It would have been heartbreaking had it not been for that other recent time, on a still, autumn afternoon, when, standing at her gate, she was back to her old form. “Why those holes in your jeans?” she observed of my well-worn pair of denims. Janina had a habit of making left-field comments. “You don’t have very big feet,” she remarked once, apropos of nothing, leaning down to pat my dog.

She could be full of surprises. In the wee hours of a weeknight years before, I was hunched over the bar in my local when I turned to see Janina perched on a stool nearby, sporting her trademark headscarf, knotted under her chin, Eastern European-style. “Hal-lo,” she said, as breezily as if we’d run into one another at the grocer’s, instead of in a near-deserted hotel at 12.30am.

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At that time Janina would have been in her mid-60s, one of a handful of feisty, working-class widows who all lived alone in my street, their husbands having fallen off the twig in early retirement. You got the sense that these women were relishing their less confined, freshly self-realised lives.

The toughest specimen of all was Peg, 10 doors down, with her shock of big white hair, who bought her double-fronted fibro house from a lottery win in the 1950s. When I once warned her about a spate of local break-ins, she leaned forward on her front fence with firmly knit fingers. “I’ll just buy a shotgun and kill ’em,” she said.

Another old lady much further down the street had a less violent remedy for a bunch of young heavy-metal enthusiasts who moved in next door. “I’ll bake ’em a pie and put me valium in it.”

As the years passed and most of these tough, pragmatic old women slowly died off, a tide of gentrification engulfed my street. Peg’s house was torn down and replaced by a couple of look-at-me, million-dollar-plus terraces. Janina became the last woman standing, in a decaying bungalow on a massive block which had real estate agents salivating.

She was about 15 when the war drew to a close. She spoke warmly of the kindness of the American soldiers, who provided hearty meals.

In the first few years of living next door to Janina, we’d exchange a polite greeting, and that would be that. Then one Sunday I offered to remove the ivy that had swallowed her side of the fence. Sitting on a blue milk crate under a big sunhat on a hot afternoon as I hacked away at the climber, she gradually opened up.

I learnt she’d been a lifelong smoker – she’d given up only a few years before – and a lung cancer survivor. She also talked about growing up in a small town outside Warsaw during the war. She was about 15 when the war drew to a close. She spoke warmly of the kindness of the American soldiers, who provided full, hearty meals – her first in years – and warm blankets.

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Janina came here after the war and bought her house in 1959, in what was then a migrant-dominated area. She raised two children there, a son and a daughter. When I chatted with her daughter in the year or so before her mother went into care, she described Janina as a tough mother who could be distant and demanding.

But perhaps it was an awareness of those very imperfections – etched into every crease of her face – that made Janina so compelling to me. I do miss seeing her over the front fence.

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