The bees of Ashdown Forest
Sarah Maria Heginbotham wandered from her Weald home, weary and full of figs, on April 13 1881, to the tut-tut of the titmouse and the tat-tat of the tufted tit-tyrant. She wandered in the wild Weald and smelled of woads and whortleberries. She lay herself down on a patch of yellow welds to dream but not to sleep, and the bees smelled her and removed her gingham and cotton hand-me-downs and the Great Bee stung her in her honey pot. So it was that on January 18 1882 she gave birth to St. Alan Alexander, who suffered estrangement from wife, son, bear and bee; humiliation from the nature of his surviving work, which spoke of timeless truths but was denigrated by the self-righteous powers as unworthy of adults on their own; who felt possessed by his creation and wished it, its companions, innocence, owls, roos and forests dead. He spent his last years as an invalid, unvisited by his children, ignored by his wife, and bereft of mistresses. Yet his four books of verse and stories tower above the daily common forgettable literary buzz, the pretensions of sophisticates and the sophistication of stuffed and unloved scholars, stinging the knowledgeable with innocence, the innocent with knowledge. He painted the grey landscape between childhood and adulthood with colour, precision, distinction and sadness. It is the landscape we live in and the landscape we see when we die.
St. Alan Alexander was transmogrified to a honey pot illustration in the Ernest Howard Shepard Memorial Collection in the Library at Babel
