Amethyst crystals with daisies and blossom

The hall still smells of floor polish and boiled cabbage, and Mr Hollis is still wearing that tweed jacket with the leather elbows, though he now needs both hands on the lectern to keep it steady. I stood by the squash table for ten minutes rereading the notice about the Year Nine trip to the quarry at Thornley, and I thought of you with mud up to your knees, shouting that you'd found something.

It was a cluster of purple crystals wedged in grey rock, half hidden under a bank of wild daisies. You wanted to leave it where it lay. I wanted to take it. We settled on a compromise: you carried the rock, I carried a sprig of blossom that had fallen from the hawthorn onto it, and the bus driver made us sit at the back with the thing cradled between us all the way home. Nobody believed it was real until Mr Hollis held it up to the window and the light went through it like wine.

Tonight Ruth Ashdown, who never spoke to either of us, asked whether I still had it. I said yes. I didn't tell her it lives in a jam jar on my kitchen windowsill, slightly cloudy from the tap water, or that I take it down on evenings when the house is too quiet. She said her daughter collects stones now too, and I realised I had been waiting twenty years for someone to ask.

So come up at Easter. Bring the rock if you still have it. We'll walk out to Thornley together and see whether the daisies are back on the bank. I'll bring the jar.