Two moments from the Kids' Camp weekend, interspersed
with a memory: I often wonder what odd things will stick in these children's
minds. One can hope it's a tradition of magnificent story telling and wise
counsel, one can hope it's the excited discovery of achievements: the first
time they step out on the zip wire, the first stay away from home… but it might
be a dead or deadly insect.
***
I was sorry that we drowned the wasp. There were plenty that didn't slip into
the simple trap. It helped to keep a sense of calm, I suppose, to know there
was a way to halt their stinging sprees. Some of the children were allergic.
The drowned wasp did not scare them. They could observe the shape, the infamous
stripes, the articulated legs, those mournful eyes, the tiny slack mandibles.
Boy shrugs. He has tried the old trick of luring them
off with a picnic lunch of their own: an apple split and left open in the
hedge-line. Evident from the creature that lands on his own sandwich that an
apple was not enough. The bread chomping is so hearty I can imagine that it
burps. Vespula Vulgaris, the common wasp: well named.
Eleanor squints at the body in the drinks bottle. She
wants to know what to do with it.
'Put it in the hedge, so it can go back into the
earth.'
A simple insect funeral is performed.
It's odd, the things that stick in a mind. I remember a beer garden lunch; long
ago when chicken-in-a-basket was a novelty dish; there being a pint glass on
the table squirming with these black and yellow monsters. At the tabled area
the air was laced with grease, beery sweat, perfume, cigarette smoke. The metal
cutlery too hot to touch. Away from here was short grass, cool under foot, and
flowers colours still bright in shade. Ladybirds were considered friendly, but
close up, no less alien than wasps.
Later, after we have all been into the woods to locate a variety of tree
species, a girl leans over a leaf we are identifying. She thinks she sees a
ladybird.
'It's a Harlequin,' her team leader says. 'They
actually eat our native ladybirds. You should squish it, really.'
She looks closely at the orange invader, uncertain,
lets it disappear under a leaf.
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