They weren’t familiar park visitors, but a couple with a specific purpose, laden down with camera equipment. They unpacked carefully, without the swift expertise of a professional photographer and his model, working on the clock. Years ago, we went to Japan on our honeymoon, and the girl’s outfit was something I’d seen before in Tokyo – a pink and white frilly knee-length crinoline, flailing with ribbons. In Harajuku, it used to be called Lolita-style, and the girls parade up and down competitively. In this country, I don’t suppose anyone has dressed like that since Bubbles Rothermere died.
The only sign of embarrassment was that they would not catch anyone’s eye. I was in my stout tweed; Greta in her tiny waxed coat; we sat on a chilly bench and watched with unabashed fascination. It was a bright day, but pretty cold. A reflective parasol was unpacked; a tripod; a spotlight; a huge Leica and an array of lenses. The patient girl stood in the middle of a south London park and put on her practised, blissful face. She must have been freezing, but she was radiant, and the cold wind was shaking the long grove of cherry trees. The blossom would appear to be floating all round her. It was going to be a ravishing set of photographs, you could see. I popped my woolly gloves back on.
The cherry blossom in Battersea Park draws half of Japanese London south of the river, regular as Lent, every year. There are about 60 cherry trees in a double line, cutting the big field diagonally in two, as well as odd patches of threes and fours in the rest of the park. Around the beginning of March, the buds form, reach the point of an exquisite pink cloud like nothing else before bursting into blossom, instantly beginning to shed. And the annual pilgrims turn up.
Cherry blossom is a big deal in Japan – I’ve been told the progress of blossom features in the television news like a weather forecast. For some reason, Battersea Park seems to be a big deal there, too. About 40 years ago, the Japanese donated a splendid riverside pagoda with gilded statues of Buddha. It’s supposedly in the support of peace, and permission for it was apparently granted as the last passive-aggressive act of the Greater London Council in its 1980s Nuclear Free Zone mood. How it must have longed to plonk it opposite the Ministry of Defence.
In any case, along with the Peace Pagoda came a Japanese Buddhist monk called Gyoro Nagase. He’s been living in a hut in the Old English Garden, redesignated a temple, since 1985. The park officials will assure you that him beating a drum and performing his rituals is ‘a familiar sight’, but since he only does it at sunrise before popping back to his holy hut, I’ve never glimpsed him, and don’t think I’ve met anyone else who ever has.
But the other Japanese donation, from the governor of Nara Prefecture, is the avenue of cherry trees. When they burst into blossom, it’s supposed to remind you that life is short, but I’m not sure a mood of sober reflection is all that evident. The dog walkers look forward to it eagerly. We talk about whether the swans have laid their eggs yet, how many of the baby geese have been eaten by the foxes (only one out of five this year); we share rumours that the park police have at last started stopping and fining the illegal cyclists; and we discuss the progress of the cherry blossom, and what we think of the crowds of annual visitors.
Her outfit was something I’d seen before in Tokyo – a frilly knee-length crinoline, flailing with ribbons
‘The Japanese are absolutely fine,’ a friend said as her smooth-faced French bulldog sniffed, with fascination, at the luxuriantly ponging beard of my schnauzer. ‘I think they’re bolder than I would be, having a picnic in March under the blossom. And the Japanese, they always take their rubbish away with them. But the trouble is…’ ‘They’re not all Japanese,’ I said. ‘Exactly,’ she said, and went on into a very convincing analysis of the different cultural attitudes towards personal detritus in eastern Asia. ‘My brother used to work in Hong Kong,’ she said. ‘Banking.’ I was convinced.
In any case, it’s an annual delight, a festival from a different place which, unlike many, has taken root in London without requiring the condescending approval or licensing of the mayor’s office. The blossoms erupt; the stalwart picnickers turn up with tripods, party dresses and multiple boxes of bento; and depart taking their gunk with them or leaving them for the Kyoto-efficient cleaners of the park to dispose of, it hardly matters.
Every year Greta and I fall in love with the festival; I annually look up the name for it, Hanami, and every year I wonder if it would be polite, or correct, to say what the meeter-and-greeters say to customers in shops in Japan. Should one say ‘Irasshaimase’ (‘Welcome’) to the visitors? Would it be weird? The question goes unanswered for another year, and we go home together in a strange mood of pink-tinged, slightly perky shyness.
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