Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: And Other Prose Writings

  Then we followed the funeral party after the casket out the side door to the street going up the hill to the cemetery. Behind the high black cart, which had started up with the priest swaying in black and white at a decorous pace, the funeral cars—one car, a taxi, then Herbert G, looking green and scared, in his big new red car. We got in with him. ‘Well, old Perce always wanted to be buried in Devon.’ You could see he felt he was next. I felt tears come. Ted motioned me to look at the slow uplifted faces of children in the primary school yard, all seated on rest rugs, utterly without grief, only bland curiosity, turning after us. We got out at the cemetery gate, the day blazing. Followed the black backs of the women. Six bowler hats of the bearers left at the first yew bushes in the grass. The coffin on boards, words said, ashes to ashes—that is what remained, not glory, not heaven. The amazingly narrow coffin lowered into the narrow red earth opening, left. The women led round, in a kind of goodbye circle, Rose rapt and beautiful and frozen, the Catholic dropping a handful of earth which clattered. A great impulse welled in me to cast earth also, but it seemed as if it might be indecent, hurrying Percy into oblivion. We left the open grave. An unfinished feeling. Is he to be left up there uncovered, all alone? Walked home over the back hill, gathering immense stalks of fuchsia foxgloves and swinging our jackets in the heat.

  July 4:

  Saw Rose, in a borrowed black velours hat, letting herself into the house. She going to London, but will return in a week. She had been having her hair done, guiltily, a wave of tight curls. ‘I looked so awful.’ She had brought over two old books (one of which I am sure propped Percy’s chin), a pile of buttons, thousands, that they had been going to put on cards and sell, an address stamp, also for home business, and a few notebooks: pitiable relics. I had passed once and seen two women, their hair tied from the dust in kerchiefs, on their knees in the parlor, sorting miscellaneous objects and walled in by upstanding vividly floral mattresses and bedsteads.

  Rose said she heard a couple outside our house ‘Oh, but it has a thatch and is much too big for us.’ She came out. Were they wanting a house? Yes, they were retiring from London and wanted a cottage. How strange, says Rose, I am wanting to sell this cottage. O it is just what we want, say the people. Now I wonder, will they come?

  Charlie Pollard and the Beekeepers

  (June 1962)

  June 7:

  The midwife stopped up to see Ted at noon to remind him that the Devon beekeepers were having a meeting at 6 at Charlie Pollard’s. We were interested in starting a hive, so dumped the babies in bed and jumped in the car and dashed down the hill past the old factory to Mill Lane, a row of pale orange stucco cottages on the Taw, which gets flooded whenever the river rises. We drove into the dusty, ugly paved parking lot under the grey peaks of the factory buildings, unused since 1928 and now only used for wool storage. We felt very new & shy, I hugging my bare arms in the cool of the evening for I had not thought to bring a sweater. We crossed a little bridge to the yard where a group of miscellaneous Devonians were standing—an assortment of shapeless men in brown speckled bulgy tweeds, Mr Pollard in white shirtsleeves, with his dark, nice brown eyes and oddly Jewy head, tan, balding, dark-haired. I saw two women, one very large, tall, stout, in a glistening aqua-blue raincoat, the other cadaverous as a librarian in a dun raincoat. Mr Pollard glided toward us & stood for a moment on the bridge-end, talking. He indicated a pile of hives, like white and green blocks of wood with little gables & said we could have one, if we would like to fix it up. A small pale blue car pulled into the yard: the midwife. Her moony beam came at us through the windscreen. Then the rector came pontificating across the bridge & there was a silence that grew round him. He carried a curious contraption—a dark felt hat with a screen box built on under it, and cloth for a neckpiece under that. I thought the hat a clerical bee-keeping hat, and that he must have made it for himself. Then I saw, on the grass, and in hands, everybody was holding a bee-hat, some with netting of nylon, most with box screening, some with khaki round hats. I felt barer and barer. People became concerned. Have you no hat? Have you no coat? Then a dry little woman came up, Mrs P, the secretary of the society, with tired, short blonde hair. ‘I have a boiler suit.’ She went to her car and came back with a small, white silk button-down smock, the sort pharmacist’s assistants use. I put it on and buttoned it & felt more protected. Last year, said the midwife, Charlie Pollard’s bees were bad-tempered and made everybody run. Everyone seemed to be waiting for someone. But then we all slowly filed after Charlie Pollard to his beehives. We threaded our way through neatly weeded allotment gardens, one with bits of tinfoil and a fan of black and white feathers on a string, very decorative, to scare the birds, and twiggy lean-tos over the plants. Black-eyed sweetpea-like blooms: broadbeans, somebody said. The grey ugly backs of the factory. Then we came to a clearing, roughly scythed, with one hive, a double-brood hive, two layers. From this hive Charlie Pollard wanted to make three hives. I understood very little. The men gathered round the hive. Charlie Pollard started squirting smoke from a little funnel with a hand-bellows attached to it round the entry at the bottom of the hive. ‘Too much smoke‚’ hissed the large blue-raincoated woman next to me. ‘What do you do if they sting?’ I whispered, as the bees, now Charlie had lifted the top off the hive, were zinging out and dancing round as at the end of long elastics. (Charlie had produced a fashionable white straw Italian hat for me with a black nylon veil that collapsed perilously in to my face in the least wind. The rector had tucked it in to my collar, much to my surprise. ‘Bees always crawl up, never down,’ he said. I had drawn it down loose over my shoulders.) The woman said: ‘Stand behind me, I’ll protect you.’ I did. (I had spoken to her husband earlier, a handsome, rather sarcastic man standing apart, silver hair, a military blue eye. Plaid tie, checked shirt, plaid vest, all different. Tweedy suit, navy-blue beret. His wife, he had said, kept 12 hives & was the expert. The bees always stung him. His nose & lips, his wife later said.)

  The men were lifting out rectangular yellow slides, crusted with bees, crawling, swarming. I felt prickles all over me, & itches. I had one pocket & was advised to keep my hands in this and not move. ‘See all the bees round the rector’s dark trousers!’ whispered the woman. ‘They don’t seem to like white.’ I was grateful for my white smock. The rector was somehow an odd-man-out, referred to now and then by Charlie jestingly: ‘Eh, rector?’ ‘Maybe they want to join his church,’ one man, emboldened by the anonymity of the hats, suggested.

  The donning of the hats had been an odd ceremony. Their ugliness & anonymity very compelling, as if we were all party to a rite. They were brown or grey or faded green felt, mostly, but there was one white straw boater with a ribbon. All faces, shaded, became alike. Commerce became possible with complete strangers.

  The men were lifting slides, Charlie Pollard squirting smoke, into another box. They were looking for queen cells—long, pendulous honeycolored cells from which the new queens would come. The blue-coated woman pointed them out. She was from British Guiana, had lived alone in the jungle for 18 years, lost £25 pounds on her first bees there—there had been no honey for them to eat. I was aware of bees buzzing and stalling before my face. The veil seemed hallucinatory. I could not see it for moments at a time. Then I became aware I was in a bone-stiff trance, intolerably tense, and shifted round to where I could see better. ‘Spirit of my dead father, protect me!’ I arrogantly prayed. A dark, rather nice ‘unruly’ looking man came up through the cut grasses. Everyone turned, murmured ‘O Mr Jenner, we didn’t think you were coming.’

  This, then, the awaited expert, the ‘government man’ from Exeter. An hour late. He donned a white boiler suit and a very expert bee-hat—a vivid green dome, square black screen box for head, joined with yellow cloth at the corners, and a white neckpiece. The men muttered, told what had been done. They began looking for the old queen. Slide after slide was lifted, examined on both sides. To no avail. Myriads of crawling, creeping bees. As I understood it from my blu
e bee-lady, the first new queen out would kill the old ones, so the new queencells were moved to different hives. The old queen would be left in hers. But they couldn’t find her. Usually the old queen swarmed before the new queen hatched. This was to prevent swarming. I heard words like ‘supersede’, ‘queen excluder’ (a slatted screen of metal only workers could crawl through). The rector slipped away unnoticed, then the midwife. ‘He used too much smoke’ was the general criticism of Charlie Pollard. The queen hates smoke. She might have swarmed earlier. She might be hiding. She was not marked. It grew later. Eight. Eight-thirty. The hives were parceled up, queen excluders put on. An old beamy brown man wisely jutted a forefinger as we left: ‘She’s in that one.’ The beekeepers clustered around Mr Jenner with questions. The secretary sold chances for a bee-festival.

  Friday, June 8:

  Ted & I drove down to Charlie Pollard’s about 9 tonight to collect our hive. He was standing at the door of his cottage in Mill Lane, the corner one, in white shirtsleeves, collar open, showing dark chest-hairs & a white mail-knit undershirt. His pretty blonde wife smiled & waved. We went over the bridge to the shed, with its rotovator, orange, resting at the end. Talked of floods, fish, Ash Ridge: the Taw flooded his place over & over. He was wanting to move up, had an eye on the lodge at Ash Ridge, had hives up there. His father-in-law had been head gardener when they had six gardeners. Told of great heaters to dry hay artificially & turn it to meal: two thousand, four thousand the machines cost, were lying up there now, hardly used. He hadn’t been able to get any more flood insurance once he had claimed. Had his rugs cleaned, but they were flat: you can live with them, I can’t, he told the inspector. Had to have the upholstered sofa & chairs all redone at the bottom. Walked down the first step from the 2nd floor one night & put his foot in water. A big salmon inhabited his reach of the Taw. ‘To be honest with you,’ he said, over & over. ‘To be honest with you.’ Showed us his big barny black offices. A honey ripener with a beautiful sweet-smelling slow gold slosh of honey at the bottom. Loaned us a bee-book. We loaded with our creaky old wood hive. He said if we cleaned it and painted it over Whitsun, he’d order a swarm of docile bees. Had showed us his beautiful red-gold Italian queen the day before, with her glossy green mark on the thorax, I think. He had made it. To see her the better. The bees were bad-tempered, though. She would lay a lot of docile bees. We said: Docile, be sure now, & drove home.

  These few lines were typed at the top margin of the original MS

  Noticed: a surround of tall white cow-parsley, pursy yellow gorse-bloom, an old Christmas tree, white hawthorn, strong-smelling.

  Part IV

  Stories from the Lilly Library

  A Day in June

  There is one day you can never forget, no matter how hard you try. You always remember when summer comes again, and it’s warm enough to go canoeing. When the first blue June day comes, there is the memory, vivid, crystal, as if seen through tears….

  You and Linda are going canoeing on the lake for the first time this season. You walk down to the boathouse … to the wharf of rotting planks that slants into the water … to the empty canoes along the dock, waiting, like shallow green peapods afloat. You step shakily into the bow of one while Linda takes the stern, and all the time the light boat prances and bounces beneath you, impatient to be off. It’s one of those perfect days in June you try to describe but never quite can. Take the smell of fresh washed linen; of sweet grass drying after a rain; take the checkered twinkle of sunlight in a meadow; the taste of mint leaves cool on the tongue; the clear-cut brightness of tulips in a garden; green shadows, thinning to yellow, thickening to blue … the dazzle … the hot touch of sun on your skin … blinding arrows of sunlight glancing off the deep glassed blue of the water … the exhilaration … bubbles rising, bursting … the gliding motion … the liquid singing of water past the bow … shifting specks of color dancing: all this to love, to cherish. Never again such a day!!

  You paddle to a cove … you drift … you lie back and close your eyes against the sunlight, hot upon the lids … you squint into the sunlight and there are webs of rainbows on your lashes. Lulled by the rhythmic lapping of waves against the prow, the rocking … the gliding … you drift near shore.

  Suddenly you hear voices … unmistakable … boys’ voices. There is a tremor of excitement in your veins, a sudden tenseness. You and Linda are at once alert. Adventure is in the offing. You smooth your hair and look slyly about. Sure enough … another canoe is skirting the shore behind you … two boys…. How to delay? How to pause accidentally? The steep bank toward which you are drifting is covered with rhododendrons … tempting clusters of scarlet and white blossoms hang over the lake and cast dark reflections on the water. Linda says in a tremulous voice, ‘Let’s pick some flowers.’ That’s all … four words … and you two understand each other completely. You stand up in the canoe, teetering perilously and laughing as you reach out and tear the blossoms off … snapping the stems recklessly … all the time you laugh … a little too excitedly perhaps, but you laugh, picking the flowers and aching to look over your shoulder, but not quite daring. All the time there is a delicious excitement tingling inside you. The voices grow louder. You hear one say, ‘Let’s go over and see the girls….’ You pick the rhododendrons more carefully now, with a conscious attempt at grace and nonchalance. ‘Hello there!’ exclaims a warm masculine voice behind you. You both turn abruptly with feigned surprise. ‘Oh, hello …’ you manage breathlessly, nearly tipping over the canoe as you sit down. And the rest? You wonder nervously what happens now? But the rest comes along of its own accord. You look at Linda, giggling with nervous gaiety and tossing her blonde hair back from her eyes. You look at the two boys … not so handsome close to … but nice. The two canoes bob side by side and you exchange a steady stream of meaningless patter. You think back and can’t quite remember what you’ve said. But you laugh … knowing that they think you’re cute … knowing that they think you’re nice. You tease the boys … which one can paddle faster? They look at each other, laughing. Let’s race, you suggest. Oh, no, that wouldn’t be fair. One of them will paddle you. You protest gaily. They insist. You hope secretly that the darkhaired fellow will come with you…. He steps easily into your canoe and takes the stern. Buck, his name is. The other boy, Don, lets out a mock groan. ‘I can’t paddle alone.’ He looks at Linda. Flattered, she pretends to hesitate and says, ‘Should I?’ But she steps over, too, and everything is perfect. You lean back on the pillows, facing the boys, and you and Linda exchange secret looks of satisfied pride. Nothing like this has ever happened to you before. None of the boys at school have ever been this nice to you. You concentrate on Buck. He is thin and pale, with dark eyes and stringy black hair, but you don’t notice his uncombed hair, his pallor; you look always at his eyes. Here is a boy … paddling you in a canoe … he likes you. Immediately Buck is enveloped in a dreamy haze. Minute by minute he grows more appealing. You push aside the nagging thought, ‘What ever would people say?’ You laugh always, being mysterious, and, you think, coquettish.

  The sun’s rays are getting cooler now. You can’t push back the twilight. The boathouse looms in the distance. The unspoken question rises between all four of you simultaneously … how to pay? You have an uncomfortable notion that you should trade canoes again and go in alone, but an absurd perverse part of you rebels. Why not prove your power? Why not? ‘How much’ll your canoe cost you?’ Buck asks laconically. Again you and Linda exchange glances and understand. ‘Cost?’ you falter innocently. ‘Do you have to pay?’ It takes a while to persuade the boys that you have no money, but you conceal your wallets in your pockets and play the game. Buck paddles ahead and asks you, his eyes hard and burning, ‘Just what were you planning to do if we hadn’t come along?’ You look at him, churning inside, heat pounding at your temples. This is getting a bit too uncomfortable. Tears of embarrassed anger blur your eyes, hot and wet, stinging with salt. Miraculously his face softens. ‘Aw, heck, don’t cry. I’l
l pay for us. I just don’t want them to know I’ve got money.’ You feel queer inside, very small and mean in the face of such generosity. You want to say, ‘I’m sorry, it’s all a lie,’ but the words just won’t come out. He trusts you now. His face is friendly and you can’t … you won’t … change that by telling him the truth. ‘Oh, Buck,’ you stammer, choked by emotion. ‘Help me out when we get there, like you were an old friend, so the man will think we’ve known each other all along.’