Sparrow approached the stall with the least amount of people around it. Even so, she had to push her way to the front. The vendor looked down at her.
"Bit late for you to be out, eh?"
Sparrow said nothing, only held up the coins in her hand. The vendor shrugged and waved his ladle over the stall contents.
"What you want? Stew? Noodles? Rice?"
"Rice please. For six."
The customers around laughed. The vendor scowled, "That's six bits - you got that much, kid?"
They drove all through the morning, only stopping briefly to wolf down some food that Caris and Jem had packed for them. Mattie had a sandwich and some water from a battered metal canister. Then it was back on the road. They were driving along winding roads, with high hedges on either side, the bushes almost forming a tunnel above their heads. Occasionally there would be a gap where they could see overgrown fields of long waving grass, dotted with the last of the summer flowers.
Over the next few days, Zed slowly began to get better. Sparrow began to think about leaving. She packed and re-packed their bags several times, trying to make them as light as possible. Reluctantly, she left out the book of stories that Jem had given her. She'd already read it several times over anyway, sometimes reading aloud to the others before they went to sleep at night, if there was a stub of candle to be spared.
If Caris and Jem noticed her preparations, they said nothing. Although Jem did mention that the weather seemed to be taking a turn for the worse. Sparrow cleaned and checked over their collection of footwear and realised that something needed to be done. Zed couldn't carry on wearing sandals through autumn, and Dee's canvas shoes had holes in. She found some tape to patch the holes, but the sandal problem would need some thought.
Sparrow wandered off to explore the rest of the market while Caris and Jem were busy haggling over prices with some last minute customers. She turned the coins over in her pocket, wondering what to do with them. All around her, the different sights and smells were vying for her attention. She stopped in front of a stall selling clothes and other things, and picked up some sunglasses. Dee was always complaining about the sunlight hurting his eyes.
Last week I went out mudlarking for the first time in ages. I have one spot that I go to, near me, that is at the mouth of a river where it meets the sea, and then spots along the beach that I know I regularly find stuff at. Mudlarking, if you don't know what it is, is an obscure sort of hobby where people look for things in mud, or in my case, sand. I think of the things I find as little historical treasures, but I suppose they are essentially the rubbish of history. In some cases, literally, as often collected rubbish was dumped on beaches to be taken away by the sea.
I find old pieces of pottery and china, sea glass, bits of old broken bottles, bottle stoppers (glass and vulcanite) and plastic figurines. I've even found what could possibly be a small stone cannonball, but that's a story for another blogpost.
On this mudlark I found 19 pieces of blue and white pottery, 3 pieces of pink transfer ware, one piece with tiny hand-painted gilt detail, one piece of black transfer ware, one piece of a Staffordshire slipware mixing or kitchen bowl, the handle of a brown teapot, a highly detailed piece of brown pottery that probably came from a teapot, two necks of old bottles with corks still in, the top of a clay ink bottle, a glass bottle fragment with embossing on it, two vulcanite bottle stoppers and one glass bottle stopper.
The slipware fragment is terracotta with a mustard yellow glaze with brown decoration in an elongated wave pattern. I'm very excited by this piece as it's only the second piece of Staffordshire slipware I've found, and is probably mid nineteenth century.
The vulcanite bottle stoppers are mid twentieth century, and can be dated fairly accurately to that as one is 'war grade' style, with the middle hollowed out to save on rubber, and the other has text on it that allows me to research further. 'Vulcanisation' was a process that hardened the rubber to make it stronger. These stoppers can often be found with a softer red rubber seal still around them that made the bottle stopper airtight. The second vulcanite stopper I found was marked with 'Wm. Murray & Co. Ltd/Craigmillar/Edinburgh'. A quick internet search later and I discover that William Murray & Co. was a brewing company founded in 1880 and closed in 1963. So my little bottle stopper is nearly 60 years old. My glass bottle stopper will be even older, and would have had a cork seal around the glass.
The glass bottle fragment has '...AYLOR/...ERBALIST/...REET/...K' embossed on the side, which probably was a Herbalist, called Taylor, who worked out of an unknown street, and then the town, which would end in K (either Kilmarnock or Greenock?) but I've been unable to find out anything more.
"Hey, what do you think this is for?" Dee asked, holding out a strange knife with a large square blade.
"Put it back!" Sparrow hissed as the door from the washroom creaked open.
"That's for chopping off the heads of nosy little chickens..." Caris said, pushing Tekla and Rat in front of her.
Dee's eyes widened and he shoved the knife back into the drawer and slammed it shut.
"But not actual chickens, right?" Sparrow asked, "Not for killing actual chickens?"
