Seeking Patience Strong – ‘The Sunday Times’

Patience Strong, it can be safely said, is the pseudonym for an enigma of an undisclosed age who, after a lifetime of the unexplained, lives anonymously at a secret address somewhere in England. As for the rest, it’s all a bit of a mystery….

She sits in her seaside chalet dispensing dinky sandwiches on doilies, sidestepping intrusion into that privacy with steely skill wrapped in olde worlde charm. No, this is just her weekend home, her real home is …elsewhere. Yes, quite near, about ten miles away…in a little village. And no, Patience isn’t her real name but it’s quite alright to call her that.

A slight figure now in her seventies, she has that English peachy skin that will last her lifetime and the kindly eyes of aunts who were soft touches for a mid-term postal order; when a lock falls from her piled silver hair, she slowly curls it back into place with a couple of those re-assuring pats from another age.

“It used to be blonde,” she says wistfully, ” and naturally curly.”

Her voice has the tea-shoppe tinkle you read into her Daily Mirror prose, the only deviation coming at moments of disagreement when she puckers her lips and turns “Ooooh no,” into a little tune.

Patience, as you are forced to call her, led an uneventful life till the age of four when the first family piano was delivered and she tottered downstairs to play, ‘Everybody’s Doing It,’ and ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’ never having touched one before. She shrugs off the precociousness and tells the Channel, “Some things are left unexplained,” with a sang frois shared by her mother who was merely relieved at saving of 1/6d. per hour on piano lessons.

She then discovered a talent writing words for popular ditties – when a publisher played ‘Jealousy’ to her over the phone, she’d written the lyrics within fifteen minutes for which Hutch was eternally grateful – and from there it was a just a short stanza to writing The Quiet Corner in the Daily Mirror for the next thirty five years.

Destiny came during an air raid warning at Orpington which had her sheltering in the Village Hall slap in the middle of a meeting of the British Israel World Federation, (Orpington Branch), whereupon the veil, she puts it, was rent.

“For years I had been groping for the truth, now it was here and so plain, everything in the Bible became understood. We, the Anglo-Saxons are the direct descendants of the ten Israeli tribes who migrated west and settled in these Isles. We are descendants of Jacob and it’s laid down in the Bible that we must not mix with other nations.”

It is a moment of culture shock best measured by Richter – from the world of dappled dells, leafy boughs and dinky, doilied sandwiches, you are catapulted into a torrent of gung-ho idealism delivered in evangelistic overdrive which in these PC days would curdle custard at fifty yards. We are now entering Strong country…

“Separatism is taught in the Bible, the Brotherhood of Man is not. I’m not against other nations, just the mixing of them. We aren’t all born equal, have you got the brains of Winston Churchill…?”

“No but – ”

“The trouble is there’s only a remnant of us left now who believe in every word. I’ve no time for sentimental Christians,” and she rolled her eyes and gave a little growl – soft and feminine, but still a growl.

There were other growls to come, for anything and anyone that threatens the purity of Anglo-Saxons…for the EEC, the Channel Tunnel, Abroad, Foreigners, Mrs. Thatcher, (post-Lusaka), the New English Bible, conifers…

“Conifers…?”

“They’re imported you see, they blot the landscape. I have a line of them by my cottage, and they’re all coming down.”

“Where was that again?”

“About ten miles away. Harps of the Wind, that’s what I call trees.”

“But – ”

“But not conifers, they keep out the sunshine. We’re getting near The End you know, The Second Coming. Events are out-stripping the Biblical prophecies. There’ll be a nuclear holocaust first, then the greatest earthquake will open up….. look, eat the last sandwich now.”

“NOW?”

“It’ll get stale, I’m not eating you see, not really interested in food. There’s so much else to be done in life. No man knoweth the hour.”

She looked out to sea and was gone again.

It had been two and half hours non-stop since she announced how she found talking to people so exhausting and there hadn’t been a hint of a see-you-out line till she was on her knees at the bookshelf looking for a Biblical prophecy of Allenby’s taking of Palestine.

“I’m a little worried about how you’re going to mention….locations,” she said.

“But haven’t we settled on ‘ten miles from here’?”

“No no, I mean about here, what shall we call here? What about putting ’somewhere on the South Coast’?”

“Not even ‘Sussex’?”

She looked down at the carpet and gave a loose lock two thoughtful pats.

“Sussex…? Yes, I don’t mind that all. Sussex will be fine.”