‘Oh, good.’
‘And I am paid to watch them.’
‘You mean to tell me that you are standing in that unheated wooden hut in all this cold and snow just to guard the crocuses?’
‘You could say that.’
‘Isn’t this cotton any use, then?’
‘Cotton is effective against bird thieves. I am not saying anything about human thieves.’
‘But I wasn’t going to eat your crocuses!’
‘I am only doing my job.’
‘Your job is to be a crocus-watcher?’
Yes, madam, and it always has been and my father before me. When I was a little lad I knew the work I wanted to do and I’ve done it ever since.’
Not thus the youngsters, much less suspicious characters, understanding quite well how respectable citizens may envy them their jobs.
There was this incident when the geraniums had flowered once, and needed to be picked over to induce a second flowering. There were banks of them, covered with dead flowers. I myself had resisted the temptation to nip over the railings and dead-head the lot: another had not resisted. With a look of defiant guilt, an elderly man was crouching in the geraniums, hard at work. Leaning on his spade, watching him, was a summer gardener, a long-haired, barefooted, naked-chested youth.
‘What’s he doing that for?’ said he to me.
‘He can’t stand that there won’t be a second flowering,’ I said. ‘I can understand it. I’ve just dead-headed all mine in my own garden.’
‘All I’ve got room for is herbs in a pot.’
The elderly man, seeing us watching him, talking about him, probably about to report his crime, looked guiltier than ever. But he furiously continued his work, a man of principle defying society for duty.
On a single impulse, I and the gardener parted and went in different directions; we were not able to bear causing him such transports of moral determination.
But, of course, he was quite in the right: when all the other banks of geraniums were brown and flowerless, the bank he had picked over was as brilliant as in spring.
By now it had rained, and had rained well, and just as it was hard to remember the long cold wet of the early year in the cold drought, and the cold drought in the dry heat, now the long dryness had vanished out of memory, for it was a real English summer, all fitfully showery, fitfully cool and hot. Yet it was autumn; the over-fullness of everything said it must be. A strong breeze sent leaves spinning down, and the smell of the stagnant parts of the lakes was truly horrible, making you wonder about the philosophy of the park-keepers – it was against their principles to clear away the smelly rubbish? They couldn’t afford a man in a boat once a week to take it away? Or they had faith in the power of nature to heal everything?
In my garden, last year’s wasteland – so very soon to be left behind – the roses, the thyme, geranium, clematis, were all strongly flowering, and butterflies crowded over lemon balm and hyssop. The pear tree was full of small tasteless pears. The tree was too old. It could produce masses of blossom, but couldn’t carry the work through to good fruit. At every movement of the air, down thumped the pears. All the little boys from the Council flats came jumping over the walls to snatch up the pears, which they needed to throw at each other, not to eat. When invited to come in and pick them, great sullenness and resentment resulted, because the point was to raid the big rich gardens along the canal, into which hundreds of gardenless people looked down from the flats, to raid them, dart away with the spoils, and then raid again, coming in under the noses of furious householders.
One afternoon I was in a bus beside the park, and the wind was strong, and all the air was full of flying leaves. This was the moment, the week of real autumn. Rushing at once to the park, I just caught it. Everything was yellow, gold, brown, orange, heaps of treasure lay tidily packed ready to be burned, the wind crammed the air with the coloured leafage. It was cooling – the Northern hemisphere, I mean, not the park, which of course had been hot, cold and in between ever since the year had started running true to form, some time in July. The leaves were blown into the lakes, and sank to make streams of bubbles in which the birds dived and played. All around the coots’ battered nest lay a starry patterning of plane leaves in green and gold. You could see how, if this were wilderness, land would form here in this shallow place, in a season or two; how this arm of the lake would become swamp, and then, in a dry season, new earth, and the water would retreat. All the smelly backwaters were being covered over with thick soft layers of leaf; the plastic, the tins, the papers vanishing, as, no doubt, the park-keepers had counted on happening when autumn came.
I walked from one end of the park to the other, then back and around and across, the squirrels racing and chasing, and the birds swimming along the banks beside me in case this shape might be a food-giving shape, and this food shape might have decided to distribute largess around the next bend and was being mean now because of future plenty. There were many fewer birds. The great families bred that year off the islands had gone, and the population was normal again, couples and individuals sedately self-sufficient.
Only a week later, that perfection of autumn was over, and stripped boughs were showing the shape of next spring. Yet, visiting Sweden, where snow had come early and lay everywhere, then leaving it to fly home again, was flying from winter into autumn, a journey back in time in one afternoon. The aircraft did not land when it should have done, owing to some hitch or other, and, luckily for us, had to go about in a wide sweep over London. I had not before flown so low, with no cloud to hide the city. It was all woodland and lakes and parks and gardens, and a highly coloured autumn still, with loads of russet and gold on the trees. All the ugly bits of London you imagine nothing could disguise were concealed by this habit of tree and garden.
In the park, though, from the ground, the trees looked very tall, very bare, and wet. The lakes were grey and solid. When the birds came fast across to see if there was food, they left arrow shapes on the water spreading slowly, and absolutely regular, till they dissolved into the shores: there were no boats out now, for these had been drawn up and lay overturned in rows along the banks, waiting for spring.
And the dark had come down.
The park in winter is very different from high, crammed, noisy summer. A long damp path in early twilight … it is not much more than three in the afternoon. Two gentlemen in trim dark suits and tidy, slightly bald heads, little frills of hair on their collars – a reminiscence of the eighteenth century or a claim on contemporary fashion, who knows? – two civil servants from the offices in the Nash terraces walk quietly by, their hands behind their back, beside the water. They talk in voices so low you think it must be official secrets that they have come out to discuss in privacy.
The beds are dug and turned. New stacks of leaf are made every day as the old ones burn, scenting the air with guilt, not pleasure, for now you have to remember pollution. But the roses are all there still, blobs of colour on tall stems. All the stages of the year are visible at once, for each plant has on it brightly tinted hips, then dead roses, which are brown dust rose-shaped, then the roses themselves, though each has frost-burn crimping the outer petals. Hips, dead roses, fresh blooms – and masses of buds, doomed never to come to flower, for the frosts will get them if the pruner doesn’t: Pink Parfait and Ginger Rogers, Summer Holiday and Joseph’s Coat, are shortly to be slashed into anonymity.
For it will be the dead of the year very soon now, soon it will be the shortest day.
I sit on a bench in the avenue where in summer the poplars and fountain make Italy on a blue day, but now browny-grey clouds are driving hard across from the north-east. Crowds of sparrows materialize as I arrive, all hungry expectation, but I’ve been forgetful, I haven’t so much as a biscuit. They sit on the bench, my shoe, the bench’s back, rather hunched, the wind tugging their feathers out of shape. The seagulls are in too, so the sea must be rough today, or perhaps there is an oil slick.
Up against the sunset, today a dramatic one, gold, red and packed dark clouds, birds slowly rotate, like jagged debris after a whirlwind. They look like rooks, but that’s not possible, they must be more gulls. But it is nice to imagine them rooks, just as, on the walk home, the plane trees, all bent one way by the wind, seem, with their dappled trunks, like deer ready to spring together towards the northern gates.
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