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A Birthday Surprise

May 21, 1807

During the night, a powerful storm pounded the seawall and the cliffs of Lyme Regis. A man-made breakwater, called the Cobb, created a harbor for the village and held back the highest wash of the English Channel tides. But a hard storm like this one always drenched the houses built close to the sea.

Mary Anning lived in one such soggy house. She remembered a time when the rising water had flooded the first floor and crept step by wooden step up to the second floor where the family of four slept. That time they were forced to climb out the bedroom window to escape drowning. It had seemed a grand adventure to Mary, to be perched like a gull on the rooftop, waiting for the floodwater to ebb.

East of Lyme Regis large cliffs faced the sea. The Black Ven was the cliff that rose 150 feet high above the rocky foreshore and was formed by layers of limestone, shale and soft clay. The layers were called the Blue Lias — “blue” for its shade of gray and “lias” for its layers of flat stone. The layers crumbled easily, and bashing waves regularly brought new stone treasures into view. People called these odd rock shapes “curiosities.” After a hard storm, Mary’s father always got up early to see if there was anything new and unusual to dig up.

Pa was a carpenter by trade. He made cabinets, boxes of every size and tables — but his first love was scouring the cliffs for fossils. Curiosities also fascinated young Mary. From the time she was five, Pa had taken her and her older brother, Joseph, along and taught them how to find curios in the cliffs and on the beach.

On this particular morning, Mary dressed quickly and made her way carefully down the dark stairwell. The oil lamps had not been lit, but Mary saw shadows and slivers of morning light peeping through the windows in the kitchen.

Suddenly, light flared out from the lamp on the dining table. Now Mary could see who had been making the shadows.

“Happy birthday, Mary!”

Pa and Joe had already gathered their collecting sacks and long poles for poking at the rocks. It was hunting time. After a storm, Pa liked to beat old Captain Cury to the best new treasures.

“I’m coming with you!” Mary said eagerly.

Pa wouldn’t have minded taking her, but Mary was eight today, and that meant school — Mary’s very first day.

“Time you learned to read and write,” said Pa. Then he handed Mary the smaller sack he’d been hiding behind his back.

“Happy birthday, lass!”

“Open it!” encouraged Joe.

Mary plunged her hand into the sack and pulled out a hammer. Her eyes sparkled with delight when she saw what it was.

“It’s a rock hammer!”

“I made it special,” said Pa. “The blacksmith crafted the copper claws and the grip band. What do you think? It’s got a good heft.”

The hammer would make digging up new discoveries much easier.

“I’m coming with you! I’m going to dig up the giant croc with this hammer! You wait and see.”

Many in Lyme Regis believed there was a giant creature — some called it a crocodile — buried in the Black Ven. Hadn’t Pa been finding bits of its spine, what he called “verteberries,” for years?

“Not so fast, Mary,” said Ma. “There’ll be no hunting this morning. Ann will be here shortly to walk with you to school.”

Ma didn’t like her daughter scrambling on the beach with its treacherous tides and slippery shoreline. People in the village already belittled Pa for being a fossil fanatic. Wasn’t one eccentric in the family enough?

“It’s grubby work for a girl,” Ma muttered whenever Mary came home with hair blown wild by wind and hands creased with dried clay.

Ma wanted more for Mary. She wanted her daughter to behave in a way that wouldn’t set tongues wagging and would help her make a better life than the one they were living. Ma felt she was letting her daughter down each time she allowed her to follow her father to the cliffs.

As Pa and Joe turned to leave, Joe secretly stuffed something wrapped in paper into Mary’s apron pocket.

“For later,” he whispered. “I’ll come fetch you at school.”

Father and son slipped out the door, and Mary ran to the window to watch them walking toward the beach and the dawn’s early light.

When Mary heard a knock at the door, she knew it had to be Ann.

Ann Bennett lived next door. She shared the same birth year as Mary, 1799, but because she was a couple of months older she’d already started chapel school. Her father was also in the trades. John Bennett was a shoemaker.

“Happy birthday!” said Ann, handing Mary a tightly wrapped paper.

“Thank you, Ann,” said Mary as she unwrapped her favorite lemon drops.

The pair started off for school with Ann telling Mary all that she might expect on her first day.

Before entering the chapel, Mary stopped to see what Joe had given her.

It was the perfect ammonite Joe had found last week. Mary had wanted to keep it, but Pa had said it was a sure sell, so she’d let it go.

“Isn’t it a beauty?” marveled Mary. “Joe must have talked Pa into letting me have it.”

Ann frowned. “You and your dirty old rocks.”

“Aren’t you at all curious about the creature that once lived inside this shell? Don’t you wonder why it turned into stone or what kind of world it lived in?”

“No,” replied Ann bluntly. “Never.”

And that was that. Ann Bennett didn’t wonder, and she rarely would.