Stromness Dragon

This is based on a true story. I am going to write it as a short story in several parts, but if I get a good feeling about it, I might expand it and see where it goes!

When her mother died, Olivia felt nothing but relief. She had played the part of the youngest daughter diligently, and followed her parents’ Victorian notions of duty by staying at home to look after them in their old age. Her sisters had both had jobs, if not careers, and both had married and now lived too far away to be of any use.

Her mother’s death left Olivia financially independent (her reward for giving up her youth, she supposed) and she was at liberty to pursue whatever dream had not been stifled by the claustrophobia of the sickroom. Lying on her wooden bed and hearing the springs creak beneath her, Olivia’s first thought was ‘away’. Away to where, though? She had never travelled and had little notion to see the world. If she had a companion perhaps, or a husband, then a journey of exploration might have been undertaken, but Olivia could not envisage herself mounting camels, or taking a train across continents. She could not see the point of holidays.

What leisure time Olivia had enjoyed during her parents’ years of sickness and dotage had been spent in educating herself. She had forced herself through her father’s leather-bound Classics (mostly untouched and some with pages still uncut), and to stretch her mind through the long nights of nursing, had taught herself German in order to study the works of the great German philosophers. Her sisters, in their rare visits, had accused her of being humourless. They’d be bloody humourless, she’d thought, scraping the burnt toast, if they’d had to wipe the ancient backsides.

Olivia’s glance drifted around her book-stuffed room and she allowed her mind to slip. Heidegger and Kierkegaard sat alongside Milton and Keats. A collection of dog-eared Bibles paid testament to Olivia’s religious habit. And it was a habit, she supposed, borne out of years of her father’s stern voice and the silent, dusty Sundays. From her prone position, she stretched out her hand and slid her bedside Bible onto her chest and opened it at random, just in case it could offer her any words of wisdom. It didn’t. It offered her a page of begats, doing no more than reminding her of her loveless state of spinsterhood.

Her first task was to clear out her parents’ belongings and clean the house from top to bottom. The scrubbing of the sickroom floor provided a monotonous rhythm to Olivia’s thoughts: ‘What shall I do? What shall I do? What shall I do?’ she muttered under her breath. It never occurred to Olivia to do nothing: it was simply not in her nature. She heaped woollen coats and flattened leather brogues onto the cart of the rag-and-bone man and locked her father’s Great War medals in her wooden box. As she swept out her mother’s wardrobe, she found a pile of old school exercise books, inscribed with her fastidious hand. Untying the string she was faced with faded ink lines of Latin and Greek and the reminder that she had once shown an aptitude for scholarship. Her hand paused in the turning of the pages.

A week later a brown envelope arrived bearing pamphlets and booklets. A fortnight after that, a letter, bearing a florid embossed crest, informed Olivia that if the financial arrangements were found to be in order, her place at the Faculty of Theology in Paderborn, Westphalia, would be secured.

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