Wasps n things

My father had an endearing, if slightly irritating quality, of telling the same story over and over again. I have to say, unlike my family when I repeat myself, we always nodded in all the right places and acted as if it were the first time ever we had heard that particular tale..

One of the incidents that formed part of his repertoire concerned a fairly ferocious aunt who lived in Heathfield in Sussex. One summer the family accompanied her on a visit to Bateman’s, the home of Rudyard Kipling. While she was eating her cream tea she was stung by a wasp. Not much of a tale there you may think but it was her reaction that amazed and impressed my father. Apparently she said not a word and merely removed the offending creature from her face. My father would accompany the tale by imitating a very restrained grimace. That was all. Whether this impressed him because he thought it was very controlled and middle class or whether he knew my mother and I would have been flapping and shrieking if that wasp had come anywhere near us I don’t know But even my husband heard that story a million times.

It is for this reason that I am not sure whether I had actually been with them at Bateman’s during the wasp incident or whether I just felt I had been there. Whatever the truth when I visited today it felt like a very new and enjoyable experience and there wasn’t a wasp in sight.