While I Live 1947

In Cornwall in 1922, Olwen Trevelyan is a young pianist and composer who fights to finish a piano tone poem that haunts her evenings as much as it breathes with life. The piece’s ending has become a pressure point she can barely bear, especially under the watchful eye of her domineering elder sister, Julia Trevelyan, whose urgency to see Olwen complete the work only amplifies the tension between duty and creativity. Olwen’s nerves fray as she wrestles with the piece’s final bars, until one night she sleepwalks to the edge of a cliff near their home. Julia follows, shouting her name, but Olwen wakes suddenly, loses her balance, and plummets to the rocks below. The tragedy stains Julia’s memory, leaving her unable to forgive herself and pushing her into years of reclusion, where her sole purpose becomes preserving Olwen’s memory. In time, Olwen’s final composition earns posthumous recognition, and every anniversary of her death the piece is broadcast on the radio, a ritual that keeps the past alive in the family’s consciousness.

On the 25th anniversary of Olwen’s death, Julia is listening to the broadcast when a knock sounds at the door and an unknown young woman, Carol Raye, steps in and heads straight for the piano, joining in with the radio performance as if she has been living with the Trevelyans all along. She claims to have lost her memory and to know nothing of who she is or how she wandered to such an isolated house, yet she moves with an eerie familiarity of the surroundings and the family history that seems to reach beyond ordinary recollection. Struck by her striking resemblance to Olwen and by behavior echoing Olwen’s peculiar traits, Julia becomes convinced that the woman is Olwen reborn—the reincarnation she has long feared and hoped for. Playing a pivotal role in this unsettling turn is Nehemiah, a local faith healer and self-proclaimed man of second sight, Tom Walls, whose involvement adds a spiritual, prophetic layer to the unfolding events. As the mystery deepens, it increasingly feels as though history might be repeating itself, building to a tension-filled moment when the young woman again stands perilously close to the cliff’s edge—the very place where Olwen fell years before.