MY LITTLE TIN BOX

By Bob French

Jillian felt the cold.

October wind tugged at her wet raincoat as she stood under the tall oak tree that had stood guard over the graves of Rayleigh Town out on the Hockley Road for centuries.  The mourners, having paid their respects, had left her standing in the wind and rain, staring confused over the dark hole in the wet grass, where her father now lay.

            She tried to clear her mind; think of all the good times they had spent together but felt only anger at how their life had turned out. Ever since her Mum had run off with someone, things had deteriorated and money had become tight.

            Her Dad had been a soldier in the war and after moving around, had settled in Rayleigh and found a job with one of the high street banks. Then their world fell apart. After eleven years of loyal service, he was fired; replaced by the daughter of the manager.  When he challenged the manager, he was told that they had found out that he had been embezzling money from the bank.  He was furious and vigorously denied the charges, but was arrested, and tried, but because he had an impeccable record, the judge gave him a suspended sentence. After the trial, he was a broken man and rarely left the house.

            The local papers and subsequent gossip soon made it impossible for Jillian, who had recently finished school, to find a decent job in town, so had to settle for anything that could earn enough to stave off starvation, so during the afternoons she worked as a waitress in the White Hart and in the evenings, she packed shelves at Woolworths three days a week.  It was slave labour with corresponding wages, but it allowed them to get by. That was four years ago and during that time she watched her Dad slowly fade away.

            A few days after the funeral, Jillian decided to get on with her life and started to clean the house.  It was late in the afternoon that she found an old metal box under her Dad’s bed.  She sat staring at it for a while before plucking up enough courage to open it.  It took some time to force the key to turn, but when it finally opened, she stared into the box and felt a sudden wave of sadness rush over her and for a few minutes, she openly cried at the memories and loss of her Dad.

            Inside the box were many things that jolted her memory; some photographs of her as a child in school uniform, and a group photo of his chums in the desert from the war with their names scribbled on the back, a pair of knitted booties she had worn as a baby, his war medals and a tattered copy of a Ladybird book; The Adventures of Pinocchio with the first few pages torn out.  As she held up the book, some white cards with numbers written on them fell out. Jillian stared at it all, then felt the tears fill her eyes again as she realised that this was all she had left of the man she owed so much to and had loved dearly, even though he had been through some terrible times, he had always been there for her.

            The clatter of the letterbox told her that the post had arrived and pushing the box aside, she made her way downstairs. As she sat at the kitchen table reading the letters, fear crept through her tired body; they were all bills or final demands and as she opened the last from Anglia Water, she burst into tears.  She didn’t know how she was going to pay them.

            Totally exhausted, she lowered her head onto to her arms, closed her eyes and slept, hoping to push the worries that faced her away. It was the noise of the telephone that woke her.  The irate voice of the manager of the White Hart demanding to know why she had not turned in and after explaining her circumstances, he grunted, then and put the phone down on her. 

            The following morning Jillian laid out the contents of the box on the kitchen table. She read the little Ladybird book, listening to her father’s voice in her head as she read it. Then she remembered the white cards and the game they used to play of converting letters and numbers into numbers and letters. After half an hour she had created the phrase: ‘Where Jimmy is buried will show you the way.’ Straight away she understood, it was one of her Dad’s games, but who was Jimmy?

            She studied the rest of the contents, hoping to find who Jimmy was; then his name sprang out at her; he was one of her Dad’s friends in the photo.  Under his name, written in pencil, was Rayleigh.    She glanced at the other names and noticed that they all had different towns and assumed that it must be where they were buried.

            The following day she walked into Rayleigh and wandered around the graveyard of Holy Trinity. To her surprise she found it within the hour: a simple headstone; on it were the details:  James Oliver Charles Kent, died 29 December 1965.  Jillian scribbled the details down and went home, tired and hungry.

            That evening after her shift at the White Hart, she studied the details again, then the penny dropped.  The men in the photo had all fought in the African Campaign and took out his medals.  There she found the bronze medal named the African Star, in the centre of it were the Royal cipher GR for King George.  She let out a yell of joy, of course remembering her Girl Guide training; GR meant grid reference; then looking at Jimmy’s date of birth and converted it into six numbers: 291 265.  This had to be the next clue.

            During the following night as she packed shelves, she asked Marcus, a fellow stacker at Woolworths, if he had a local map, he didn’t but told her she could look things up in the town Library.  The following morning Jillian was shown into the little room behind the reception desk where she studied an Ordnance Survey map and found that the grid reference was an animal graveyard out at Hockley.

            The following day Jillian took a bus out to Hockley and wandered around the small graveyard for nearly two hours not knowing what she was looking for.  It was as she sat on the bench staring at her notes that it came to her. The first letters of Jimmy’s full name; James Oliver Charles Kent, spelt JOCK and there was only one little grave in the grounds dedicated to a Yorkshire terrier named JOCK.  Beneath its name were a string of letters and numbers.  They meant nothing to her but she scribbles them down and made her way back home. After four days of trying to decipher these numbers, she gave up.  Her code-breaking skills had run out.

            Saturday morning, she decided to return her library books and as she was handing them over to the librarian, she noticed the number on the spine of her book and quickly asked if they had a book that had the number D. 2/10/1968 on it.  The lady smiled and pointed her in the direction of the children’s section.

            “You’ll find them on the third and fourth shelf, my dear.”

            After quickly looking at each book; found nothing that would give her a clue to the next step and as frustration and depression clouded her thoughts, she once again, gave up and went to leave.  As she approached the desk a little girl was asking her mother what the funny numbers were in the front of her book on nursery rhymes was. Without thinking, Jillian returned to the shelf and took out the little Ladybird book of The Adventures of Pinnochio, flipped it open and smiled at the pencilled arrow pointing to the ISBN number which had been slightly altered by pencil.

            At home, using the process of converting the numbers of the ISBN into letters, found that it read: ‘under the rose bush.’  She stared at it for ten or so minutes, then felt failure creep into her tired mind.  ‘What did Dad do when he was stumped?’  she asked herself.  ‘Make a cup of tea.’  She also remembered that he always stared out the kitchen window into the garden with his mug of tea in his hand, so without further-a-do, she boiled the kettle, made herself a mug of tea, then stood looking out of the kitchen window.

            The weather on that afternoon was fine for the time of year as she let her eyes wander around the garden which her Dad had taken great delight in caring for.  She tried to remember the various names of the flowers, then her eyes settled upon a beautiful rose bush, its bright red blooms swaying gently in the warm afternoon sun. 

            Before she left for work at the White Hart that evening, she carefully dug around the rose bush until she found a small plastic box buried beneath in the dirt.  Once she had washed the dirt from it, she sat down at the kitchen table and carefully opened it.  Inside was a letter from her dad and two keys, a small one, similar to the one that opened her Dad’s metal box and a more robust brass key, that according to the cardboard label her dad had attached to it, opened a safety deposit locker at Waterloo Station.  She read the letter from her Dad and burst into tears; it told her of his love for her and how sorry he couldn’t have been a better father, but that she should empty the box and use the contents wisely. 

            Jillian’s heart ached; her head thumped and her eyes stung as she openly wept again.  Exhausted and drained, she slowly rested her forehead onto her hands on the kitchen table and cried herself to sleep. 

            The sound of the telephone cut into her sleep again and as she answered it heard the gruff voice of the manager of the White Hart pub.

            “You didn’t show for work Miss Cordon.  I warned you that if you were late again, you would be dismissed.”  The phone went dead.  She’d been fired.  That’s all she needed, then slumped down into her Dad’s chair and fell asleep sobbing.

            The following morning the post arrived delivering more threatening letters and demands for un-paid bills.  With what little money she had left, she took the afternoon train into Waterloo and found the deposit box, emptied the small tin box into her rucksack and made her way home. The train was delayed at Shenfield and by the time she got home, she’d missed the start of her Woolworths shift and expected a phone call telling her she’d just lost her job there as well.

            Exhausted, she left the box on the kitchen table, and still fully clothed, climbed into bed and fell into a deep sleep.  The sun broke through her grey drab curtains, waking her and as she glanced at her alarm clock was surprised to see it was eleven o’clock.

            Jillian stood in the kitchen still dressed in yesterday’s clothes and toyed with the box, then remembered the second small key.  With her freshly made mug of tea, she sat down and opened the box.  To her surprise she found four large bundles of twenty-pound notes, the wrappers told her that each bundle was worth £15,000. A note from her Dad and a thick envelope folded several times. 

            The note stated that within a few months of working at the bank he had realised that something was wrong so decided to put his pension and savings into the tin box, rather than open a bank account.  This was now hers.  The envelope contained a detailed account of how the manager of the bank had been embezzling the bank out of thousands of pounds and the account numbers where he had moved his ill-gotten gains to in the Channel Islands.  She reread the letter again in disbelief. 

            Her Dad’s note ended by asking her to take the envelope and put it into the hand of George Wainright, an old Army friend at the Southend Chronicle.  He would know what to do with it.

            Two weeks later having just returned from a holiday in Majorca, Jillian threw back the gaily patterned curtains to her newly decorated bedroom just as her Teasmade started to boil.  There was a clatter at the front door as the newspapers arrived.  Over breakfast, Jillian read with enthusiasm how a local bank manager and his daughter had been found guilty of embezzlement and had been sentenced to ten years.

            As she ate her second slice of toast, the telephone range; it was George Wainright.

            “Hello Jillian, just thought I’d give you a call to say that The Courts have reassessed the evidence against your father and he has been exonerated of all charges and I have managed to sell your Dad’s story to the nationals for £30,000.  Where would you like the money to be sent?”

            “Oh, I don’t have a bank account, Mr Wainright.  I keep my money in my little tin box.”

Copyright Bob French