Ghosts, Spirits and Muses: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall on stage by Aurora Dawson-Hunte.
From the Wolf Hall Weekend Event - June 2024, Cadhay.
We’re thrilled to share this transcript of the talk given by Aurora Dawson-Hunte at our Wolf Hall Weekend, June 2024 at Cadhay House, East Devon. Aurora has kindly allowed us to reproduce it here and we hope you will find it as inspiring as did the audience at the weekend event.
Almost 10 years ago now, I woke up from a long, long sleep. I was still living at my mum’s, it was a familiar environment to me. And as I woke up, and tried to clear the sleep out my eyes, I sat up on my bed. It was June, a very bright day, and I went to the loo, came back, and sat on my bed again. Through the open door walked a woman dressed all in black, with black slippers on and a pink turban. She looked at me, and the sensation I had was that she was watching me, checking on me, almost like she was asking me whether I was ready to get ready for the funeral. A few years earlier I had lost a member of my family, and it was like reliving the memory of that day and how it began. After a moment of looking at each other - and I have to stress that in this moment I felt nothing strange, if anything I felt almost comforted - she walked out of the room. It was at that moment that a terrible sense of dread came over me, and my whole body went cold, almost like an ice cold bucket was being poured from inside my head and down my body. I jumped off my bed, closed my door, picked up my phone and called my mum. “Have you let anybody into the house?” I asked her. And she replied, sounding panicked, “No.”
So I explained what had just happened.
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