‘Farewell then, little lodger. I wish you would stay for ever but I understand that girls in their early twenties meet boys and go off to live with them in flatshares in Tooting.
I had such a soft spot for her, the builder boyfriend nicknamed her ‘mini-me’.
I taught her to ride and would pull her behind me on Grace like a duckling.
With her pink specs, white blonde hair and tiny frame, she looked like a miniature Daryl Hannah in the film Steel Magnolias. When we first met she peeped shyly at me through the thick lenses.
She began chattering away nervously and I don’t think she ever really stopped until she gave me notice a few days ago. I have never met anyone quite like her. We’re all unique, but some people are more unique than others.
She was absolutely pint-sized, and wore a lot of children’s clothes. She once told me: ‘I just want to be a fairy princess.’ She took herself off to Disneyland Paris at regular intervals on her own. When she returned she would have a phone full of photos of herself posing with Mickey Mouse, or hugging women dressed as Sleeping Beauty or Belle.
She was philosophical in the extreme. Perhaps because she was a social worker, nothing seemed to surprise her.
‘It’s one of those,’ she would say (pronounced ‘one a those’), in response to almost everything that happened to her. She would come home, I’d be making dinner in the kitchen and she would tell me a troubled teenager had attacked her. I would gasp and she would say: ‘Yeah, it’s one a those.’
I could never quite decide if she was mature beyond her years or disarmingly childlike. I think, if it’s possible, she was a perfect mixture of both.
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