Dulwich Despatch
Page 14
Creative Writing: Oldmere Village
Samantha Lewis is an accountant aged 41 who lives alone in a house larger than the rest, overlooking Mere pond on Market Street. Samantha splits her life in two, detaching her job from her normal life. She keeps her job confidential and little is known about it, her customers know only what she wants them to. She has a few friends but over all her life is quite solitary. One thing Samantha has been successful at is making enemies—Sam, Dudley and George; these are only a fraction of her foes. She enjoys sitting in the tea shop across from the gym zoning out, admiring Andy, the gym manager, and regarding most others with disgust. Samantha has a generic face, concealed behind thick, expertly applied makeup. She ties her jet black hair back in a bun smartly. A tight black blazer semi-covers her white, crisp, ironed shirt. Samantha wears black trousers with fashionable, shiny black high heels, and to complete her strong, city, upmarket look she always has her nails painted, ’ black swan ’. At a closer look you would notice she walks briskly in a small trot or even a gallop. At an even closer look every time Samantha sits she twitches uncontrollably just bellow her left ear. While at the same time shrugging her right shoulder and blinking. If she sits mid-way through her conversation she will even take the time to briefly go through this process before resuming her sentence. This is all incredibly hard to spot as she does all three movements simultaneously. As a child Samantha lived up north on a grim farm with her mother, farher and uncle. She was the youngest of three brothers and four sisters, all of which she loathed. Her parents were drug addicts, her brothers smoked and her sisters were no better than bullies. It was claustrophobic in the mornings and the day was filled with pigsty dung. Dirt and decay filled the air like a sewer, and at night it was cold and damp. Finally, at 18, Samantha Lewis left for university with an OCD for cleanliness. Her childhood left her with an unwelcome habit of needing to point out, in a complaining tone, any imperfection. She has now wiped clean any trace of her northern accent and we are still unsure of how she got from farmer’s daughter to wealthy business woman. Aiken Furlong, 7E ******** My character’s name is Patsy Smith and she lives at Number Eight Low Street in the Eastern part of Oldmere, close to the pretty Mere Pond. She is also the owner of a teashop and delicatessen. Patsy is thirty-eight and a half years of age with a birthday on March the twenty sixth. She is very small of stature compared with most of her friends and other women her age. Features that make Patsy stand out from others are her long lush glistening dark copper red hair and her small upturned freckly nose. She also has light grey eyes with a tint of seaweed green. When she walks she has a tendency to double tap her left foot on the ground and also tap her left thigh with her hand. Patsy sometimes thinks this may be because she is always trying to stop herself from dancing as she walks along, because she loves dancing, it is one of her favourite things. She also likes to run a lot and wear her hair in a swinging ponytail, which bounces against her luminous orange running vest. On the rare occasions when she sits down she cricks her neck to the left. Patsy also likes to greet everyone kindly and doesn’t like rudeness. She always says hullo to people. Patsy came to live in Oldmere sixteen years ago when she was twenty-two. She sort of stumbled across it and decided that she wanted to make it her home. At first, Patsy rented an old house close to an old disused quarry and tried to think of a way to make a living in this quaint charming market town that she had discovered. It was not easy and in the end it took two difficult, and at times disappointing, years to start the business that she now has. Failures included trying to set up a shop in her house and the fact that properties rarely came up for sale, and when they did they were ridiculously expensive. Eventually she found the right house (8, Low Street) and for once things went her way and
(Continued on page 15)
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