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
