by Roald Dahl
The other curious part of this curious law is this: it is the person who discovers the treasure in the first place who gets the reward from the government. The owner of the land gets nothing – unless of course the finder is trespassing on the land when he makes the discovery. But if the finder of the treasure has been hired by the owner to do a job on his land, then he, the finder, gets all the reward.
In this case, the finder was Gordon Butcher. Farthermore, he was not trespassing. He was performing a job which he had been hired to do. This treasure therefore belonged to Butcher and to no one else. All he had to do was to take it and show it to an expert, who would immediately identify it as silver, then turn it in to the police. In time, he would receive from the government one hundred per cent of its value – perhaps a million pounds.
All this left Ford out in the cold and Ford knew it. He had no rights whatsoever to the treasure by law. Thus, as he must have told himself at the time, his only chance of getting hold of the stuff for himself lay in the fact that Butcher was an ignorant man who didn’t know the law and who did not anyway have the faintest idea of the value of the find. The probability was that in a few days Butcher would forget all about it. He was too simple-minded a fellow, too artless, too trusting, too unselfish to give the matter much thought.
Now, out there in the desolate snow-swept field, Ford bent down and took hold of the huge dish with one hand. He raised it but he did not lift it. The lower rim remained resting on the snow. With his other hand, he grasped the top of the sack. He didn’t lift that either. He just held it. And there he stooped amid the swirling snowflakes, both hands embracing, as it were, the treasure, but not actually taking it. It was a subtle and canny gesture. It managed somehow to signify ownership before ownership had been discussed. A child plays the same game when he reaches out and closes his fingers over the biggest chocolate éclair on the plate and then says, ‘Can I have this one, Mummy?’ He’s already got it.
‘Well, Gordon,’ Ford said, stooping over, holding the sack and the great dish in his gloved fingers. ‘I don’t suppose you want any of this old stuff.’
It was not a question. It was a statement of fact framed as a question.
The blizzard was still raging. The snow was falling so densely the two men could hardly see one another.
‘You ought to get along home and warm yourself up,’ Ford went on. ‘You look frozen to death.’
‘I feel frozen to death,’ Butcher said.
‘Then you get on that tractor quick and hurry home,’ said the thoughtful, kind-hearted Ford. ‘Leave the plough here and leave your bike at my place. The important thing is to get back and warm yourself up before you catch pneumonia.’
‘I think that’s just what I will do, Mr Ford,’ Butcher said. ‘Can you manage all right with that sack? It’s mighty heavy.’
‘I might not even bother about it today,’ Ford said casually. ‘I just might leave it here and come back for it another time. Rusty old stuff.’
‘So long then, Mr Ford.’
‘’Bye, Gordon.’
Gordon Butcher mounted the tractor and drove away into the blizzard.
Ford hoisted the sack on to his shoulder, and then, not without difficulty, he lifted the massive dish with his other hand and tucked it under his arm.
‘I am carrying,’ he told himself, as he trudged through the snow, ‘I am now carrying what is probably the biggest treasure ever dug up in the whole history of England.’
When Gordon Butcher came stamping and blowing through the back door of his small brick house late that afternoon, his wife was ironing by the fire. She looked up and saw his blue-white face and snow-encrusted clothes.
‘My goodness, Gordon, you look froze to death!’ she cried.
‘I am,’ he said. ‘Help me off with these clothes, love. My fingers aren’t hardly working at all.’
She took off his gloves, his coat, his jacket, his wet shirt. She pulled off his boots and socks. She fetched a towel and rubbed his chest and shoulders vigorously all over to restore the circulation. She rubbed his feet.
‘Sit down there by the fire,’ she said, ‘and I’ll get you a hot cup of tea.’
Later, when he was settled comfortably in the warmth with dry clothes on his back and the mug of tea in his hand, he told her what had happened that afternoon.
‘He’s a foxy one, that Mr Ford,’ she said, not looking up from her ironing. ‘I never did like him.’
‘He got pretty excited about it all, I can tell you that,’ Gordon Butcher said. ‘Jumpy as a jack-rabbit he was.’
‘That may be,’ she said. ‘But you ought to have had more sense than to go crawling about on your hands and knees in a freezing blizzard just because Mr Ford said to do it.’
‘I’m all right,’ Gordon Butcher said, ‘I’m warming up nicely now.’
And that, believe it or not, was about the last time the subject of the treasure was discussed in the Butcher household for some years.
The reader should be reminded that this was wartime, 1942. Britain was totally absorbed in the desperate war against Hitler and Mussolini. Germany was bombing England, and England was bombing Germany, and nearly every night Gordon Butcher heard the roar of motors from the big aerodrome at nearby Mildenhall as the bombers took off for Hamburg, Berlin, Kiel, Wilhelmshaven or Frankfurt. Sometimes he would wake in the early hours and hear them coming home, and sometimes the Germans flew over to bomb the aerodrome, and the Butcher house would shake with the crumph and crash of bombs not far away.
Butcher himself was exempt from military service. He was a farmer, a skilled ploughman, and they had told him when he volunteered for the Army in 1939 that he was not wanted. The island’s food supplies must be kept going, they told him, and it was vital that men like him stay on their jobs and cultivate the land.
Ford, being in the same business, was also exempt. He was a bachelor, living alone, and he was thus able to live a secret life and to do secret things within the walls of his home.
And so, on that terrible snowy afternoon when they dug up the treasure, Ford carried it home and laid everything out on a table in the back room.
Thirty-four separate pieces! They covered the entire table. And by the look of it, they were in marvellous condition. Silver does not rust. The green crust of oxidation can even be protection for the surface of the metal underneath. And with care, it could all be removed.
Ford decided to use an ordinary domestic silver polish known as Silvo, and he bought a large stock of it from the ironmonger’s shop in Mildenhall. Then he took first the great two-foot plate which weighed more than eighteen pounds. He worked on it in the evenings. He soaked it all over with Silvo. He rubbed and rubbed. He worked patiently on this single dish every night for more than sixteen weeks.
At last, one memorable evening, there showed beneath his rubbing a small area of shining silver, and on the silver, raised up and beautifully worked, there was a part of a man’s head.
He kept at it, and gradually the little patch of shining metal spread and spread, the blue-green crust crept outwards to the edges of the plate, until finally the top surface of the great dish lay before him in its full glory, covered all over with a wondrous pattern of animals and men and many odd legendary things.
Ford was astounded by the beauty of the great plate. It was filled with life and movement. There was a fierce face with tangled hair, a dancing goat with a human head, there were men and women and animals of many kinds cavorting around the rim, and no doubt all of them told a story.
Next, he set about cleaning the reverse side of the plate. Weeks and weeks it took. And when the work was completed and the whole plate on both sides was shining like a star, he placed it safely in the lower cupboard of his big oak sideboard and locked the cupboard door.
One by one, he tackled the remaining thirty-three pieces. A mania had taken hold of him now, a fierce compulsion to make every item shine in all its silver brilliance. He wanted to see all thirty-four pieces laid out o
n the big table in a dazzling array of silver. He wanted that more than anything else, and he worked desperately hard to achieve his wish.
He cleaned the two smaller dishes next, then the large fluted bowl, then the five long-handled ladles, the goblets, the wine-cups, the spoons. Every single piece was cleaned with equal care and made to shine with equal brilliance, and when they were all done, two years had passed and it was 1944.
But no strangers were allowed to look. Ford discussed the matter with no man or woman, and Rolfe, the owner of the plot on Thistley Green where the treasure had been found, knew nothing except that Ford, or someone Ford had hired, had ploughed his land extremely well and very deep.
One can guess why Ford hid the treasure instead of reporting it to the police as Treasure Trove. Had he reported it, it would have been taken away and Gordon Butcher would have been rewarded as the finder. Rewarded with a fortune. So the only thing Ford could do was to hang on to it and hide it in the hope, presumably, of selling it quietly to some dealer or collector at a later date.
It is possible, of course, to take a more charitable view and assume that Ford kept the treasure solely because he loved beautiful things and wanted to have them around him. No one will ever know the true answer.
Another year went by.
The war against Hitler was won.
And then, in 1946, just after Easter, there was a knock on the door of Ford’s house. Ford opened it.
‘Why hello, Mr Ford. How are you after all these years?’
‘Hello, Dr Fawcett,’ Ford said. ‘You been keeping all right?’
‘I’m fine, thank you,’ Dr Fawcett said. ‘It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Ford said. ‘That old war kept us all pretty busy.’
‘May I come in?’ Dr Fawcett asked.
‘Of course,’ Ford said. ‘Come on in.’
Dr Hugh Alderson Fawcett was a keen and learned archaeologist who before the war had made a point of visiting Ford once a year in search of old stones or arrowheads. Ford had usually collected a batch of such items during the twelve months and he was always willing to sell them to Fawcett. They were seldom of great value, but now and again something quite good had turned up.
‘Well,’ said Fawcett, taking off his coat in the little hall. ‘Well, well, well. It’s been nearly seven years since I was here last.’
‘Yes, it’s been a long time,’ Ford said.
Ford led him into the front room and showed him a box of flint arrowheads which had been picked up in the district. Some were good, others not so good. Fawcett picked through them, sorted them, and a deal was done.
‘Nothing else?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
Ford wished fervently that Dr Fawcett had never come. He wished even more fervently that he would go away.
It was at this point that Ford noticed something that made him sweat. He saw suddenly that he had left lying on the mantel over the fireplace the two most beautiful of the Roman spoons from the treasure hoard. These spoons had fascinated him because each was inscribed with the name of a Roman girl child to whom it had been given, presumably as a christening present, by Roman parents who had been converted to Christianity. One name was Pascentia, the other was Papittedo. Rather lovely names.
Ford, sweating with fear, tried to place himself between Dr Fawcett and the mantelpiece. He might even, he thought, be able to slip the spoons into his pocket if he got the chance.
He didn’t get the chance.
Perhaps Ford had polished them so well that a little flash of reflected light from the silver caught the doctor’s eye. Who knows? The fact remains that Fawcett saw them. The moment he saw them, he pounced like a tiger.
‘Great heavens alive!’ he cried. ‘What are these?’
‘Pewter,’ Ford said, sweating more than ever. ‘Just a couple of old pewter spoons.’
‘Pewter?’ cried Fawcett, turning one of the spoons over in his fingers. ‘Pewter! You call this pewter?’
‘That’s right,’ Ford said. ‘It’s pewter.’
‘You know what this is?’ Fawcett said, his voice going high with excitement. ‘Shall I tell you what this really is?’
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ Ford said, truculent. ‘I know what it is. It’s old pewter. And quite nice, too.’
Fawcett was reading the inscription in Roman letters on the scoop of the spoon. ‘Papittedo!’ he cried.
‘What’s that mean?’ Ford asked him.
Fawcett picked up the other spoon. ‘Pascentia,’ he said. ‘Beautiful! These are the names of Roman children! And these spoons, my friend, are made of solid silver! Solid Roman silver!’
‘Not possible,’ Ford said.
‘They’re magnificent!’ Fawcett cried out, going into raptures. ‘They’re perfect! They’re unbelievable! Where on earth did you find them? It’s most important to know where you found them! Was there anything else?’ Fawcett was hopping about all over the room.
‘Well …’ Ford said, licking dry lips.
‘You must report them at once!’ Fawcett cried. ‘They’re Treasure Trove! The British Museum is going to want these and that’s for certain! How long have you had them?’
‘Just a little while,’ Ford told him.
‘And who found them?’ Fawcett asked, looking straight at him. ‘Did you find them yourself or did you get them from somebody else? This is vital! The finder will be able to tell us all about it!’
Ford felt the walls of the room closing in on him and he didn’t quite know what to do.
‘Come on, man! Surely you know where you got them! Every detail will have to come out when you hand them in. Promise me you’ll go to the police with them at once?’
‘Well …’ Ford said.
‘If you don’t, then I’m afraid I shall be forced to report it myself,’ Fawcett told him. ‘It’s my duty.’
The game was up now and Ford knew it. A thousand questions would be asked. How did you find it? When did you find it? What were you doing? Where was the exact spot? Whose land were you ploughing? And sooner or later, inevitably, the name of Gordon Butcher would have to come into it. It was unavoidable. And then, when Butcher was questioned, he would remember the size of the hoard and tell them all about it.
So the game was up. And the only thing to do at this point was to unlock the doors of the big sideboard and show the entire hoard to Dr Fawcett.
Ford’s excuse for keeping it all and not turning it in would have to be that he thought it was pewter. So long as he stuck to that, he told himself, they couldn’t do anything to him.
Dr Fawcett would probably have a heart attack when he saw what there was in that cupboard.
‘There is actually quite a bit more of it,’ Ford said.
‘Where?’ cried Fawcett, spinning round. ‘Where, man, where? Lead me to it!’
‘I really thought it was pewter,’ Ford said, moving slowly and very reluctantly forward to the oak sideboard. ‘Otherwise I would naturally have reported it at once.’
He bent down and unlocked the lower doors of the sideboard. He opened the doors.
And then Dr Hugh Alderson Fawcett very nearly did have a heart attack. He flung himself on his knees. He gasped. He choked. He began spluttering like an old kettle. He reached out for the great silver dish. He took it. He held it in shaking hands and his face went as white as snow. He didn’t speak. He couldn’t. He was literally and physically and mentally struck absolutely dumb by the sight of the treasure.
The interesting part of the story ends here. The rest is routine. Ford went to Mildenhall police station and made a report. The police came at once and collected all thirty-four pieces, and they were sent under guard to the British Museum for examination.
Then an urgent message from the Museum to the Mildenhall police. It was far and away the finest Roman silver ever found in the British Isles. It was of enormous value. The Museum (which is really a public governmental institution) wished to acquire it. In fact, they insis
ted upon acquiring it.
The wheels of the law began to turn. An official inquest and hearing was arranged at the nearest large town, Bury St Edmunds. The silver was moved there under special police guard. Ford was summoned to appear before the coroner and a jury of fourteen, while Gordon Butcher, that good and quiet man, was ordered also to present himself to give evidence.
On Monday, July the first, 1946, the hearing took place, and the coroner cross-questioned Ford closely.
‘You thought it was pewter?’
‘Yes.’
‘Even after you had cleaned it?’
‘Yes.’
‘You took no steps to inform any experts of the find?’
‘No.’
‘What did you intend to do with the articles?’
‘Nothing. Just keep them.’
And when he had concluded his evidence, Ford asked permission to go outside into the fresh air because he said he felt faint. Nobody was surprised.
Then Butcher was called, and in a few simple words he told of his part in the affair.
Dr Fawcett gave his evidence, so did several other learned archaeologists, all of whom testified to the extreme rarity of the treasure. They said that it was of the fourth century after Christ; that it was the table silver of a wealthy Roman family; that it had probably been buried by the owner’s bailiff to save it from the Picts and Scots who swept down from the north in about AD 365–7 and laid waste many Roman settlements. The man who buried it had probably been liquidated either by a Pict or a Scot, and the treasure had remained concealed a foot below the soil ever since. The workmanship, said the experts, was magnificent. Some of it may have been executed in England, but more probably the articles were made in Italy or in Egypt. The great plate was of course the finest piece. The head in the centre was that of Neptune, the sea-god, with dolphins in his hair and seaweed in his beard. All around him, sea-nymphs and sea-monsters gambolled. On the broad rim of the plate stood Bacchus and his attendants. There was wine and revelry. Hercules was there, quite drunk, supported by two satyrs, his lion’s skin fallen from his shoulders. Pan was there, too, dancing upon his goat-legs with his pipes in his hand. And everywhere there were maenads, female devotees of Bacchus, rather tipsy women.
