I never realised my ambition of taking a census of the spring passage of the curlews … When I went to live inland I found that what I missed most of all was the calling of sea and marsh birds in the night. There is something sad and strange and lonely in the sudden, piercing voice that comes out of the darkness above you, the voice of a bird travelling at sixty miles an hour …
My practice was to work on my novel in the morning and to explore the coast in the early afternoon. This was short and I often walked home in the dark. I borrowed local books from the Aldeburgh Public Library where Miss Redstone advised me. She introduced me to Miss Howe, whose mother had been housekeeper to Edward FitzGerald. Miss Howe showed me his shawl and his inkpot. I had entered a world of wanderers and coastal seamen, people who made an uncertain way in life. As the days lengthened so did my mileage. Orford and Kessingland needed early starts. Then there came the dramatic hold-up at Slaughden, just south of Aldeburgh, of the Martello Tower, the last of them to be built.
Something about the Suffolk coast made it an open invitation to an invader, first Napoleon, then Hitler it was thought. It was Captain William Ford who suggested that we should copy a circular tower he had seen the Royal Navy bombard – but to no effect – at Martello Point in Corsica in 1794. One hundred and three Martello Towers were built, all made of brick, the largest and northernmost in Suffolk, at Aldeburgh. This was a vast quatrefoil sloping shape standing in a brick saucer, its walls eight feet thick and thirty-three feet high. It was the ultimate expression of the sandcastle turned out of a tin pail into a sand moat. Tastelessly, considering its sad history, a jazz-age eyrie had been constructed on its roof. Yacht Club lanyards rattled in the wind below it and there was a rearing tarred Peggotty-boat with white windows near by. George Crabbe’s humiliation at Slaughden, his tough experience heaving the salt barrels about, took place long before the Martello Tower existed. They said it was stuffed with French prisoners after Waterloo, neglected, forgotten creatures. It was their cries I heard, not the poet’s resentment. I thought I heard them singing, ‘Do not weep for me, Lisette, let not grief your beauty stain.’ I saw them carving fishbones and writing graffiti on the bricks, and being thrown grub like animals. Later on this year I would climb into it, and be shocked by its brick power. Julian Tennyson regarded it cheerfully. ‘Had Napoleon landed … it would have been Corsican against Corsican.’ He too had climbed in and surprised a courting couple with his wicked shrieks. It was a Sunday afternoon.
A Martello Tower is beyond being war litter like redundant anti-tank scaffolding, minefields and barbed wire. Most of this had gone without trace in 1955. But not the signature of the great 1953 flood, which was still writ large wherever I went. It was sordid, a mark of wretchedness, a reminder of what the North Sea could do if it chose. There having been a two-centuries gap since it behaved so nastily, the general feeling from Canvey to the Wash was that it would not do anything like it again for ages. But serious defences were being built. Those built by the Catchment Board from the White Lion to the Brudenell Hotel by the end of 1949 proved useless on the night of 31 January–1 February 1953. The sea rose over them and filled the town at will. It wanted to show that it could do what it liked. Yet near as they were these dramas of the coast became a past history to me as the present enormity of being ‘a writer’ itself became a kind of flooding claim, needing to obliterate everything that had gone before. Far from this being a self-certainty, I could only mention it to my friend James Turner, since I was in full imitation of what he had done many years before. He watched me anxiously, spoke a lot about money and did not approve of ‘Aldeburgh’.
But Denis Garrett did, although never in Festival terms. By coming to Aldeburgh I had entered Denis’s ‘holy ground’. In the summer of 1955 he showed it to me as he plant-hunted on the shingle. Bending from the hip without bending the knees, he would look closely and adoringly at sea-holly, sea-pea and all the other shingle plants, tenderly regarding them like a returning prodigal.
Our first impressions of a town are likely to remain to some extent. Mine of Aldeburgh in the winter of 1955 have stayed indelible although a great many later sights of it have extended or balanced these. After the shore I trod the borough. The High Street must have had herds then carriages in mind – like Long Melford and Hadleigh. Newson Garrett and Victorian cold-climate enthusiasts had put a halt to Georgian decay with flashing plate-glass windows and massive gables. Whilst flood-boards remained propped along the Crag Path, balconies were being strengthened. The light was brilliant. It poured in from all corners of the sky. There were ‘marine residences’ on the high ground and strong terraces broken here and there by ancient cottages which Crabbe would have known. The Moot Hall, once in the centre, stood like a beautiful Tudor toy almost on the beach. Like Thorpeness, there was evidence of the fantasy life of the Edwardians, a love of sundials, a play of decorative stones. Almost everything that had been built since, maybe since the 1820s, had been confidently and handsomely created, although a Garrett mercantile insistence touched every brick. However, there remained a hard speculative element in the recent architecture. But it was not ‘sea-side-y’. Neither was it charming like Southwold. Or resortish like almost every other coastal place. There was something powerful about it which was not easy to fathom and which made the decision to found a festival of music and the arts there so soon after the rough ways of the Second World War either foolhardy or challenging. And yet I don’t believe that either of these hazards so much as entered the heads of Eric Crozier (the suggester) or Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. The more likely reason was the useful Jubilee Hall, which Skelton Anderson, Elizabeth’s husband, had built to celebrate Victoria’s sixty years on the throne. He also created the golf course and might now be seen as a kind of rural Albert to his wife’s reign over the borough.
Alde House, where Elizabeth Garrett Anderson had lived, had been divided into flats when I was there. Norah, the widow of the poet Robert Nichols, lived in one of them and she lent me books. Here and there all over Aldeburgh there was this cultured residue of a previous age, some of it going back to the visits of Thomas Hardy and George Meredith, and, in Miss Howe’s case, to Edward FitzGerald. Past and present concertinaed. From feeling stranded I began to feel that I was in great company, although staying solitary all the same. I expect I must have poured these confused thoughts out to Norah Nichols, as I had done to Christine Nash, whose common sense had landed me on the shingle beach. Christine would drive over from Wormingford to see how I was getting on, sometimes staying the night, when we would get up a good blaze of driftwood. Once in early May she thought it would be warm enough to have a swim. I watched her, a tall woman in her late sixties wearing an optimistic straw hat and smoking a cigarette in an amber holder, splashing up and down. ‘Oh, do come in, my dear!’ Life, our multitudinous scraps of it, was a kind of pointillism which we tried to fix into shape. The ultimate joined-up writing. I veered between Tennysonian (Julian) cheerfulness and Hardy-like morbidity and once searched for the little building ‘for washed-up bodies’ in the churchyard.
At Snape I had seen the gradual emptying of what was almost a malt city. One by one its workers fled. They had once walked or bicycled there in droves; some, after harvest, from as far away as West Suffolk to earn ‘Christmas money’, sleep in sheds and supplement their wages. Newson Garrett’s great enterprise on the site had lasted a century. Denis and Jane Garrett and I once went there to stare on that Victorian desolation. A malt barge rocked by the hard. Denis of course was looking at those plants which so soon come to occupy an abandoned site. The marshes were alive with birds. Iken glistened distantly. There seemed to be countless brick buildings all cobwebby, all deserted. We stood under the clock. Like all Victorian entrepreneurs, Newson Garrett worshipped time. The clock was going. We would watch a malthouse become a concert hall. To their horror, Newson and his wife would watch their daughter Elizabeth become a doctor. ‘The whole idea is so disgusting I could not entertain it for a moment!’ decla
red the father. ‘Oh, the disgrace!’ cried her mother. Snape Maltings at that moment was like ‘Nineveh that great city’ – teeming with workers. Now it was a desolation. But at the same time a starting point for the three of us; Denis would go on to his Cambridge Chair, Jane to become a distinguished social worker in Cambridge, and myself to writing.
Although at this particular moment at Snape Maltings there were no plans, no sense at all of a common future – only a kind of mutuality, and a comfortableness with each other. And I suppose a taken-for-granted recognition of our always being together in some indefinable fashion. Whether our being deeply rooted in East Anglia in our various ways had anything to do with it, it is impossible to say. I suppose we just ‘fitted’. There was no analysis, just an accepted continuum. Standing under the Maltings arch after there were no more workers left to clock-in timed our future.
4 How I Came to Wormingford
John Nash at Bottengoms
The time by the sea was also in part the first time deeply inland at Bottengoms, the home of John and Christine Nash, in the village of Wormingford, eight miles north of Colchester. Not unlike Imogen Holst’s dutiful flights to Thaxted in some ways; she to her mother, myself to giving a hand.
*
John Nash first came to Wormingford in June 1929. It was a wet, cold month ‘and I began to tell myself, this is no place at all …’ His wife Christine, always less easily depressed, sent a Judge’s postcard of the Mill to her mother with the message, ‘Good river scenery. Think we may stay here.’ Christine had discovered this particular working-holiday cottage through an advertisement in a local paper, and after a fruitless search around Framlingham for a suitable spot where John could paint. Throughout her married life, making such reconnaissances, often two or three each year, ‘were part of my job’, she said. ‘I don’t wish to boast, but it was only the places which I did not go to look at first that weren’t successful.’ During the early years of their marriage she had vetted these painting locations by bicycle, pedalling for long distances all over southern England, and along the Gower peninsula, to find landscapes for John’s sketchbooks. These he would fill with pencil and wash drawings, complete with weather and colour notes, to be transcribed on to canvas during the autumn and winter. Like most young artists, they roughed it in their first attempts to make a living. Christine made no bones about it. ‘We very often had some awful places to stay. We were hard up, and really we had to endure a great deal, but we did have to have the right kind of scenery!’
They arrived at Wormingford Mill in fine style, however, due to the legacy of a sturdy 8.18 h.p. Talbot motor car which the previous owner, their dear friend Francis Unwin, used to drive round Brooklands. Unwin, one of the finest etchers of his time, had died from tuberculosis in Mundesley Sanatorium in Norfolk in 1925, and it was partly from a number of sad visits to him that John Nash had become attracted to East Anglia. His roots were in the Chilterns but family connections near Colchester had made him familiar with the Suffolk–Essex border. Paul Nash had actually taken part in the epic 1909 Colchester Pageant, and both myself and John were to wear his Tudor costume on fancy-dress occasions half a century later. But Wormingford in 1929 was entirely new to John and Christine, and when the sun came out by the flower-choked river, the village’s potential as a working-holiday location was evident. Some might say, ‘No wonder, with Gainsborough painting almost up to it and Constable almost down from it!’ But these celebrated associations meant curiously little to John. He himself was to become famous for what appeared to be an indifference to any art other than his own, and this not because of pride, but because of the way in which he was so entirely domi nated by his own vision of landscape. Sickert used to warn artists off the Stour Valley, saying it was a ‘sucked orange’, but John Nash painted it as though he had never heard of it being the most familiar river territory in English art.
The holiday house turned out to be a little clapboard bungalow adjacent to the Mill with a rustic fence and a view of the race. Box Brownie camera snapshots show an easel set up on the bridge, a punt containing a picnic and a portable gramophone, and John poling it through the reedy water, dressed in pyjama trousers and a jersey; Christine bathing and fellow artists sketching. The unpropitious June of 1929 had turned hot, and the long association with Wormingford had begun. He was thirty-six and had been an artist for seventeen years. In this comparatively short time he had taught himself to paint, to be a first-rate botanist and a good musician. He had achieved considerable recognition with his first show, had fought on the Western Front with the Artists’ Rifles, had as an official War Artist painted two of the greatest pictures of the fighting, had married a half-German, half-Scots Slade student named Christine Kühlenthal, and was at this moment one of the leaders of the renaissance of book illustration which had taken place during the 1920s. He was a slight young man with large aquiline features and reddish-brown hair. His wife Christine was tall and dark. She no longer painted – ‘One artist in the house is enough’ – but was at this time active in Cecil Sharp’s English Folk Dance and Song Society, and her interest in movement and drama would, years later, be fulfilled in the many plays which she produced or acted in at Wormingford. Her ‘dancing’ step – like Imogen Holst’s, a leggy kind of gracefulness – remained with her until old age – and I always loved the way in which she would take off for a long walk with never a thought about the distance or the weather. Once the two of us walked from Bottengoms to Stoke-by-Nayland in thin rain, and we regularly walked those perfect footpaths which meandered from the house to Sandy Hill, via the Grange, the mere and the high ground past the church. John used to call all this countryside ‘the Suffolk–Essex Highlands’ and he liked to surprise guests by taking them off to see such untypical East Anglian contours, but always by car, never on foot.
John and Paul Nash, and their sister Barbara, were the children of a Buckinghamshire lawyer, William Nash, who became the Recorder of Abingdon. All three were inspired by the Chilterns’ beechwoods and chalky escarpments, and by such strange phenomena as the ancient tumuli known as Wittenham Clumps. They lived at Iver Heath, then the deepest countryside during those pre-First World War days. One of their aunts had been engaged to Edward Lear and it was at her house that John first became influenced by comic drawings, as well as by Lear’s pale and exquisite watercolours of his travels. Both Paul and John were ‘pointed’ to painting by literature, this and their profound understanding of both the mystery and the practical lie of the land. It was John’s first intention to become a writer, and he apprenticed himself as a teenager to a local newspaper, learning shorthand and trying to learn style. But in 1912 a friend of Paul’s, the artist Claughton Pellew, took him off on a walking tour in Norfolk, talked to him, showed him what he was really seeing, which was line and colour, not words and plots, and sent him home to Iver determined now to paint, not write. His father, hearing the news, said John, cleared a space on the dining table and said, ‘You had better do it here.’ Paul was studying at the Slade. Should John go to an art school? ‘No,’ advised his brother. ‘The teaching will destroy the special “thing” which you possess, so teach yourself.’ It was daring advice but it proved right. I always remember old Mr Nash’s making a space on the table and saying ‘Do it here’ when John used to make a space for me on his painting table just before setting off on his work-holidays, so that I could write. But writers don’t like north-facing studios, so I would find a sunnier spot, although not confessing to this as I used to think that it would hurt his feelings to have his favourite worktop rejected. Ivy grew in a dense curtain across the studio windows and, when I tugged some of it off to let in light and view, John would murmur, ‘Poor ivy.’
John’s discovery of Wormingford was partly due to the suggestion of Sir William Montagu-Pollock that he would find much to excite him in East Anglia – hence Christine’s search for a painting place near Framlingham. Thus two quite casual invitations to the area were to have far-reaching consequences. Claughton Pellew
’s made him a painter; Sir William’s eventually led him to Bottengoms. Such are the small incidents which define what we are and where we should settle. For the whole of the Thirties the Stour Valley alternated with Cornwall and other places as a working-holiday venue. During John and Christine’s second visit in the summer of 1930, the old Mill burned down, and the nice clapboard bungalow with it. John’s sister Barbara was staying with them and she told me how they managed to rescue some of his pictures from the flames, though not all. This experience resulted in spasms of acute fire-anxiety later on, when they would beg me never to burn paper or ‘run with the lamps’, something I would never do, having been brought up with oil lamps. Christine loved their soft yellow light and the heat they generated, and their tongues of flame, so Pentecostal and comforting. She put off having electricity for ages so that she didn’t have to give them up. For me they were glowing reminders of childhood, with their paraffin scented wicks and ‘Swan’ glass chimneys. Later at Bottengoms there would be Aladdin lamps with mantels and fat, battered parchment shades.
For most of the time between the wars the Nashes were living at Meadle in Buckinghamshire. It was there that John did much of his remarkable wood engraving, where he began to make friends with great gardeners such as Clarence Elliott who owned the Six Hills Nursery at Stevenage, and where he painted a whole series of landscapes whose subtle mixture of agricultural realism and underlying poetry established him as an artist in the classic English tradition of Cotman and Girtin. In November 1935 tragedy broke into this disciplined existence and wrecked it. William, John’s and Christine’s only child, was killed in a car accident. He was nearly five, a little boy who had become part of their happiness in the water-meadows and lanes in and around Wormingford. Hardly knowing what to do, there was talk, as John put it, of selling the house at Meadle and building another near the river here. The need to recover from this disaster apart, they had begun to put down roots in the Stour Valley. There were new friends such as Adrian Bell the writer and his wife, who lived at Creems Farm at Wissington, and they would be nearer to old friends like the Cranbrooks at Great Glemham. In the event nothing happened; the pattern re-established itself and the idea of moving was put in some kind of abeyance. ‘One day’.
The Time by the Sea Page 3
