Diamonds resurface for anniversary

Joan Quinn felt sick.

She upturned the rubbish and the compost, searched the garden, combed the streets and put advertisements in the local paper.

But the engagement ring she had worn on the fourth finger of her left hand for 17 years had vanished, she thought for ever.

Then, 32 years later, while pottering in the back yard, a sunbeam drew her to something small and metallic in her vegetable patch.

The three diamonds were mud-encrusted, but intact - and Joan had her long-lost engagement ring cleaned and on her ring finger just in time for her golden wedding anniversary.

"It just shows, you never give up," she said.

Joan and her husband, Greg, had been posted to Fiji when he proposed to her. They met in the Air Force, where she was an administrator and he was a flight engineer.

Joan remembers it was a balmy evening when he popped the question. She was about to return to New Zealand and Greg knew he had to snap up the chance to propose.

Later, the couple searched the island for an engagement ring and Joan said she was drawn to the ring with three diamonds on the cross.

"It was different, it didn't sit straight on your finger."

The couple were married in Gisborne on March 7, 1959, and later moved to Massey, Waitakere City.

On June 6, 1976, Joan removed the ring to peel potatoes, but did not realise it was missing until after dinner.

"It was sickening, it had been part and parcel of my life," she said.

Sometimes while gardening, she would quickly check it was not in the soil.

Two or three times a year she would turn the soil on her vegetable patch and think back to the potato peelings and the compost she had scoured the night she lost the ring.

The soil had been turned just a few days before she found the ring on January 8 this year, and at first she thought a grubby beer-can tab had made its way to the surface.

Greg knew what had happened as soon as Joan walked in from the garden with a huge smile on her face.

"He always thought it would turn up one day," she said.

They had a drink to celebrate, and two months later when they celebrated 50 years of marriage, the ring was back in its place next to the wedding ring.

And there, Joan says, it will stay.

- additional reporting by Jacqueline Smith