If you haven’t heard of it already, type ‘Joyce Vincent’ into Google and see what comes up. A tragedy that hit news headlines back in 2006, and now relinquished to the backs of people’s minds, Carol Morley brings this issue to the fore once again. A woman died alone in her flat. Sad, yes. Unusual? Probably not. What made this case stand out was that she wasn’t discovered for 3 years. No friends, no family, no one came knocking. Or if they did, they didn’t try too hard. Some took the sound of the television to mean she was avoiding them.
What they didn’t know was that Joyce lay dead inside, the dim light of the screen flickering over her remains. When the news came out, it caused uproar. It seemed to show how much society had changed – people didn’t chat to their neighbours any more, they simply went about their lives without interacting with others, eating dinner on the sofa, not picking up the phone to call relatives…ending up completely cut off from the world. How could anyone be forgotten like that? It’s something we all dread to think could happen to us. It didn’t seem possible.
Filmed in a docu-drama style, ‘Dreams of a Life’ is made up of interviews with friends and ex-colleagues of Joyce Vincent (her family chose not to appear), and re-enactments of key moments in her life. There are very few answers, or absolutes, and she was quite secretive, so a lot of it is speculation – although many of her friends and colleagues came to the same conclusions. She drifted quite a bit; she moved house twice a year sometimes, all over London. If there was a problem at work, she wouldn’t try to resolve it – she’d just quit and that would be the end of it. She had elocution lessons when she was younger, and was always well turned out.
Joyce’s mother passed away when she was 11, and her father told her the news in this awful matter-of-fact way. It affected her quite deeply, and after that point she seemed to be much less grounded – she’d float through life, not forming real attachments, and was always preoccupied with things being temporary – she always felt something bad was going to happen, that something would go wrong with whatever was right in her life.
There was some speculation that she might have been abused as a child. Some feel her behaviour was typical of someone who was abused at a young age, and it might go some way to explaining her issues with trust, and needing to find a kind of father figure in her relationships – I gather she didn’t think highly of him at any rate, he was always carrying on with young girls, and generally not being the father he should’ve been. This catalogue of events informs the audience of everything which might make up a person’s attitudes and views.
‘Dreams of a Life’ has a very intimate feel to it – there are Joyce’s friends talking about her, reminiscing about stupid things like one guy having a crush on her, and women giggling about the time she showed up with a new (much less attractive) boyfriend, wearing a powder blue rubber dress… They can’t seem to reconcile the two images of the Joyce they knew, so outgoing and the life and soul of the party, to how she ended up – in some god awful bedsit, completely cut off from friends and family. She went into hospital for an operation a few months before she died, and for her next of kin she listed her bank manager.
It makes you wonder what a film about your own life would be like – what people think of you, the way you act, the choices you make. It’s quite strange to watch all of her friends (separately) saying how she always seemed to go for ‘the wrong guy’ and ‘if only’ she’d done this, or that, and eventually realising she only showed a little of herself to others, and much of her past was shrouded in secrecy. People only knew what she chose to tell them. She had a consistently on-off relationship with one man for years, and even he couldn’t shed much light on her past.
It’s quite painful to watch those close to her recalling old conversations – her ex-boyfriend remembers she showed up at his flat one time, and wanted to stay for a few weeks. He recalls asking if she was in any kind of trouble, if someone had beaten her, if she needed help, but she said no – that she was fine, she just needed a place to stay for a while. Then he hesitates, head in hands, wondering if that’s what she’d really said, or something his memory had conjured up in false imaginings. You see him agonise over whether there had been any clues, any signs something was deeply wrong. Whatever she was running from, he didn’t know how to help her. And she didn’t know how to ask for his help. She stayed for 6 months in the end, but one day he came home from work and she was gone. It was always like that; she’d disappear, and he felt relieved in a way. That was the last time he ever saw her.
Little bits of anecdotal information trickle through – sometimes contradictory, but little signs of vulnerability slip through the front she put on. She once had a boyfriend who used to lock her up in the flat all day to stop her going out, and her old flatmate wasn’t surprised in the least to learn she’d been a victim of domestic violence. She saw Joyce in the street once, about a year before she died, and called out to her. But Joyce carried on, kept her head down, and hurried away. Maybe she was ashamed of how her life had turned out – she was still hoping for something better around each corner. When leaving her most recent known job, she told some people she’d been head-hunted by another company, and others that she was going travelling with a group of 20 people. One of her colleagues hopes it was the latter which was true.
She was in a women’s refuge for victims of domestic violence for a while, and people think it was an abusive boyfriend who made her impose such distance between herself and her family. A few months before she died, she had an operation in hospital, and as her next of kin she listed her bank manager. How isolated she must have been. In the end, those who knew her best are adamant that if she was alone, it was through her own doing, and because she’d pushed people away.
Despite all this, Joyce Vincent lived an amazing life – she met Gil Scott-Heron, and Nelson Mandela, and plenty of soul singers and musicians. There’s a video clip of her at a Mandela concert…she looks so radiant and happy. It was a wonderful way to immortalise her memory.
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