In that virtual library where I brushed up on the history of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, I learn that on March 15, in response to the pandemic, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles suspended masses, and LA County ordered the closure of bars and gyms. Closer to home, in Nonsuch Park — named for a peerless but long-gone Tudor palace —  there’s a ban on cars.

When I went in on my usual run, I found all the car parks closed, presumably to discourage people from arriving in groups and breathing over one another as they got out of their vehicles. That left more elbow room for locals, for runners and cyclists, but I did feel sorry for those who wouldn’t be able to enjoy the space because they couldn’t get there under their own steam.

I’m guessing the last time anything with an engine presented a threat in Nonsuch Park was during the Second World War, when Brian Jackman, that great observer of the African bush, was growing up nearby and the Luftwaffe’s squadrons were roaring over Surrey to drop their bombs on London. He was five when the war broke out (and at the age of eight would be evacuated for two years to a farm near Bude, in Cornwall). He remembers that “at infant school when the sirens moaned we filed out of class to sing ‘Run, Rabbit Run’ in the air-raid shelters”.

Long before he set eyes on the Maasai Mara, which he has described vividly in his books with the film-maker Jonathan Scott, The Big Cat Diary and The Marsh Lions, Brian had imagined it in a suburb of London. In Wild About Britain, a collection of his writing about landscapes and wildlife, he recalls the park of his boyhood:

Nonsuch… had once been the site of a great palace built by Henry VIII and subsequently demolished… But of course we knew nothing of this. Instead, enclosed by fleets of blowsy elms, its unshorn meadows were our prairies, its hawthorn hedges our African savannahs. In one field a landmine had fallen, blowing a deep crater in the clay that quickly filled with rain; and nature, always swift to exploit a niche, soon transformed it into a wildlife haven… Nonsuch was the perfect adventure playground, where I swung like Tarzan through the trees, made Robin Hood bows from young ash staves and built Apache dens among the cow parsley…

Reading that, I’m reminded of when and where I first registered the name Brian Jackman. It was in the early 1980s, in typescript on the sub-editors’ desk of The Sunday Times, on the fifth floor of 200 Gray’s Inn Road, London, where I worked initially as a casual and then on contract. Around us was a newsroom clattering with typewriters. Occasionally, too, there was a swoosh and a rattle, as a canister bearing copy headed towards the printers through a pneumatic tube system, like a pea in a giant peashooter. 

On Saturday my colleagues and I subbed stories appearing in the early pages of the paper, which tended to be “hard” news in several senses of the word (though not necessarily as hard as in the front page from an old New York Post stuck to a partition that screened off the picture desk: “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR”). On Fridays we worked mainly on foreign-desk stories and on softer pieces from other parts of the paper. Occasionally there would be something from Brian, either for the travel section, which sent him everywhere from the Falkland Islands to Everest Base Camp, or for the later pages of the news section, where he was among writers given space for the way they told a story as much as for the story itself. Dropping the copy on my desk, the then chief sub, John Wardroper, a lean and learned Canadian, would say: “Here’s a little treat for you: another lovely piece from Brian Jackman. Just tick it up.” In other words: make paragraph marks for the printers, correct any typos; breathe on it, but don’t edit it.

I know now that Brian had joined The Sunday Times in 1970 as a travel writer, after, as he modestly puts it, “an undistinguished career” that he had begun as a Fleet Street messenger boy. Twenty years further on, he left to go freelance. It would have been in the mid-1990s, when I was working at The Daily Telegraph and had moved on to the travel desk, that we came into contact again. Once more, I was steering his copy on to the page, and occasionally even commissioning him. Brian was by then living in Bridport, in Dorset, and neither of us knew then that we had a London suburb in common.

In May 2010, I wrote a piece about a new luxury train in India, the Maharajas’ Express. I’d spent a week on it, being greeted at stations by turbaned musicians, dancers balancing bowls on their skulls and smiling women dabbing vermilion dots on my forehead and draping garlands over my shoulders. After all that, I said, going back to the 07.57 from Stoneleigh to Clapham Junction was a bit of a letdown.

As soon as the piece appeared, in came an email from Brian: “Stoneleigh? I didn’t know you lived in Stoneleigh. “I grew up there.” He went on to tell me how he had seen a Hurricane shoot down a Messerschmitt right over his street, Briarwood Road. “The Messerschmitt pilot was hanging over the cockpit, having tried and failed to bale out. After it crashed, the Hurricane came past in a victory roll and we all ran out into the street to cheer. Another time my mate and I were walking home down the London Road (near Nonsuch Park gates) and we heard — and then saw — a buzz-bomb coming straight towards us. We dived for cover into someone’s front garden and lay down until we heard it explode in the adjoining fields. Then we rubbed the dirt off our knees and went home for tea. No counselling in those days!”

It was quieter when we arrived. Teri and I moved into 1930s suburbia writ large in 1988, partly because we’d failed to find our dream Edwardian house and had tired of hunting, and partly because Stoneleigh made such a convenient base. At one end of our street are a junior and middle school; at the other end is a railway station exactly half an hour from Waterloo. There are shops and pubs within walking distance, and, when we arrived, you could have walked to a cinema, too, the Rembrandt, but that closed 10 years later. And there’s the great green lung of Nonsuch, with its fields, woods, ponds and gardens, and the turreted 19^th-century Mansion House, in Tudor Gothic style, which, before 2020, was regularly the venue for weddings.

Until the middle of the 20^th century, many visitors to the park would have taken the Mansion House for “Nonsuch Palace”. They walked over the hidden site of the palace, half a mile away, without realising they had done so. The building ordered by Henry VIII, which would have no equal and which would be called “None Such”, had disappeared without trace.

Henry had commissioned the palace to celebrate the birth of his son and heir, Edward, and the advent of the 30th year of his own reign. To make way for it, a whole village, Cuddington, was wiped off the map, and fields that had been farmed for centuries turned into deer parks. Work began in April 1538, and after seven years had cost £24,536 — half as much again as had been spent on Hampton Court in the same period. After Henry’s death in January 1547, completion was overseen by Henry Fitzalan, twelfth Earl of Arundel, who bought the palace from the Crown in 1556. Elizabeth I regained Nonsuch in 1592 — and would spend time there every summer — and it remained in royal hands until 1670, when Charles II gave it to his former mistress, Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine, a big spender and a bad gambler. She had the palace demolished over 1682-3 and sold off for building materials; she also broke up the parks.

In its heyday, Nonsuch had been renowned throughout Europe for its splendour and magnificence, particularly in the panels on the walls of its inner court, which covered some 900 feet on the inward and outward walls. Created in stucco and carved slate, they were work of the highest quality, designed to show the young Prince Edward the duties he should fulfil and the pitfalls he should avoid. The palace had provided work not only for builders and craftsmen from near and far but, over the 150 years of its life, for many local people in Ewell and Cheam, who kept its household fed and watered and its fabric maintained.

Halfway through the 20th century, though, with its plundered ruins levelled off and buried, Nonsuch was as little remembered as the village of Cuddington. Then along came John Dent, a professional librarian with a keen interest in local history and a mission to “restore the palace, in words and pictures, to… the general public”. He began collecting for Epsom and Ewell Library copies of every book, manuscript and picture that featured the place. Over 18 months, he built up a plan of the likely layout and position of the palace buildings, a plan that proved remarkably accurate when excavations were made in 1959 and 1960. Finds were catalogued for later exhibition, among them fragments of those inner-court panels: cherubs, angels’ wings, slender hands and feet, swags of flowers and fruit. “They, more than anything else,” Dent writes in The Quest for Nonsuch, “drove home a full realisation of the ruthlessness and wantonness of those who pulled down the palace.” 

Once the digging was done, and the layout made clear, visitors came and toured the site. Then the foundations of both the palace and the nearby banqueting hall, having been recorded in minute detail, were buried again. This time, though, their locations were marked. Walk through Nonsuch now, and you’ll be reminded on posters, plans and bollards of what lies beneath your feet.

The parkland is today about a seventh of what it was. The palace was originally surrounded by two parks: the Great Park of 1,000 acres (to the west of the modern-day London Road and extending over what are now the suburbs of Stoneleigh and Worcester Park), and the Little Park, of 671 acres (east of where the road now runs), at the heart of which lay the palace and its gardens. It’s a part of the latter that survives today, covering about 250 acres, still “a very large open space”, as the website of Epsom and Ewell Council puts it, but until recently I couldn’t say that I’d made the most of it. I’d hit the grass when running, but on walks through the park I’d long tended to stick to the marked paths, the widest of which, The Avenue, runs from a gate at the A24, London Road, entrance right over the centre of where the palace would have been.

It wasn’t until halfway through 2019 that I bought a copy of John Dent’s book. After reading it, I printed out a “Nonsuch Trail” written by local volunteer historians and followed it to the site of what was the banqueting house, built in the 1540s. The trail, marked by numbered bollards, leads through what used to be known as “the Wilderness”, which is unkempt today but in Tudor times would have been carefully tended, with sanded walks, menageries of stone animals and aviaries housing real birds under topiary trees. Beyond it was “the Grove of Diana”, dedicated to the goddess, which had a fountain, a grotto, a temple and an archway with verses telling the story of Actaeon, whose punishment for spying on Diana and her nymphs was to be turned into a stag and hunted to death by his own hounds. The grove — all trace of which has gone — was built in the late 1500s on the orders of Henry Fitzalan, perhaps (the trail guide suggests) as a comment on his own failure to win the hand of Elizabeth I, whom he had entertained lavishly at Nonsuch after her coronation.

The banqueting house, too, is long gone, but the platform on which it stood survives, its edging bricks rising from the brambles. It marked the highest point in the Little Park, commanding views to Windsor, Richmond, Hampton Court, London, and the surrounding downs. During hunts the banqueting house would have served as a grandstand, perhaps with the deer being driven past it, and as a place for “the banquet” — which in Tudor and Stuart times was more dessert than main meal, consisting of  sweet foods, spiced wine and sculptural sugar-work. As a vantage point, it’s not what it was: you hear the roar of the Ewell bypass and, until summer thickens the hedges, see traffic hurtle past, but light refreshments are still taken. Now and again, at the base of the conifers where teenagers like to gather, you find discarded beer cans.

I’d always felt fortunate to have Nonsuch on our doorstep, and more so after reading Richard Powers’s The Overstory. In this branching, twining, 600-page redwood of a novel, disparate characters are brought together by trees and, in a world where the felling of forests is speeding global warming, do all they can to save them. It’s a book full of memorable phrase-making: the sound of wind-shaken aspens is “polite applause”; the wood-wide web, by which individual plants are linked to one another beneath the soil, is “their underground welfare state”; campaigners are moved to action by the realisation that “We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.” The Overstory as a whole is a reminder — and I’ve pinched this from the author — that there’s a dead metaphor at the heart of the word bewilderment.* Since reading it, I’ve been seeing trees in an entirely different way. Hearing them differently, too. Walking through Nonsuch, I’d catch a new message from the wind-swished branches. Get to know us, they seemed to be saying.

Late in the day, I’m trying. London plane? That’s always been easy, thanks to that bark of damp green plaster and lime-wash (though I’m puzzled that a tree that can survive pretty well anything — drought, exhaust fumes, nailed notices and impacted soil — feels the need to clothe itself in camouflage).

I know an oak from its leaves, but I still need to check my tree guide to remind myself of the differences between the English and the sessile. I recognise a rowan when it’s wearing its red berries. I’ve never had any trouble with horse chestnuts: conkers and candles — those hyacinth-like stalks of pinkish white flowers that appear in May — are a giveaway, and even in winter the brown-red sticky buds are a help. Just to the left of the gate I usually pass through into the park, I think there’s an ash tree close to a false acacia, but I’d need them both to be in leaf to tell them apart.

To the left of a bollard on The Avenue marking the Nonsuch Trail, I pass what I’m now pretty sure is a crack willow (Salix fragilis), so-called after its habit of splitting with cracks and fissures, and the sound with which its twigs break. It has long, thin leaves with toothed edges, dark green above, lighter below, and, from May, being a male tree, will have yellow catkins (the female tree’s catkins are green).

Turning towards home on a run, I’d pass a sapling near the Mansion House. I took it in winter, from its greyish bark, for a silver birch. Then I saw it with its leaves on; leaves whose striking shape led to the tree’s common name in its native China: “i-cho”, meaning duck’s foot. It’s a ginkgo biloba, or maidenhair tree. There are individual trees there reputed to be more than 2,500 years old, and fossils of ginkgo leaves have been discovered in rocks that date back more than 200 million years — before the time of the dinosaurs.

Having sworn off flying for 2020, I knew I’d be doing less travel writing, and was thinking of subjects I might turn to closer to home. I had notions of finding an anniversary or some other peg that might enable me to write about Nonsuch. Maybe I could learn a little more about trees, too, by getting my hands dirty with the Nonsuch Voles, the volunteers who help with gardening at the Mansion House and woodland management elsewhere in the park… Health precautions have put paid to that, but they haven’t stopped me exploring on my own.

On my way to the park, I sometimes walk along Briarwood Road, past the house where Brian Jackman lived. It would have been built as a chalet bungalow but, in common with most houses in the area, has since been extended. It has a tile-hung bay window at the front, and the door’s at the side. Part of the ground to the front is paved with bricks, but the other side has a healthy-looking lawn. I’m reminded that, during the war, Brian’s father dug up the back lawn to feed the family with potatoes. Sitting on a bench in the park recently, swotting up with The Quest for Nonsuch, I was reminded, too, of responses in these parts to earlier crises.

John Dent tells how “Fear of the [bubonic] plague in 1636 and 1637 caused orders to be issued forbidding people from London to come near the Palace, the great concourse of pedlars, tradesmen and others at Ewell fair being regarded as a particular source of danger…” Then, in 1665, a royal proclamation was issued for the transfer of the Exchequer to Nonsuch, “by reason of the great and dangerous increase of the plague in and about the City of Westminster”. Samuel Pepys, who was then Surveyor-General of the Victualling Office, responsible for feeding the Royal Navy, and had regular dealings with the Exchequer, first became aware of the proposed move on August 11. The day before, with the week’s total plague deaths announced as more than 3,000, he had made his will, “the town growing so unhealthy, that a man cannot depend upon living two days”.

* A more recent novel from Richard Powers, Bewilderment (2021), is about a troubled father and son who find temporary solace by heading back into the wild.

Brian Jackman’s Wild About Britain is published by Bradt, as are West With The Light: My Life in Nature, which has more on his boyhood in Stoneleigh, and his latest book, Wild About Dorset: The Nature Diary of a West Country Parish.

My (1988) edition of The Quest for Nonsuch by John Dent was published by London Borough of Sutton Leisure Services.