The Woman Who Wins the Raffle

The Summer Fete raffle has been won by Mrs Delphine Oyelowo eleven years running.

The odds against this have been calculated by three separate people, one of whom teaches statistics at a university and did it properly, and the number is large enough that it stopped being funny somewhere around year six.

There have been two investigations.

Investigation one (2018)

Conducted by the fete committee. Findings: the draw is conducted in public, from a drum, by a child selected at random from the audience, and Mrs Oyelowo buys between four and six tickets out of a typical eight hundred.

No irregularity found. Recommendation: none.

Investigation two (2022)

Conducted, at his own insistence, by Mr Colin Prewett, who is a retired auditor and who has never enjoyed anything more.

Mr Prewett's report runs to nine pages. He examined the drum, the tickets, the child-selection procedure, and the physical properties of the folded ticket stubs. He conducted, at home, four thousand simulated draws.

Findings: no irregularity.

Recommendation: that the committee "consider whether a phenomenon requires an explanation merely because it is unlikely."

The committee thanked Mr Prewett and did not implement the recommendation, because nobody could work out what implementing it would involve.

The prizes

This is where it starts to come apart.

2014: a hamper. 2015: a voucher for a garden centre. 2016: a bicycle. 2017: a hamper again. 2018: afternoon tea for two. 2019: a television.

Mrs Oyelowo has kept none of them.

The hamper went to the Wilsons, whose father had just been made redundant. The garden centre voucher went to the school. The bicycle went to a boy on Fenn Street whose bicycle had been stolen the week before, and who received it anonymously, and who is now twenty-two and does not know.

The television went to the community centre and is still there, and is the reason there is a Tuesday film club.

Mrs Oyelowo has never once mentioned any of this. Every single instance was discovered by somebody else, usually years later, usually by accident.

The 2024 draw

Eight hundred and forty tickets. The child selected was a boy of about seven called Amari.

Amari reached into the drum, rummaged for an uncomfortably long time, and pulled out a ticket.

He looked at it. He looked at the crowd.

Then he said, very clearly, into the microphone: "It's the lady again."

Four hundred people made a noise that was not quite a cheer and not quite a laugh.

Mrs Oyelowo, who is eighty-one, came up to the front and took the prize — a weekend in a cottage in Pembrokeshire, the best prize in the fete's history — and thanked the committee, and went and sat down.

What Mr Prewett saw

He was standing near the drum, because he always stands near the drum now, and he was watching Amari's hands.

He watched the boy rummage. He watched him pull out one ticket, look at it, and put it back.

He watched him do that four times.

On the fifth, Amari found what he was looking for and held it up.

Mr Prewett has told nobody. He has thought about it constantly for four months.

Because Amari is seven, and had never met Mrs Oyelowo, and could not possibly have known which ticket was hers.

Unless somebody had told him. Unless somebody tells whichever child gets picked, every year, quietly, before the draw. Unless this has been happening since 2014 and involves — Mr Prewett has done the arithmetic — at least eleven children, all of whom have kept it to themselves.

He has drafted a third report twice.

Both times he has got to the section headed FINDINGS and stopped, because the finding is that an entire village has been conspiring for eleven years to make sure an eighty-one-year-old woman keeps winning a raffle so that she can keep giving the prizes away.

He does not know what recommendation follows from that.

The cottage in Pembrokeshire, incidentally, has been given to the Nowaks, who have four children and have not had a holiday since 2019.

They think they won a separate draw.