A Boy named Phoebe
During the summer of 1988, my friend Susan had gone on a caravan holiday along the Norfolk coastline with her partner and their son. She later told me that she’d met a fellow caravan holiday-maker one morning.
“That woman told me she’d met my daughter,” I remember Susan telling me. “I told her I don’t have a daughter, but a son.”
After comparing physical descriptions of her son with the girl the woman had met, they decided it was the same child. Susan told the woman the child’s a boy with long, white blonde hair, so she could’ve mistaken him for a girl.
“But your son told me his name is Phoebe,” the woman then told Susan.
Fast forward 18 years, and I got to meet “Phoebe” (real name – Luke) who was home from university for the Easter break last month. He’s now a very tall, very skinny 20-year-old studying Geography in Scotland. He turned 20 the day after my unplanned visit, and the timing was such that if I had called the next day, I would not have had the chance to see him after all these years.
When I told Susan and Luke the Phoebe story, neither of them remembered it. After a while, she did start to remember it, and she even began to realise why it was that he told the woman his name was Phoebe. Turns out when Susan was young, her mother used to call her Phoebe.
“And it could be that my mother might’ve called him Phoebe when he was young,” she told me.
Well, with his long, white blonde hair, it was no wonder the woman believed Luke when he told her his name was Phoebe. See for yourself …
Luke / Phoebe with mum Susan behind him, circa 1988
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And one of the two of us that same evening
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