On 25 January 2006, officials from a northLondon housing association repossessing a bedsit in Wood Green owing to rent arrears made a grim discovery. Lying on the sofa was the
skeleton of a 38-year-old woman who had been dead for almost three years. In a corner of the room the television set was still on, tuned to BBC1, and a small pile of unopened Christmas presents lay on the floor. Washing up was heaped in the kitchen sink and a mountain of post lay behind the front door. Food in the refrigerator was marked with 2003 expiry dates. The dead woman's body was so badly decomposed it could only be identified by comparing dental records with an old holiday photograph of her smiling. Her name was revealed to be Joyce Carol Vincent.
I first heard about Joyce when I picked up a discarded copy of the Sunon
a London underground train. The paper reported the gothic circumstances
of her death – "Woman dead in flat for three years: skeleton of Joyce
found on sofa with telly still on" – but revealed almost nothing about
her life. There was not even a photograph of her.
The image of the television flickering over her decomposing body haunted
me as I got off the train on to the crowded platform. In a city such as
London, home to 8 million people, how could someone's absence go
unnoticed for so long? Who was Joyce Vincent? What was she like? How
could she have been forgotten?
On 25 January 2006, officials from a northLondon housing
association repossessing a bedsit in Wood Green owing to rent arrears
made a grim discovery. Lying on the sofa was the skeleton of a
38-year-old woman who had been dead for almost three years. In a corner
of the room the television set was still on, tuned to BBC1, and a small
pile of unopened Christmas presents lay on the floor. Washing up was
heaped in the kitchen sink and a mountain of post lay behind the front
door. Food in the refrigerator was marked with 2003 expiry dates. The
dead woman's body was so badly decomposed it could only be identified by
comparing dental records with an old holiday photograph of her smiling.
Her name was revealed to be Joyce Carol Vincent.
I first heard about Joyce when I picked up a discarded copy of the Sunon
a London underground train. The paper reported the gothic circumstances
of her death – "Woman dead in flat for three years: skeleton of Joyce
found on sofa with telly still on" – but revealed almost nothing about
her life. There was not even a photograph of her.
The image of the television flickering over her decomposing body haunted
me as I got off the train on to the crowded platform. In a city such as
London, home to 8 million people, how could someone's absence go
unnoticed for so long? Who was Joyce Vincent? What was she like? How
could she have been forgotten?
News of Joyce's death quickly made it into the global media, which
registered shock at the lack of community spirit in the UK. The story
ran on in the British press, but still no photograph of Joyce appeared
and little personal information.
Soon Joyce dropped out of the news. I watched as people discussed her in
internet chatrooms, wondering if she was an urban myth, or talking
about her as though she never mattered, calling her a couch potato, and
posting comments such as: "What's really sad is no one noticed she was
missing – must have been one miserable bitch." And then even that kind
of commentary vanished.
But I couldn't let go. I didn't want her to be forgotten. I decided I must make a film about her.
At this point all that had been revealed in the press was that Joyce
Vincent was 38 when she died, had been born in west London to parents
who were from the Caribbean, and that some of her family had attended
her inquest. Some reports suggested Joyce was, or had been, engaged to
be married, and that before living in the bedsit she had been in a
refuge for victims of domestic violence. But she didn't fit the typical
profile of someone who might die and be forgotten: she wasn't old
without family; she wasn't a loner, or an overdosed drug addict; nor was
she an isolated heavy drinker. Who she was and the circumstances of her
death were a mystery.
I placed adverts with various publications and internet sites. On a
poster on the side of a black cab I asked: Did you know Joyce Vincent?
Meanwhile, as I waited for any response, I contacted people who were
involved with bringing Joyce's story to light.
I met Alison Campsie, news editor for the Tottenham & Wood Green Journal,
whose journalist David Gibbs had reported on Joyce Vincent's inquest.
She told me that while the paper would have liked to have pursued the
background to the story, they didn't have the time or money, and that
even the BBC with all its resources had tried and failed to run an item
on Joyce.
In the Three Compasses pub below her office, I talked to Lynne
Featherstone, MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, Joyce's constituency. Lynne
had urged the police to reopen their investigation into Joyce's death
but they decided there was nothing to answer to in terms of foul play.
The coroner recorded an open verdict, with the cause of Joyce's death
"unascertained". "We don't know how big a part Joyce played in her own
isolation or whether it was more down to society neglecting her," Lynne
told me.
Lynne wrote to the local council, the utility companies, and the housing
association about Joyce's unpaid bills, questioning why alarm bells
didn't ring earlier – but she either received no reply or little
insight. "The point is, Joyce Vincent is dead, no one murdered her, and
no one seems to care that much. I gather she was very beautiful, which
for reasons totally spurious makes it more poignant because we always
think beautiful people have everything go their way."
On the way to her next appointment Lynne drove me to Wood Green, to the
back of Shopping City, where lorries rumbled in and out of a delivery
depot. She pointed to the housing estate above the mall known locally as
Sky City, where Joyce had lived and died. I looked at the red brick
walkways and tiers of water-stained grey concrete, interspersed with
metal grilles, indistinguishable from the car park or the shopping
centre below. "I suppose, in a way, we all walked by," Lynne said. As I
stepped out of her car she wished me luck.
Dominating the skyline was a round blue sign for Shopping City – a
beacon to commercialism. In one of the flats I saw an open window with a
billowing net curtain and I thought of the window in Joyce's bedsit
that had been open for the two years she lay dead, insects crawling
along the windowsill, the escaping smell of her decomposing body
attributed to the rubbish bins below. I walked around to the other side
of the complex – to the high street, hectic with shopping activity and
traffic. The main door Joyce used to access her part of the estate is
here, sandwiched between the usual chain of shops.
Inside the entrance I avoided the lift and climbed the empty grey
concrete stairs. I walked along a walkway, meeting nobody. In contrast
to the hordes of people below, it was desolate. I found Joyce's bedsit,
with its glossy green door, at the end of the walkway. With only one
neighbouring flat, and no flat above or below, it felt architecturally
cut off. I knocked on the doors of other flats in the block, but no one
answered. I wondered if I would ever meet anyone who actually knew
Joyce.
The first response to my adverts was from Karen, but it turned out she
never knew Joyce. "I was a neighbour. I lived on her doorstep. I got my
old diaries out. Had I seen her? Had I written about her? All the
neighbours – where were we? Why didn't we talk to her?" Karen said she
had always liked living in Sky City but that as she lives alone, and is
the same age as Joyce was when she died, she now worries whether anyone
would notice if anything happened to her.
Months passed. I spent time in libraries and public records offices,
piecing together some of Joyce's history through official records,
locating previous addresses and relatives. I managed to track down
people who knew Joyce, but they wouldn't talk to me. Then I received an
email from Martin Lister, who had seen my advertisement. He wrote to me
in the hope that the Joyce in question was not the same Joyce he went
out with in his twenties. We quickly established that it was. On the
phone he said it just didn't add up – "she never drank much, she never
took drugs" – but the thing that most surprised him, he said, was that
she ended up in social housing.
I arranged to meet Martin outside Shepherd's Bush underground station.
In his late 40s, he wore a green Brazil baseball cap, and was all
friendly smiles. In his local pub I thanked him for seeing me. "Well I
want to thankyou," he said, his pale complexion flushing pink. "Therapy, is how I feel about it."
While he had confided the news of the circumstances of Joyce's death to
friends, he was glad to have the opportunity to discuss her at length.
They had met in 1985, when he worked negotiating client renewals for a
shipping company in the City. Joyce was 20 years old and secretary to
his boss. "She was always asking me to go for a drink, but it never
occurred to me that she was asking me out. I thought, what a shame she
doesn't have any friends. I didn't read anything into it."
Eventually Martin went for a drink with Joyce and they subsequently
dated for about three years. Afterwards they kept in touch, on and off,
until 2002. Looking back, Martin was unsure if he ever knew exactly what
was going on in Joyce's life. "You look back and think, I wish I'd
asked more, wish I'd understood more."
They had good times together. "We were always doing something," Martin
reminisced, "racing at Goodwood, tennis at Wimbledon, classical music,
opera. We liked restaurants too." Martin shook his head, baffled at
Joyce's outcome. "She always wanted to improve her mind. Actually, she
told me she'd had elocution lessons and she sounded – I wouldn't say
posh, but you wouldn't know she was from London, she just sounded very
well-spoken, almost BBC really. In reality she grew up off the Fulham
Palace Road in west London and she used to say, 'I don't know why people
say it's so lovely round there because it certainly wasn't when I was
growing up.'"
Pulling some photographs from a carrier bag, Martin looked at one
wistfully before handing it to me. It was the first photograph of Joyce I
had seen. I held it carefully, trying to take in every detail. "People
used to say she looked like Whitney Houston," Martin said proudly. He
sipped his wine and looked at another photo. "Her hair came from her
mother's side. Her mother was Indian, she died when Joyce was young, 11,
I think. She had a real bond with her mum, especially as she was the
youngest. She had four sisters, but I think she was the only one to be
born over here – the sisters brought her up really. Her dad was a
carpenter. I never met her family, which I thought was a bit odd.
"I don't understand. She worked her way up, had really good jobs. She
earned excellent money." His voice was tinged with sadness as he said:
"Apparently she wanted to marry me, but being a typical bloke I was like
– no, no, don't be ridiculous. I didn't want to settle down."
Martin opened a sizeable old Filofax to find Joyce's name. Her contact
details had been TippExed over a number of times. "It was alarming
really, how often she moved – at least once a year."
I asked Martin to appear in my film. I stressed how Joyce's story was a
very modern one. She was born in 1965, the year the Post Office Tower
opened, which Tony Benn later referred to as a symbol of our age – an
age in which we worship the internet, television, mobile phones. I told
him how ironic I thought it that Joyce should be forgotten and
unreachable in this so-called period of communication.
Martin listened politely, thought for a while, and then said, "We'll
see". It was not until a few years later, sitting in the same pub, that
he finally agreed. "I can't say no, I've got to do it for her," he said
then.
A few weeks after meeting Martin, I went to the Horn Pub in St Albans
with John Ioannou, who was once friendly with both Martin and Joyce.
Known as John the Greek, he was exuberant and talkative. He recalled
reading the story about Joyce in a newspaper, but didn't connect it to
the Joyce with whom he had once shared a house for a while. He told me
he felt an enormous amount of guilt because he spoke to her on the phone
in 2002, but never found the time to meet her.
He described his gang of home-counties friends whom Joyce had hung out
with in the 80s. "We were a bunch of blaggers. We did things way above
our class. A few of us came from money, but most of us didn't. We used
to mix with proper posh people and go sailing, go to glitzy nightclubs.
Right poseurs we were. We used to make up names. Joyce called herself
Rachel Prejudice."
I showed him the photographs I'd gathered of Joyce. "The trouble with
Joyce was she was very fanciable," he said. "Wherever she went and
whatever she did, there were people trying to get her into bed. It was a
burden that she was so beautiful and she was very clever, a lot more
intelligent than she let on. I think she had several lives."
John asked what had attracted me to Joyce. I replied that I couldn't
leave her to be forgotten – and that I had discovered there were a lot
of things that connected us: we were exactly the same age, we shared a
name – Carol, her middle name – and at one point we even lived on the
same street. Joyce lost her mother when she was 11 and I was 11 when my
father died, so I felt I understood something of the loss she had
suffered. I told John that the title of the film, Dreams of a Life, captured
what I was trying to do – dream up Joyce's life and ambitions through
the information I gathered and the people who knew her.
John said: "I want to know Joyce's story myself, and that sounds
ridiculous coming from someone who knew her. There must have been signs
she would end this way, but if there were she covered them up with this
happy-go-lucky, having-a-great-time act." John shook his head and
sighed. "She died of neglect. We all loved her, but not enough to stop
her dying."
On the train back to London, I reflected on how nobody she knew really
worried about Joyce when she fell out of touch with them, as she often
did – they just thought she was off somewhere having a better life than
they were. Her aspirations and desires, her immaculate way of presenting
herself, masked any deeper troubles she may have had.
As I continued my research I tracked down some of Joyce's former
colleagues who were willing to appear in the film. Kim Bacon and Dan
Roberts worked with Joyce at Ernst & Young, one of the biggest
accountancy firms in the world. They told me Joyce worked for the
company for four years and had a very responsible job in the treasury
department, "moving the company's money around". It was during this
period that Joyce was engaged for two years to someone I tracked down
but who wishes to remain anonymous.
Her colleagues were surprised when she decided to quit in 2001. Kim
said: "There do seem to be conflicting stories about what she did when
she left." Joyce told some people she was going travelling with 20
people, and others that she had been headhunted. All that is known for
sure about what happened to her in the time between her departure from
the firm and her death is that she spent some time in a refuge for
victims of domestic violence in Haringey.
Dan said: "I know it sounds odd, but it seems like we're talking about
two different people. I just can't connect the Joyce who died to the
Joyce that we knew." Kim nodded in agreement: "I mean she gave this
impression of being a happy, bubbly person but it does make you wonder
what was really going on."
I showed them the Sun article
that started my quest. Kim studied the accompanying photograph of the
bedsit. "The place she ended up living in doesn't tie up with her
persona. I always imagined she lived in a really nice Victorian house,
lovely furniture, nice things around her, everything immaculate and
perfect. Not somewhere like that."
They looked at the photos of Joyce I'd gathered. "This is the sort of
thing you'd imagine being on Facebook," Kim said. Dan agreed – "but we
didn't have Facebook then. It's different now, you can keep in touch
with people very easily." Dan looked around the pub we were in, where
they used to socialise with Joyce. "It's shocking to think that two
years after she left work she was dead," he said. Kim put the photos
down. "I really don't understand," she said. "She was a very popular
girl and I don't know why we didn't keep in touch. I feel a bit guilty
about that."
As time went on I received a lot of messages via Friends Reunited from
Joyce's old schoolfriends. All concurred that she was beautiful, well
turned out, funny, down to earth, and all mentioned that she loved to
sing – one message even urged me to tell the world about Joyce's
fantastic singing voice.
It was two more years before I found Kirk Thorne, a musician, and a
friend and landlord of Joyce's in the late 80s. Kirk had once recorded
Joyce in his studio.
I sat with him in the garden of the same modern house in Wapping that
Joyce had once occupied. He told me that since he received my message
about Joyce he had spent hours speculating on how she ended up as she
did. "I can't understand. She had a lot of friends and a good social
life. She was not a girl that came in and sat in front of the telly. If
she was white she could have been a debutante – she was upwardly mobile,
a high flyer."
Kirk was especially surprised that by the age of 38, Joyce was living
without a man. "Joyce was the kind of person that would worry most
women. She was a threat. Good-looking, intelligent, successful and on a
mission for the type of man all women are after."
He showed me around the studio he had built at the bottom of his garden.
It was here that Joyce once dressed up as a maid and served tea to
Captain Sensible, the punk legend. It was also here that she first
fulfilled her dream of being a recording artist. Kirk had lost the tape,
though at my insistence he promised me he would have another hunt for
it. He wondered if Joyce might have been happier if she had pursued her
singing and taken a different path in life. "She had a clique with all
these City bankers – they didn't suit her, but she liked it," Kirk said.
"I think she was on a search for something she wasn't going to find. I
used to think that what she needed was a good black man. She was my
flatmate, not my family, so I didn't tell her."
Catherine Clarke became good friends with Joyce while renting a room in
Kirk's house. I tracked her down in Florida, where she recalled that
Joyce only had one other close female friend. "Mostly it was men. Men
who had crushes on her, men who followed her – there was always a story
about a guy that had the hots for her. It was just unbelievable how
intense guys would get with her."
Catherine said she was not surprised that Joyce ended up in a refuge for
victims of domestic violence. "Guys would come on so heavy and not let
go. I can only think she became isolated from her family because of a
guy that she chose. Maybe she was ashamed of the situation she got
herself into. To go into a women's refuge, for Joyce, would have been a
big thing."
I tracked down another of Joyce's friend's – the American disco singer
Judy Cheeks, who once took Joyce out to dinner with Stevie Wonder. On
the phone from the States, Judy said she last spoke to Joyce in the late
90s and found her still looking for Mr Right. "I had no idea where she
was heading. It appears no one did. I often thought of her and always
assumed she had finally found her ideal husband, had a few kids and was
happy."
Over time I received a number of phone calls from Joyce's former
boyfriends. Mostly they were calling me for information, so disturbed
were they that the Joyce they went out with could have ended up being so
overlooked. Most of them didn't want to appear in the film, but were
willing to give me snippets of information. Jason, for example, told me
that when he met Joyce he was a working-class boy from a sink estate,
and Joyce was five years older than him and wanted to be a pop star. "I
used to resent her for that. I used to resent her for having dreams…
what a fall from grace." Jason told me that before he went out with her,
Joyce went out with a baronet and an MP, but he couldn't recall their
names. He also thought that Joyce once knew the American soul singer
Betty Wright.
So I wrote to Betty in Miami. A couple of months later I received a
phone call from Alistair Abrahams, Betty's one-time tour manager and
Joyce's former boyfriend. Betty had told him about my letter. Stunned by
the news, he invited me over to see him in London the following day.
In his early 50s, with long dreadlocks swept back behind his shoulders,
Alistair showed me into his living room. Originally from Zimbabwe, he
delivered his accented words slowly and cautiously as he described Joyce
and the two years they lived together in the early 90s. "There were a
lot of exciting things happening to me and her arrival coincided with a
lot of that change, so I used to call her my lucky charm. She was always
immaculately attired down to the bows on her underwear. But she wasn't
just physically beautiful, she had an aura about her."
Alistair explained that Joyce never really talked about her life before she met him. "Have you ever seen the movie The Man with No Name? That's how she was – she came with no past."
While Joyce lived with Alistair she came into contact with many of the
musicians he knew and worked with. "We had great times. We had Jimmy
Cliff to stay at the house, Gil Scott-Heron and Isaac Hayes came for
dinner. For her it was exciting, vibrant, thrilling. It was a good
time."
He asked me if I had found out how Joyce had died but I told him that
not even the pathologist came to a conclusion. "Perhaps she suffered a
fatal asthma attack, or do you think it was something more sinister?" he
asked. I replied that Joyce's death would always be shrouded in mystery
and open to speculation, but what was more important then dwelling on
how she died was to remember her life.
"I was so committed to Joyce almost in a paternal way. I think that's
what she wanted out of a relationship, someone she could rely and depend
on. She was a chameleon in many ways – she adapted to the environment
she was in. I introduced her to Ben E King and the next day she bought
his album. After I'd introduced her to Gil Scott-Heron, when she met him
again, she had this wonderful knowledge of him, she was asking him
questions about the civil-rights movement and The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."
Alistair recalled the time he surprised Joyce by taking her to Wembley
in 1990 to see a Nelson Mandela tribute concert. "Something very
momentous happened – she met Nelson Mandela, she shook his hand. In fact
I spoke to my brother yesterday and he thinks he may have seen her at
the concert, when it was on the TV."
I ordered up the film of the concert, Nelson Mandela, International Tribute for a Free South Africa, from
the BFI National Archive. I trawled through it, ever hopeful,
constantly pausing when I spotted anyone remotely resembling Joyce.
After a few fruitless hours I began to prepare myself for disappointment
when the programme cut from the stadium crowds to Nelson Mandela
backstage, addressing the musicians who had taken part in the show. As
he ended his passionate speech they cheered in appreciation, and there
was a cut to a wide shot from the rear of the room – featuring an array
of backs of heads.
And then I saw her. It was Joyce, unarguably. She turned and smiled at
someone behind her. Catching the light, her earrings gleamed. She turned
back and I panicked, I had lost her.
But she turned around once more. It was Joyce – moving and alive. I had
found her. The power of the moving image hit me, the power to resurrect.
I rewound the tape and timed Joyce's appearance. Four seconds. I slowed
the footage down and watched. One hundred frames, hundreds of dancing
pixels.
Joyce, who died alone in her bedsit, anonymous and seemingly forgotten,
had once had her image transmitted live to millions of living rooms in
the 61 countries where the show was broadcast.
The video cut away from Joyce to the Wembley crowd and I thought of her,
backstage, in her element, on a high, talking to Anita Baker and Denzel
Washington, shaking hands with Nelson Mandela, in a room with
verifiable stars. She was 26 years old, ambitious, beautiful, full of
hope for the future. She had her whole life ahead of her but in 13 years
she would die and nobody would know and nobody would notice.
I resumed the tape and carried on watching the show, eager to experience
what Joyce once had. Nelson Mandela arrived on stage to rapturous
applause and the crowd sang, louder and louder, "You'll never walk
alone".
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