In an article to coincide with the release of The Lady in the Van, the film about Miss Shepherd, who lived in Alan Bennett’s front garden in north London for 15 years (see page 27), Bennett explains that she was a very eccentric Catholic. When she received Communion she would virtually prostrate herself so that her parish priest, Fr Cormac Rigby, who suffered from a bad back, would “follow her right down in order to post the wafer into her mouth”, writes Bennett in The Guardia