Not the Doctor Who kind, although he does crop up eventually. It begins with welcome relief from a troubled week, a delightful 3-day stay in Meldreth with my friend Clare the Poet. Since we first met getting on for 300 miles north and more than 25 years ago, inevitably we spend time in the past: Do you remember our production of Top Girls - "Rocky Mountain Jim..."? And the first meeting of the Book Group? And the wedding: when was that exactly? We walk the dog, stroll across fields and along the river, lunch in the lovely Teacake in Shepreth, linger over a glass of wine. I’m also captivated by Clare (and Iain’s) beautiful garden, in particular a lovely old rose, deep crimson, which fills the air with its fragrance.
I’m there to take part in neighbouring Melbourn’s celebration of Bloomsday. On the first day, eight short stories are read outside different houses in the village – Dorothy Parker's 'Arrangement in Black and White', Virginia Woolf’s ‘Kew Gardens’, Joyce’s ‘Eveline’. My turn coincides with a deluge. I read a P.G. Wodehouse story under a chestnut tree, shouting out the wonderful lines (“The kemerer’s ’idden in the keb”) against the din of the rain. The following day I take part in a panel of four working writers discussing who we are, what we do, how we do it and why. It’s a compulsion, we agree.
And then Bloomsday itself, 16 June, a reprise of Leopold Bloom’s 1904 day out in Dublin. We follow him, in the tireless person of local Bloomsday organiser and enthusiast Hugh Pollock, wandering from martello tower to butchers to post office to pharmacy. Many have dressed in period costume. Like Bloom we eat sausages for breakfast and a gorgonzola lunch in the pub as we listen to music of the time from the very talented Brind family. I have the last reading of the day, in the cemetery for Paddy Dignam’s funeral. The sun is almost out, the band plays Abide with Me. It’s both funny and moving. The entire event raises money for the charity Water Aid.
And then Bloomsday itself, 16 June, a reprise of Leopold Bloom’s 1904 day out in Dublin. We follow him, in the tireless person of local Bloomsday organiser and enthusiast Hugh Pollock, wandering from martello tower to butchers to post office to pharmacy. Many have dressed in period costume. Like Bloom we eat sausages for breakfast and a gorgonzola lunch in the pub as we listen to music of the time from the very talented Brind family. I have the last reading of the day, in the cemetery for Paddy Dignam’s funeral. The sun is almost out, the band plays Abide with Me. It’s both funny and moving. The entire event raises money for the charity Water Aid.
Saturday takes me to London for the annual Open Garden Squares Weekend. I begin with a diversion, striking out up the Holloway Road in search of the school in which I cut my teaching teeth. I feel I am close but, it turns out, not close enough. So I retrace my steps and track down my first garden, the tiny Melissa Bee Sanctuary, tucked away at the side of the Union Chapel on Highbury Corner, where I spend half an hour sitting on a tree stump bee-watching and learning about these amazing insects. A mix of Italian and Serbian bees, they are busy collecting pollen. Although they are not kept for honey, some has had to be removed from the hives, so I get to taste a spoonful on my way out, an energy boost for my next venture. Heading east, I turn off along Petherton Road to Clissold Park, trying to spot the house I used to visit in the early 70s. Everything looks both the same and different. I have heard stories of total gentrification, but Green Lanes and Newington Green Road seem as defiantly run down and as determinedly Turkish as I remember. I toy with the idea of loitering for a coffee but decide to press on.
It’s late morning by the time I arrive at King Henry’s Walk, just off the Balls Pond Road. This is probably my favourite garden of the weekend. Once derelict, the garden has been transformed by local volunteers, with a large raised bed along the south-facing wall, planted with espalier and fan-trained fruit trees and divided into plots for local people, with peonies, sweet peas, vegetables and herbs. There are also large metal planters accessible to wheelchair users and a small wood. They have provided a feast of home-made cakes and there is a sizeable pizza oven on the go – I make the mistake of deferring lunch until the next garden, a decision I definitely regret later. We are entertained by a chamber group. It’s such a lovely, friendly environment, I sit in the brief spell of sunshine with a cup of tea, imagining that I might one come and live in the neighbourhood. The estate agents windows I pass en route to Hackney bring me back to earth with a financial bump.
The rest of my gardens for the day are a mixed bunch: Dalston Eastern Curve doesn’t quite cut it for me, whereas the modest Cordwainers Garden with its raised bed community allotments, plants for dyeing and its curious backdrop of tailors’ dummies in the London Fashion School windows I find charming. At the Geffrye Museum I meet up with Joy, another friend from my early days in Cumbria, so tea and cake and memories, including a strange series of Doctor Who-related coincidences, eat into garden time. We manage only a quick march through 400 years of English town gardens and are chased out by the man with the keys when we attempt a second look at the lovely herb and rose garden. I stay overnight with Joy in Hackney and hop on an early Number 30 which takes me back along the streets I walked yesterday to Euston Square, then a walk down Gower Street – here’s UCL, the Catholic Chaplaincy, 89, Waterstones that was Dillons when I was 18 and a student here – to The Academy Hotel, its two courtyard gardens my my volunteer slot for the morning.
By lunchtime I’m just about gardened out, but I’m still feeling the need to stitch together the pieces of my past which are bobbing about like prayer flags in my mind. I head west along Goodge Street to Manchester Square – a brisk circuit of the gardens – then a dip into the Wallace Collection for a glass of wine, a bite of lunch and a spot of art: Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda holds my attention for a while – I’m struck by the legs of the swooping upside-down Perseus, which remind me of the tiny legs of Icarus disappearing in the water in Brueghel’s painting (which is now thought to be not by Brueghel at all). Both paintings date from around the same period, but how different. On the way out I pause by Rembrandt’s painting of his son Titus, painted about 100 years later. I think I can feel the artist’s love of his subject – something about the light along the nose? I learn later that 1657, the date of the work, was a troubled year for the artist. Titus was the only one of Rembrandt’s four children by his first wife to survive infancy, and died eleven years after the painting was completed.
Ladies enjoying the Geffrye Museum Gardens
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