The Winner
‘The Dowry Chest’ by Paul Beatty of Stockport, is a perfectly constructed story with only two characters, detailing the mystery of a locked chest over a number of years. We never learn the name of the protagonist, but that’s because although it is her story, it is Grammy who is the overseeing influence. The gentle relationship between the two pervades the story, as the girl does her detective work. Maybe it is predictable that the girl would inherit the farm, but it is completely right that she should, and that her discovery – and her subsequent actions should give the story its satisfactory conclusion with the words, harking back to T.S Eliot, ‘…their link in the chain that brings time present and time past to time future’.
Second prize
‘Wine and Roses’ by Brian Burden of Braintree, Essex, a sinister horror tale of a date following an encounter in a road house. Little does our hero suspect that he is about to date a ghoul, and after fatefully getting the date wrong, he has no end of a surprise!
Shortlisted:
Anita Williams, Wolverhampton, for ‘The Mysterious Thirteenth’ in which a blocked novelist rents an isolated cottage in which to work on his thirteenth novel and finds that the ghost in the machine is doing it for him! This turns out to be an author of twelve fantasy novels who mysteriously disappeared from her cottage many years ago whilst working on her thirteenth….
D.R.D. Bruton of West Linton, Borders, for ‘The place and the time of Dominique Bird’, a story of a boy’s relationship with a girl who feels herself a misfit for some time, but as the years pass, achieves her right time and place in charity care work far away. But alas, Little Bird is to die in a bombing atrocity and the newspaper reports in clichéd fashion ‘she was just someone in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ But although this may seem nothing like a happy ending, the storyteller knows that Little Bird was happy and smiling in the photograph with the children who reminded him of their own classroom days so long ago.
Martin Handley of Leeds for ‘Screen Presence’, a refreshingly original ghost story in which booth number one of the National Media Museum is haunted by that historic episode of Valerie Barlow’s shocking death in Coronation Street early in 1971 . The one-time auditionee Audrey Richardson finally makes it to the screen in the part after all!
Highly commended:
Jeff Jones of Harlow, Essex, for ‘The Fallen’
Gwenda Major of Kendal for ‘Playing Nicely’
Jenny Long of Hockley, Essex, for ‘The swarming of ants’
Norma Murray of Hassocks, W.Sussex for ‘Letter to follow’
Michael Limmer of Witney, Oxon for ‘Never Prosper’
