Snow Class in the Vercors, Where Beehives Were Letterboxes

Saint-Étienne used to send its primary classes up to Gresse-en-Vercors in winter for three weeks of classe de neige: ski lessons, lessons-lessons and fresh air at twelve hundred metres. In January 1970 one class walked to the slopes along a road where, in those days, a car hardly ever came, and stopped at a farm.

The adults admired an old bread oven built into the yard wall, and explained it, as adults will, at length.

A nine-year-old was not looking at the oven. She was looking across the yard at a row of wooden beehives on legs, each with a slot at the front, and she said that the letterboxes were big here.

The adults had found an oven; she had found a postal system.

The teacher, who told the story years later, chose not to correct her on the spot. I would like to pause on that choice, because I have never made it. Not once. When the youngest told a guide at the Atomium that it was “a giant’s molecule kit”, I explained the actual molecule, in some detail, until the guide, very gently, took over.

A big letterbox, in a nine-year-old’s logic, is not a mistake. It is a deduction. The box has a slot. Things go in through slots. If the box is big, the post must be big too. Somewhere up a mountain there is presumably a very large postman.

And honey is a reasonable thing to get back by return.

I have tested this theory at home. I asked the youngest what she thought a beehive was for, before telling her the story. She said, at once, “Bees’ flats.” Then she asked where the bees’ post goes.

I did not know. I said I would find out. That was three weeks ago, and every morning at breakfast she asks again, and I have now read two articles about pollination and one about the Belgian postal service, and neither covers it.

My husband says I should have let her keep the letterboxes. The teacher in the Vercors did, for as long as it mattered, and the girl in question kept calling them letterboxes for the rest of her life.

I have decided to follow the Vercors method. This morning, when the youngest asked again where the bees’ letters go, I said: “To other bees.”

She thought about it and nodded. Then she asked what the stamps look like. My husband has gone to work early.