A story I started writing several years ago but which had a much longer germination was one about a young woman who was washed ashore on a beach; she was uninjured but had no memory of who she was or how she came to be in the sea. She didn’t know if she had fallen from a boat or ship, or if she had been walking by the sea and fallen in, or whether something had happened to her.
This was based on a newspaper article reprinted in one of those corners of a paper, ‘100 years ago today’ and it was from a turn of the century story of a young woman who had been found in these mysterious circumstances. I took the idea and began to write a modern story. In my story she was discovered by a woman, Sylvie, who owned a guest house and was having an early morning stroll beside the sea before her guests needed their breakfast. In my story Sylvie had lost her husband six years previously… and when I say lost I mean that, he had walked out of the dining room of the guest house one evening and just vanished. He had never been seen again, nor any trace found of him, and it was supposed that for some reason he must have gone down to the sea and either fallen in, got pushed in, or threw himself in… but his body was never found.
This is another fascination of mine, people who vanish, just walk out of their homes and are never seen again, and no-one ever knows if harm has befallen them or not. So in my story Sylvie has lost her husband but finds the young woman. Social services put the young woman into Sylvie’s guest house and the story continues… Sylvie realises that the young woman has been found, but she has been lost by someone else – a family, parents, a partner friends .. somewhere someone has lost this girl…
There are other real-life stories too, about people who pretend to have been lost at sea, John Stonehouse the disgraced MP, pretended to drown but secretly tried to start a new life, John Darwin who pretended to have had a canoeing accident but was secretly living in a hidden room in his own home, before moving abroad, and then returning to England and faking amnesia…
And then there are the people who are tragically really lost at sea… some over the Christmas period, how their families must be wishing they could be found.
Lois Elsden 