Sally, Nottingham Newspaper Seller and Pavement Artist. And Friends

Pome

Sir Micheal McMinn made a rule,
Which applied not to Scrabble nor Poole,
He said,
        Practical Christianity,
        Leeds to insanity,
& Solumnly slid off his stool.
                                          Boom Boom.

The 'Pome' and the sketch are by Sally, once a noted figure on Nottingham streets selling first the rebel weekly Nottingham News, and then selling the regular Nottingham Evening Post. I'm grateful to David Wilson of the Nottstalgia group for sending me fresh information about her, which has caused me to re-write and add to this post. A few newspaper articles using the surname Freeman for her have appeared, so we must indeed use that name.

Sally was noted by most people who passed because they found it rather incongruous to hear a female voice – I think all had previously been male – calling out 'Post' in a delicate, highly elegant-sounding accent. Later, she graduated to pavement artist, making very elaborate – and really rather clever – chalk drawings on the street around Lister Gate, Nottingham. She has long been gone, and judging by a few Nottingham nostalgia forums, no one knows where, although they certainly miss her. Rumours of her death are unsubstantiated.

The person in the idiosyncratically spelt poem and the diagram is the late Mick McMinn, who was also known as 'Luton Mick' after his town of origin to avoid confusion with a surfeit of Micks, and he was a friend of mine and a very close friend of Sally's and her partner Sam's. The drawing points to Mick's love of pool, scrabble, and alcohol, moving from upright position on a bar stool to a skeletal heap on the floor, still clutching his drink and reaching for the last letter of the alphabet. Mick told me that all of Sally's chalk drawings were about him or him and Sam, and as I've no way of proving otherwise I'll have to believe it. On several occasions, I had a drink in city centre pubs in the company of the three of them, and I remember at least one evening being with Mick, his partner Polly, Sally, and my ex-wife at Mick's house. Sally was usually quite quiet, but when she did speak it was often with a sparkling wit.

And Mick told such stories about Sally and Sam. How about their day trip to Skegness, when they boarded the train out with an empty wheelie bin, all the Nottingham folk on the coast were in generous holiday mood seeing Sally do her pavement artist routine, and of course the merry pair had great difficulty hauling the bin onto the return train as it was full to the brim with money.

Mick was obviously in awe of both of them, fascinated by their antics, and was evidently distressed when his own partner Polly barred them from visiting their house in Sneinton, although I forget why. He said that the following evening, Sally and Sam both stood on the doorstep drenched in tears and begging forgiveness. They were, of course, forgiven.

Sam, accompanied by Sally, used to sell cannabis around the local pubs, and I once went with Mick to the Sawyer's Arms on Lister Gate, where Sally expertly rolled a spliff and shared it with us: the use of cannabis was a very frequent part of their everyday lives. They were of course outsiders, anarchists in the positive sense of the word, although there was a very dark side to Sam, a man Sally seemed to worship, and I suspect that he had a strong control over the money she made from her chalk drawings. Sam was dying in the early 1990s, although I'm not sure why. I have no idea if Sally was on harder drugs, although I strongly suspect Sam was.

Why I turned down Mick's offer to see the couple at their flat is because of what Mick told me about the conditions there. It was full of cats, and smelt of them. Plus, the bath was a coal bunker and Sam at least used to bathe only when it was raining, going out naked into the backyard: Mick never mentioned Sally's bathing habits. Er, Sam used to have a huge table boulder which he'd hacked chunks out of to put his drugs in, and also kept pebbles there which he regularly threw at Sally when he was stoned and/or drunk: the living room was separated from the kitchen mainly by former glass partitions, but of course had been smashed by the pebbles.

And how did Sally respond? With love and devotion – on one occasion someone insulted Sam in a pub (then the New Inn in Carrington) because of his vile smell: Sally, when Sam told her about the insult, smashed a chair over the offender's head and the couple were barred for life. An Evening Post snippet dating from mid-October 1991 reveals that Sally Anne Freeman, 33, of Mapperley Park Drive, was found guilty of causing actual bodily harm to an unnamed person, ordered to pay £30 compensation plus £35 costs and conditionally discharged for a year. Although the very short article doesn't give any details of the assault, I'm pretty certain that the case concerned is the above incident, which Mick informed me of in about 1991.



A seated Sally selling (or rather reading) Nottingham Evening Post.

I noticed this fine shot of Sally which Dave Armstrong has very kindly given me permission to reproduce here. It's a lovely photo of her, with the apparent incongruity of the flamboyant hat mixed with the duffel coat accurately capturing the way she was. And her face registers the timidity, the fragility behind her eccentricity. A superb portrait of a remarkable woman.