Little Treasures

A Willerby Story

Maggie’s real name was Martha, but nobody ever called her that.

Maggie came from Magpie – a nickname given to her by her mum and dad because of her eye for treasure.

She began finding them as soon as she could walk; at first coloured beads, threads of shimmering tinsel, plastic jewels long-lost marbles and devil’s toenail fossils. Her parents and older brothers learned to keep a close eye on her because before she knew they could cut and hurt she was especially drawn to shards of sparkling smashed glass and twists of wrecked metal.

Maggie was jealous of her finds.

She kept them in an ever-growing collection of charity-shop sourced trinket boxes she called her treasure chests, stacked neatly under her bed where she could easily get them out to pore over their contents in quiet moments when she had time to herself.

Her tastes became more discerning as she grew up.

With her dad’s help and books from the library she learned to recognise the stalks of clay pipes, the amber and aqua of Victorian medicine bottles, the difference between modern coins and those last held by people who lived hundreds of years ago.

Once – when she was eight – she found a socketed bronze-age axe a few inches below the surface of a ploughed field and got her photo on the BBC website.

Her dad couldn’t explain why she’d stopped and dug down at the exact spot the axe was.

He knew it was probably luck but didn’t really think it was that – her stop and stoop had been too sudden and purposeful – as if she already knew there was something special there.

The axe went to Beckworth museum which Maggie was not happy about. “It doesn’t belong to them”, she said after they took it away, “it belongs to someone else.”

After that she became more careful and began keeping the most precious of her treasures to herself, in her boxes, under her bed.

She kept them secret. She kept them safe.

For her tenth birthday she got a metal detector – a second-hand Ebay Garrett Ace. She pretended to be delighted. She didn’t tell them she had no use for it, that the lost things in the ground and in the hedges called to her without magnets and wires.

Maggie was a bright girl who did well in school and her family were surprised she was not more interested in history. She learned her facts and wrote her essays competently but without passion.

Once, while they were watching a programme about the Tudors, her mum asked her why she didn’t find it more interesting.

“It doesn’t feel alive to me,” she said, “or real. It’s just what people think about what other people did and most of the time they get it wrong. And most of the time people didn’t care much about what we learn in lessons or what’s on the telly.”

Her mum put down her knitting and looked at her. “How do you know that, love?” She asked.

Maggie shrugged. “I just do.”

One day in Year 8, grown thoughtful tall, pale and blonde, she had to be picked up from school because a local historian had brought in a collection of artefacts, and she’d begun crying and screaming when it was her turn to hold what the class were told was a bayonet.

She dropped it as if she’d been burned.  “It did terrible things,” she shouted, “you shouldn’t have brought it in. It’s a dreadful, bloody thing take it away take it away take it away.”

She would not be calmed.

Maggie was a quiet, self-contained child not prone to dramatics and this was so out of character it frightened her teachers and her family. They made her talk to a psychiatrist, but she just said she’d been tired because she hadn’t slept well the night before and had suddenly remembered a scary film she’d once seen about the war.

Nobody believed this but because she went back to being fine, they didn’t make her go back.

After that she didn’t touch anything old until she’d prepared herself and if it was something bad, she supressed her screams because she knew other people didn’t like her to be frightened or upset.

Maggie loved art and her teachers called her talented.

She liked to use pencil crayons and later, to paint in watercolour – pictures of the things she read about in archaeology books and academic papers; Roman villas and towns, Anglo-Saxon hill forts, Viking longhouses, walled medieval cities and wrecked Tudor ships once again above the waves in all their sailed splendour.

Then when she felt ready – about the time she began her GCSEs – she began painting people in her pictures, knowing their frames and faces by what she saw when she held their lost possessions in her hands.

That’s how she brought them back – holding what they had lost in her work.

She painted at home on the easel in the craft room and didn’t go out of her way to show them to anyone else.

They were better than what she did at school and to begin with it frustrated her parents she would not take them in, but then her subjects began visiting the house and they understood.

The first to come was a Roman legionary in full armour. He gave her mother quite a turn, but he smiled warmly and made a such a show of taking his gladius from its scabbard and leaving it in the porch she knew he meant no harm.

She showed her to Maggie’s room, and Maggie showed him her picture of him standing on the old Roman road and holding the purse he’d dropped that had contained the coins she’d found.

He smiled and nodded his thanks and then left, collecting his sword on the way out.

Seeing the picture was enough for him.

It was enough for them all.

Enough for the old woman who’d lost her thimble while collecting blackberries.

Enough for the little boy whose button had once been the nose of his teddy bear.

Enough for the young man who’d lost the locket with the strand of hair inside.

There was nothing for the warrior who visited again and again though, the one she had nothing to show to, the one she could not invite in. Maggie could not paint his picture because she did not have the axe she’d found when she was eight, the one that had been taken away and put into a glass cabinet in the museum.

Twice, Maggie visited it and tried to paint the warrior’s picture there, but she did not expect that to work, and it didn’t.

The picture would just not come our right there.

She knew if she wasn’t in Willerby her work had no power.

It did not seem fair and while she did not believe it was her fault she did think it was her responsibility so she asked her dad if would help get it back. Her dad spoke to her mum and because they now knew what she could do and had become well enough steeped in Willerby and its ways they agreed.

They helped her write a letter to the museum containing part but not all the truth.

They said she wanted to draw it for her school portfolio. The curator suggested she bring her easel and paints to the museum to draw it there but eventually after they visited and said it would be hard to transport all her supplies there and that she did not know how long it would take, he bent the rules because she was the one who found it and let them have it for a week.

He took her dad’s passport as token collateral, not because he really thought she wouldn’t bring it back, but because he recognised the romance and adventure in it and wanted to contribute by making it feel more risky, more of a drama.

They brought it back in a special wooden case Maggie approved of because it looked like one of her old treasure boxes.

She felt she owed the warrior more than she owed the others and spent days on his painting.

He came to the door twice before it was finished. Both times she sent him away, telling him it would be ready soon.

When it was finished his painting was bigger than all the others, finer and more detailed. She used her brushes to summon him back to his witch-hatted roundhouse hung with furs, his gleaming cauldron above his blazing fire, surrounded by his fine pots and with his great round shield propped carefully against a carved and painted wooden pillar.

Maggie placed him in the centre of his home in a woollen tunic with a fox fur shawl wrapped over his shoulders and his shining axe-head on a long pole in his right hand.

When she showed him, he was pleased. He tried to touch the axe-head, which Maggie had put on coffee table below the painting, but his hand went straight through it.

He didn’t seem to mind, even seemed to expect it.

Then he left and did not come back.

None of them ever did.

Maggie the Magpie, now grown to her twenties, she never stops finding her little treasures on her walks around the village fields and her visitors keep coming.

Her family is very proud of her.

We all are.