I reached London on a Sunday afternoon. The man at the immigration desk stared hard when I said I was on holiday. “Are you here on work,” he asked.
“No,” I said, savouring the word as I spoke it. “Holiday!”
He gave me a curious, disbelieving glance. “What do you do?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I replied. That was exactly what I wanted to do. Nothing.
“Nothing?” his eyebrows rose. An Indian who did nothing and was on holiday. It was exactly the sort of conundrum the U.K. Border Police didn’t need.
“I am a writer,” I said.
“Oh, so you are here to meet your publishers.”
“Yes,” I said, realising there was no need for me to convince him about my lack of plans.
The thought of me having something to do seemed to make him happy. He stamped my passport and said, “All the best for the meeting.”
What meeting? I laughed in my head.
Anita Nair Why is it that the idea of me going on a trip for no real reason seemed to bother people as much, I wondered, as the taxi drove me to West Sussex, which was where I was going to begin this journey of nothing towards nothing.
Every year, when the summer heat presses down on my head and the monsoon seems like a distant mirage, I dream of being in a place where it is neither too hot nor too cold. Where the trees are ablaze with blossoms and where the grass is a green carpet strewn with wild flowers. I dream of lying under a tree and letting my thoughts drift with the clouds. In a strange way, I knew I was dreaming of spring in England. Except, there was no real reason for me to travel to England at that point.
I very seldom travel on a whim. Most of my trips have work attached somewhere. I manage to add a few days to a business trip to explore; however, it isn’t easy. Like in Kathakali, where one minute of performance has to be supported by 100 hours of practice, two days of exploring a place necessitates a week of rigorous work. But this time, and for the first time, I decided I was going away with no definite plan or agenda. I would just take the requisite visas and let destiny take its course.
One April morning, I went offline, said a quiet good bye to my family and slipped away. It had been a very busy first part of the year. I had set up >Anita’s Attic , a writing mentorship programme, and the 12 weeks had sapped me of energy. Like a caterpillar gnawing relentlessly at leaves, I had worked steadily without a break, but now a curious lethargy had settled within me and all I wanted to do was withdraw to someplace quiet and let time do its magic. I dreamt of entering a state where I would be free from responsibilities and the roles I was expected to play. For a while, I just wanted to be a butterfly. But, before that, there was yet another stage for me to go through. That of the pupa.
I turned off my mobile phone and, like a pupa, curled into a ball on the flight. Knowing I was unreachable made me feel liberated. Much as I love technology, I have increasingly felt as if it were dictating my life. On a flight, sans phone and Internet, I finally felt I had made my escape.
Patrick and Carmen are very old friends of mine. Each time I go to the U.K., I always stay a few days with them. However, this time I intended to stay with them for just three days as I didn’t want to get too comfortable. My journey would be stillborn then.
That night, as I lay down in my usual room in their home, Ketrey, after a celebration supper of what they knew I liked to eat: batter-fried haddock, mashed potatoes and steamed vegetables on the side, followed by meringues and the first of the season’s strawberries and raspberries, I felt a giant, black cloud lifting from over my head. The pupa was beginning to crack.
The next morning, after we had caught up on family news and life events, eaten breakfast and looked at photographs, they asked me what I would like to do. “Nothing,” I said.
They looked nonplussed. Usually, I have a laundry list of things to do: go to an old bookstore, shop for antique porcelain, go to a play or to the opera, visit some dead writer’s home or grave, see an exhibition at a particular art gallery, etc.
Where do butterflies go to? So I smiled and said, “How about a garden?”
The thing is, very seldom do beautiful gardens come without a home attached and so it was with Nymans. This one even had an old bookshop apart from the standard store which, apart from everything else, sold T-shirts, aprons, jams, watering cans and fridge magnets. I gave myself a stern lecture before stepping in. She who travels light travels fleetest, etc. But in the old bookstore, I found two book titles that piqued my interest: Victorian Ghost Stories and Outraged of Tunbridge Wells .
I only needed a second to decide. The books would travel with me. If I didn’t like the first 10 pages, I would leave them behind on a train somewhere for someone else to find and keep, or leave behind.
It was a cold but bright spring day as I walked through the grounds, pausing beneath trees, gazing at shrubs, marvelling at the daffodils and blue bells, sniffing at camellias, pausing at a bench beneath a giant walnut tree… I was living my dream; I was a butterfly in a garden in the English countryside. I was ready to fly.
In the late 19th century, Ludwig Messel, a member of a typically creative German Jewish family, decided to settle in England. He bought the Nymans estate, a house set in 600 acres on a sloping site overlooking the picturesque High Weald of Sussex. One of its highlights was its garden planning. Messel brought in topiary features to contrast with new plants from temperate zones around the world. His head gardener from 1895 was James Comber, whose expertise helped form plant collections of camellias, rhododendrons, which here, unusually at that point of time, were combined with magnolias. William Robinson, whose ideas about wild gardening spurred the movement that evolved into the English cottage garden, a parallel to the search for honest simplicity and vernacular style reflective of the British Arts and Crafts movement, advised in establishing the Wild Garden.
The Nymans garden is like walking through a dream. Robinson’s influence is seen in the absence of standard roses, statuary, sham Italian gardens, and other artifices common in gardening at the time. Instead, the garden flows seamlessly with alpine plants in rock gardens; dense plantings of perennials and groundcovers that expose no bare soil; use of hardy perennials and native plants; and large plantings of perennials in natural-looking drifts.
The garden reached a peak in the 1930s and was regularly opened to the public. But a disastrous fire in the house in 1947 turned it into a ruin. The house was partially rebuilt and became the home of Anne Messel. In 1953, it was willed to the National Trust with 275 acres of woodland open to the public.
(To be continued)
This is the first of a three-part travel series by novelist Anita Nair.
