- With apologies to Hans Christian Anderson
Sol Western blanched as he regarded the display cabinet’s shattered glass. The outer strongroom door with its array of locks and tumblers was intact, the silken white cushion still there, but the pea had gone! Probably his job as well. After three decades in the Corps of Commissionaires, concluding his working life in The Museum of the Pea had promised an effortless journey towards a comfortable retirement. Now all was in question.
Opinion on it being the one responsible for the princess’s bruising was divided. Fake news pedlars bent on denigrating the author had even fuelled the mal-information that Hans Christian’s story was a fairy tale. Research papers, funded by The Pea Promotion Council and its rival The Legume Lovers Foundation, further fuelled the debate. Legumes Lovers pointed out that in addition to the more publicly recognised dried beans and pulses their inclusion of clover, lupins, carob, chickpeas, and tamarind as well as peanuts in the legume diaspora afforded them an enlightened and comprehensive knowledge base, pointing-out it was their august body that had discovered the responsible legume was in fact a peanut, not a pea. A forensic examination of the original translated document had revealed the hitherto missed ghost-word “nut”, – the transcribing error of a scratching ink-less quill. And peas are green and squishy. How could a pea be felt through 20 mattresses and 20 eiderdowns?
Riled by such questioning, PP pointed out that the pea in question would have been a dried one extracted from an abundance of similar gunny bags stored in the palace cellars, – tithe offerings from local peasants in return for royal shelter in the Big Hall during extremes of weather. Even the aspiring princess had been caught out, knocked on the castle door and the rest is history … or fairy tale if you so prefer. LLF evidently lacked any creditable academic erudition regarding Pisum Sativum.
Sol suspected his secret paramour Mary Smith of the deed. The possessor of a steady hand and an expert eye, Mary was employed as the council’s knocker-upper, earning the princely sum of sixpence a week for shooting dried peas at boarding- house windows and waking up the sleeping inmates in time for work. Mary was also an expert lock-picker.
“T’wars me Birt that lernd me.” Mary attributed her skill to her late husband. The world of “security” is a small one: Sol had of necessity hidden the affair from his new employers.
He confronted her. “Was it you?”
“Why shud you av it all day long? I jus wunnid to work witha best. Ard as a bent copper so it is. Swif too. Took me arf the time yestuday. Gorrit ere!”
The Museum is closed on God’s Day of Rest. Enlisting the assistance of a glazier friend, the pea was, in the concluding words of Hans Christian, restored to “the treasure chamber, where it is still to be seen, … unless somebody has taken it away.”
Sol has retired now. The museum’s “treasure” remains.
