Three generations of the Wood family lived and worked on a small plot of land near Bassingbourne in Cambridgeshire, England.
The eldest was Grandma Wood; she was the last of her generation. Her son, Poppa Wood, and his wife and their three daughters, the eldest of whom was Kezia Wood.
Their farm was small — a mix of animals and crops, the way farms used to be before anyone told you to specialise. It was never easy and rarely profitable. Most years they made enough. Some years a little more. And some years the weather turned, or the prices did, and everything they’d built up quietly came apart, and they began again. The land gave what it gave. Some years that was enough. Some years it wasn’t. That was the life. That was always the life.
Grandma Wood hated seeing the family struggle. By now she was becoming older and more frail. She could do less work on the farm. Her husband passed away a decade earlier. The full responsibility for running the farm now fell upon her son, with his wife and daughters.
When they married, Grandma Wood had been given a pendant by her groom. It was a special pendant made with a shiny brown stone. It was Grandma Wood’s prized possession and her only piece of real jewellry.
The flat lands of Cambridgeshire used to be full of shiny brown stone deposits. Few people knew what they were, and even fewer knew where to find them. After all, brown stones in brown soil were not the easiest to spot. If a farm worker found one, they were usually allowed to keep it. The stones could be polished and made into simple, cheap items of jewellry.
The best chance of finding such a stone would be on a rainy day. The rain would seep into the soil and wash away the earth around the stone. Gradually, the rain would reveal the stone lying near the surface of the ground.
On one such rainy day, Grandpa Wood was working out in a field. It was one of those days that he, a young farmer, cursed. He cursed a lot; he cursed the rain, he cursed the wind, and he cursed being a farmer. But he knew he had to work the land no matter what weather; it was a case of survival. Even in driving rain, he tried to sow seeds: wheat, barley, or whatever needed to be sown.
On this day, the rain lashed down onto the ground and onto his neck as he bent down planting seeds into the ground. Then something caught his eye. He could see a brown stone, not any old stone but a shiny brown one. The stone looked quite round in shape.
He stopped, bent down, and picked up the stone. He looked at it briefly, then put it into his pocket. In the hole left behind by the stone, he planted a seed.
Once back in the farmhouse, he dried the stone, wiped it, and then wrapped it in an old rag. He kept it safe until one day when he had to go into the village for food. This was a regular event, and his wife suspected nothing but Grandpa Wood had a secret plan.
As well as getting food, he took the stone to a local jewel maker. He asked the craftsman to polish the stone and make it into a pendant.
A week later he went again into the village to buy provisions and also to collect the pendant from the jewel maker. He returned home and, that evening, presented the pendant to his young wife.
Grandma Wood always cherished the pendant. She said she felt the presence of her late husband whenever she looked at it. If she ever felt lonely, which she often did, she would rub the stone and feel that he was with her once more.
In her last years as frailty overtook her, she knew she had not much longer to live. She called her granddaughter, Kezia, to her death bed. She handed the pendant to Kezia and told her to take care of it.
“Your grandfather found this. In the lower field — just a pebble, really — but he had it set for me.” She told Kezia
She held it out and waited until the girl took it.
NThe family continued to work on the farm, but it became harder to make a living. Kezia, as she grew up, became more aware of the problems her parents were having. So much so, that she decided to help by taking a part-time job as a barmaid at the local pub.
Each evening that Kezia worked as a barmaid, she would wear her grandma’s pendant. The pendant hung above her cleavage; there it seemed to make her popular among the regular pubgoers.
The extra money Kezia brought in helped a little, but it was never enough. Not enough, that is, to bring the family out of their financial difficulties. Kezia started to worry more about this, so much so that she started having dreams and nightmares about it. In her dreams, her grandparents would appear, urging her to sell the pendant. In her nightmares, men laughed at her.
The financial situation on the farm didn’t improve. So Kezia resolved to do as her grandparents had urged: to sell the pendant.
After this, each day that she worked as a barmaid, she would ask the gentlemen customers, if any of them would like to buy her pendant. Each time, the men would laugh at her saying;
‘That pendant? It’s shit.’
Each nighttime, in her dreams, her grandparents would urge her to keep trying.
Each day, she would ask and each day the men would laugh and call the pendant, ‘shit’.
One day, though, a well-dressed man came into the pub. He ordered a drink and stared at Kezia’s pendant. She noticed his interest and asked if he’d like to buy it.
The well-dressed man was a little surprised by this but he said that he certainly would like to buy it but only if there were more brown stones like it.
Kezia told him the story of how her grandfather had found the stone, how he’d had it polished and then made into the pendant for her grandmother.
The man was intrigued and said he’d like to see the field in which the stone had been found.and, if there were more stones in the field, he’d pay a handsome price for them.
The next day, Kezia and her father, greeted the man at their farm and took him to see the field. Where the man started walking around, looking intently at the ground. On occasions, he’d stop, pick something up, examine it, but then put it back.
Having had a good look around the field, the man came back to Kezia and her father. He said to them;
‘There are several brown stones in this field and I suspect there are a lot more beneath the surface.’
Then to Kezia, he said, ‘ young lady, we had an agreement. I promised you that I shall pay handsomely for your pendant and I shall honour that agreement right now.’
From inside his coat, he produced a bunch of banknotes, the likes of which the Wood family had never seen before.
More than this, though, the man offered to buy as many more such stones as the family could dig up. Each week, he would send a cart to collect their stones and take them away..
For months, e’ ven years this went on. The family and other nearby farmers, would collect the small brown stones. Each week, a man would come with a cart, collect up the stones and take them away.
One day, the man, himself, arrived on the cart . He greeted Kezia and the family, he had come to thank them for all their efforts. Their efforts had enabled the man to grow rich.
Kezia, always curioys, asked the man why he had wanted the stones when everyone else had called her pendant ‘shit’.
The man laughed , ‘yes ‘ , he said, ‘they were right. It is shit. Really. It is fossilised dinosaur shit and my factory has been able to use it to grind down as a fertilizer for farmers’ fields.’
It occurred to Kezia, that she had never asked the man his name.
In response to her question, he replied, ‘my family name is Fison, ‘
And, with that, he had one more surprise for Kezia. He reached into the inner pocket of his coat and handed back the original pendant he had bought from her, in perfect condition.
My Storytelling 