A Solitary Lady

As the widow of a policeman, Mary's life had hardly ever been a happy one.Not long after her marriage in 1941, PC Harold King had been one of sixteen people tragically killed by a German parachute mine dropped on his beat area of Balby. Mary had been haunted for the rest of her life by this traumatic event, especially the memory of the patrol car pulling up outside her front window. She knew instinctively, before the two officers even emerged from their vehicle, that she would be facing the rest of her life alone.

For the remaining sixty-four years of her life, until her death at the age of eighty-four, Mary lived a distant childless and reclusive life; hermetically sealed from the increasingly toxic air of the developing world. She had never been able to come to terms with her grief, nor could she summon up the strength or even the desire, to take a firm grip on her life and move forward. The semi-detached 1930s house that she had shared with Harold for those few short months became a time capsule, a place to stash memories and memorabilia and to seek sanctuary and comfort from them. Even the part time jobs she had taken over the years, in order to supplement her meagre police widows pension, had been menial and soulless and void of social activity. Mary, as her neighbours often said of her, lived in a parallel universe, seemingly untouchable by events.

Towards the end of her life though, and to the surprise of the few people who knew her, she made some tentative steps towards normality. She took in a stray cat and named it Harold, even though the neighbours told her it was female. Even more surprisingly, she began working a small number of hours each week as a volunteer in the local charity shop. Mary was happy to sit alone in the back of the shop sorting donated bags of clothes and bric a brac, steaming clothes considered fit for resale, and even, on rare occasions, manning the till front of house. Sadly, none of these activities ever managed to remove that look from her face which had become its principal feature, that of indelible grief. One Friday morning Mary failed to appear at the shop when expected and a concerned colleague called the police. Two officers in a patrol car called at the house.....