Buried Treasure? And how! In 1942, ploughboy Gordon Butcher was working a field at West Row, near Mildenhall in Suffolk, when the plough turned over an immensely valuable hoard of Roman silver tableware from the fourth century AD. Our poet Fiona Clark says “This owes not a little to my vague memory of Roald Dahl’s factual account, which was written in 1947 for Saturday Evening Post, then republished as a separate book in 1999 with Jonathan Cape, which I acknowledge, but I hope my version is sufficiently reimagined to make it my own. ” It is Day 664 of the daily poems.
The Mildenhall Treasure
Fog hung over the furrow the plough-horse plodded,
with slow tread and steamy breath.
The ploughboy trudged, each day the same.
Then suddenly, a glint within the soil.
He bent, and heaved a heavy weight,
his shirtsleeve brushing mud from a silver plate,
a buried treasure, lost from ancient times.
He gazed in wonder as a strange old face met his:
lips grinned among the seaweed beard,
and flowing hair, where dolphins swam.
Here, shameless girls in gauzy shifts, played pipes,
or dived with scaly monsters in the waves
A shepherd lad rolled homewards, worse for wear,
supported by a couple of his mates.
Another, with a bunch of grapes,
rode on a panther, or some such big cat,
a whole world mirrored on a silver moon.
He shook his head. ‘What’s to be done?’
But Farmer Ford, who knew about old things, persuaded him
‘I’ll take it home, and clean it up, then turn it in to those who know.’
But there it stayed, the Neptune Dish, in Ford’s back parlour,
gleamed on the mantlepiece with other treasures wrangled from the dirt
– rare plates and spoons, fit for fairy-folk,
Siofra stuff.
Ford was a man bewitched.
For hours he sat, just gazing at those things.
None knew of it, but Gordon, and Ford’s wife.
His eyes were moon-dazed, he grew gaunt and thin,
sipped a little supper from a silver bowl and spoon,
did not answer if his wife called to him,
heard music in his head from timbrels and pipes,
drunk on invisible wine from vines which twined around those plates.
He sat at the hearthside, firelight flickering
on those dishes from the dark earth, and on his enchanted face.
He whispered to his prize, polished it to a mirror’s brilliant glow,
seeing his features in the sea god’s fearsome smile,
reflections mocking him.
And in the end, of course, they came for it.
Fiona Clark
Siofra is a Suffolk word for fairy folk.