The end of the month, the long year shrunk suddenly to a remnant. The weight of food and the warmth of family (if you can avoid arguments) combine with unaccustomed free time to give these days a gloss of significance. Our Christmas Day passes without incident. We remember last Christmas, most of us collected in Albert Street, then a couple of days in the cottage in Norfolk, finding Mum waiting with her coat on by the door each morning, bag packed, ready for home. I recall the morning I bullied her into a bath. This year, a less ambitious single day in Searle Street, marred only by the moment when she failed to recognise her son, and the small wet patch that remained on her chair after a game of Scrabble. We are left wondering if this will be our last Christmas with her.
My last visit to the Garden for the year coincided with a warning about essential tree works, the felling of a rotten tree near the Rose Garden. I head in that direction but am too late. Beyond the evergreens there’s a huge roughly circular area, perhaps 25 or 30 metres in diameter, covered with sawdust. The smell of newly cut wood hangs in the air. Two sections of trunk have been placed near the outer edges of the circle, ringside seats for a show that is already over. In the centre of the circle, the remains of the trunk stand a few inches clear of the ground on a raised mound. The stump is irregular in outline, its flat top mottled grey and pink, with a narrow broken band, almost white, just inside the layer of bark. One side of the stump is taken up with a dark heart-shaped hollow, partially filled with a reddish wood-dust and a knuckle of blackened branch. A darker area next to the hollow perhaps indicates the spread of the decay. One of the ‘seats’ is also rotten, almost half of the wood reduced to black dust where the trunk divides. It’s the size of the arena, though, which holds me there, its little cavities and hollows signs of the vast root system which supported this ‘tallest’ of trees.
Ailanthus altissima, native to China, is a fast grower with a short life. It’s a complex character, known as the ‘tree of heaven’ perhaps for its grace and stature or for its curative properties. It has been widely used in Chinese medicine, the earliest recorded recipes dating back to the seventh century. Different parts of the tree were used for different ailments: the roots (mixed with the urine of young boys) to treat mental illness, whilst the leaves were applied to the skin for relief from boils and abscesses, or to tackle baldness by stimulating hair growth. The bark is still figures prominently in modern Chinese medicine, used to treat conditions as various as asthma and epilepsy, cancer, dysentery and palpitations. The tree has a dark side, though. Its Chinese name means ‘foul-smelling tree’. And it’s an invader, with a suckering habit and an ability to suppress the competition, so that in many countries it’s classed as a noxious weed.
The shortest day past, we still have to rush to arrive in Norfolk in time for a walk before dark. We see a field of 40 or so Bewick swans; I learn that small heads and short necks are their distinguishing features. Two jays fly up on the edge of a wood, and a kestrel hovers at the roadside. A stoat ripples at speed across the road, its black-tipped tail a final flourish, then a muntjac. We pass five wild ponies, rough coats the washed-out colours of the wintry heath, and a flock of teal take to the air as we park. The pale sky is smudged with ash-grey. On Holme beach the tide is as far out as I’ve seen it, the white sands tinted a rusty pink. Not a breath of wind, we say, and immediately are proved wrong as we move out of the shelter of the dunes into a skin-shaving gust. We cut through marram grass onto the salt marsh, dodging patches of standing water, the ground a livid mix of russet and crimson, lime and emerald and sage, and then up through scratchy limbs of sea lavender onto the boardwalk and back through the pines. Driving home, we peer out in search of a short-eared owl rumoured to be hunting nearby as the last of the colour drains from the world but no joy.
We wake in the morning to a dusting of snow which quickly turns to sleety rain and a vicious wind. Dodging the worst of the weather, we head for Holkham in the hope of watching the geese come in to roost from the little tower that is the Joe Jordan hide. There are several trickles of pink-feet but not the huge numbers we expect. Still, there's the magic of straining the eyes towards what might be only an added graininess in the sky, until they materialise as dots which grow larger and more definite, the lines always shifting and rearranging themselves, filtering, shuffling themselves into one variation of their v-formation after another, never faltering, never crashing. We make our way back to the car, the hint of sound swelling to a constant chatter, at once plaintive and strident - William Fiennes has called it a ‘wild lung-top gabble’ - as more flocks come into land. It's an oddly thrilling noise which stays with me long after we've left Holkham and are home in front of a log fire. The following day the wind has vanished. The skies clear and warm sun coats Cley’s reed beds and salt marshes with a rosy glow. Waves crash and sparkle white, a flock of snow bunting bursts glittering upwards and away to the east; a perfect last Norfolk day for the year.
The Snow Geese is published as a Picador Classic in January. William Fiennes will take part in a Picador Classic day at Foyles, London WC2 on 7 February. Email [email protected]
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