Southend U3A

October 2022

The Vase - Pete Norman

Grandma’s vase was beautiful. It was tall and elegant and had a silvery grey dragon, almost luminous, against a rich golden sky. It was strangely ethereal; it made your eyes go funny if you stared at it for too long. You could almost believe that if you turned around, it would spread its wings and fly away. As a small boy, that is precisely why I have always loved it. It has stood in pride of place in the dead centre of the mantlepiece for all those years and, if I had my way, it would still be there when I am old and grey.

This vase, however, has been the centre of a long and bitter feud within my family.

My grandma was the archetypal grandmother, she was cuddly and soft and kind and nothing was ever too much for her precious, her one and only, grandson. She was a truly lovely lady. While my parents were both working, grandma was the one who looked after me – just like a surrogate mother.

My granddad had died when I was very small, so I never really knew him and the family were most reluctant to ever speak of him – and even when they did, every single word was barbed with poison. Grandma, on the other hand, used to regale me with unbelievable stories about him. She would always admit that he had been ‘a bit of a lad’ – but, if pushed, with a secretive grin and the hint of a tear in her eye, she would say that he was ‘high spirited’.

My childhood was happy and life ticked along, year on year, without too many problems. However, on my sixteenth birthday everything changed.

My parents were both at work and Grandma called me into the lounge and told me to sit down. She went very serious – a side of her I had never seen before. She told me that she had something very, very important to tell me. Then she said, ‘Now, this is my rule: I speak and you listen. Is that understood?’

Totally confused but also a little intrigued, I nodded my head.

‘I want to tell you ‘bout my vase.’

I said, ‘Yes, I know, it’s beautiful.’

She snapped back with, ‘I said, I talk and you listen!’

I sat back in my chair and waited.

‘Now . . . you see, your granddad were a kind man, a real, real kind man. He took good care of me all of my life and . . . from time to time he used to bring me back . . . a little . . . ‘a little something’.’ She paused, staring me full in the face as if to gauge my reaction. I carefully nodded and waited for the revelation.

‘Now, I never, ever asked him where the ‘little somethings’ had come from and he never, ever, told me.’ She paused again.

Her eyes misted over. She coughed and then continued.

‘I’ve never met the men he knew down the Duke of York – ‘cause in those days, pubs was for men only – but you do hears whispers and I knew that some of them was like what you might call, ‘trouble’.’

She paused once more to recover her composure.

‘Now one day, when you’s about four or five he goes away for a few days and then, when he comes back, he has this vase with him. He says like it were just ‘a little something’ for me to take care of. He says it were real precious and he says that I must never, ever, ever part with it. But then he says something real peculiar. He says that when he dies . . . I gotta smash it – smash it to smithereens.’

I stayed silent as she picked up the vase and put it on the coffee table in front of me.

‘Smash this? . . . can you imagine anything more stupid? But I promised him I would do as he wanted and we said no more about it.’

She gently rotated the vase and we both watched as the dragon appeared to fly across the sun.

‘On the day he died, I picked up the vase . . . but . . . I couldn’ do it – it were far too precious to me.’ She sniffed. ‘So, for the first time – ever – in our marriage, I disobeyed him . . . and, there it stands – the livin’ proof of my unloyalty.’

Her words dried up as the tears began to flow freely down her face. I put my arm around her and, for the first time in my life, it was me trying to comfort her.

It took several minutes before she was able to speak again.

‘Now, I did wrong, I knows it, but, when I goes off to meet your granddad again, then I needs someone to make it all right again for me.’

I opened my mouth to speak but she put her hand up to stop me. ‘Thank you, I knows you would do it but I has to ask your mum first, so she understands what I’s asking. But . . . I knows your mum and she is born of me and she loves pretty things too much and there’s no way on God’s earth she’s ever gonna do it.’

She looked me in the eyes and squeezed my hand. ‘That’s why I’s telling you this, ‘cause if your mum don’t do it then you has to do this one last thing for your old grandma . . . you has to smash the vase for me.’

Grandma must have known something that the rest of us didn’t know, because it was exactly a month later, on what would have been granddad’s birthday, that she passed away peacefully in her sleep. There weren’t many mourners at her funeral but those of us that were, shed enough tears for a much larger congregation.

When we finally got home, I took mum to one side and I told her what grandma had asked us to do. Mum scoffed and said, ‘Look, I know I loved my mum but she did have some hairbrained ideas sometimes. Don’t you take any notice of her, it was just her dementia talking.’ She picked up the vase. ‘How could anyone in their right mind destroy something as exquisite as this, eh?’

My father said, ‘Now she’s gone – that’s the answer to all our problems. We’ve always known your dad was bent and we’ve always known it’s stolen. I’ll bet it’s worth a fortune so we’re going to flog it.’ The day had been traumatic enough already but this final confrontation was the fuel on the fire. Mum went ballistic . . . and then dad hit her . . . and then I got in between them . . . and then dad hit me . . . and then he stormed out in a rage.

The next day the vase had disappeared and my mother refused to divulge where it had gone. After an intense few days, my father was the next one to go and my mother and I were left on our own to manage the house and the vase was never mentioned again.

It was almost a decade later when my mother was diagnosed with a tumour and, in a matter of weeks, I was alone in the world for the first time in my life.

The house seemed big and empty without them but I kept myself busy tweaking it to my own style. I kept a few of my parents’ things but I wanted to make a completely fresh start. I systematically gutted every room and spring cleaned as I went. It was when I was on my hands and knees looking for a new cleaning cloth under the sink that I found something, right at the back, wrapped in a tea towel. I immediately guessed what it was – she must have known that this was the one place where my father would never go.

I delicately unwrapped the vase and gave it a loving wipe down . . . but now I had a dilemma. I knew that my duty was to immediately smash it on the hard kitchen tiles . . . I closed my eyes and raised it above my head . . . but then I chickened out and carefully brought it down again. I would put it back where it had always been – in the dead centre of the mantlepiece.

I turned towards the lounge and, as clear as day, I saw her – I saw my grandma’s face, her eyes ablaze, her lips taught . . .

I raised it up and my hands parted. The vase fell. I screamed out and dropped to my knees. My fingers clutched at it but it still hit the tiles with some force. By some miracle it had not broken but as I picked it up, I heard a slight sound. I shone a torch inside and there was something at the bottom – it was wrapped in paper and it was moving but it would not come out. I prodded and poked with a bread knife and eventually a folded brown paper envelope fell out.

I shook the envelope and it rattled.

With trembling fingers, I opened it . . .

I stared at the contents for some minutes in complete disbelief but then I carefully poured out into a saucer a small pile of what looked very much like little pieces of glass.

I could hear my grandma telling me that granddad was ‘a bit of a lad’ and I laughed – this was not glass! I reckon he was more likely ‘a lot of a lad!’

These diamonds were clearly stolen . . . and I was not a criminal . . . and I did not want to go to prison . . . but I had no idea whatsoever how to deal with the situation.

The following morning, I found myself queuing in the Police Station foyer with my hand closed tightly around a brown envelope in my pocket. I asked to speak to someone in CID and minutes later I was seated in an interview room with Detective Sergeant Bill Fisher, who could not take his eyes off the diamonds. I told him the whole story right from the beginning and, when I had finished, he simply said, ‘Well I’m buggered. In all my years a copper I have never heard anything quite like this.’

He left me with a cup of tea while he went off to make some enquiries. It took over an hour but, on his return, he had a smile on his face. ‘Right, young man . . . you say that you first saw the vase when you were a small child. Well, we have gone back a decade before and after that but we can find no record of a substantial diamond heist anywhere local. I’m waiting for a response from other forces but at the moment we’ve hit a brick wall.’

He picked up the envelope again and stared at the gems. ‘What I am going to do is to get these examined by a local jeweller so we know exactly what we are dealing with and then we will speak again. In the meantime, I will get Scenes of Crime to take some photographs and then seal them in the safe so we can guarantee its safety. I will get back to you when I have anything useful.’

The days passed and the longer the time went on the more I guessed that I was never going to see them again. I busied myself as best I could with sorting out the house but then, a week later, he rang. ‘I have found no record of these gems anywhere. The police no longer retain found property unless it’s been involved in a crime, so, as we can’t prove they’re stolen, what we have, quite simply, is found property, which, of course, belongs to the finder.’ He pushed the envelope across to me. ‘I have written the name of the jeweller who examined them and I understand he would be most happy to enter into a discussion with you regarding their purchase.’ He smiled. ‘I think that is a reasonable outcome, don’t you?’

I left the station in a daze but there was a niggling thought that I could not shake from my mind. I diverted to the cemetery and walked through row after row of stone remembrances. When I reached Mary Cartwright, I stopped and knelt down. I tidied up her flowers and whispered to my grandma, ‘I know I didn’t do what you told me to do but I think we know now why granddad wanted you to break it, so I hope you won’t mind if I put your vase back on the mantlepiece so it will always remind me of you.’

I slipped my hand into the envelope and pulled out a single diamond and pressed it gently into the soft earth. ‘This one is for you, grandma.’