Fast Fiction: Who Was It?
…One summer's day during the second world war I met a woman walking on the downs. She wore a white dress and a large white sunhat…
Could it be…? Surely not. She drowned herself before this happened…
Richard Mallinson tells a puzzling tale.
One summer's day during the second world war I met a woman walking on the downs. She wore a white dress and a large white sunhat
She said, 'Let us sit here and then you can tell me all about yourself.'
I told her that I was an evacuee from London and I wanted to be a shepherd when I grew up, which was true at the time.
'Don't you ever want to go back to London?' she asked.
'Not bloody likely,' I said (though I did go back at the end of the war.)
She smiled with her lovely eyes and said, 'You are as brown as a nut.'
A long way away I could see the sea with the sun glittering on it and there were some ships, I think.
She opened a book she was carrying and began to read to me in a voice like music about a boy who wanted to go to a lighthouse.
Then she became tearful and walked slowly away until she was just a white spot far below and then nothing.
Yes, I do still think of her after all these years.
*
- So, was it a dream?
- No, it happened.
- But did it happen as you now think it happened?
- I'm not sure about the book and the lighthouse.
- You were trying to imply that she was Virginia Woolf?
- Yes, I suppose I was.
- Cheating a bit?
- Perhaps . . .
- When did you meet this woman?
- I think it was in 1943.
- But Virginia Woolf drowned herself in 1941.
- Well, if it wasn't her... then who the hell was it?
