‘Do you want to see something?’
We stand up from the bench, the four of us, and follow him along a clipped path between the headstones. The air is dozy, threaded with slow flies. A bumblebee bumps against lichen, looking for the way in, its humming taken up by the distant buzz of a paraglider on the other side of the valley. Lawnmowers, strimmers, a lone aeroplane scoring sky, the low drone of late summer.
I carry the baby. I waft a hoverfly away from his nose. Maurice keeps the place beautifully neat.
‘Where are we going, Maurice?’ Sam asks, genially.
RM Block
Maurice lifts a hand, beckons us on, keeps walking.
We step through longer grass at the boundary and go through into the area not open to the public. Two blocky hives stand eyeless at the margin. Near the house, half-barrels of nasturtium climbing willow-cane; Kathy at the kitchen window. I wave the baby’s arm.
He stops next to a large flat stone set into the ground, a slab the size of a single bed, a piece of plywood resting across it like a stiff duvet. He waits for us to cluster around him and then rubs his hands together.
‘Let’s see who’s about, shall we?’
Tim shuffles back against Sam’s legs. ‘Daddy,’ he whispers, ‘is it a coffin?’
Maurice’s beard broadens. ‘A big hole under here! Bigger than a car. Like a room.’
‘Really?’
‘That’s why we don’t let people wander around in this part,’ Maurice nods. ‘Used to be all open, but the ground kept collapsing. Not safe.’
‘Could you fall in?’
‘Who’s to say people haven’t?’ He grins. ‘You just walk where I walk.’
Tim twists his mouth.
‘Closer, come on. You won’t get a long look.’
We shuffle obediently an inch nearer the stone slab. Satisfied, Maurice takes hold of a corner of the plywood. And then lifts it up, quickly, so that we can see underneath. They are glazed and brown as a fresh pretzel. Tim says a soft oh and Sam puts his hand on the top of his blond head.
‘Is it snakes?’
‘Slow worms,’ says Maurice. Already the pretzel is unlacing itself, easing apart the knot, beginning to disperse. We have affronted them. Not worms, he tells us, but lizards. They like it under there, next to the cool stone. Some of them have been here for years, he says.
Maurice motions towards the two squat figures near the fence, and says, ‘Come and see the beehives now.’
Begin again
We stand up from the bench, the three of us. Summer is circling the drain, all the wildflowers crisping, trees turning their minds to fruit. I’ve a crick in my neck from cradling the baby. All summer he’s been breastfeeding on the half hour, thirsty as a radish. I feel alarmed by his singlemindedness: a bumblebee pushing into a foxglove.
I wander the clipped grass, reading the headstones. Freddie Freshwater. Alonso Lusty.
‘Sam, look.’ I point. ‘They can’t be real, some of these.’
He squints at the feet of an ivied angel. ‘Barbara B. Glory.’
‘Amazing. What’s that little one there, behind the cross?’
He steps over a tangle of stickybud, leaning low. ‘Tom something.’
‘Our names are so boring.’
‘Not Tom, Timothy. Who left this world aged five years – five, Jesus.’
‘Kid graves give me the chills.’ The baby pulls up a handful of grass.
Footsteps. The man leans over the fence and touches his temple in greeting.
‘Hi! Must be funny living next to this lot,’ Sam says.
‘Oh, it’s ours, actually!’ A woman appears next to him, pulling off her red gardening gloves.
‘Yours?’
‘Yes – the land is, anyway. The question of who owns the graves themselves is all a bit muddly.’
Her husband raises his eyebrows. ‘They belong to the dead!’
‘True enough,’ she agrees gently.
Sam’s intrigued. ‘How did you come to own a graveyard?’
‘There was a chapel, years ago. And then the council were going to build flats on it, so we bought it.’
‘Oh, wow.’
‘And now we live with them!’ the man adds.
I sit the baby on my hip, where he starts grizzling. ‘I was just saying what fantastic names they have.’
She laughs. ‘Yes! Lots of local families, but blow-ins too. Soldiers and so on. And some quite mysterious. Maurice is the real knowledge.’
Maurice nods. We wait for more, but he stands still as an oak. Bees thrum nearby.
‘Well,’ Sam says, after a moment. ‘We’ll head off and find some shade, I think. Nice to meet you both. Maurice and …?’
‘Kathy. Come back any time.’
‘We will! We just moved, actually. It’s a lovely place.’ He smiles at Maurice, ever the pleaser. It’s not easy to discern the direction of Maurice’s gaze. Suddenly he leans down to point at the small gravestone.
‘That one’s a good one,’ he says, voice like a lawnmower engine. ‘Timothy Wedder.’
Kathy bats a fly away. ‘Not such a nice story, Maurice.’
‘No, not nice, not nice.’
‘Not sure they want to hear that one, with a little babe!’
‘All the children used to go down there,’ Maurice points, ‘stand at the side of Nympsfield hill, wait for the milk cart to come down from the farms. And they’d grab the cartwheel as it went past and go all the way down the hill.’
‘God.’ Sam grins. ‘Different times. When I was a kid––’
Maurice cuts across him. ‘And the one time the dairy farmer puts new mudguards on …’
‘Oh no.’
‘Maurice––’
‘Metal mudguards over the wheels––’
‘It says he was five …?’
‘And Timmy Wedder, he jumps on as usual, and––’ Maurice draws a finger through his beard.
Sam widens his eyes. ‘Gruesome.’
‘Lots of stories here. They don’t need much. I like to set them free.’
We say goodbye. As we head for the gate we hear Kathy muttering sharply.
I whisper, ‘That was weird.’
‘It was, a bit. Are you alright? Did the beheading of Little Timmy frighten you?’
‘No. I mean – yes, of course – but who knows what’s true. He’s a funny fella, though, isn’t he.’
We reach the gate but I look back – have we left something on the bench? The baby’s hat, his white muslin?
No, still no – begin again
An aeroplane folds the high cerulean in two. We stand up from the bench.
‘It’s hot, dear god …’
Sam flaps his hand in front of my face, barely stirring the torpid air. ‘Do you want to go?’
‘Yes. Let’s get an ice cream.’ I slap a fly from my arm. ‘I’m getting bitten to shit.’
‘Do you want to look at those older graves?’
‘You can’t go in – I had a nosy while you were sleeping.’
‘I wasn’t sleeping!’
‘You were snoring.’
‘Outrageous.’
‘Like a lawnmower trying to start.’ I do my impression. He swats at me. ‘Anyway, there’s a fence. DO NOT ENTER – UNSAFE GROUND.’
‘Maybe badger holes.’
‘Fucking wildlife. Badgers, mosquitoes, hornets …’
‘Poor little city girl.’
‘Poor me. There’s a whole children’s section, too overgrown to see, really. Strange to think of burying a baby.’
‘Is it? Don’t forget your book.’
I pick up the Plath I found in the second-hand bookshop and stuff it into my rucksack. ‘I suppose not. I just can’t imagine.’
We start walking the clipped pathway to the gate, the arch dripping in ivy. Sam puts his arm around me.
‘When I was a kid we buried all sorts in the garden. Budgies, gerbils.’
‘Yours, I hope.’
‘… our cat, Foxy.’
‘Foxy!’
‘Shut up. We kept getting goldfish, they kept dying. It shouldn’t be so hard to keep a goldfish alive.’
‘And this is why we’re not having kids.’
He laughs. We keep walking and after a moment he slides his arm off my shoulder.
‘Sam.’
‘I’m fine! Just getting uncomfy.’
It’s cooler here, near the ivy, a thick dense boundary. The heat casts a glamour over everything, like looking through honey. I reach for the latch.
‘Hey, look at this.’ He doubles back to a grave overlooked by purple buddleia. It’s whiter than the others, made of a finer stone. He circles it to find the name. ‘It’s one of the war graves.’
‘Sam. Ice cream. Urgent. I want pistachio.’
‘You’ll be lucky. It’ll be a Calippo from the corner shop. I just want to look at this one. What war is this?’
I sigh and go to join him. ‘I didn’t know you cared about military history.’
‘My granddad was a bomber.’
‘Not sure I knew that. What was his name?’
‘Samuel as well. I was named after him.’
‘This lad too.’ I straighten up. ‘That’s weird.’
‘That is weird.’
‘What is it with the names here? Did you see Freddy Freshwater?’
He laughs. ‘I love that one. And Alonso Lusty. You can call me that, if you like.’
‘Can you hear that humming?’
‘There are beehives over there.’ He crouches down, brushing the base of the plaque. ‘I want to see what it says.’
I leave him hunkered in the grass, call back over my shoulder: ‘I was just reading one about a beehive, you know.’ I unzip my rucksack and pull the Plath back out, and go and stand right up against the boundary fence, next to the UNSAFE GROUND sign, as close as I can get. They are sleeping. I fold the cover back and read the poem again.
Something catches my eye. I turn to see a man standing at an upstairs window. I shield my eyes from the glare with the copy of Ariel, give him a wave while calling back, ‘Sam, shall we head off, then?’
The man pushes the window open. What is he saying?
‘Sorry!’ I call. ‘I’m having a look at your beehives.’
That humming! There must be a million bees in there.
‘Hello,’ his mouth is saying over the drone. ‘I am the owner.’
‘Sam!’
I am walking quickly back to the war grave. I stand and turn in a circle, like a sprinkler system.
‘Sam!’
The whole world roars, drowning out the man in the window, the bees browsing the ivy over the boundary gate. I can hear nothing but this thunder from the sky, a huge black vessel tearing everything in half, and there’s Sam in the long grass, his face pressed to the ground, hands clasped over the back of his head.
Begin again
The bench is warm under my cheek. I sit up and brush bits of lichen from my shorts, rub a hand over my eyes, yawning. I stretch to the frayed, deepening blue.
God, my back! This was a terrible place to doze off. I’ll have to walk it off before the train. Maybe stop for a pint, actually, at that pub down in the village. See if the bookshop is open.
Must be hours I’ve been here. Something soporific in that humming – a lawnmower a few streets away. It’s so quiet. You couldn’t pay me to live here.
I did spot an old couple beetling about beyond that fence, picking beans. I was poking in all the old overgrown headstones piled up there. Funny how you can always find your own name.
What does it say on that yellow sign? Something something GROUND.
Come on. Stand up.
Someone has left a baby’s muslin, tucked between the gate and the brickwork. I look around guiltily and then fish it out. I wipe my forehead, the back of my neck. The air is so close I can hardly breathe, except here, in the cool space underneath the ivy.
It’s coming from the beehives, that noise. I can hear it now. It’s seductive, it compels me. I can see fresh earth on tarpaulin. A sheet of plywood leaning up against a fence; a stone slab at a tilt. Two large figures, clad in white, visors down.
I have nothing to go home for, no one to answer to.
And now they will come over, the two of them, and speak to me.
Judge Evie Wyld awarded Bee Box second prize in this year’s Moth Short Story Prize, describing it as “unsettling and folkloric in the best way”. Sprackland is an editor, writer and translator. Her debut collection of poems, Citadel (Pavilion, 2020), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Costa Poetry Award. Her fiction has been shortlisted for both the London Magazine‘s and Brick Lane Bookshop’s short story prizes, and she is at work on a novel. Sprackland’s new translation of the poems and prose of sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross is forthcoming from Penguin Classics in the spring of 2026. Her prize consists of a week at the luxury writing retreat, Circle of Misse, in France, aided by a travel stipend.
