Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

First it was Cromwell felling the trees for the Navy, 534 acres with 124 deer and 16,297 tree of oak, ash, elm, wite thorn and maple . Then it was Nash, deciding what new trees to use, pairing the colours of different kinds of tree to suit his villas. Then they felled the trees all over again for the twentieth-century wars. More than three hundred bombs changed the shape of the place in the 1940s. And now it’s now. The park that began with the lords and the ladies in their carriages. The park that evolved, that learned to open its gates to everybody, to hold all the city’s hundreds of languages, the city’s efflorescence, in the one place. Great forest of wooded glades ; the first written description we have of the Forest of Middlesex, which became the Great Chase, the Marrowbone, the Marybone, the Marylebone Pleasure Gardens, the Marylebone Park, the Regent’s Park, where today, like any old day of the week, the day in the park curved itself off like a bird into the air over the six thousand trees, the laughable colours of duck, the black swans in the Rose Garden drinking the earlier drizzle off their own backs, all the people on their way to work who love to walk through the park, the young couple slowing their pace for their old slow dog on the Broad Walk, the man shouting at the woman cyclist and the cyclist giving him the perfectly reversed V sign over her shoulder, the magpies gathering in wait for feeding time over the zoo’s walls, the Primrose Hill bookshop where stray leaves from the park blow in at the door all year round.

The day in the park, like any old day, took its usual bee-line, one never threatened by mere winter (which only makes the fountains more beautiful, the ice forming all down the sides of them), one that always makes something of itself, like the honey the Regent’s Park bees make of their visits to the lime trees in Avenue Gardens, or the honey that tastes of roses in the seasons when the Rose Garden proves good pickings for the bees. Amber Queen. English Miss. Wandering Minstrel. Sweet Dreams. Ingrid Bergman. Anna Ford. Mayor of Casterbridge. Old Yellow Scotch. There are hives all over the park where, right now, the bees would be crowding together to keep the temperature up, would be taking turns to be circled and warmed by all the other bees, would be tending to the year’s future bees in their cells; there are beehives in good quiet places all over the park.

Look at that, nothing but a passing honeybee, the kind of nothing that has two sets of eyes and makes a thousand flower-visits a day, a creature so clever that bees are already teaching themselves to combat the mites and diseases that have been killing them off so rapidly and so mysteriously (to humans at least) over the past few years. What’s honey? A sweetener? Two pounds of honey equals a hundred thousand bee miles. The ancient Egyptians were the first to use it as an antiseptic, it’s good on a burn, and it’s not just good with a cough or a sore throat, it can help fight anthrax, diphtheria, cholera, MRSA, and when doctors transplant people’s corneas the replacements are transported in honey.

Without bees? Nothing. Nothing pollinated. Hardly any fruit, almost no vegetables. All the food chains disrupted, from the human one down to the insect.

The beekeeper’s got twenty-eight hives in the park at the moment. He has no idea if they’ll survive the winter. Last year in the park only five out of twenty hives survived, and the year that followed was rough; a too-warm February, a too-cold spring, a too-wet summer; the bees needed supplementary feeding, God knows what’s to come. He began with imported New Zealand queens; they’re pretty, bright yellow and black. He’s worked at creating new colonies, new queens, in case of the same kind of bee loss as last year.

Urgent. Current climate. He works for no salary. He makes a tiny profit on the honey he sells. Local feral bees are much blacker in colour. Last year he saw the yellow of the bees foraging in the roses by the café in the Inner Circle and he knew immediately they were Regent’s Park’s bees. The spring honey tasted, last year, of lime and somehow of passionfruit. Does light have a taste? Does the park have a taste? The late-extraction honey last year was medicinal, sweet, dark and powerful.

Could any place be more historied and less ghostly? Where’s the ghost of the poet Elizabeth Barrett stealing the park’s flowers to put in an envelope addressed to her fiancé, Robert, in Italy? Where are the ghosts of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, sailing their paper boats on the pond? Where are the ghosts of the forty-odd people who went skating in January in 1867 and drowned in the lake when the ice gave way? Even them, cold and shivering, with the right to be a bit aggrieved, the right to hang about complaining for over a century, they’re just not here. It’s all open air. There’s nothing dead and gone about it. Elizabeth Bowen, watching the swans in their slow indignation ; and Richard Wagner standing at the lake throwing bread to the ducks; and Samuel Johnson causing a mini riot because it’s too wet for the fireworks he’s come to see; Charles Dickens, melancholy, a woman’s been drowned in the canal; old George Bernard Shaw young again on the seat of a far-too-fast bike; Dodie Smith filling the park with the imaginary barks of dogs; Sylvia Plath, real as can be, hearing the hungry lion roar over the crib of her newborn child; then Ted Hughes, newly bereaved, the zoo-wolf howl in his ears; and Virginia Woolf herself, howling or furious or sad, doesn’t matter which, walking and walking by the flower-beds till it cheers her up, leaves her happily making up phrases .

There’s the woman who comes into the park at half past six in the morning and spends all the daylight hours leaving little mounds of cake and sunflower seeds (she always buys organic) in the same places so the wildlife will find it there when it comes looking.

There’s the story of the man who, nearly two hundred years ago, bought four tiny birds from a sailor he met in the park. He put the birds in his pocket. When he got back to his lodgings he set the birds free. He watched them soar up over London.

Bet you any money, even if they’d been snared there in the first place, those birds flew straight back to the park.

*

One entire Park, compleat in unity of character . Endless stories, all crossing across each other, and mine tiny, negligent, quick as a blink, where nothing much happened except this: I stepped out of myself and into the park, I stepped off the pavement and into a place where there’s never a conclusion, where regardless of wars, tragedies, losses, finds, the sting or the sweetness of what’s gone in a life, or the preoccupations of any single time, any single being, on it goes, the open-air theatre of flowers, trees, birds, bees.

In this way, at this time, nothing concluded.

In other words: in foggy London town the sun, shining everywhere. The meeting could wait. It did wait, while I sat on the bench in Avenue Gardens and thought about the poem where the god of love gets stung by a bee and his mother laughs at him, and about whether there were as many different kinds of rose in the Rose Garden as there were different languages spoken in the city of London, and about the day back then when a visit to the park gave me back my own senses.

I had no idea where you were today in the world. But I remembered, sitting there in the park, what it meant that our paths had crossed. I remembered, too, that old Mini you had and how its floor had rusted right through, and how we could look down and see the surface of the road pass so quickly beneath us that going at thirty miles per hour, twenty, ten, even something near walking-pace, shocked me every time with what it was that words like fast or slow or road or city really meant.