A lost past, and fears of the future

Anxiety grips her, and it is hard for her to think. "My mind is all clogged up," she says.

Images intrude . . . of flames consuming her auto-show trophies, of two frisky German shepherds running free in the back yard behind the house on Pine Street - a house that isn't there anymore.

"The dogs are loose in the neighborhood somewhere," she says. She simply will not think of them otherwise.

Robin Neely, 28, race-car owner, part-time waitress, wife of an automotive mechanic and mother of three, is among the dispossessed. Her peaceful middle- class family life has been shattered by the MOVE conflagration. She is angry and scared and sad, but she is holding on.

Yesterday she sent her kids to school. It was a small thing, perhaps, when measured against all the other things yet to be done. But it was a start.

"We've moved in with my mom, who has a three-story house. . . . I lost my dad in January," she said. "Thank God I can always go home. But I can't figure that being back at Mom's means that it's over with. It's not over with, and it won't be over with for a long time."

She is dressed in the same silky black shirt and blue jeans she was wearing Monday night, when she watched from afar as her house on the 6200 block of Pine Street went up in flames.

"I'm not sure when I can go back to work, because I have no clothes," said Neely, who has a job in a luncheonette at Second Street and Girard Avenue. She was sitting at a table in the temporary basement shelter set up in the St. Carthage Catholic Church at Cedar Avenue and Cobbs Creek Parkway. ''I've been doing volunteer work here for the past two days, trying to get people into housing, answering phones. I've taken a lot of obscene phone calls. People say, 'Leave MOVE alone. You can't win. ' I'll tell you, I'm afraid of them."

She thinks back to when they first found the house on Pine Street, in 1981.

"It was a handyman's special. That means a lot of work went into it, a lot," she says. "My husband, David Coston, who is 28, is a race-car driver and he works for Cottman Transmission. Like all the men in the neighborhood, he works really hard.

"It was a beautiful neighborhood, and people were very welcoming to us. We have five racing cars, and the neighbors loved them. I drive one - a 1965 white Dodge Dart with black trim - and he drives one, and we keep the other three in Wynnefield."

On Saturday, Coston and Neely arrived home at 9 p.m. from an antique-auto show in Plainfield, N.J., to find that their neighborhood had become an armed camp. "When we got home, I was feeling good, very good," she says. "I came in second in the show, and I won a plaque and a trophy. No money, no. Money doesn't mean anything to me; that's not why I do it. I got interested in cars because my father was. The trophies, the kind of things you keep, although. . . . "

Her voice trails off. The trophies, of course - except for those she kept at her mother's house - are gone now. She composes herself quickly. "These kinds of things are the kinds of things you cherish," she says quietly.

"On Saturday night the police told us to get a change of clothing for ourselves and our children. We had about five minutes to do it. I am thankful that they were staying with my mother, that I didn't have a baby sitter in to take care of them, because they would have been so scared, and I would have panicked."

The children - Robin, 9, David, 6, and Patricia, 4 - are confused by what has happened. "I haven't had an hour to just sit down and explain to them what has happened, to talk to them about it all," Neely says. "They want to know when all the cops are going to leave and when the MOVE people are coming out. They see this on television. Well, the MOVE people are coming out, but not the way they mean."

She has tried to comfort them, to quiet their nightmares and soothe their fears, and yesterday she decided it was time for them to return to school. "I told Robin, who goes to the Albert M. Greenfield School, that if her classmates asked her a lot of questions she just didn't have to answer them. She was worried about that. And I took David and Patricia to their preschool and kindergarten program at a Baptist church near here.

"And then I came back to the shelter, because this is the only place where the people from the neighborhood have been able to get together. So here I am, I'm 28 years old and I'm back living with my mom. You know, I always thought that I would have a nice home and that some day, when she got old, she would come and stay with us. I didn't expect it to be this way.

"This isn't a permanent solution. We'll look for a new place, but not in this neighborhood. I'm afraid to walk in this neighborhood anymore. The mayor has to build new houses here. He can't leave an empty lot. But that doesn't mean we have to live in them, here with the memories.

"I couldn't live again on that crazy soil."