words with her and she seemed very nice. Since then we’ve been at the exchanging smiles, ‘how are you?’ type greetings and the occassional cat anecdote – she has nine.

When we moved home although we’d only been away for 3.5 years both Dragon Lady and her husband / brother had aged a lot. She is now hunched right over and walks any great distance with the aid of a frame. He appears physically fitter but is collected every weekday morning by a bus which takes him off to a day care centre. For a long period prior to that a carer arrived every morning to their house. He does walk with a stick but seems otherwise well so I had assumed his health problems were more of the mental debilitation variety, perhaps alzheimers or similar. (Hey I have a lot of time on my hands to gaze out the window and build up complete lives for the people I see including illnesses, dietary preferences, relationships with the people they are with and other details such as their favourite song, colour and tv show. I have a catalogue in my mind of what I think they would introduce as their first law if they became monarch for the day, what they think about Margaret Thatcher and where they were when they heard Kennedy was dead!).

So anyway, yesterday when I got in from work and was making lunch for me, Dad, Davies and Scarlett I could hear Dad and the children giving a running commentary on Much-Berated-Man (or MBM as we will now call him). He was trying to get into his house and failing and then walking around to the back, then looking up and down the road a bit and generally looking more and more agitated. Dad said he’d seen Dragon Lady (or DL as we will now refer to her) earlier that morning when some men had been round there clearing out her gutters and he’d not seen her go out since – yes I do get my nosey-neighbourness from my Dad, he loves sitting here looking out of my windows, you can see so much more from them that his more private house 😆 MBM had a paper under his arm and was looking more and more confused and upset, knocked on the doors of both his next door and next door but one neighbours but couldn’t get any reply. He seemed fairly sure that DL was in the house too and I started to wonder if either he was confused or she had perhaps fallen or something and was unable to answer the door. So I went over to see if I could help.

He was shaken and visibly upset and not particularly coherant but I managed to get out of him that he’d gone out for the paper leaving the door on the latch but now couldn’t get in. He could hear his wife shouting but she couldn’t open the door to let him in. I asked what his phone number was so we could ring her to see what was wrong but he couldn’t remember and wanted to ring the police. Having ascertained that no window were open and we couldn’t get in the back door I ran back to my house to get my phone and my Dad to come and assist too – Davies and Scarlett were hanging out of the window watching. Dad tried to get more sense out of him and just as we were about to ring the police two police cars pulled up. Having helped explain what Dad and I were doing there one of the policemen knocked on the door which was immediately opened by DL saying ‘take him away, I don’t want him here!’ at which point Dad and I beat a hasty retreat. 😯 Clearly rather more to that story than we’d thought. He had said that she’d been away on holiday last week and he’d been in a care home for the week.

The policeman was inside the house for a good ten minutes while two other officers stayed outside with MBM who got increasingly upset throwing down his paper, banging his stick around (which was eventually taken off him by one of the officers) and finally the policeman came out of the house and they took MBM off in the car with them.

The whole saga fascinated Davies and particularly Scarlett who was coming up with ever more imaginative reasons why she might not have wanted to let him in the house casting each of them in turn as the ‘baddy’. Clearly we’ve no idea what was going on or indeed what might have been going on for years but it was a sad sight to see an old, watery eyed, shaken man taken off in a police car looking in utter confusion at his house while his wife looked sadly out of the window as the car pulled away :(.