ONE

August 16. A notice advertises a visit to a ‘secret garden’, the garden of the old Bishop’s Palace, it doesn’t say what the tickets cost, but since it’s organised by the Cromwell’s House business it won’t be cheap. Just because a garden stands behind high walls doesn’t make it secret. The Bishop’s Palace garden is merely private. A secret garden is surely within itself secret, or secretive, to be discovered, to surprise. I’ve looked down into the old palace garden from the heights of the cathedral tower, and it looks open, expansive, with broad lawns and monumental plane trees, a rational space. On the other side of the Green the gardens of the Chantry house and another big eighteenth century house are behind similar walls built of the beautiful local brick, not unlike London stock but with hints of more colour, at least eight feet high, thick, capped by a ridge made of the same brick, with nourishing swags of ivy leaved toad flax and snap dragons of various colours but dominantly a shade of deep blood red. The walls of these two grand houses continue on either side of the cut-through called Green Lane which runs from St Mary’s street to the cathedral Green. I was thinking I might take a step ladder there and pick the almost ripe plums which were hanging over from the Chantry, but one morning I saw that they had all gone. Just now bright yellow rudbeckias overtop the wall on the other side, they must be huge plants. The old sacristy buildings line one side of the east end of the High Street; their gardens are separated from the cathedral green by another high wall. There are several gates in the wall but they are always locked; I’ve never had so much as a glimpse inside.

But on the south side of the cathedral, along the lane which runs up from the Porta towards the priory, there are gardens you can look into, though you may have to stand on tip-toe. And the gate into the yard of the current Bishop’s house is always open; from the yard you can peep through a gate into another garden. Sometimes on a table in the yard apple juice sits for sale, with an honesty box. Predominantly Bramley’s though, too sour for me, but more palatable if diluted, and £3 a bottle. All proceeds to the Church of England’s Children’s Society. On the other side of that road (which is strangely called the Gallery, after a covered walkway which used to connect the Bishop’s Palace to the cathedral) are the so-called secret gardens, behind another huge wall in the same style as the others; all you can see of those gardens are the huge plane trees, reputed to have been planted in the 17^th century. A door in the wall has a notice, with the King’s school logo, which says make sure this door is locked.

Here and there in these environs, notably near the old tithe barn, by the little green which also hosts a well organised display of bedding, square wooden planters contain phormiums, which seems to me a terrible shame. Phormiums always seem to insist on showing off in public. Why are they never kept secret?

TWO

This evening the gate which divides the green in two and is normally, as the sign says, locked at half past five so preventing a circuit of the cathedral, wasn’t, and it was silent and predominantly dark all around the east side and the south side, since the King’s School which peoples most of the old monastic buildings is on holiday, allowing darkness and silence. Then coming round to where the view opens up to the south across Cherry Hill and its dark trees the three quarters moon was rising. Reflections from the bulk of the cathedral in the stillness amplified the layered sounds of a long goods train below, a hifi experience in surround sound – the laboured crescendo of the locomotive fading with the swelling entry of the reluctant procession of clanking slave waggons with all their squeaks and groans. A bass solo as an intro to the chorus. As hard to describe as the screaming and the flight of the swifts around St Mary’s, gone too soon to Africa.

Then as I walked back along the Gallery I saw that the door which must always be locked was wide open! This was almost as shocking as if stones had been thrown through the palace windows. I stepped inside and saw two lines of waist high posts with bright lights on top of them marking paths, presumably; the rest was blackness, apart from the nearest plane tree which caught some of the light from the posts and looked quite grand. Blinded by the light, as the song has it. But there must have been a great expanse of lawn because anything above waist height would, like the plane tree, have been illuminated, and so, unless there were distant mysteries the gardens would reveal, during the day, the open prospect of parkland, a rational landscape without secrets, but kept apart for the private pleasure of a few.

Let there be light, yes, but not too much of it, I don’t want to be struck down by a fundamentalist vision that blackens everything else. I want to be able to see the detail in the shadows.

Then I remembered how sometimes people who are not confident in the dark or in the country, take a torch with them even on a fairly bright night, so that all they see is a narrow circle of light, beyond that, nothing. Turn the torch off and you’ll get used to the dark, I said.

THREE

There is one interesting garden which is usually open, (at set times, otherwise high walled and securely locked,) and run by knowledgeable volunteers, the almonry garden on the east side. Dogs on leads. It does have secrets. Any garden which is dense with plants, with few open spaces, which encourages you to look for the details, is revealed slowly as you walk through it.

Diversion: Then I remembered Joey telling me how, in his days as a criminal, he used to ride on the top floor of buses at night to look through the windows of the bourgeoisie, confident people who saw no need to draw the blinds and who despised net curtains, at their possessions and books, to find places to rob, although he began to feel attracted to them, and curiosity and envy grew in him. Bookshelves up to the high ceilings, books accumulated one by one, two by two, a display of patience and learning, or, because of course so many sit there unread, a statement of aspiration and good intention, although Joey wasn’t to know that. Anyway, I thought those lit interiors were like secret gardens.

Excursions: High ceilings: that reminds me. Living space is generally reckoned, by estate agents at least, in terms of square metres of floor, but working class homes have lower ceilings than those of the middle class. We have more volume. Generally of course we bourgeois need more space than the little people: we have so many books, so much inherited furniture, so much documentation and memorialisation, we have archives and collections and our relatives are so generous with christmas and birthday presents. But especially as I grew older I was getting fed up with my high ceilings in London. I would sit polluted by my little wood stove and think of the heat gradually accumulating in a thick blanket eight feet up while whispers of cold air continually attacked my toes. And it was becoming dangerous to climb up on a step ladder to get to books and maps and photographs on the top shelves, and if I did, I nearly choked on years of dust. It’s the books that make the greatest display. Some of our favourites are still unread, we know them not by their contents but by their reputations and the colours of their covers. Is there a hope still that in advanced old age we will forget our new-loved screens and sit down quietly to read Proust or Dostoevsky without falling asleep? The real advantage of high ceilings was that tobacco smoke drifted up there. Babies would be relatively safe, crawling on the draughty floor.

Some of us have downsized to lower ceilings and got rid of hundreds and hundreds of books and felt liberated. So they say.

The other day the dog approached two young women sitting on a corner of the green with music and a picnic, they were all smiles. What a nice dog! said one. Better than yours, I said, for they had a black plastic dog about a foot high seated between them in a strangely cat-like pose. What is it? I said. It’s a speaker, she said. Oh! yes! So it is. That’s why the music was coming out of it. They were from a village near here – so many villages around here, the fens somehow being both empty and densely populated.

FOUR

Sunday august 18. Last night I went down to the river after dark, an orange moon had risen, almost full. Just by the railway bridge I met the old couple again who watched birds and trains. In the dark he was silent and she was loquacious and entertaining as ever. She said they were going home to feed the hedgehogs. Five hedgehogs come every day, after dark. I didn’t quite understand this manoeuvre, but they leave the lights on downstairs and then go upstairs to look out at them from a darkened room. I said what do you feed them, she said hedgehog food! Oh, you can buy special hedgehog food? Oh yes, she said, moist or crunchy. Apparently their hedgehogs will only eat the moist stuff.

The football season is back and I hear on radio 5 that Kevin de Bruyne’s strawberry-blonde hair is flopping in the West London afternoon sunshine. poetry is all around us.

FIVE

August 20, dull and damp. Last night a few people stood on the river bank looking across towards the cloudy south east, but the special full moon failed to show. Once again I met the old couple who watch trains and birds. A brightly lit passenger train cruised past and the driver blew his horn, a couple of toots. The lady waved towards the train and said, oh, that’s my nephew. He’d recognise you then? Yes, he knows we’d be out now. As I walked back in the dark a man pointed out just a few scraps of light which managed to leach through the clouds. Further along the old couple – must ask their names – had stopped to talk to a young woman who had a vivid star-filled picture of the night sky on her smart phone which indicated where to look for the super moon. In the usual place, I thought. Sort of south east or east south east, at this time of year. But they were looking towards a group of willow trees on the opposite bank and I told them that the whereabouts of the moon was hidden by the trees, they’d need to walk back fifty yards or so and even then the chances were they’d only see a smudge. But just before I went to bed it briefly appeared bold and perfect cutting through the the shadows and highlights of cloud drama.

SIX

August 21. A clear sky and last night a glorious big almost full moon. Still tinged with orange when low which apparently is the result of smoke from wildfires in north America. I saw it rise from Cherry Hill and woke several times in the night to see its steady progress through the sky, brighter as it climbed higher, lighting up the room.