The Roman Field

Two elderly people find old age to still have adventures in store.

 

THE ROMAN FIELD

 

It was a month after Christmas when all the excitement and overeating is over and done with for another year. People feel guilty about how much they have overindulged in sweets and alcohol and promise themselves to go on a diet and do more exercise. Gloria had suggested to Harley they spend some time with her cousins in the country, for the fresh air and the exercise. As they were both retired it was no problem to pack up and take themselves off.

 

The evening they arrived, they met up with a cousin they had never met before, Zinnia. Harley was happy to see someone other than the usual faces. As the people were all elderly, there was no friction among them.

 

For one reason or another the Roman Field had been mentioned. Zinnia had been enthralled by the fact it was there on the opposite side of the road from the houses they were staying in. Harley realised that he had an accomplice.

The Roman Field had been there since forever, nobody was quite sure why it had never been ploughed and crops of some kind grown in it.

 

Harley lay in bed next to his wife, she was lightly snoring, a thing he found endearing. Ever since Gloria had told him about the Roman Field he had had the suspicion that it was a bit of a fairy tale. As far as he was concerned it was a square field with a burnt oak in the left hand corner when looking at it from the road.  He still found it difficult to think there wasn’t a secret in the field.

 

At ten o’clock Harley and Zinnia, well-wrapped, crossed the road and walked to the field. It didn’t look at all like a proper field as it wasn’t dug up. It was more like wasteland in appearance. The burnt oak stood dark and tragic in the corner.

“What set it on fire?” Zinnia inquired.

“Lightning is the most popular theory,” Harley answered.

“Why is it called the Roman Field? Were the Romans ever near here?” Zinnia asked him.

The field was Harley’s main interest and he was quite happy to talk about it. “It’s rumoured that lights from a camp fire and talking can be heard on certain nights of the year. There’s also rumoured to be an underground river in this area,” Harley declared.

“Has anyone tried to discover if any of this has any veracity?” asked Zinnia.

“Not as far as I know. But have you any ideas how to proceed?” an interested Harley asked her.

“We could keep an eye on the field to start with. Another thing, why don’t we get into the field and tidy it up a bit?” suggested Zinnia.

“Nothing has ever flourished there except wild plants and flowers. By the way, how do you think we’re going to tidy it up? Do you know how to use a plough?” Harley stared intently at Zinnia wondering what and who she was.

“Due to the economic chaos we should be able to rent a man with a plough to dig up the field. What do you think of that?”

“And then after the field has been dug up, what do we do?” Harley asked more interested than ever.

“Let’s wait and get it dug up first, shall we?” Zinnia replied, then, “Is there a decent bookshop in town?”

“The local department store has a good variety of books,” Harley told her.

 

 “Have you any books on local history?” Zinnia asked the young man in the book department.

“Yes, Madam. Are you interested in anything special or just a general history?”

“Well, I’d like to find out if the Romans were ever here and why the Roman Field is called such, if they were never here.”

The assistant left Zinnia and searched in the computer to see if anything answering her questions was in stock. He looked through the books on the shelves and took several down. “Madam, this might be of use to you. If you prefer something else, I can order it for you online. But you would have to wait to see if a copy is available.”

Zinnia took a good look at the books. The young assistant had worked well and had managed to find exactly what she was after. “Thank you very much, I’ll take all of them. You’ve been very helpful.”

The assistant smiled and said, “In this store we aim to please.”

“Well, you’ve certainly pleased me,” Zinnia said, handing him cash.

 

Tucked up in bed, Zinnia began to read. The Roman occupation had been carefully documented and soon she was caught up in how the Roman garrison had tried to civilize the locals. It wasn’t all that much of a success, and the native population had put up resistance. After a lot of skirmishes and bad feeling on both sides, the Romans won - if it could be called that. Some from the garrison married local women, which didn’t go down very well with the local men. After some years the Romans just disappeared back to where they had come from, or were they totally integrated into the village population? Although Zinnia was sleepy she found in one of the books the legend of the Roman Field. One night, when the Romans had not been there long, the villagers crept up to the edge of the field where they were camped. They encircled the field and set fire to it thus creating a ring of fire so that no one could escape. The oak tree hadn’t been struck by lightning, but its destiny to suffer by fire began on that night. The oak survived, but over the centuries it had got weaker and weaker until it had reached its present state. Since the fire, nothing had grown on the field and a superstition had grown up that it was cursed. Zinnia happily closed the book and switched off the bedside table lamp. She lay in the dark and tried to imagine how it might have been that fiery night. All the shouting and screaming of the victims. Humans and animals. No wonder no one talks about it, or did they feign ignorance of the origin of the field’s name. Tomorrow I’ll inform Harley .

 

“Did you know about the locals setting fire to the Roman camp here?” Zinnia asked Harley the next morning as they were once more standing gazing at the field.

“I knew something. Where did you find that out?”

“In a book I purchased yesterday afternoon when I went book hunting in town. Looking at it today, it seems more like the true story. I wonder what’s underneath all that churned up earth.”

“Not much I should think. They were Roman soldiers, not rich men. This wasn’t an important area, so the military presence here wouldn’t have been the best.”

“Now we need to know if anyone has ever made an attempt to cultivate the land. Shall we go into town and find out, or shall we try the internet?” Zinnia asked.

Zinnia was very self-assured and was one of the few people who hadn’t laughed at his ideas about the field, thus Harley felt a lot better for being in the country.

 

Zinnia went to the town hall and asked who she could speak to about the Roman Field. The receptionist told her that the council had made an effort to dig it up but to no avail. The land was hard and flooded when it rained. Specialists said it was due to fire. But the fire that Zinnia had read about had taken place two thousand years ago. There’s something weird going on, thought Zinnia, before thanking the receptionist.

Zinnia went into a café and rang her cousins to tell them that she would not be home for lunch. They told her that they were going to spend the afternoon playing cards, and then might go shopping in the village. It all depended on the weather. With her laptop open Zinnia got to work on the Roman festivals. She was convinced that the Roman soldiers had done something radically wrong to have upset the locals so much that they should want  to kill them. She saw that there was a festival on January 12 called the Country Crossroads. The date today was January 19.

Zinnia closed her laptop and went for a brisk walk through the centre of town. Something was buzzing around inside her head, it annoyed her that she couldn’t figure it out. The date of the fire was in January, the date wasn’t mentioned anywhere. Feeling in need of food and warmth, Zinnia walked into a restaurant that served local food. This attracted Zinnia as she wasn’t sure what local ‘local food’ meant. There were few choices of menu; all had soup, fish or meat with vegetables as the main course, and mince pies with cream or custard to follow. 

 

The walk back through the town after lunch helped Zinnia to clear her head. It was freezing cold so she went up to a taxi stand and hired one. “Where to?” asked the taxi driver.

“To the crossroads,” Zinnia replied.

The driver said, “OK. Freezing today, isn’t it?”

Zinnia, not in the mood for conversation said, “Yes, well, it is winter.”

The road out to the crossroads was the one that went from the Roman Field to her cousins’ houses. “Well, here we are.”

Zinnia paid the driver and got out. It was a short walk to the house. The crossroads had nothing in particular about it and as the weather was not for being outside, she didn’t hang around.

 

Alone in her bedroom Zinnia got undressed and put on her violet pyjamas and fluffy bed socks. The bedside table lamp was switched on. Zinnia was lying against her pillows and reading the info on her laptop.

 

At midnight Zinnia woke up with a stuffy head and a dry throat. She went into the bathroom and took an effervescent anti-flu pill in a glass of water. Then went back to her bed and instantly fell fast asleep.

 

Harley called round the next morning to ask Zinnia if she was well enough to go to the local museum. He was sure that there would be Roman artefacts there.

At the museum, which was rather on the small side, they were shown into the Roman Room. Shop window dummies were dressed up in Roman military costumes and carried swords and knives. They were obviously not the original outfits. It didn’t take them long to see the figures.

“What next!” demanded Zinnia. Harley was staring at the right hand wall. There was a map of the Roman camp as it would have been at the height of the Roman occupation. They stood a fair distance away from it. “Look, there’s the Roman Field. It was well situated, they could never have been taken by surprise,” Harley pointed out.

There was a list of the artefacts taken from the field: rusty swords, mirrors, and a few pieces of Roman military garb. “We’ve seen all of those things in the other room.” Zinnia commented.

“I wonder if there is any other information here about what happened in the last few days before the field was set alight,” Harley offered.

Inside the entrance to the museum there were lots of pamphlets and books for sale referring to the Roman occupation of it. Zinnia asked the sales lady behind a small counter, “Is there any information from the Roman point of view? If so, we’d like to buy a copy.”

“There’s one account written as if by a Roman alive at the time. It comes as a chapter in that pamphlet with the picture of a Roman on the cover. It’s not much but it’s the only thing that might be of interest to you,” the sales lady responded.

They bought a pamphlet each and sat down in the museum café to study it. The camp had been placed at a crossroads and was in an enviable position for the Roman military. From their informers inside the village, the Romans were aware that there was something strange afoot. They had a meeting and decided to leave the camp as soon as the weather permitted and would travel as far and as fast as possible away, to join up with other Roman camps that were farther to the north. When the villagers arrived at the camp and created a ring of fire the Romans were long gone. The Romans had only one problem, there was a heavy chest of silver coins and as it was so heavy they thought it better to bury it and return later when the villagers were asleep or less antagonistic towards them.

The oak tree was the only place they could think of at the time. The oak’s roots seemed to go deep down into the earth and the soldiers dug and dug till they considered it safe to put the chest inside its tomb. The earth was smoothed over, making sure that the earth didn’t look more churned up than the rest of the field. The whole camp climbed onto their horses and rode off. The Romans viewed the red sky line as they turned their horses round into the direction of their next camp. Whatever happened to the Romans who had buried the chest nobody ever said or found out.

“The chest must still be there,” declared Zinnia.

“It would seem so. Let’s go and ask the sales lady to see if she knows anything,” suggested Harley.

The sales lady welcomed them back, “Well, what do you think of the info in the pamphlet?”

“Is it supposed to be true?” Harley asked her.

“Some say it is, others say it isn’t. The majority of the people around here think it’s a legend. It adds to the story that once upon a time we had a Roman camp here. Who’s to know whether or not there’s any truth in it. Perhaps one day they did arrive back here to reclaim their chest of coins.”

“Have there been any efforts made to find the chest?” Zinnia inquired.

“No, I don’t think so. Even at the college they think it’s a bit of a fantasy.”

“Who is said to have written this story?” Harley wanted to know.

“As you can see it just says, ‘Written by a Roman soldier’, nothing else as to who he was.”

“Thank you very much for your time. Good bye.” Zinnia said.

 

They were both of the same mind, and after a quick lunch they went back to the crossroads. The burnt oak was as miserable looking as ever. “Do you think it holds a secret as old as a chest of coins?” Zinnia asked Harley.

“Come on, help me find out if anything in the story is true.”

“We’ll have to be quick, it won’t be long before the evening, and then night sets in,” replied Zinnia.

 

The car boot was full of spades and other implements for digging up earth. “The fire has prevented the field from being used, perhaps it has stopped the chest from being found,” Harley going over to the tree. “In the roots, the account said, well, let’s get on with it.”

“There’s only one problem, what if we are seen?”

“Haven’t you seen how big this oak is? Nobody will see us, so get on with digging.”

“How do you know where to dig?” asked Zinnia.

“Somewhere between the roots is the chest. There wouldn’t have been all that much time for them to dig very far down.”

Darkness  was upon them, and as the oak was dark too, it became more and more difficult to see. Harley had a torch he kept in his car and that was the only light they had. Fortunately there was not a lot of traffic that night. Zinnia had visions of having bed rest due to pneumonia. The hole they had dug between them was deeper than they had thought themselves capable of making. Their thoughts about it all they kept to themselves, keeping their concentration on the digging.

They were both wondering whether or not to give up, when Zinnia heard the chink of metal on metal. “I think I’ve found it,” she said to Harley. Not a bit excited, after all, they were two elderly people wearing themselves out over a story that had captured their imagination.

“Let’s hope it is, I don’t fancy the idea of having to dig right round the tree till we find it,” Harley reacted, as exhausted as Zinnia was.

The soil was moist and hard no more as the two intrepid old aged pensioners dug away till they were able to see and touch the chest. “I think we’d better ring the police  about the chest. We don’t want to be accused of some felony,” Zinnia suggested.

Harley was so tired that he could hardly stand up. “That’s a good idea. I hope they take it in a good way. After all, we’ve done these people a service. They don’t have any interest in the field.”

“We’re letting our imaginations run away with us. Just supposing this is not the chest.”

“Zinnia, for goodness sake don’t be negative now, please. I’m going to ring up now.”

 

The wail of a police car with lights flashing soon arrived at the burnt oak. The car’s headlights lit up the oak and the two worn out elderly people. “What’s going on here?” asked he first policeman to get out of the car.

“Constable, we think we’ve found a chest full of Roman coins left behind by the Romans when they had to leave in a hurry,” Harley said, going up to the hole that he and Zinnia had dug.

“We’d better take that chest down to the station and you two can come with it. I can see we are in for a very long chat,” the constable said, who, with his companion, carried the chest between them to the car boot.

 

After all was said and done, Harley and Zinnia were praised for their keenness and interest. The chest was full of coins that, once they were cleaned up, were put on show in the local museum, along with Harley and Zinnia’s names as the two intrepid OAPs who had unveiled the age-old secret.

 

What nobody understood was, why, in all the years that had passed, the Roman soldier’s version had not been taken seriously.