That box!

With a scuffed shoe, I gave the box a good kick, sending it sliding across the grey, stone floor. I hated that green wooden box as the Devil hates Holy Water! Its transformation from a worm chewn beer crate had been cursory. Partitions, cobwebs, dead insects and other detritus removed, the box had been augmented with a hinged lid knocked together from two pieces of mouldy plank. Hasped and stapled, a smearing of bright green gloss paint (no primer, no undercoat), had completed the reincarnation. This was my tuckbox.

It squatted forlornly surrounded by professionally manufactured trunks, complete with leather bindings, bright brass corner plates, rows of shining rivets and gleaming locks. Many incorporated carefully stencilled or hand-painted monograms, clues to the owner of each treasured casket. My grass-green glossed beer crate needed no such identification unlikely as it was to be confused with any other.

The box slid easily across the burnished stone floor like an old house brick hurled across an icy pond. It slid easily since, as usual, it was almost empty save for two choice items. A partly consumed packet of mouldy, crumbling Lincoln biscuits and a leaking glass bottle containing a cheap chemical confection known as Orange Squash. Usually diluted with water I had taken to drinking this neat in a Proustian effort to evoke the distant flavour of oranges that lingered in the deeper recesses of my memory. It never did.

My box thudded to a halt at the far corner of the room, arrested in its curling glide by a well crafted, wooden trunk. Upon the lid in gilded, gothic script had been lovingly inscribed the monogram GNP. The trunk was also conspicuous for being heavily scorched and charred around the lid as though the owner, having mislaid the key, had attempted to effect an entry with the assistance of one of those very large heat lances so beloved of television safebreakers. Perhaps even one of those science inspired laser guns that, in the hands of technologically au fait master criminals, were beginning to make such an impression upon impregnable vaults in the cinematic world. At any rate, the general effect was that some pyromaniac had had a jolly good go at GNP’s box for one reason or another. The truth however turned out to be rather more prosaic than my imaginative leaps of fancy, though no less explosive.