Read the article and say whether these statements are true or false.
1 Anne Smith lives in a car.
2 Miss Smith drives her car.
3 Miss Smith’s life is the same as that of the people who live around her.
4 Some neighbours don’t approve of Miss Smith’s lifestyle.
5 The authority hasn’t decided yet what to do with Miss Smith.
6 The problem is not so difficult to understand.
7 People tell different stories about Miss Smith.
8 Miss Smith used to be a professional musician.
9 Miss Smith uses feathers to decorate her dress.

For longer than most of her neighbours can remember, the slight, grey-haired
woman has lived an eccentric but blameless life in one of West London's streets.
Anne Smith has become a well-known local character, and her unconventional
home — a battered old Ford Consul covered in colourful spots, slogans and
poems — a neighbourhood landmark.
Some neighbours in the Chiswick street where her home is parked believe she
should be moved on, worried that her continuing presence could affect the value
of their half-million-pound homes. Others are prepared to accept Miss Smith’s
alternative lifestyle. This well-heeled community’s support or rejection of 58-year-old
Miss Smith has come to stand for society’s attitudes to those who do not, or cannot, conform.
The argument has long been a topic of conversation at the neighbourhood's dinner
tables but the fate of Miss Smith is now about to be settled in the more clinical surrounds
of Hounslow Civic Centre. Behind closed doors, the council’s social services experts,
housing officers and lawyers are mulling over the intricacies of the problem. Does she
have rights under the European convention of human rights to stay in a spot she has
occupied for many years? The authority will make its decision within a few weeks.
So emotive is the problem that until then it is refusing to answer questions about her.
Quite how Miss Smith came to be living in the car remains unclear. It is thought she has
lived in the street for more than 30 years, at first in the family home and then for a dozen
or more years in the Ford. According to some she suffered a nervous breakdown after her
parents died. The house was sold and she moved into the car with her dog Bouncer.
Others believe the story that she fell in love with a choir singer with a marvellous baritone
voice, but the relationship failed, putting her in a deep depression. Miss Smith, for her part,
refuses to discuss her situation.
She is believed to have grown up in Sussex and was encouraged bv her mother to become
a musician. In the 1960s she appeared in concerts at the Wigmore Hall in London and
performed under the watchful eye of Sir Adrian Boult, conductor of the first BBC Symphony
Orchestra. She went on to teach at a convent school. By coincidence one of her
former pupils, Jane O'Brien, lives in the same street.
Now she roams the neighbourhood dressed in rags, which she stitches together herself,
and shoes patched with pieces of plastic and feathers “borrowed" from the pigeons she feeds.
She cooks on a rudimentary barbecue and washes and gets drinking water from a local shop.

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