Ned Kelly and the City of Bees Read online

  Ned Kelly & the City of Bees

  Thomas Keneally

  Illustrated by Stephen Ryan

  To Jane and Margaret,

  my daughters, who talked me into writing this story

  Note for the American Edition

  The story of how Ned Kelly spent a summer in a bee hive, in the company of a 120-year-old girl called Nancy Clancy and the bees of Selma’s kingdom, is set in a country, my country, called Australia. In Australia when I was young I went to a school where the summer uniform was like Ned’s—shorts, an athletic vest, sandals, a big hat. I lived in a town like the one where Ned’s family lives; I too had a strange experience in the town’s hospital.

  Perhaps the most important amusement of people in that town when I was a child were radio programs of the kind to which Apis, the worker bee, listens in this book. Some of these programs were romantic, others were adventurous, and people—like Apis—went to a lot of trouble to make sure they heard the next episode of their favorite serial. My favorite was called The Search for the Golden Boomerang, and, although I can hardly remember the story line, I mention it in the book because of the joy it gave me then.

  Australia is different from America in many ways. Notably, the seasons are the reverse of American seasons. You will see that in the story: August is winter, December is summer. But you will notice, later in the book, a likeness between America and the Australia of my childhood and Ned’s. The stealing of cattle was common—ordinary men took cattle, often because times were hard and money was scarce. Americans call the crime ‘rustling,’ Australians—as you’ll see—call it ‘duffing.’

  You will also notice that just as there were Indians in the forest and on the great plains of America before the whites came, there were in Ned’s valley and mine a race we call the aborigines of Australia. It was these sensitive people who comforted Nancy Clancy when she was lost in the Australian wilderness.

  I hope you enjoy this story. I have lived in Connecticut and have known American children, and it gives me great pleasure to think that they might take this book in their hands and, best of all, enjoy it.

  TOM KENEALLY

  Contents

  Ned Kelly in Hospital

  A Bee and Nancy Clancy

  Romeo Drone and Landing

  One Hundred and Twenty Year Old Girl

  Ned Kelly Meets the Queen

  Selma Lays a Queen Egg

  Giving Romeo the Hive-Smell

  Maurie Abey Hates Insects

  Miss Such’s Typewriter

  Ned Kelly Squashed

  Wasp War

  A New Queen

  Moving and Maurie Abey

  The Hive at Major Steel’s

  Duffers

  Arrest

  Autumn Rains

  The Drones are Expelled

  Home

  1

  Ned Kelly in Hospital

  When I was a small boy, I spent a whole summer with wild honey bees in their nest in the hollow of an old mountain ash. Before you start laughing at the idea, you’d better listen to what I have to say.

  I lived in a warm valley then. A broad, snaky river ran through the valley and many blossoms grew on its banks. Bees were always visiting the blossoms collecting sugary nectar from them, rolling their fat little bodies against the pollen—that dust, often yellow, sometimes even purple, you can see in the insides of flowers and pick up with your fingers. Although it is not always kind to people, that dust, making some sneeze and others wheeze, the bees feed their infants on it.

  I knew that some of the bees belonged to farmers and lived in neat white hives that the farmers made for them. Farmers’ bees would take the dusty pollen and the sweet nectar they had collected back to the owners’ hives. They would use up the pollen and make honey from the nectar. Only some of this honey would they use themselves, and then the farmer would collect the extra honey out of the white hive and sell it to the people. The bees didn’t mind, although in the streets of our town you sometimes saw unlucky farmers with swollen faces or hands from bee stings. But farmers have been building hives for bees and taking honey from them for thousands of years. For honey is, as everyone knows, good for humankind.

  But there are other bees. They are the wild honey bees. They make honey only for themselves and for their ruler, the queen of their wild hive. Sometimes I saw their hives in holes in the trunks of trees. Or in the walls of some derelict farmhouse where some poor family had gone broke and had to leave home. The wild bees knew how to find a place that was shady and away from the wind, a place that would not fill up with water when it rained, a place that was high enough to be beyond the reach of most ground-level nuisances—rats or mice or opossums.

  At the time of my meeting with the bees I was of course a schoolchild in our warm valley. In fact, so warm was it in our valley in summer-time that our school uniform was: a straw hat, a vest, and a pair of brown shorts. You can get some idea of how I looked then from the drawing.

  The girls wore light frocks. For example, my friend Jack Horne had a sister called Kate. They were so poor that Kate’s frock was made of flour bags. Those two were my best friends, and we used to walk to school together and walk back again. I remember that sometimes the tar on the roads would be so hot we’d have to hop across like kangaroos. It was two miles to school, two miles home, but there was always something fresh to see—a funeral, or a circus setting up at the showground, or a Chinese vegetable seller, or a long goods train held up at the station, or one of the Indian traders coming to town with his camels.

  On the day I first met the bees, I began feeling dizzy as soon as I left the school gate. There was a terrible pain in my leg. My body felt heavier than the earth. Jack and Kate Horne ran through the town but I dragged behind them.

  At last I sat down on a grass footpath. The right side of my stomach felt large with pain. I looked at the hill leading up to my house and knew I could not climb it. Jack and Kate Horne ran back to me.

  “What’s the matter?” they said. Then they said, “You look white.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Get my mother, will you?”

  “Run and get his mother, Jack,” Kate ordered. “Go on.”

  “Why me?”

  “Men are runners,” Kate said, “and women are nurses.”

  Because in those days there weren’t many male nurses, or many female runners.

  So it was Jack who ran for my mother. Kate went down to a rain-water puddle in the gutter. She dipped a handkerchief in it and wiped my forehead. “Well,” she said, “never fear, Nurse Kate is here.”

  But Nurse Kate did not improve the pain. I lay on my back with my knees up. Kate pushed a twig into my mouth. “Let me take your temperature,” she said. I was weak and full of fear and I couldn’t stop her doing that sort of thing.

  At last I saw my father’s old truck come down over the hill. My father was driving, my mother sat beside him and Jack stood in the back, looking serious. They pulled up by the footpath and my mother jumped out and looked at me. The first thing she did was pull the twig out of my mouth.

  “What’s a twig doing in your mouth?” she said.

  “What’s the matter? What’s the matter, Ned, mate?” asked my father.

  “Aagh!” I said. “My side hurts.” And I began to cry. My father got my mother to sit in the front seat. He lifted me into the truck and laid my head on her lap. While he drove as fast as the old truck would go up the hill towards the town hospital, Jack and Kate rode in the back, cheering a lot, as if we were a stagecoach that was outrunning Indians. I thought, I wonder do they care about me?

  A fussy Sister met us at the hospital door. She looked over her spectacles at my mother and at me in my mother’s
arms. She looked at my father in his work clothes. Since he worked in a sawmill he was very dusty. Then she looked at Jack and Kate.

  “We can’t have those grubby children in here,” she told us.

  My father nodded towards me. “Here’s one grubby child you’ll have to have.”

  “Those two can wait outside,” she said, pointing in her turn at Kate and Jack. So Kate and Jack stayed at the door, making faces when the Sister’s back was turned.

  The Sister showed my mother and father a bench where they could lay me. Then she ran to fetch the town’s new young doctor, Doctor Morgan. When Doctor Morgan came in he touched my stomach. I squealed with pain.

  “That’s it,” he said. “I’m sure it’s appendicitis.”

  “How do you spell that?” asked Kate. She had crept in behind us because Doctor Morgan was young and friendly and she wasn’t as scared of him as of the Sister. Also, she thought she was the best speller in the school and often asked grown-ups to spell things for her.

  Doctor Morgan smiled, “APPENDICITIS,” he said. “The appendix is a small tube of muscle in the intestine. Sometimes it gets so swollen we have to take it out. Put this boy in a bed, Sister.”

  As the Sister carried me out, I could hear Kate spelling, showing off. “APPERCIDITMUS.”

  “Wrong,” said Doctor Morgan. “Out!”

  At the door, the Sister turned so that I could wave to my mother and father, and to Kate and Jack as they left. I had a feeling that frightened me, that I wouldn’t see my parents or Kate or Jack for a long time.

  The Sister took me into a hospital ward and put me in a bed that was screened off from all the other beds. There were other children in the ward making a lot of noise. Two boys were having a race on crutches. I saw through a crack in one of the screen curtains a fat boy fall off his crutches.

  The Sister called out, “You brats stop that! We have a sick boy here.”

  Doctor Morgan came to my bed carrying a large syringe.

  “This will make you sleepy,” he told me. “Then we can operate. You won’t feel it much.” Doctors have always said that to children since the start of time. Sometimes they are right. But I wasn’t worried by the idea of pain. I was lonely. That’s what worried me.

  The Sister pulled down my school pants, roughly, so that my backside was bare. I didn’t like having this done by someone like her. Before I could think of it, the doctor slid the needle in.

  2

  A Bee and Nancy Clancy

  As soon as the medicine went into my body through the point of that needle, I began to feel lighter, sleepier, even a little happier. But when Doctor Morgan left, and the Sister went out too, having dragged my shorts up again, I felt I was the loneliest boy in the world. There were all at once tears all over my cheeks. Yet I was so tired I slept in a second.

  When I opened my eyes, I looked at the window sill above my bed. It seemed there were two small creatures up there. One was definitely a bee. I could see the dark and the gold of its little body. The other looked like a small butterfly. They sat there staring at me. I knew by the way they sat that they were interested in everything that had gone on in the hospital ward, that they were watching me the way I watched circuses or strangers arriving in the town. The butterfly didn’t flutter, there wasn’t a buzz from the bee.

  It was normal to see bees on window sills in our town. Funnily, I’d never looked at one before as closely as this. What’s a bee’s face like? I wondered. Let’s see.

  The first thing I saw were the eyes. Deep brown. Glossy. I saw something there that I’d never seen in a bee before. Pity. The bee was sorry for me. You know, the way a dog looks at you with eyes full of sorrow. In fact the bee was just like a dog to me. It was handsome. It was furry. I felt I wanted to reach out and pat it. I said, “G’day, feller,” the way you do to a dog. At least, the way we used to say to dogs. We used to call the males feller and the bitches girl. It would be a little while before I found out this bee was a female.

  As soon as I spoke, the bee whirred its wings and jumped and landed on my chest. It climbed up my vest, coming towards me. Any other time, I would have been frightened of being stung. Bee stings are a nuisance. There’s a swelling, and a little black sting stuck in your skin. Some people don’t take well to bee stings. Mrs Delahunty who lived on the hill swelled up like a balloon one day when a bee stung her. They’d had to rush her to the hospital. When I was stung, my mother used always to put washing-blue on the place. I wonder what mothers use these days, now that you don’t see washing-blue any more.

  Of course bee stings are a problem for the bee too. The skin and muscles of humans are like iron to a bee and so, once it stings a human, the bee cannot pull its sting back out. It has to leave the sting there; it has to rip its belly open to get away from the human, and so it dies.

  I could tell this bee didn’t want to sting me or to die. Its mouth was open like a pup’s and a sort of snout hung out like a pup’s tongue. And on the end of the snout hung one drop of something golden and glistening.

  “Honey for me, feller?” I asked it. But it wasn’t honey, not heavy or sticky like honey.

  The bee came right up to my chin and dumped the drop of glowing liquid on my bottom lip. Then it walked up my face and sat down near my ear. I licked the golden drop and my body seemed to sigh. I felt warm and golden myself, just as if I was a fresh baked loaf of bread in the window of Bennet’s bakery. I closed my eyes a second.

  When I opened them the bedclothes and the bed seemed to race away from me in all directions. The bars at the end of the bed seemed far away and high as mountains, growing higher all the time. There I was, lost in a plain of white. I thought that I was dreaming of snow. But it didn’t snow in that town, in fact I had never seen snow in my life.

  The bee rolled over at my side, the way a large too-playful dog would. At the same time a voice above my head said,

  “Play with a bee, my boy, say I

  But watch out for the sneezing and the weepy eye.”

  It was a girl’s voice and I looked up. High above us, on the sill, sat a small girl in a blue gingham dress. Earlier, I’d thought she was a butterfly, but she was definitely a girl, her hair done up in old-fashioned corkscrew curls.

  No sooner had she warned me about the sneezing and the weepy eyes than I began sneezing and my eyes began to weep.

  “You’ll get used to that,” said someone. It was a husky female voice. I looked at the bee, who had stopped rolling.

  “What did you say?” I asked it.

  “You’ll get used to it,” it said. “You got used to it, didn’t you, Miss Clancy?”

  The little girl sitting on the sill high above us said,

  “I got used to it, barely a sneeze

  Barely an itch or a scratch or a wheeze.”

  The bee’s husky voice announced, “She’s doing everything in rhyme. It’s a stage she’s going through.”

  The girl above us yelled.

  “I can’t help it, it’s my fancy,

  You see, my name is Nancy Clancy.”

  The bee explained with a sigh. “That’s right. Her name is Miss Nancy Clancy. I wish it wasn’t. Maybe if it was Susan O’Leary or something like that, she wouldn’t make rhymes all the time.”

  “And down there,” the girl called, “rolling round like an over fed pup, is my friend Apis. You may have noticed she’s a bee.”

  “A worker and a gatherer,” said Apis with pride.

  “You listen to the radio half the day,” Nancy Clancy said.

  “Even a worker bee needs her relaxation,” said Apis. “Why, there are some bees that gather all day long. They’re dead by the end of summer. Worry. Overwork. It’s not going to happen to me. I’m going to last the winter, and see another summer come.”

  “Do you really listen to the radio?”

  “At Mrs Abey’s place. I like the serials. I like When a Girl Marries and The Search for the Golden Boomerang. Mrs Abey has a shady sill. I can sit up there quite safe an
d hear the whole program. How else do you think I learnt to speak so well?”

  “Can you speak bee?” I asked the girl in the blue gingham dress.

  She gave a pitying laugh as if I were a very backward boy.

  “In a hive you don’t have to speak so well.

  It isn’t how you talk, it’s how you smell.”

  She let that sink in for a little while. “You don’t do much talking in a bee hive. But if you smell the right way, if you have the hive smell, then all is well. The bees will let you in the hive without any argument.”

  “That’s so,” said husky Apis. “There are sentries at the entrance to every hive. They’re usually young and not too bright. If you smell of the hive, they let you past. Of course, if a mouse smelt of the hive, they’d let him past. If a rat did. If a possum did. They’re not too bright, as I said. But—they’re the only ones we can find for the job.”

  “Would you like to smell right?” asked Miss Nancy Clancy from her position on the window sill.

  “Well,” I said. “I’m supposed to be having an operation.”

  “Oh,” Apis told me, “they leave people here for weeks before they touch them. We’ve seen children very nearly die of boredom in here. In this very ward.”

  Miss Nancy Clancy said, “Yes. We come down here a lot, mainly when Mrs Abey’s radio breaks down. And that’s what we generally see. Children dying of boredom.”

  “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t visit the hive. With us,” Apis suggested. “It would be company for Miss Nancy Clancy.”

  “Apis would have you back,” said the girl, “in time to have your appendix out, with a slight delay at Abey’s for Rick the Frontier Scout.”

  I didn’t feel lonely any more. My side no longer hurt, and I did not want to die of boredom. But I also was a little afraid of walking amongst bees who were as big as St Bernard dogs.

  I heard Apis laughing in her throaty way. “I know. You think you’ll be stung. It won’t happen.” With that she pounced on me and we tumbled over and over on the vast white plain of the hospital bed. The bee’s fur tickled me. Sometimes I sneezed. I could hear Miss Nancy Clancy clapping. At last the bee stopped and I lay panting and laughing.