"It"s a marvellous job," he answered. "It"s lovely."
"And that"s why you go to the races?"
"Race meetings is easy meat," he said. "You just stand around after the race, watchin" for the lucky ones to queue up and draw their money. And when you see someone collectin" a big bundle of notes, you simply follows after "im and "elps yourself. But don"t get me wrong, guv"nor. I never takes nothin" from a loser. Nor from poor people neither. I only go after them as can afford it, the winners and the rich."
"That"s very thoughtful of you," I said. "How often do you get caught?"
"Caught?" he cried, disgusted. "Me "Me get caught! It"s only pickpockets get caught. Fingersmiths never. Listen, I could take the false teeth out of your mouth if I wanted to and you wouldn"t even catch me!" get caught! It"s only pickpockets get caught. Fingersmiths never. Listen, I could take the false teeth out of your mouth if I wanted to and you wouldn"t even catch me!"
"I don"t have false teeth," I said.
"I know you don"t," he answered. "Otherwise I"d "ave "ad "em out long ago!"
I believed him. Those long slim fingers of his seemed able to do anything.
We drove on for a while without talking.
"That policeman"s going to check up on you pretty thoroughly," I said. "Doesn"t that worry you a bit?"
"n.o.body"s checkin" up on me," he said.
"Of course they are. He"s got your name and address written down most carefully in his black book."
The man gave me another of his sly, ratty little smiles. "Ah," he said. "So "ee "as. But I"ll bet "ee ain"t got it all written down in "is memory as well. I"ve never known a copper yet with a decent memory. Some of "em can"t even remember their own names."
"What"s memory got to do with it?" I asked. "It"s written down in his book, isn"t it?"
"Yes, guv"nor, it is. But the trouble is, "ee"s lost the book. "Ee"s lost both books, the one with my name in it and and the one with yours." the one with yours."
In the long delicate fingers of his right hand, the man was holding up in triumph the two books he had taken from the policeman"s pockets. "Easiest job I ever done," he announced proudly.
I nearly swerved the car into a milk-truck, I was so excited.
"That copper"s got nothin" on either of us now," he said.
"You"re a genius!" I cried.
" "Ee"s got no names, no addresses, no car number, no nothin," he said.
"You"re brilliant!"
"I think you"d better pull in off this main road as soon as possible," he said. "Then we"d better build a little bonfire and burn these books."
"You"re a fantastic fellow," I exclaimed.
"Thank you, guv"nor," he said. "It"s always nice to be appreciated."
A Note About the Next Story
In 1946. more than thirty years ago, I was still unmarried and living with my mother. I was making a fair income by writing two short stories a year. Each of them took four months to complete, and fortunately there were people both at home and abroad who were willing to buy them.
One morning in April of that year. I read in the newspaper about a remarkable find of Roman silver. It had been discovered four years before by a ploughman near Mildenhall, in the county of Suffolk, but the discovery had for some reason been kept secret until then. The newspaper article said it was the greatest treasure ever found in the British Isles, and it had now been acquired by the British Museum. The name of the ploughman was given as Gordon Butcher.
True stories about the finding of really big treasure send shivers of electricity all the way down my legs to the soles of my feet. The moment I read the story, I leapt up from my chair without finishing my breakfast and shouted good-bye to my mother and rushed out to my car. The car was a nine-year-old Wolseley, and I called it "The Hard Black Slinker". It went well but not very fast.
Mildenhall was about a hundred and twenty miles from my home, a tricky cross-country trip along twisty toads and country lanes. I got there at lunchtime, and by asking at the local police station, I found the small house where Gordon Butcher lived with his family. He was at home having his lunch when I knocked on his door.
I asked him if he would mind talking to me about how he found the treasure.
"No, thank you," he said. "I"ve had enough of reporters. I don"t want to see another reporter for the rest of my life."
"I"m not a reporter," I told him. "I"m a short-story writer and I sell my work to magazines. They pay good money." I went on to say that if he would tell me exactly how he found the treasure then I would write a truthful story about it. And if I was lucky enough to sell it, I would split the money equally with him.
In the end, he agreed to talk to me. We sat for several hours in his kitchen, and he told me an enthralling story. When he had finished, I paid a visit to the other man in the affair, an older fellow called Ford. Ford wouldn"t talk to me and closed the door in my face. But by then I had my story and I set out for home.
The next morning, I went up to the British Museum in London to see the treasure that Gordon Butcher had found. It was fabulous. I got the shivers all over again just from looking at it.
I wrote the story as truthfully as I possibly could and sent it off to America. It was bought by a magazine called the Sat.u.r.day Evening Post Sat.u.r.day Evening Post, and I was well paid. When the money arrived, I sent exactly half of it to Gordon Butcher in Mildenhall.
One week later, I received a letter from Mr Butcher written upon what must have been a page torn from a child"s school exercise-book. It said, ". . .you could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw your cheque. It was lovely. I want to thank you. . ."
Here is the story almost exactly as it was written thirty years ago. I"ve changed it very little. I"ve simply toned down some of the more flowery pa.s.sages and taken out a number of superfluous adjectives and unnecessary sentences.
The Mildenhall Treasure
Around seven o"clock in the morning, Gordon Butcher got out of bed and switched on the light. He walked barefoot to the window and drew back the curtains and looked out.
This was January and it was still dark, but he could tell there hadn"t been any snow in the night.
"That wind," he said aloud to his wife. "Just listen to that wind."
His wife was out of bed now, standing beside him near the window, and the two of them were silent, listening to the swish of the icy wind as it came sweeping in over the fens.
"It"s a nor"-easter," he said.
"There"ll be snow for certain before nightfall," she told him. "And plenty of it."
She was dressed before him, and she went into the next room and leaned over the cot of her six-year-old daughter and gave her a kiss. She called out a good morning to the two other older childen in the third room, then she went downstairs to make breakfast.
At a quarter to eight, Gordon Butcher put on his coat, his cap and his leather gloves, and walked out of the back door into the bitter early-morning winter weather. As he moved through the half-daylight over the yard to the shed where his bicycle stood, the wind was like a knife on his cheek. He wheeled out the bike and mounted and began to ride down the middle of the narrow road, right into the face of the gale.
Gordon Butcher was thirty-eight. He was not an ordinary farm labourer. He took orders from no man unless he wished. He owned his own tractor, and with this he ploughed other men"s fields and gathered other men"s harvests under contract. His thoughts were only for his wife, his son, his two daughters. His wealth was in his small brick house, his two cows, his tractor, his skill as a ploughman.
Gordon Butcher"s head was very curiously shaped, the back of it protruding like the sharp end of an enormous egg, and his ears stuck out, and a front tooth was missing on the left side. But none of this seemed to matter very much when you met him face to face in the open air. He looked at you with steady blue eyes that were without any malice or cunning or greed. And the mouth didn"t have those thin lines of bitterness around the edges which one so often sees on men who work the land and spend their days fighting the weather.
His only eccentricity, to which he would cheerfully admit if you asked him, was in talking aloud to himself when he was alone. This habit, he said, grew from the fact that the kind of work he did left him entirely by himself for ten hours a day, six days a week. "It keeps me company," he said, "hearing me own voice now and again."
He biked on down the road, pedalling hard against the brutal wind.
"All right," he said, "all right, why don"t you blow a bit? Is that the best you can do? My goodness me. I hardly know you"re there this morning!" The wind howled around him and snapped at his coat and squeezed its way through the pores of the heavy wool, through his jacket underneath, through his shirt and vest, and it touched his bare skin with an icy finger-tip.
"Why," he said, "it"s lukewarm you are today. You"ll have to do a sight better than that if you"re going to make me me shiver." shiver."
And now the darkness was diluting into a pale grey morning light, and Gordon Butcher could see the cloudy roof of the sky very low above his head and flying with the wind. Grey-blue the clouds were, flecked here and there with black, a solid ma.s.s from horizon to horizon, the whole thing moving with the wind, sliding past above his head like a great grey sheet of metal unrolling. All around him lay the bleak and lonely fen-country of Suffolk, mile upon mile of it that went on for ever.
He pedalled on. He rode through the outskirts of the little town of Mildenhall and headed for the village of West Row where the man called Ford had his place.
He had left his tractor at Ford"s the day before because his next job was to plough up four and a half acres on Thistley Green for Ford. It was not Ford"s land. It is important to remember this, but Ford was the one who had asked him to do the work.
Actually, a farmer called Rolfe owned the four and a half acres.
Rolfe had asked Ford to get it ploughed because Ford, like Gordon Butcher, did ploughing jobs for other men. The difference between Ford and Gordon Butcher was that Ford was somewhat grander. He was a fairly prosperous small-time agricultural engineer who had a nice house and a large yard full of sheds filled with farm implements and machinery. Gordon Butcher had only his one tractor.
On this occasion, however, when Rolfe had asked Ford to plough up his four and a half acres on Thistley Green, Ford was too busy to do the work so he hired Gordon Butcher to do it for him.
There was no one about in Ford"s yard when Butcher rode in. He parked his bike, filled up his tractor with paraffin and petrol, warmed the engine, hitched the plough behind, mounted the high seat and drove out to Thistley Green.
The field was not half a mile away, and around eight-thirty Butcher drove the tractor in through the gate on to the field itself. Thistley Green was maybe a hundred acres all told, with a low hedge running round it. And although it was actually one large field, different parts of it were owned by different men. These separate parts were easy to define because each was cultivated in its own way. Rolfe"s plot of four and a half acres was over to one side near the southern boundary fence. Butcher knew where it was and he drove his tractor round the edge of the field, then inward until he was on the plot.
The plot was barley stubble now, covered with the short and rotting yellow stalks of barley harvested last autumn, and only recently it had been broad-sheared so that now it was ready for the plough.
"Deep-plough it," Ford had said to Butcher the day before. "It"s for sugar-beet. Rolfe"s putting sugar-beet in there."
They only plough about four inches down for barley, but for sugar-beet they plough deep, to ten or twelve inches. A horse-drawn plough can"t plough as deep as that. It was only since motor-tractors came along that the farmers had been able to deep-plough properly. Rolfe"s land had been deep-ploughed for sugar-beet some years before this, but it wasn"t Butcher who had done the ploughing and no doubt the job had been skimped a bit and the ploughman had not gone quite as deep as he should. Had he done so, what was about to happen today would have happened then, and that would have been a different story.
Gordon Butcher began to plough. Up and down the field he went, lowering the plough deeper and deeper each trip until at last it was cutting twelve inches into the ground and turning up a smooth even wave of black earth as it went.
The wind was coming faster now, rushing in from the killer sea, sweeping over the flat Norfolk fields, past Saxthorpe and Reepham and Honingham and Swaffham and Larling and over the border to Suffolk, to Mildenhall and to Thistley Green where Gordon Butcher sat upright high on the seat of his tractor, driving back and forth over the plot of yellow barley stubble that belonged to Rolfe. Gordon Butcher could smell the sharp crisp smell of snow not far away, he could see the low roof of the sky -- no longer flecked with black, but pale and whitish grey -- sliding by overhead like a solid sheet of metal unrolling.
"Well," he said, raising his voice above the clatter of the tractor, "you are surely fashed at somebody today. What an almighty fuss it is now of blowin" and whistlin" and freezin". Like a woman," he added. "Just like a woman does sometimes in the evening," and he kept his eye upon the line of the furrow, and he smiled.
At noon he stopped the tractor, dismounted and fished in his pocket for his lunch. He found it and sat on the ground in the lee of one of the huge tractor-wheels. He ate large pieces of bread and very small pieces of cheese. He had nothing to drink, for his only Thermos had got smashed by the jolting of the tractor two weeks before, and in wartime, for this was in January 1942, you could not buy another anywhere. For about fifteen minutes he sat on the ground in the shelter of the wheel and ate his lunch. Then he got up and examined his peg.
Unlike many ploughmen, Butcher always. .h.i.tched his plough to the tractor with a wooden peg so that if the plough fouled a root or a large stone, the peg would simply break at once, leaving the plough behind and saving the shares from serious damage. All over the black fen country, just below the surface, lie enormous trunks of ancient oak trees, and a wooden peg will save a ploughshare many times a week out there. Although Thistley Green was well-cultivated land, field-land, not fen-land, Butcher was taking no chances with his plough.
He examined the wooden peg, found it sound, mounted the tractor again, and went on with his ploughing.
The tractor nosed back and forth over the ground, leaving a smooth black wave of soil behind it. And still the wind blew colder but it did not snow.
Around three o"clock the thing happened.
There was a slight jolt, the wooden peg broke, and the tractor left the plough behind. Butcher stopped, dismounted and walked back to the plough to see what it had struck. It was surprising for this to have happened here, on field-land. There should be no oak trees underneath the soil in this place.
He knelt down beside the plough and began to scoop the soil away around the point of the ploughshare. The lower tip of the share was twelve inches down. There was a lot of soil to be scooped up. He dug his gloved fingers into the earth and scooped it out with both hands. Six inches down. . . eight inches. . . ten inches. . . twelve. He slid his fingers along the blade of the ploughshare until they reached the forward point of it. The soil was loose and crumbly, and it kept falling back into the hole he was digging. He could not therefore see the twelve-inch-deep point of the share. He could only feel it. And now he could feel that the point was indeed lodged against something solid. He scooped away more earth. He enlarged the hole. It was necessary to see clearly what sort of an obstacle he had struck. If it was fairly small, then perhaps he could dig it out with his hands and get on with the job. If it was a tree-trunk he would have to go back to Ford"s and fetch a spade.
"Come on," he said aloud. "I"ll have you out of there, you hidden demon, you rotten old thing." And suddenly, as the gloved fingers sc.r.a.ped away a final handful of black earth, he caught sight of the curved rim of something flat, like the rim of a huge thick plate sticking up out of the soil. He rubbed the rim with his fingers and he rubbed again. Then all at once, the rim gave off a greenish glint, and Gordon Butcher bent his head closer and closer still, peering down into the little hole he had dug with his hands. For one last time, he rubbed the rim clean with his fingers, and in a flash of light, he saw clearly the unmistakable blue-green crust of ancient buried metal, and his heart stood still.
It should be explained here that farmers in this part of Suffolk, and particularly in the Mildenhall area, have for years been turning up ancient objects from the soil. Flint arrowheads from very long ago have been found in considerable numbers, but more interesting than that, Roman pottery and Roman implements have also been found. It is known that the Romans favoured this part of the country during their occupation of Britain, and all local farmers are therefore well aware of the possibility of finding something interesting during a day"s work. And so there was a kind of permanent awareness among Mildenhall people of the presence of treasure underneath the earth of their land.
Gordon Butcher"s reaction, as soon as he saw the rim of that enormous plate, was a curious one. He immediately drew away. Then he got to his feet and turned his back on what he had just seen. He paused only long enough to switch off the engine of his tractor before he walked off fast in the direction of the road.
He did not know precisely what impulse caused him to stop digging and walk away. He will tell you that the only thing he can remember about those first few seconds was the whiff of danger that came to him from that little patch of greenish blue. The moment he touched it with his fingers, something electric went through his body, and there came to him a powerful premonition that this was a thing that could destroy the peace and happiness of many people.
In the beginning, all he had wished was to be away from it, and to leave it behind him and be done with it for ever. But after he had gone a few hundred yards or so, he began to slow his pace. At the gate leading out from Thistley Green, he stopped.
"What in the world is the matter with you, Mr Gordon Butcher?" he said aloud to the howling wind. "Are you frightened or something? No, I"m not frightened. But I"ll tell you straight. I"m not keen to handle this alone."
That was when he thought of Ford.
He thought of Ford at first because it was for him that he was working. He thought of him second because he knew that Ford was a kind of collector of old stuff, of all the old stones and arrowheads which people kept digging up from time to time in the district, which they brought to Ford and which Ford placed upon the mantel in his parlour. It was believed that Ford sold these things, but no one knew or cared how he did it.
Gordon Butcher turned towards Ford"s place and walked fast out of the gate on to the narrow road, down the road around the sharp left-hand corner and so to the house. He found Ford in his large shed, bending over a damaged harrow, mending it. Butcher stood by the door and said, "Mr Ford!"
Ford looked around without straightening his body.
"Well, Gordon," he said, "what is it?"
Ford was middle-aged or a little older, bald-headed, long-nosed, with a clever foxy look about his face. His mouth was thin and sour, and when he looked at you, and when you saw the tightness of his mouth and the thin, sour line of his lips, you knew that this was a mouth that never smiled. His chin receded, his nose was long and sharp and he had the air about him of a sour old crafty fox from the woods.
"What is it?" he said looking up from the harrow.
Gordon Butcher stood by the door, blue-cheeked with cold, a little out of breath, rubbing his hands slowly one against the other.
"The tractor left the plough behind," he said quietly. "There"s metal down there. I saw it."
Ford"s head gave a jerk. "What kind of metal?" he said sharply.
"Flat. Quite flat like a sort of huge plate."
"You didn"t dig it out?" Ford had straightened up now and there was a glint of eagles in his eyes.
Butcher said. "No, I left it alone and came straight on here."