Letters to Viv: The Day Bernadette Took Over My Life for an Hour
A stranger crashed my walking tour and recruited us all into her fake family for an afternoon.
Letters to Viv
Open, soul-packed letters to the kind of human I write for: the curious, creative, exhausted by the hustle, and craving something more. I’m writing to you (and me).
Dear Viv,
I met the most magnificent menace the other day.
Technically, I signed up for a walking tour of my neighbourhood. In reality, I accidentally booked front-row seats to The Bernadette Show.
It started innocently enough. There were about eight of us gathered on a narrow street of white stucco Victorian townhouses. It was the middle of a heatwave. My mid-forties body was competing in its own extreme sport. I’d already got the handheld fan out — perimenopause and a heatwave being an unholy alliance — before Jonathan, our guide, even finished his introduction. We’d barely been standing there five minutes when an older woman wandered over, a bag of groceries swinging from one arm, stopped dead in front of the group, looked across the road, then looked at all of us, and got straight to it. No hello, just…
“Do you know about the murder that happened in that house?”
Jonathan blinked. “Murder?”
“Oh yes,” she said, delighted. “Absolutely gruesome.”
And off she went. Within seconds we’d learned about a decades-old killing, a scandal or two, and several bits of neighbourhood gossip that definitely weren’t in Jonathan’s carefully researched notes. I don’t know whether tour guides are trained for this sort of thing, though I suspect they’re not.
Then Bernadette pointed towards a set of ornate black gates. “Have you seen the private gardens?”
We all looked, Jonathan included.
“They’re only for residents,” she continued. “Pretend you’re my family. You’re all here for a wedding.”
Before anyone could object, she’d opened the gate and marched us inside.
Well. If a seventy-something-year-old woman confidently tells you that you’re her relatives, apparently you become her relatives.
The garden was worth the trespass. Light fell in slats through trees twice Jonathan’s age, the grass a green you don’t get back home, a couple of kids shrieking with joy on a swing set tucked in the corner. Bernadette pointed towards a particular spot.
“Princess Diana used to collect William and Harry from school here.”
Whether she’d planned this interruption or simply spotted a captive audience, I couldn’t tell you. Either way, she was having the time of her life. She showed us another house, another story, another tiny piece of the square she’d clearly fallen for. Poor Jonathan stood there smiling, watching his walking tour slowly become someone else’s walking tour.
At one point he offered to carry her shopping bag.
“Well,” she replied, “I was waiting, Jonathan.”
The timing. The delivery. Oscar-worthy.
Eventually Jonathan admitted defeat. “Bernadette, I really do have to take the group this way.”
She pointed down the street. “That’s fine. I live there.” She showed us her kitchen window. Naturally.
He thanked her for joining us and said he owed her a drink sometime. “I like Guinness,” she said. Of course she does.
Then she waved goodbye and disappeared into her building as casually as someone who hadn’t completely hijacked a professional walking tour. The rest of us stood there grinning. Jonathan wandered back to the front of the group.
“I’ve never had my tour hijacked before.”
I think he secretly loved it. I know I did.
I’ve thought about Bernadette more than once since that afternoon. She was outrageous, and she belonged entirely to herself, and there wasn’t a single apology in the way she moved through the world. She loved where she lived, knew every story tucked into those streets, and wanted total strangers to see the place through her eyes. It never once occurred to her that she might be too much.
Imagine that. Reaching an age where you’ve stopped editing yourself, where curiosity has finally outrun self-consciousness, where recruiting eight strangers into your imaginary family just to show them a garden feels like the most natural thing in the world.
I spent the rest of the walk wondering if I should have asked for her phone number. In a completely non-creepy, I’d-like-to-grow-up-to-be-you sort of way.
My second act is teaching me that role models can be carrying groceries through West London, talking about murders before introductions, asking for a Guinness they haven't been offered yet, and reminding everyone around them that life is far too interesting to spend worrying whether you're taking up too much space.
If that’s what getting older looks like, Viv, I’ll happily audition. Actually, scratch that. I don’t think Bernadette ever auditioned for anything. She simply walked onto the stage, took the microphone, and carried on with the tour. And somehow, every single one of us was delighted to follow.
If she’s any indication, the whole point of a second act is exactly that: deciding you’re allowed to take up the space you’re already standing in.
XO,
Tanya
Great story! So much fun to be hijacked by a septuagenarian. I was wondering if, at the end of the tour, she would vanish, and it would turn out that she was the ghost of the woman who had been murdered. I would have believed it!