Susan Hill’s story: The Boy who taught the beekeeper to read.
I first read Susan Hill’s collection The Boy who taught the beekeeper to read in June 2003. I can’t remember if that June was a sunny month, but I always think of the title story in terms of light and shade. The whole effect of the story seems to be a dance around the effects of summer light and ironically I taught the story to a student leaving Withington High School for Cheltenham Ladies’ College and the story came up in the entrance examination. Weird synchronicity!
The story does cast a spell over you as you enter its peculiar space, a space where a young boy with ‘peeled twigs’ for legs, first encounters a ghostly looking figure in a bee suit and they enjoy an unexpected summer’s friendship, both finding in their occasional conversations, a warmth and humour that alleviates their loneliness.
”They both stood quite still, the man in the strange helmet and ghostly garment and the stick limbed boy.There was no movement of air among the dark heavy August leaves, so that the vibrating in the branches of the oak tree above them was clearly heard, like the sweet music of comb and paper. ”
I love the way Susan Hill allows us to see the pair in silhouette. This gives the meeting a tenderness and subtlety and also a fragility. Will their friendship endure? Or is the ghostly, ethereal quality both its attraction and demise? It seems as if everything-even nature, holds its breath and witnesses their meeting. The scene is an event drawn and heard. An intake of the breath, and a gentle drawing out of the lines that differentiate one human being from another.
A wonderful story and Susan Hill at her very best, I feel.
A Homage to Katherine Mansfield perhaps too with the balancing of the transient with something more granite like and solid.
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i If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
If you see a whole thing – it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
Ursula K. Le Guin