Virginia

It was the last straw when some pipsqueak editor
rejected her short story. Bad enough
to know that Hitler was poised for the invasion
and was targeting her strip of the Sussex coast.
They’d talked about suicide, and it had always
been present – long ago, when it had seemed
that violence couldn’t touch her magic circle.
Dark days had come, and she was not equipped for them.
She didn’t know, but could guess, that a bishop’s wife
would say that it was cowardice; the rest of us
were facing up to things, and why not she?
She knew all that. She might have coped. But when
some man without a fraction of her genius
casually snubbed her, that was the last straw.

Merryn Williams