"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 goo
d 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 Saturday 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 passages 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."