The Find in the Attic

The house had been sold in April, and the estate agent wanted it empty by the end of the month. Rowan drove up on the Saturday with a car full of cardboard boxes and a plan to be finished by four.

His grandmother Nesta had lived there for fifty-one years. She had been a quiet woman who wrote lists, kept the good plates in a cupboard nobody opened, and told him off for putting his elbows on the table.

The rooms went quickly. The attic did not. Rowan pulled down the ladder, hit his head on a low beam, and stood in a grey light full of dust, looking at forty years of things nobody had thrown away.

Behind a suitcase there was a biscuit tin with a picture of a harbour on the lid. It was heavier than a tin of biscuits ought to be, and it had been pushed right to the back, where nobody would find it by accident.

Inside were three medals on faded ribbons, a folded newspaper page, and eleven photographs. In every photograph the same young woman stood at the edge of a swimming pool with her hair pushed under a white cap.

Rowan sat down on the floor of the attic. He had known his grandmother for twenty-nine years, and in all that time he had never once seen her swim. She hadn't even come to the beach with them.

The newspaper page was from 1961. It said that a nineteen-year-old swimmer from the county had won two races at a national meeting, and that she was expected to be chosen for a much bigger team the following year.

He phoned his mother from the attic, still holding a medal. She was quiet for a while and then said that she had known, more or less, but that her mother had asked her many years ago not to make a thing of it.

There had been an accident with a bus in the spring of 1962. Nesta's shoulder had been badly hurt, and after two operations she had been told that she would not compete again. She was twenty at the time.

"She never talked about it," his mother said. "Not because it hurt her, I think. She just decided it belonged to a different person." Rowan looked at the tin and thought that this was not quite the whole truth.

Because somebody had kept the tin. Somebody had cut out that page, folded it, and carried it through five decades and at least two house moves. If it had really belonged to another person, it would have gone in the bin.

Rowan finished the attic at ten past seven, three hours later than planned. He filled nine boxes for the charity shop and two for the tip. The tin went into the front seat of the car, next to him.

He hung the three medals in his hallway, where they are the first thing a visitor sees. When people ask about them, Rowan says that they belonged to his grandmother, who was a swimmer, and that he only found out last spring.