Page 109 of Hope and Happiness in Bluebell Wood
For all my doubts, I’m still certain this means something. I’m convinced the birds wanted me to find this today.
But why? How does this small piece of engraved metal fit with everything else that’s going on?
The others might have given up, content that we’ve done enough, but I’m determined to discover exactly what the birds of Bluebell Wood want us to know . . .
Thirty-four
‘How did you get on?’ I ask Jemima on Tuesday afternoon when Merlin and I have finished our first reading session of the week at the school. ‘Did you find anything?’
‘As a matter of fact, we did.’ Jemima looks cautiously around the playground in case anyone might be listening. ‘The children discovered quite a few interesting bits and pieces.’
I’d been wrong about everybody else being content after our excursion on Sunday morning. Later that day, when I was feeling pretty down about our lack of success on the dig, I’d had a phone call from Jemima, who had come up with an ingenious idea.
‘Why don’t I see if I can get permission to take the children on to the field with the metal detector as part of their history lessons?’ she’d suggested. ‘It will be educational for them, and hopefully helpful to us. I’m pretty sure Cuckoo Land Homes won’t say no. They seemed pretty keen to keep the village onside when we had dealings with them before. I’m sure I can persuade them that this will be a great idea.’
I had of course agreed, and I’d waited most of Monday forJemima to get the go-ahead from Colin Cuckoo, and then all of Tuesday morning, when I knew she was heading up there with a class of children, to hear if they’d found anything.
I still wasn’t sure if my passion for stopping this development came from a need to give something back to the village and the people that had helped me heal so much in the last few months or from a desire to help Callum feel better about what he’d done, or if my drive actually came from something much deeper inside me – as Callum had suggested – a need for good to prevail over what I considered to be the evil party this time.
Whatever was pushing me on, I was determined to stop the development and keep Bluebell Wood as the picture-perfect village it had always been.
‘Really?’ I ask Jemima eagerly, keen to hear her news. ‘What did you find?’
‘Some of the things we found were quite modern – you know, decimal coins, more keys, nails, screws – that kind of thing. The children were excited every time the detector went off. But we also found some interesting bits that look like they might be from broken utensils – one looks like a spoon, and the other could be a handle, and several of the children found pieces of broken pottery on their own, which might not be that old, but I think could be.’
‘Wow!’ I reply, astonished to hear this. After Sunday, I’d begun to wonder whether the coins Robin had found might be a one-off. ‘What did you do with them?’
‘I just collected everything up together in a box. When one of the builders stopped us on our way out to enquire if we’d found anything, I just showed him the modern stuff that was on top.’
‘Great! Well done.’
‘I felt bad, though, because he seemed really interested in what we were doing.’
‘I bet he did; Colin Cuckoo probably told him to keep an eye on you.’
‘That was the weird thing,’ Jemima says, with a puzzled expression. ‘When I rang up on Monday to ask permission to take the children on the field, I didn’t speak to Colin Cuckoo, he wasn’t in the office, I spoke to someone else in his company. It was them that agreed to us going on the site, as long as we stayed at the top of the field where the construction work hadn’t started yet, for safety reasons. That was fine with me because I didn’t want the children anywhere near the big machinery, so we were confined to the end close to where Robin said he found his coins, which is, of course, where we wanted to be.’
‘What was weird about that?’
‘It might be nothing, but when we arrived the builders were very welcoming; they’d obviously been told we were coming by someone. But they also seemed quite surprised we’d been allowed on there.’
‘How do you mean?’
Jemima shrugs. ‘I don’t know, it just seemed like they were really keen for us to find something, and when we left, they seemed slightly disappointed that all we’d found were the modern things I chose to show them.’
‘I’ve met a couple of them, they seem like nice guys. They don’t like Colin Cuckoo, that’s for sure. I expect they were disappointed for the children.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Anyway, this is great news. If you’ve found items that might be Roman actually on the field, they will be counted as treasure, and will mean the building work will have to be stopped.’
‘I guess so,’ Jemima says, sounding a bit hesitant again.
‘Why do you say it like that?’
‘I really don’t want to put a downer on your plans, Ava, honestly I don’t. If what we’ve foundisof historic interest, the building work will definitely have to stop for a while to allow the area to be excavated, and what they find then will depend on how long the work is paused for. But it won’t be for ever, will it?’
‘Why not?’
