03-12-2020, 08:07 PM
1
Stolen Memories
Hilda Thrump was drifting through the no man’s land between her book and being fast asleep with it open on her lap, when her tranquillity was assaulted by loud knocking on her back door. There had been a second lot of loud knocking by the time she managed to escaped the gravity of her chair and get to the door. When she opened it, there were two unfamiliar men standing there.‘We’ve come to read your gas meter,’ said the shorter, stockier and balder of the two.
‘I haven’t got a gas meter,’ said Hilda, ‘I’m not connected to the mains.’
‘Well do you have any other meters we could read,’ said the man.
‘I’ve got an electricity meter,’ said Hilda, hoping it would go some way towards making up for not having a gas meter.
‘We’ll read that then, if you like,’ said the man.
‘Well if it’s not too much trouble,’ said Hilda appreciatively; knowing that they would have preferred to read a gas meter.
The two men followed Hilda into the house, and she led them to where her electricity meter was; in the cupboard under the stairs, as is so often the way with electricity meters. While he was inspecting the meter, the short man chatted away, and Hilda, not having spoken to a soul for over a week, took steps to turn it into a conversation. So engaged in it was she, that she didn’t notice the other man, the taller, thinner of the two, was no longer with them.
Just as Hilda was about to go into the history of her arthritis, the meter man turned to his friend, who had now returned as stealthily as he had left, and said, ‘well, we’d better get on then,’ and on they got. By the time Hilda mumbled, ‘I was going to offer you a cup of tea,’ they were well out of earshot. Just one cup, then, thought Hilda, as she closed the door and made her way to the kitchen.
With cup, saucer and fig roll in hand, Hilda set off back to her chair in the other room. As she passed the glass fronted display cabinet that was just inside the room, she stopped dead in her tracks and stood rooted to the spot, absorbing what she was seeing. What she was seeing was an empty cabinet. My thimbles; where are my thimbles? Wherever they were, Hilda’s thimbles, accumulated over more than fifty years from seaside resorts throughout the British Isles, were no longer where they should have been.
What a nice young man, Hilda thought, as the police officer was writing down her account of the incident. That opinion was not only because of his youth and pleasant manner, but also because he had accepted a cup of tea. She didn’t hold his saying no to a fig roll against him.
‘I feel so foolish about being taken in by those people,’ said Hilda, ‘but I never dreamed anyone could do such a thing.’
‘Don’t blame yourself,’ said the policeman, and then went on to say, ‘these con artists are very plausible, and some very intelligent people get taken in by them,' being careful to mean con artists in general, in order to lend some degree of truth to his assertion.
‘It’s not as if they are worth anything to anyone,’ said Hilda, as a tear appeared below the rim of her glasses, ‘but they are worth the world to me. There was one for every holiday Norman and I went on. Wherever we were, the first thing we would do was look for a thimble as a memento, and he would buy it for me. Each one was a memory of a place, and of us being there together.’
The nice police officer said that they would circulate a description of the stolen thimbles, and make enquiries in the usual places, and as Hilda didn’t ask where the usual places for enquiring about stolen thimbles might be, he left it at that, apart from saying that they would keep her informed of any progress.
The policeman smiled at Hilda as he said goodbye, and gave the top of her arm a squeeze. She closed the door and made her way back to her sitting room. As she was about to sit down, she noticed the book she had been reading earlier, which had fallen to the floor when she rose from her chair to answer the door. She bent to pick it up; it was still open at the page she had been reading; page 56; the exact same number as the thimbles that were no longer in the cabinet, and another tear ran down Hilda’s cheek.
03-12-2020, 10:14 PM
5
Re: Stolen Memories
Originally Posted by Silver Tabby
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What a lovely story!
03-12-2020, 11:02 PM
9
Re: Stolen Memories
Originally Posted by Harbal
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Thanks, ST. And on the subject of stories, how's the Xmas ghost story coming along? It's the only thing about Christmas that I'm looking forward to.
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