Gramps always said there was treasure
buried on his allotment, but I never for a minute believed him. I’d sit there
for hours ‘helping’ him turn the soil, plant the seeds and harvest the rewards
while he told stories of his life. How he’d spent the war in prison as a
conscientious objector – he said he was a Marxist back then and believed it was
not right to kill the fellow working man.
After the war he’d been unemployed and unemployable, so found himself
running a house of ill-repute where he’d met granny and they’d got married. (Gran
told me it was all lies; he hadn’t gone to war because of his dodgy knee and
he’d met her at a rugby club dance.) During the second world war, he said he ran
the black market, buying, selling, robbing and thieving. Running from the cops
and the air raid wardens at night, and then selling them his ill-gotten gains
in the pub the following afternoon. (Granny cast doubts on this too.) By the Sixties
he’d left my gran and was going with a cabaret singer and then he finally
married Lucy who was young enough to be his daughter. I never knew what to
believe but I knew Lucy was true and she and the allotment kept him happy right
into his eighties. He claimed he was a wide boy, a spiv, a con artist, a jack
the lad, a drinker, a smoker a gambler, but he was the best granddad in the
world and he always talked about his buried treasure in the fertile soil of his
allotment.
I cried at his funeral, hot, salty tears,
that burned my face and left red marks. I’d miss him, I’d miss the allotment,
I’d miss the nuggets of advice, but most of all I’d miss his stories.
A few days later Lucy broke the news to me,
he’d transferred the allotment to my name a few weeks before his death. I was
thrilled of course, but I didn’t know what to do; I was no gardener. I’d
‘helped’ gramps but I hadn’t paid any attention to what he was doing. I’d just
done the lumping and the carrying. She gave me a card, I read it and smiled.
If you’re
reading this, it means I’m dead. I wanted you to have the allotment. Remember
what I told you. There’s treasure in that soil.
The tears started flowing again.
I’d always assumed the treasure he talked
about was the carrots and spuds and asparagus he’d been growing for years. His
tomatoes were the best in town and his peas were sweet and juicy. But I didn’t
have his green fingers. I tried, I read books, I watched Gardeners’ World and
wrote to Gardeners’ Question Time but nothing grew. It was as if the soil had
died with him.
As a last resort I decided to leave it
fallow for a year. Turn the soil, add new fertiliser but not try to grow. I’d
read it was a good idea to dig every week; just play with the soil, tease it
back to life. So come rain or shine, I headed to the allotment and put my back
into it, the spirit of my grandfather looking over me.
Exactly one year to the day of his death my
shovel hit something in the mud. Clank.
I moved the soil and found a small metal
chest. Not a treasure chest that you’d see in the movies but about the size of
a shoebox. I carefully prised it out of the ground and took it in to Gramps’s
shed. I took a deep breath. Did I want to open this?
Of course I did. The box creaked as the lid
lifted to reveal a pile of papers and a musty smell. Not the sparkly jewellery I
had been hoping for. I flicked through them. It really was a treasure trove.
Gramps’s stories all written out in his scrawling hand, with picture and documents to back them up. Gramps’s
prison release form, a group photo of women in next to nothing, the third one
along unmistakably Gran, (so she was a prostitute!) Then, at the bottom it
began to feel a lot like Christmas. Five golden rings.
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