Searching for the next story for my new collection, I decided to look through all my old writer’s note books to see if something I’d seen, thought about, described, would trigger a story idea off. I came across the following notes from about ten years ago concerning an elderly and terrifying woman I knew briefly while I was working in London. She was called Hilda. ‘Hilda went to ST Mary’s Hospital in Praed Street after a fall and they gave her a new hip, only she says they put it on back to front, also she has a plastic thigh bone, and so now she doesn’t cook or eat hot meals because she’s afraid it will melt. She used to be a cleaner at a school in London and the headmaster had a heart attack and fell to the floor. Well, obviously Hilda had to get on with her cleaning, so she stepped over his body and then got called in for questioning over his murder.
When she was a young woman, she returned home at night to find all her family, eyes open, sitting down for dinner, food all laid out on the table, dead. Her mother, father, brother and sister…..
While she was in St Mary’s for her hip operation, at night the men turned into women and the women into men. You could see they were men because they had big wrists, but they’ve got women’s…..
Hilda lived in a huge house in West London and about it she said, ‘It’s got 17 bedrooms with ten flights of stairs and the toilet is in the attic, so by the time you’d got up there, you’d either pissed yourself or forgotten why you went in the first place.
My story ‘The Women’ is based on Hilda and her 60 year old still living at home son.
