Vanishing Presence

Doris moved to her house as a teenager. After the war she worked as a court dressmaker. Doris made dresses for princesses. She won prizes for her garden. She lived in Cecilia Road, Dalston, in the same house for 60 years. She had two or three wallpaper patterns often in one room. If the boys from next door kicked their footballs by mistake into her garden, she kept them. One of the boys bought her house after she had died and found a box full of balls. This study is a glimpse of a private and very English life, and is a comment on mortality—our passage is a gentle indentation on the soft surface of the world.