Woman In A Green Shawl ( VILLAGE TALES EP. 30 )

If, when the snow lays deep on the ground, a young woman calls to ask if you’ve seen her child, Mary, you would help her wouldn’t you? It would be natural. 

Would it also be natural for the woman to disappear and for there to be no foot prints?

We are fortunate in our village in being sheltered but not so low lying as to be threatened by rising rivers. The lane to our east is sometimes flooded just this side of Shipston, but after that the road climbs towards Shaftesbury where flooding is the least of their concerns. On many occasions during the depths of winter I have left a clear but chilly village to find approaching Shaftesbury a light dusting of snow and then more at the summit. During the January of 1985 Shaftesbury was not the only place to have a prolonged fall of snow, most of southern England was laden with a foot or more.

It was in The Old Drum and Monkey, our local, that I met Sally Pemberton. She had moved from Shaftesbury and bought Dan Forder’s old place near the village shop. It was the recent falls of snow we were talking about and specifically Shaftesbury’s fondness for it.

I asked Sally if she’d ever heard anything about a ‘girl in a green shawl’ that appeared whenever it snowed.

‘Not every time,’ she replied and obviously knew the story. Eventually she mentioned almost nonchalantly that she had actually lived next-door to the woman who in 1978 had reported the young women to the police late one evening, hoping they could find her and help her.

‘I was living with George then, my husband, and next door was Jane Cornish who was a widow. What she told me was that she was tending her coal fire in the evening when there was a knock at the her front door. She didn’t care for people calling after dark what with living alone, so she asked who it was and heard a youngish voice. When she opened the door there was a fair haired young woman, Jane reckoned in her early twenties. Jane said she was wearing a light cotton frock, and a pink cardigan, she had no hat, but had a long green shawl covering her head and wrapped around herself, even so, Jane said, she must have been freezing. She looked really upset so Jane asked her how could she help and all the young woman would say was, 

‘Have you seen my daughter, please tell me where my Mary is.’ That’s all she’d say, over and over again.’

Sally said Jane asked her for more details, when and where Mary had gone missing, how old was she, what was she wearing and where did they live? The young woman just gave the same answer. When Jane invited her in from the cold, the young woman backed away down the path. It was then Jane realised the woman had nothing on her feet. Jane called her back again but she turned away towards the road and left. Jane went inside put on a coat and some boots, grabbed one of her old coats for the young woman and went to look for her but she’d gone, vanished.’

‘The first I heard was when Jane knocked on my door to see if she’d also called on me, but I told her there’d been no one. I told George, Jane and me were going out to look for a woman who’d lost her child. We thought we might follow her footsteps, but there was only Jane’s and mine, and no others. We started getting cold so we went in and got George to phone the police. Jane told them everything but they said that nothing had been reported but they’d send a car out to have a look, and she wasn’t to worry. They took Jane’s address and that was that.’

Time passed and once in a while Sally and her next door neighbour Jane Cornish, would mention the incident and presume that the young lady had found her daughter otherwise surely, they would have heard something.

Each year brought flurries of snow but nothing like that of 78, until the winter of 85. By then the young woman had been forgotten, until that was Sally was reading the local paper.

‘I couldn’t believe it. It was exactly the same as Jane had described, a young woman in a green shawl looking for her lost daughter. By then Jane was not good so I telephoned the paper and explained what Jane had seen and they sent a chap round to talk to us both. He wasn’t too sure whether to believe us, but when we told him we had reported the woman to the police he was a bit more interested. He phoned us later to say that the police did have a note made at the time, but nothing came of it, as no child had been reported missing. The descriptions were identical.

We got the paper to see whether Jane’s story had been included. Well it had, and blow me, if there wasn’t also the same story from 1963.’

Sally was by now quite talkative, but I was still sceptical however it does you no harm to give the impression you believe someone and eventually maybe you will. I have heard stories that are sworn to be true but are part of what is called, ‘false memory syndrome’ and it’s more common than you think. The images of an event of which you are told become over time remembered as something you have personally experienced. I repeated the story to Rachael our local historian, then a few days later she called at my cottage, and the first thing she said was,

‘1927,1963, 1978, 1985.’

I asked her what she meant even though I had a suspicion. She told me that the first recorded siting of the woman looking for her daughter was in 1927, the first heavy snowfall in Dorset for some years.

’I suppose she wearing a green shawl?’ I asked, and Rachael nodded, and then added that the next appearance was in 1963. That was the first police recording of such an incident, but like Jane Cornish’s siting it was dismissed as no official report had been lodged.

‘63 was a winter famous for its snow, I remember that.’ I told Rachael, who had more details. 

In 78 again there was thick snow on the ground when the young woman in the green shawl appeared late in the evening. This time there was a good description recorded of the women’s clothing and her continual pleading, just as Jane Cornish had described to Sally, but there was more. When the householder, another widow living alone, Kathleen O’Mally, had followed the woman to offer help, she noticed that there were no footsteps in the snow where the young woman, in bare feet, had been standing at her doorway, or on the path itself. The police considered it unimportant as another fall of snow would have concealed them. Mrs. O’Mally was insistent there had been none and when asked what had happened to the woman, she said she had gone after her, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Piecing together all we had, the young woman only appeared to elderly women who were living alone and only when deep snow lay on the ground,. Rachael had researched previous years when snow fell in the Shaftesbury area. It occurred almost every year but seldom in any great quantities until she came to 1916. There were no reports she could find of a mother looking for her child, but there was a report of a house fire in Shaftesbury in which a mother and daughter had died. The mother had been rescued but the daughter, a two year old called Mary, had not. The mother had run back into the building to find her but had perished in the flames.

When the next fall of snow lays deep on the ground and the good people of Shaftesbury are warming themselves in the comfort of their pleasant homes, a knock at the door may reveal a young woman in a green shawl looking for Mary her small daughter. You may be tempted to inviter her in and she may well back away and then vanish, but she may not. If you’re living in the house she’s looking for, she will accept your kind offer, but take care,  you may never be rid of her.

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Written and read by Barkley Johnson.