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15SECTION 3 GUEST ESSAY AND STORY
Jill Dawson , The Great Lover
[Editor's Note: Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) was an English poet. One of his best-known poems is 'The Soldier', written at the beginning of the war in 1914,. It begins:
If1 should die, think only this of me:
That's there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England.
His other famous poem is 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.' He wrote it in Berlin, looking back with nostalgia to his days in the village of Grantchester, near Cambridge. It ends with these lines:
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea? ]
I knew little about Rupert Brooke when 1 began wanting to write a novel about him. 'If 1 should die, think only this of me: that there's some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England.' I had some vague notion he was gay. A First World War poet. A very English war poet. And one day 1 was eating a cheese scone, sloping in a deck chair under the apple trees in the Orchard café in Grantchester, and studying the bird mess that spattered the tables like drips of dried white paint; and thinking of nothing much at all. 1 picked up the leaflet The History of the Orchard, Grantchester and read how Brooke had lived there a hundred years ago, and sat gazing at his photograph.
It was easy to imagine Rupert Brooke at the Orchard, The trees - quince, apple, plum - were surely the same trees? The atmosphere in the gardens was conspiratorial, students talking in whispers, foliage hiding each table. 1 imagined Brooke standing amongst them, practicing (it said on the leaflet) lines from Faustus on his mates Dudley Ward (bespectacled) and Jacques Raverat (dark, beaky).
WB Yeats had called Brooke ‘the handsomest young man in England’ but from where 1 was sitting, he looked a bit of a prat. And 1 hated those sticky-sweet lines, at the end of The Old Vicarage, Grantchester. ‘Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?’
The historian George Dangerfield, I remembered, had rudely claimed that one line of John Donne was worth the whole of the Georgian Poets put together. He decried the version of England where passion perspires roses, and I couldn’t help agreeing with him.
As 1 left, 1 bought a postcard. It showed Mrs Stevenson, mistress of the Orchard Tea Gardens in the years Brooke lived there, with her three maids, presumably her daughters. The girls in their long, starched aprons lean against a tin-roofed pavilion. Behind them a shelf house jars and pots. Might one of those jars hold the honey that Brooke waxed rhapsodic about?
The bee-keeper at the time was Mr Neeve from the Old Vicarage next door. Perhaps he had an assistant? The girls in the postcard stared at me: dark, inscrutable, seemingly neat and fresh, but surely holding secrets, as maids always do.
And that’s when Nell appeared. She was not quite a maid from the postcard. She had traces of Virginia Woolfs vexing servant, Nelly Boxall. She was my grandmother Isabella who had been in service, or my maternal one, Maud, whom I never met. She looked like a young Elizabeth Taylor, with startling violet eyes. How could Rupert Brooke not fall in love with her? I reasoned. Or at the very least, leam what it really meant to produce honey: the work, the long hours, the skill, the dedication? There was a thing or two that hard-working, sensible Nell had to say to the poet Rupert Brooke. What I hadn’t reckoned on, was him answering back... ... ,-„w
The Bee-keeper’s Daughter
A short story
That morning Rupert joins me and that’s when it happens. We’re in the ramshackle gardens of the Old Vicarage; he is dressed in the white veil that belonged to Father, over a hat he has borrowed from the bee-keeper, Mr Neeve. They are the modem hives, the square box sort with frames. It makes me sorry to see them - with so little beauty compared to the straw skeps that Father always used. ; ; ■>, >
• * > I stuff the smoker with wood shavings and light it. Rupert whispers, sucking the fabric of his veil into his mouth: ‘I think you’re a rotten girl, not wearing a veil yourself, Nellie Golightly. Perhaps you want to be stung?’
This remark is so surprising that I blush furiously and drop the smoker.
We both dive to pick it up. There is a sense, as our heads meet, of something very troubling indeed. The bees know. They know our feelings before we know them ourselves, Father taught me that. Keep calm, keep a steady hand, he’d say. Father! Where are you now, when 1 need you?
The bees hum around us; a gathering storm. And Rupert is in danger of sending them wild with his flirtation - yes, there’s no other word for it - at last I see that this is what he has been doing, this is what his teasing amounts to.
‘It makes the bees out of humour when you do that,’ I suddenly say, and then watch his face behind the veil, his slow smile, drawing in the cloth. That handsome mouth: I’m done for. I’ve made matters a million times worse.
I call upon all my good sensible nature, and load the smoker afresh, and light it with a trembling hand. Rupert is close. 1 move away slightly, pointing the smoker towards the hives, and at once the bees gather their store of honey together, making ready to leave. When the cloud of bees has drifted off - their noise rolling as they pass us, a wave cresting - 1 pull out some of the frames, and show Rupert with trembling hands how to gently scrape off the remaining bees, using a wand of feathers.
‘Not so hard - Rupert - we only mean to scatter them, not kill them.’
It’s the first time I’ve said his name. The word has drawn him like a hook; he is staring straight at me. I can tell too from the way the remaining bees huddle in the corner of their frames deep and brown and heaving, that some power from him is transmitting itself to me, to the very air around us. Even the sweetest creature on this earth can be dangerous, Father would say, if you make it buzz too hard. Father -you left too soon to teach me. What to do now?
The bees know best, Father would say. !
Rupert has become still. The danger, the noise, the sense of being surrounded and threatened, has concentrated him. He admires the honey in its fresh form, brown and treacly, sealed with the waxy capping; threads of yellow liquid shining like sunlight.
He stands, watching, while I load the wheelbarrow with the frames. He does not drop his look, his gaze falling softly on my skin, on my bare arms and hands, with a tickling stealth. Perhaps it’s this, perhaps the drowsy bee-breathing silence; whatever it is, my eyes are suddenly glazed by tears and the ghost of Father appears before me, while 1 step quietly aside to watch.
A young man in a borrowed veil and gloves, is standing in a garden, staring hotly at me. Father moves aside and disappears. Bees purr between us. The young man lifts his white veil, moving his face towards mine. Fie pulls me towards him. He tilts my mouth up to his, one hand under my chin. The bees sizzle around us like a pan of oil on the stove. I close my eyes at once. Flakes of sunlight flutter like confetti on my eyelids.
And that is it. He kisses me in the Old Vicarage garden and 1 disappear for a moment. Then I return, alert to the anger all around me. A bee heading straight for Rupert.
‘You should never lift your veil!’ I say. ‘Be still now. Don’t move - don’t run - they will chase you in a bee-line, straight as an arrow]’ ■
The bee is on his neck, edging up towards his chin. I see by the wildness in Rupert’s look that he wants to flap and scream and run about, but puts his trust in me, like a small boy. His teasing, his naughtiness, his insults, his demands, his poetry, his flirting. 1 could resist them all, but not that one thing. A glimpse of the boy.
‘I say!’ Rupert shouts, and slaps at his chin. The bee strikes.
Now hundreds of bees tremble around us, awaiting instruction. I talk softly to them. 1 remind them that Father is not here, but didn’t he always treat them well? Haven’t 1 been a good girl, too? Haven’t / treated them well?
1 listen, and sniff at the air, which smells of smoke, and I hear Rupert holding his breath. „¡»¡¿¡v;;
Then the note in the air drops, and that is our sign. Quickly I fasten Rupert’s veil at his neck, and he, laughing quietly, allows himself to be led back to the house.
‘My word!’ he crows, die moment we are in the safety of the scullery, with his veil off. ‘The bees - do your bidding!’
1 dab honey on the sore place near his mouth and bid him under my breath to be quiet. He should thanli his lucky stars that it was just the one bee, 1 say, who took it into his head to misbehave.
This amuses him. ‘Just the one! Yes indeed, thank the Lord, eh Nell ? That it was just one naughty bee who - transgressed!! ’ ,,
My fondness for him of a minute ago melts. He takes nothing seriously! Least of all me. • , . ■
1 thought that would end it, cap tight the feelings. But that night, as 1 am undressing for bed, the oddest memory strikes and my heart cracks open again like a walnut shell. Father, at the front step, in the morning, polishing my boots before school. His hand is inside the little boot and the ground is frost and ice, and he is shining the leather until he can see his face, his old tired face, reflected. This was his one austere service, year on year. Offered wordlessly, and accepted without thanks. .№", ■ :i„
I remember it now. Father’s tongue peeping at the comer of his mouth, the flecks of black polish on his hand, his concentration.
.<;.v Father -1 remember what you did and I want to say thank you. Maybe it wasn’t much, by some people’s standards, but I want to tell you something, something 1 never thought I would. It was enough; you taught me. How to love.
\Note: Jill Dawson is the author of "Magpie ”, one of the novels in our ORF project. This story has been expanded into a section in her new novel “The Great Love” to be published by Sceptre, in January 2009] . ,
