INNER TOOB: THEORIES OF RELATEEVEETY

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

THEORIES OF RELATEEVEETY - PENN'S MAMA

Jack and Annie Walker
at the Rovers Return Inn

In Accrington, Lancashire, Dr. Amos Walker, a veterinarian, and his wife Joan raised four children - John (otherwise known as Jack), James, Arthur, and Louise. A decade seperated John, who was born in April of 1900, from his little sister Louise. And although Jack Walker was visited in Weatherfield (where he ran the Rovers Return Inn with his wife Annie) by both of his brothers, Louise never showed up at the Walkers' pub on Coronation Street. Louise never attended the wedding of her niece Joan Walker to Gordon Davies, nor did she come back to pay her respects to her departed brother when Jack Walker died in 1970.

And there was probably good reason for that. Even though she was never seen on the TV screens of the Trueniverse audience, I believe Louise Walker had immigrated to America to be close to the man she loved and who was the father of her child... even if that American was married to another woman.

This is the basis for the theory of relateeveety I came up with for the mother of Dr. Penn Walker from the 'Murder, She Wrote' episode "The Night Of The Headless Horseman".

At the pub in Archbury

Just as her older brother Jack worked as a publican until he could afford his own bar in Weatherfield, Louise also worked in a bar - a small village pub not far from the airfield in Archbury which would house American airmen by 1942. Because of that close proximity, Louise would be destined to become one of the 70,000 British war brides. The only hitch was that the airman Louise had fallen in love with - a B-17 Flight Engineer named Edmonds - was already married. He had a wife and a three-year old son awaiting his safe return to Cabot Cove, Maine.

Louise Walker knew what she was getting into, falling in love with a married man. But the saying was true before Woody Allen said it: "The heart wants what it wants." When she got pregnant, her snooty sister-in-law Annie Walker was scandalized. Thinking more of her own standing in the Weatherfield community, Annie convinced Louise that she and the coming baby should follow Airman Edmonds back to America where she could convince him to divorce his wife and marry her.

But Edmonds had other ideas.

He set Louise up in Wenton, a small town in Vermont near to where he would often travel on business anyway in the years before the war. There in Weston Louise supported herself (as the "widowed" war bride Mrs. Walker) by working as a housemother at the Wenton Academy for Boys. With financial assistance from Edmonds, she raised her son, whom she gave the name Penn, and sent him off to college to become a dentist.

It is unknown if Louise Walker lived into her seventies (which would have been during the 1980s.) But had she been alive there must have been a good reason why she wasn't at her son's side during his time of personal crisis in 1987. If she wasn't already deceased, then she may have been confined to a nursing home for whatever frailty that might have afflicted her at that age.

Dr. Penn Walker with Jessica Fletcher

At any rate, this is my theory of relateeveety connecting "Doc" Walker from one episode of 'Murder, She Wrote' to Louise Walker, technically from 'Coronation Street'. (She was mentioned on that British prime time soap opera, but never appeared on it over its long history. So she was a blank canvas upon which any Toobworld storyline might have been applied.....)

As I said, Louise Walker never showed up in 'Coronation Street'. So her appearance is not affixed to any one actress. Who could have played her?

Here are four actresses who could have played Louise Walker in that 1987 episode of 'Murder, She Wrote' - the main reason being they were each born in 1910. For alls I know, each of them could have affected a slight English accent, nearly lost after forty plus years in Vermont. (Originally I had chosen five, but it turns out that Virginia Bruce died in 1982.)