THE KEEPERS FIELD

A beekeeper's field is a cause of nostalgia and romance.

The old wooden gate creaked on its rusty hinges. It only opened a little being halted by the ivy that had woven itself amongst its rotting timbers. No worn path led through it and beyond into the keeper’s field, as it used to. That mid-summer morning my feet must have been the first for some time to trespass amongst the rotting hives, no longer white, no longer humming with the prospect of rich amber honey and trickling combs. 

The hives now resembled headstones tilting at random angles in a spacious but unkempt cemetery. Walking amongst them as I had done many years before, I could still see the keeper busying himself with his little workers. Tending his twenty or so hives had been the old man’s passion. A passion he would share with us, looking over his gold rim glasses down at our young enquiring faces. We knew nothing of him other than he kept bees. In our simple lives the keeper’s personal life and that of his family played no part. In our minds he was as much a part of the landscape as his hives, the bees that inhabited them and the neatly mown grass beneath his feet. Where he lived we didn’t know, nor had ever imagined. 

I now stood by the overturned remnants of a hive. I wondered whether it was here that the keeper had first felt the gripping pain in his chest, the numbness down his left side, the breathlessness, the suffocation, the oblivion. Two days he had lain in the field before his grand-daughter, skipping down the path, through the gate and across the field, had found him. He was laying face down, his glasses crumpled and broken beside him. Picking up the glasses Gemma ran to her mother.

‘Mummy,’ she had called out,’ Grandad’s glasses are broken.’ In her innocence her grandfather slept, but the look on her mother’s face would  tell her something else.

The swarms found new homes but the field and its hives stood sentinel throughout the years waiting for their keeper’s return. Some in the village say he never left and imagine his diaphanous image silently tending his hives, where ghostly bees make spiritual honey. The keeper’s field suffered the seasons in their predictable rotation. The autumn frosts, the winter gales, spring showers and the scorching summer sun peeled paint, rotted wood, rusted nails and hinges. The grass grew until the weeds took over. No longer the home of thousands of honeybees the hives provided shelter for a myriad of other insects and their minuscule friends. An army of small rodents made their cosy nests, gnawed holes, stored empty shells. They scurry like half seen shadows amongst the racks and grills that once bore the waxy combs.

Summer Sundays brought picnicking families who play hide and seek while summer frocked mothers cut cakes, feed birds, and pour pop into beakers. Uninvited wasps and ants make forays across the tartan hills. As the shadows of the hives lengthen across the crumpled rugs, half eaten sandwiches and empty bottles are packed away until the clatter of children is herded into the sunset. Then as dusk descends, the bats and pipistrelles flutter over the heads of consenting couples desperate for the solitude the keeper’s field could give their private affairs. Amongst the listening hives the innocent will explore each others nervous bodies, lonely wives will take artful lovers, and old men will take their whores and run their tobacco stained fingers over bare white thighs.

With hazel spears and bows, and arrows made from garden cane, here was the place where we would pow-wow. As Blackfoot, Sioux, Apache and Cheyenne we would pledge allegiance. Here is where we cut ourselves and made our schoolboy vows as blood brothers. Under this tree is where we’d smoke the pipe of peace, choking on the dry hollow hogweed stem that seared our throats. 

I hear a gate creak and across this field of memories I see her, but she is real.

‘Over here, Gemma!’

She stands by the third hive along the third row, our hive. That small piece of her grandfather’s field that will forever be our special place.

‘You know, some of these hives could be repaired.’ I tell her. 

She smiles, I kiss her, and her lips taste of honey.