Digging for joy

I am standing in a den of treasure.

Ceiling-high bookcases line one wall with small trinkets and ornaments, hundreds of years old, shielding the rows of literature behind. A book about Buddhism lies face down on the floor beside a chair in the left corner, which, rather than fulfilling its purpose as a resting place, holds two resplendent paintings. A woody aroma of burning incense lingers in the air.

The den belongs to my sister’s neighbor, Bill, a Royal Air Force veteran. With a distinguished thirty-year military career behind him, I’d expect him to be putting his feet up and doing as little as possible these days, but he has other ideas. He likes digging up stuff.

As his retired colleagues while away their days quietly, Bill kits himself out with a pickaxe, a shovel and a wheelbarrow to dig up the Lincolnshire countryside.

His fit physique—“it even gives me a six-pack,” he says—and enthusiasm belie his grey hair and handlebar moustache, and allow a glimpse at the boy who developed his interest in archeology early, after his mother took him to a museum in York.

“I thought, ‘Wow. This is amazing,” he says. “Where does all this stuff come from?”

His father had other plans for him, however, and after school Bill followed in his footsteps by joining the RAF. But upon retirement in 2003, he unearthed his childhood fascination. Discovering that the large expanse of green land directly opposite his house was to become a cemetery, he tracked down which company was excavating the area, and wrote to them asking for volunteer work. Eventually they offered him a job, which Bill says was “downright amazing.” And he hasn’t looked back.

“Romans are very messy,” he says of a Roman courtyard he found on a dig at the Bishop’s palace at Lincoln cathedral. “So there was, oh, shed loads of good stuff. Pottery, jewelry.” He pauses. “A dead baby.”

I gasp. He smiles.

“There’s always a dead baby,” he says.

Shocked as I am, I love hearing Bill’s stories. Every gem in his collection has one, including the jagged piece of cloudy green medieval glass I’m holding up to the light as I learn of its origins: a poor person’s window.

When a large sheet of glass cools, Bill tells me, the posh people got the outside bits that were clearer. If you just needed light through a window rather than a view, you’d get this cheaper bit in the middle.

Placing the glass back into a bowl of other rough fragments, I look around me, pondering all the treasure the room holds. Though not worth millions, it is treasure that speaks to me of rewards far greater than monetary value—rewards of contentment that hard work, and happiness doing it, can bring.

And in a world of exhausting commutes, stressed out business folk and irritable colleagues, to me, that makes it priceless.