Quiet please everybody. Turning over. Action.
It is 1945 and World War Two is finally at an end. The camera follows a demobbed soldier as he walks down the cobbled street of a wet Northern town towards his terraced house and his wife.
They were married only months before he was called up to fight. In the years they were apart she wrote him three hundred letters and every one is now in the kitbag on his back.
As he walks down the street excited children crowd him and fight one another to carry his bag.
He reaches the house and she kisses him unenthusiastically (but not because of the watching children). Her coldness contrasts with the passion expressed in her letters.
He panics that she doesn’t really loves him; that the letters were faked emotions. His fear increases when he sees a handsome young man sitting in the lounge: her new lover?
But it is worse than that: he is a Roman Catholic priest.
She rehearsed what she needs to say, but still she stumbles. While he was fighting the war, she converted to Catholicism. There is no new lover, but (and here we go in for a close-up of the woman’s damp eyes followed by the soldier’s jaw dropping) she reveals she was divorced before she met and married him.
Although legally married to our soldier, she doesn’t want to be married to him because her new Church forbids divorce and remarrying.
Cue: theme tune and end credits.
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Words: Richard Rooney
Illustration: A.I.
Flash Fiction 250
Flash Fiction 250 