Patchwork Prophecies

The smell of kerosene permeates the tiny, corrugated-iron shack at the end of a dirt road in Kent. A kettle steams on the little black stove. Amid such bleak surroundings, a scrawny, brown-eyed girl of 20 named Bridget Poole and a bedridden old woman smile and laugh together. "People think it's strange," says Elizabeth ("Queen") Allen, 83. "Such a young girl living with an old lady like me. But it seems perfect ly natural to us two. I think that's be cause love is there."

Because love is there, Queen Allen is also the most esoteric rage in sophisticated London. Bridget, an art student, found her three years ago, moved in to look after her, and last year, in hopes of raising money to supplement Queen's $37-a-month-old-age pension, invited some art teachers in to look at the small, neatly sewn quilt-pictures that the old lady had made. Within two months, London Dealer Crane Kalman was staging an exhibition of them.

Swans & Minarets. Artists and critics went overboard, comparing Queen's primitive tapestries to Klee, Picasso and the works of the Sienese quattrocento masters. Couture houses deluged her with scraps of silks and satins. Last month another 38 of her newer, brighter works went on display. Buyers snapped up all but ten that Kalman deliberately held back, and last week gallerygoers were still flocking to see the remaining few. Movie Actress Joanne Woodward became a Queen collector.

Yet Elizabeth Allen takes her fame as stoically as she has taken the pain that has been her lifelong lot. One of 17 children of an Irish mother and a German immigrant tailor, she was born in North London with a double curvature of the spine and a clubfoot, got her nickname when, as a child, she insisted she was as much a queen as Elizabeth I. She became an atheist after her mother told her that her afflictions were brought about by a wrathful God who visited the sins of the fathers on the sons. In later life, she developed an odd, quasi-mystical faith of her own, and she has woven its demons and angels, its swans and minarets into her patchwork chronicles. She learned how to sew because, though an invalid, she was forced to serve as her father's assistant in his tailor shop during World War I.

Horned Mammon. Some critics compare her to Grandma Moses, but, says Dealer Kalman, except for her age, there is no similarity between them. Rather than recalling childhood scenes, he explains, "this old lady has a very strong vision full of hallucinations and strange mystical places she has never, never been." Some of them are places she has heard about only over the radio; others betray a naive view of the outside world. One of her latest pictures, for instance, shows a horned Mammon being worshiped on Wall Street.

Come Along, Old Queen, We've Sighted the Golden Gates is one of her most ambitious. It portrays Queen, in an orange cotton dress, being led by a strong Bridget in a silk plaid skirt and a brown wool jacket, to a gold metallic gate of Heaven with a welcoming Christ within. It may also be prophetic, for Queen has become too crippled to lie flat. When she tries to doze sitting up, she is constantly awakened by spasms of pain. Since doctors were of no avail to her in her youth, she sees no reason to turn to them now, refuses all medication. Still, she plans to sew more pictures of her interpretations of the Bible. "If we can't sew, we'll write it down," she adds. Bridget smiles and nods.

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