Lockdowns have made me properly value both our garden and nearby green spaces. If I’m taking a breather on my own or with Teri, and have plenty of time, I’ll plump for Nonsuch Park (see Chapter 2). If I’m with one or two of our grandchildren, I head for Auriol, the nearest park with a playground. Sometimes we go on from there to Shadbolt Park, another half-mile away, which has a smaller playground, and diversions for me as well as for the children.

Shadbolt is the former home of Ernest Ifill Shadbolt, a man who turned to gardening in suburban Surrey after overseeing the building of railways in India. Born in London in 1851, he trained as an engineer at the Royal Indian Engineering College, in Egham, Surrey, and from 1874 spent the whole of his working life in the subcontinent. Among projects he had a hand in was the Lansdowne Bridge, which spans the Indus between Sukkur and Rohri in what is now Pakistan. It was the last link in a railway between Lahore, in the heart of “the granary” of British India, and the port of Karachi on the Arabian Sea. The bridge, consisting of two anchored cantilevers, each 310 feet long, carrying a suspended span of 200 feet in the middle, was one of the great engineering feats of the 19th century.

Shadbolt went on to be director of railway construction to the government of India from 1904 to 1906 and on his retirement returned to England. In 1920, he bought a plot of what had been farmland in the suburb of Worcester Park and built a house here (a house that’s unusual in the area in having no chimneys: he was an early adopter of central heating). The land, known then as “Darkfield” because a nearby wood — long since cleared for housing — cast deep shadows across the area, had in the 16^th century been part of the Great Park of Nonsuch Palace. 

Shadbolt was an advocate of open spaces and a senior member of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association. While laying out the fields around the house as a mini arboretum, he made the most of his contacts at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, finding and planting rare trees and shrubs from around the world. After his death in 1937, the local council bought the house (now a doctors’ surgery), gardens and an extra quarter-acre of land and opened it as a park. It’s a place of two halves: a playground, next to a field for kickabouts and an area with outdoor gym equipment; and a quiet garden with mature trees, pond and narrow paths, still much as it was when Shadbolt laid it out. 

I’ve been briefing myself recently with The Hidden Life of Trees, by the German forester Peter Wohlleben, but even if I hadn’t I wouldn’t be at a complete loss here. It’s a great place to wander if you’re still learning: little blue plaques bearing both common and Latin names are nailed to the trunks. When I was drawn by long clusters of almond-scented white flowers to a tree in one corner, a tree that wasn’t quite like the cherries in our road, I didn’t need to page through a guide or key “oval leaves, serrated” into an app. I just took a snap of the plaque and enlarged it on my phone: Prunus padus — bird cherry.

Back home, I searched for “bird cherry” on the website of the Woodland Trust. I learnt that the tree, which is common to northern Europe and northern Asia, is a bountiful one. Its flowers, which in spring provide an early source of nectar and pollen for bees, develop into reddish-black cherries that are eaten by both birds and mammals. Over the centuries, bird cherry has yielded everything from dye for fishing nets to eyewash for treating conjunctivitis. But what struck me most forcefully was a line under a section on “Mythology and symbolism”. It said that “the strong-smelling bark… [I hadn’t noticed a smell while I was in the park] was [once] believed to have magical properties that could ward off the plague”.

Shadbolt as a whole, though, isn’t a place where you find yourself  thinking of a world closed down. Coming down a slight incline into the park from Salisbury Road, you walk past the sporty types on the gym equipment, spritzing their hands with sanitiser before they touch the grips, and turn left. Then you’re away — to the west coast of the United States. 

Inside the railed-off garden area, you’ll pass trees that are native to coastal California: the Monterey cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) in the corner, with its green-yellow foliage in ascending sprays, and then an avenue of a dozen Monterey pines (Pinus radiata), shouldering their way to heaven and dropping en route a carpet of needles that reddens the compacted grass and is remarkably soft under foot.

Walking round Shadbolt will take you, too, past a California bay (Umbellularia Californica), also known as “the headache tree” because its olive-coloured leaves, when crushed, trigger headaches and migraine in some people; and a yellow buckeye (Aesculus flava), which produces candles of yellow flowers in spring. It’s native to eastern North America and primarily found in the southern Appalachian mountains. All its parts, the Royal Horticultural Society website gives warning, are “mildly poisonous by ingestion” — though another wonderfully named site, The North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox, run by North Carolina State University, says that “Native Americans made a nutritious food from the seeds, after removing the toxic element by roasting and soaking them. People used to carry the nuts for luck.”

In a corner next to the pond, there’s a swamp cypress (Taxodium distichum), a tree that in the Florida Everglades would share the water with alligators and pelicans. In Britain, it’s one of the few conifers to shed its leaves, which before they fall turn a fiery red. On the other side of the garden, there’s a tree that impresses, momentarily, even little Arthur, who’s been in Shadbolt with me a few times recently. It’s a coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), specimens of which, on the Pacific Coast of North America, have attained heights of more than 300 feet. “These trees,” I tell Arthur, “grow to be the tallest in the world. In America, some of them are so wide you can drive a car through them.” 

 “Really?”

 “Really.” I search on my phone, and up come pictures of “The Chandelier Tree in Drive-Thru Park”, in Leggett, California.

“Wow!” says Arthur. “When can we do that with this one?”

This one is just about wide enough, when you’re within reach of its fissured and flaking bark, to conceal the litter-and-dog-waste bin further along the path. Thanks to Wohlleben, I know that, while redwoods in Europe have grown to more than eight feet in diameter, they don’t do as well as they do in their homeland. They lack the help and protection of older relatives, and the soft, hummus-rich soil of the old-growth forest. But I don’t want Arthur fretting over an orphan, so I tell him this tree will take a while, and we should come back from time to time to see how it’s doing.

Shadbolt collected plenty of trees from beyond North America. There’s a Persian ironwood (Parrotia persica), whose bark peels in a similar way to that of the London plane. It’s named after a German naturalist, Friedrich Parrot, originates in Iran, and has leaves that in autumn turn vibrant shades of yellow, orange, red and purple. There’s a Corsican pine (Pinus nigra subspecies laricio), a “two-needle pine” (with leaves in bundles of two) that has bark so cracked it seems to be wearing scaly plates. There’s a blue Atlas cedar (Cedrus atlantica “Glauca Pendula”), with silvery blue-green needles, native to the Atlas Mountains of Northern Africa. And close to the pond, there’s a Lijiang (or “Li-Chiang”, as the blue plaque has it) spruce (Picea likiangensis), an evergreen conifer which — though its branches hang down rather than reach up — looks a little like a Christmas tree. It’s native to southwest China and Bhutan.

Shadbolt Park covers less than seven acres, but it’s a mind-expanding world of its own — like Romney Marsh, in Kent, where I spent a couple of days in the autumn of 1996.

* * * 

The day before I went to the marsh, I’d read a news story about a survey conducted in English primary schools, which found that a fifth of children between the ages of four and seven believed the world was flat. When I stood in the middle of the marsh, the children’s belief became perfectly understandable. All around, as far as I could see, there stretched a world of meadow and stream. It was green, gold… and flat as a table.

Romney Marsh, in the southern corner of Kent, is land that once was sea. It wasn’t wrested from the waves, like the polders of the Netherlands, but relinquished by them. Dykes have kept it drained and sea walls guard it. So where Julius Caesar once sailed, the rest of us can now walk. 

The name Romney Marsh is often used loosely of the triangle of land bounded by Rye, Hythe and Dungeness. Strictly speaking, however, it refers only to that section of the marsh north-east of the road between Appledore and New Romney. East of the marsh itself lie the shipping lanes of the Channel; to the west is the Royal Military Canal, dug over five years from 1804 in a Home-Guard panic when Napoleon, with his Grande Armée, threatened to follow the example of William the Conqueror.

Napoleon, if he got wind of the canal, doubtless had a good laugh. One contemporary visitor certainly did. Was it likely, he asked, that soldiers who had crossed the Rhine and the Danube “would be deterred by 30 feet of water”? The smugglers weren’t. They had been busy here since Ethelred the Unready (king of England from 978 to 1016), strapped for cash, came up with the idea of taxing every incoming tun of wine. To them the canal was just another dyke; no more of a hindrance than the feeble efforts of the authorities.

At the height of the smuggling trade, in the late 17th century, gangs of up to 200 would be in action, some riding to the coast to deal with “the run”, others ready to load the pack ponies, still more waiting with staves for the “Preventive Men”. The latter, as Kipling recorded, could count on little help:

Five and twenty ponies, 
Trotting through the dark — 
Brandy for the Parson,
’Baccy for the Clerk;
Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,
And watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

To the villagers of the marsh, “the owlers”, as the smugglers were known, were heroes. They were admired for their daring, but even more for their ability to provide, at reasonable prices, items that duty had turned into luxuries: tea, salt and tobacco. They perform a similarly useful service today. Their ghosts are summoned regularly by the local tourist boards, which sell the marsh as “smuggling country, an area rich in history”. It is rich, too, in land, long cropped by famously sturdy sheep and increasingly given over to corn, potatoes, cabbages, peas and oil-seed rape. But it is land of relentless flatness, with few notable trees, and no vistas to speak of.

A pig farmer told me he had read countless lyrical pieces by visitors about the year-round charms of the marsh. He lived there and, bird life aside — the herons, the harriers, the warblers — he couldn’t see the attraction. “It’s got nothing going for it outside the summer. Let’s be honest: Romney Marsh is the back end of Britain.” Richard Barham, who was rector of the marsh parish of Snargate in 1817, saw it differently. Barham, like that other cleric, Gilbert White, author of The Natural History of Selborne (1789), viewed his immediate surroundings through a magnifying glass: “The world,” he wrote, “according to the best geographers, is divided into Europe, Asia, Africa, America and Romney Marsh.”

The marsh, even as most liberally defined, is no more than 25 miles in length and 10 miles deep. Stick to the roads and it looks like a compact enough part of the great British food factory. Leave them, head into the fields on the public footpaths, and everything changes; the marsh does have a way of assuming continental airs. Several times I set out through the fields, walking between one village and another. It was invariably a circuitous route, along paths that skirted the dykes, but there would always be a farm or a church tower to head for, never more than two or three miles away. I could usually see and hear cars, too, hurtling along the main road on at least one side of me.

As I pressed on, sheep rose and hurried away. Rabbits dived for their burrows. Geese flapped from the rushes. Then the mist descended. Not an all-enveloping mist, but a curtain hanging on the horizon. I had lost my bearings. Cars, birds and beasts were gone. I was alone in the middle of the marsh — and then the rain came hammering down. Mud sucked at my boots, and even the inside of my “waterproof” camera bag felt damp. Smugglers and tourist board, Kipling and Barham — I cursed them all.

A visit to Dymchurch, on the coastal edge of the marsh, deepened the gloom. It was here that the Lords of Romney Marsh held court, issuing orders for the maintenance of the dykes and the sea walls. In Henry VIII’s time, anyone so rash as to cut down a thorn tree, the best raw material for wall building, would forfeit an ear. 

Dymchurch, part village, part seaside resort, lies seven-and-a-half feet below the high-water mark; the wall that guards it is now made of concrete. It still has three Martello towers, those squat round forts built, like the Royal Military Canal, as a bulwark against Napoleon. I had hoped to look inside one, but it was closed. A sign nearby seemed to sum up all that is worst about seaside Britain: “Toilets — Easter to 30th Sept”.

The churches restored my spirits. These solid buildings raised on mounds above the water — many with Norman foundations but built on the site of earlier Saxon churches — would alone justify a trip to the marsh. They are crammed with antiquities, if not with people. As the sea retreated, so the ports and towns for which the churches were built shrank to hamlets. Fairfield’s church, dedicated to St Thomas à Becket, I lost in the mist. But I dawdled in St Augustine’s at Brookland, with its precious lead font and its odd belfry, detached from the main building and looking like a stack of candle snuffers. 

At Old Romney, where the Domesday Book (compiled over 1085 and 1086) recorded a church, three fisheries, a mill and a wharf, only the church, St Clement’s, remains, cut off from most of the village by the A259 and hiding behind an ancient yew. Syn was the saving of the place. Money for restoration had run out in the 1960s. Then filming began of Dr Syn, Russell Thorndike’s story of a smuggling parson. The film-makers wanted a location; the parish council of St Clement’s got a big cheque. I had read about the pews, but they still came as a shock when I stepped from the darkness of the porch: bright pink, edged with black. 

Snargate Church, its interior walls washed white, was more restrained, perhaps of necessity. A notice said that, if the church seemed poorly maintained, “we can only plead that we are a very sparsely populated and impoverished parish”. Another notice listed men who during the Second World War had watched from the bell tower for enemy paratroopers. They included W Frost, “who had one wooden stump leg and found getting down the 65 steps so difficult that he said ‘never again’”.

I don’t know whether Paul McCartney — who’s had a farm in Peasmarsh, north-west of Rye, since the 1970s — has ever darkened the door of the church, but I do know he’s had a pint in the Red Lion across the road. Doris Jemison, the landlady, showed me his name in her visitors’ book. Doris was something of a celebrity herself, having featured in several books about great village pubs. She told me that the Red Lion, with its bare boards, low beams and panelled walls, was at least 450 years old and had been in her family’s hands since 1911. It was last refurbished in 1890 and could do with a lick of paint, but the regulars wouldn’t let her touch it. “They smell it when I’m painting the kitchen and they say, ‘Doris, you’re not going to paint in here, are you?’”

So Doris didn’t paint. Nor did she serve food other than crisps or nuts; but there was beer and cider from the cask — which was every bit as good as McCartney had said it was. I left her sitting by the window, grey head bent over a book of Myths and Legends, looking like some twinkly white witch.

That night, I settled on a bar stool in the Rose & Crown in Old Romney and read a report written by a visitor to the very same inn in October 1743. He was one Mr Clare, customs officer from Hythe. On arriving, he found the stables “filled with Smuglers [sic] Horse”. In the morning he had seen “18 men (armed with brass muskatoons, brass ffuzees, and pistols) and one boy, all with brazen faces… with 60 horses all loaded with dry goods… they were such fellows as dare bid Defiance to all Laws and Government”.

Sitting there, among plump Rotarians awaiting yet another dinner, I found the report hard to credit. The landlord gave me some help: “Think of how close we are to France, how cheap it is to cross… It would pay the customs men even now to nose around these pubs in the evening.”