Bamboo Blossom in 1940s Kent

I recently reread a favourite novel of mine, one that has nothing to do with China at all (or so I thought) – Harold Clewe’s The Long Memory (1951), a rather good example of 1940/50s British noir crime writing (and adapted as a rather good John Mills film in the 1950s). But it seems China seeps in everywhere. The book is set in and around Gravesend, Kent and along the Essex/Kent stretches of the lower Thames as well the marshlands thereabout. A former criminal on the run hides out in an old beached Thames barge and takes up with a refugee woman who makes the place nice for him. One day  he comes back to find a jug with flowers in – bamboo blossom…

“It is hard to believe that bamboo should be found in such a place, much less that it should flower there; but it does. For among the cargoes that flow into the port of London there are many from the Orient. The disposal of the packaging and cratage of these goods is quite a problem. Usually it is tipped into lighters and dumb barges which are towed down-stream to places like Mucking Flats and the marshes of the Kentish bank, and there dumped or burned in some way rendered innocuous. The straw and hay and dried vegetation with which the goods are packed contain not only spiders and snakes such as one occasionally reads reports of in the press, but seeds, too, of all kinds.

Some of the seeds survive and take root and grow, so that in summer the rubble dumps are gay with curious Oriental blossoms, among the sardine tins and bicycle wheels and rotting straw. How the bamboo that Elsa found came to bloom in that place at that time of the year nobody can say; we had had a kindly autumn certainly, and a spell of warm weather, and that may have brought it about. But there are many kinds of bamboo sand it seems more likely that this was one of the type, familiar I believe in Burma*, which blossoms only rarely, at long and irregular intervals with sometimes years between, and irrespective of weather or season; mid-winter is lit with bright unexpected flowers.”

* = probably Bambusa burmanica (as below)