The Time by the Sea

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  ‘Say goodbye to Elizabeth Sweeting, would you?’ said Lady Cranbrook. ‘She would like to see you.’ I had read her name on the first Programme Book. I found her in a little flood-stained room behind the Wentworth Hotel. The box files were marked with water. Two years earlier the mighty winter sea had broken all barriers from Canvey Island to the Wash, drowning many people and animals. Benjamin Britten himself had helped in bailing out Crag House and boats had been rowed down the High Street. Five years later Noye’s Fludde, Britten’s setting of the Chester Miracle Play, would fill Orford Church with Suffolk schoolchildren in a storm of sea music. Britten had remembered the carved ark on the Duke of Norfolk’s tomb at Framlingham, the many drowned sailors in Aldeburgh churchyard and the winter of 1953 when the North Sea filled his rooms. He had brought them together in a ferment of waves, hymns, terror and salvation. Amongst the guilds which traditionally re-enacted the drowning of the world in Genesis were the Shipwrights, Fishers, and Mariners. As with all Miracle Plays, Noye’s Fludde was performed, not during winter when real water would have passed through coastal towns, but at Corpus Christi in warm sunshine.

  It would not be the sea which drove Britten from Crag House but its seasonal celebrants who would stand on the wall and watch him at work. He and Mary Potter exchanged houses the same day in 1957. I saw the pantechnicons pass each other. But for Mary it was a wrong move and soon she would be back at the Red House, the perfect third person. When Stephen Potter left her Ben said, ‘Now you must call yourself “Mary, Mrs Potter”.’ My first glimpse of her work was a big oil in Crag House showing a momentarily trapped seagull in a walled garden – presumably at the Red House. It was as much poetry as painting. Her art was shadowy, haunting, carefully unemphatic, though real and not dreamlike.

  Seeing me glancing at the watermarks in the Festival Office, Elizabeth Sweeting said, ‘It was terrible!’ I noticed an element of thankfulness regarding her departure. We sat amongst the litter of her going. Mr Cullum the bank manager was furious at the plan to exchange her with Stephen Reiss. When she arrived Lord Harewood had hoped that the Festival would ‘belong to Aldeburgh and Suffolk in the sense that Mozart did to Salzburg’. When I arrived it lay to Stephen Reiss to achieve this. He appeared somehow hidden and yet powerful.

  I should here say sorry to Stephen Reiss for not earning my keep. Also tell him how great he was in Aldeburgh terms. A rescuer. A rock. There were moments when the Festival would have foundered had it not been for him. Somehow tragic in himself I thought, he knew how to bring light into dark corners, to be strong when everyone and everything else went to pieces. He had come from the New Towns in Hertfordshire and possessed a Shavian common sense, and a way of crossing awkward boundaries. This was also Fidelity’s Quaker territory and between them she and Stephen held their sensible ground in the frequent tempests of the Festival.

  I was too turned in on myself at this stage, not to say too awed by Ben, to recognise Stephen Reiss’s greatness. Fidelity Cranbrook’s understanding of it was all too plain. She would observe me as I took it in – or failed to understand what was being said. The fact was that I wrote and wrote all day, read and dreamed. Words made a screen through which every other activity was filtered and made a kind of grudging entrance. All the same I found it impossible to call myself a writer. The first person to do so was Imogen Holst. Not even Christine Nash could do more at this stage than to tell people that I had gone to Aldeburgh ‘to write’. The stress must have shown because Ben asked, more than once, ‘Are you happy, Ronnie?’ He let off steam with strange war whoops. ‘Middle class, Ronnie; middle class!’ And, ‘I’m thirteen!’

  I suppose I must have sounded confused at least to the old friends, James Turner, W. R. Rodgers, and R. N. Currey, all established poets and a generation older than me. One of our group activities had been to read George Herbert in country churches. Another was to think of ways to make book programmes for the BBC. The Third Programme had just been invented and ‘Bertie’ Rodgers was one of its stars which astonished us as he was rarely sober. And always broke. Yet he invented something called the Rodgers method of radio biography in which wonderful sound-portraits of Irish writers – W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore, and Æ – would be heard.

  Bertie would appear in Aldeburgh now and then, always immensely late for the lunch I had spent all the morning cooking, he and his Danish wife Marianne. His soft weary voice suggested a conversational exhaustion. The fact was that although he never stopped talking he never stopped listening. Conor Cruise O’Brien said that Bertie’s eyes were ‘large, prominent, lustrous, suited to a hypnotist, or a Swami. They also seemed to be, in some strange way, turned off, not looking. He listened like a blind man.’ And there was something ‘a little pastoral, as well as a little clinical’ about this listening which made it disconcerting. Although one eventually told him anything and everything, the distinct fastidiousness of his nature prohibited shapeless outpourings. He would say that men and women were ‘as honest as the day is long, and no longer’.

  He enters the Aldeburgh scene at this point because, listening to my diatribe about money, he promptly solved everything by whispering over his drink, ‘You must be a publisher’s reader.’ Thirty shillings a report. He sent me off to Ian Hamilton. The only person I knew who wrote about being a publisher’s reader was William Plomer. And he was part of the Aldeburgh scene. He and Ralph Currey, my other Colchester poet, were South Africans. Bertie Rodgers in the Aldeburgh pubs was a sight to be seen. But not, as the beer disappeared, always a voice to be heard as it grew softer and softer.

  ‘Can you hear me, Ronnie?’

  ‘No, Bertie.’

  ‘If you’d had the drink you could.’

  Observing Bertie Rodgers, I began to observe myself. Shouldn’t writing make me look for his philosophy – or at least something akin to his temperament? Whether listening to friends or enemies, he worked on the principle that everybody’s stories were fine if he thought that the speaker himself believed they were. Balancing the vanities and the decencies of human nature, Bertie arrived at his kind of accuracy by means of give and take.

  When my father died in 1957 I gave Bertie his Donegal tweed suit. He looked fine in it. When I wrote Akenfield Bertie gave me Rider Haggard’s Rural England. But what he most gave me that first year on the Suffolk coast was a sense of inclusion. Our mutual friend James Turner did the opposite. He believed that Aldeburgh would corrupt me. That going there was my initial error. He is ‘the Poet’ in Akenfield. As I couldn’t possibly be like Bertie Rodgers, then I must be like him. But the brief time there would make me unlike either of them, or anyone, unless in some strangely hoping way, at least at the beginning, like Imogen Holst. An absurd comparison of course. When I told Christine Nash this she didn’t flinch. She gave me furniture to make the flat which Imo found for me by pointing to an ad in the house agent Tuohy’s window, and said that all she asked of me was to settle. With whom? was what I was thinking. The question was deep down preoccupying. Imo herself had settled in a flat above Tuohy’s.

  Life at Crag House was most unsettled. People came and went, doors were never closed, cars went back and forth to Saxmundham station like rockets. Mr Baggott at the newsagent’s was selling postcards of it and gawpers stood on the sea wall. It was unbearable. But Miss Hudson, the housekeeper, produced meals whatever the number round the table with a bewildering efficiency. Imogen had a three-and-sixpenny lunch at the Cragg Sisters’ restaurant every day. I lived on herrings and bread and counted pennies – even when the publisher’s reader fortune began to pour in. My first manuscript was The History of the Pig. But then an American magazine paid me a hundred pounds for a short story. When I took it to Barclays bank it was taken to Mr Cullum, who peered at me through his door. I went to the Thursday sale at the scouts’ hut and bought things for the flat with it.

  Working on the Festival finances with Stephen Reiss at eight o’clock each evening I recall how we would keep our lives separate and stick to the task in h
and. Beth, his wife, would bring us coffee or a drink. The – to me – fairly incomprehensible papers would be sorted and filed, the Guarantors would be given first preference notification of seats, the Subscribers second. Stephen spoke softly and blinked through his glasses. He remained both ponderous and light-fingered, the pile of letters disappearing with speed plus heavy remarks. About eleven he would walk me to the pub corner and pass over a fat bundle of correspondence for me to post. I knew nothing about him. Later, I would be told how he would move from project to project with little explanation. One of his moves was from Balliol College to Chelsea School of Art. His main task while we were working together on the Festival was to write a book on Aelbert Cuyp, the Dutch master of landscape with cows. Long after our meetings he would promote the work of my friend Peggy Somerville. He had – like Britten – been to post-war Germany in its ruin, and had been in charge of the cultural rehabilitation of Lubeck and Schleswig-Holstein. And like Kurt Hutton and Leon Laden, his eyes had not cleared from what he had seen. He moved swiftly when important things needed to be done, out-running committees. It was Stephen who saw the Snape malthouse as a wonderful concert hall, and who took Idomeneo to Blythburgh Church within hours of the Maltings Concert Hall burning down. The Festival seemed clogged up with committee matters but Stephen often left them behind, thinking as he did on another plane. This agility wasn’t present in his face, which was pale and sad. He would last a long time. Britten dedicated A Midsummer Night’s Dream to him. His carrying the Festival from Aldeburgh to Snape was momentous. And all achieved with a bewildering cut through bureaucracy. He fell from grace in 1971. The departure, though cataclysmic, was described by Stephen as a ‘difference of opinion’.

  It was in 1971 that Peter Hall wanted to film Akenfield, a project which filled me with fear. We met for the first time in London. The book had upset him. It was as though he had encountered his ancestral Suffolk for the first time. He encouraged me to write a film treatment of it. The producer Rex Pyke gradually persuaded me that it could be done. I recalled a boyhood picture named Man of Aran directed by Robert J. Flaherty. And what was more, that my farmer neighbour at Great Glemham had acted in it as a sixteen-year-old. This in the Thirties. It was about a kelp economy on an Aran island where seaweed was inned with monotonous toil to make slippery fields. I also remembered Pier Paolo Pasolini’s masterpiece The Gospel According to St Matthew. The two films together were what finally persuaded me to go ahead with the Peter Hall film.

  Peter Hall knew that funding such a film would be almost impossible and he began to see it as a triple venture by me, Benjamin Britten, and himself, all Suffolk-born men. In July 1972 I wrote fearfully to Britten, well aware of his dislike of film crews, telling him that the Akenfield film as created out of my book, which he had read enthusiastically, would be a kind of Thomas Hardy story. Britten adored Hardy and had set a number of his poems. But I added Robert Bresson and Pasolini to my persuaders. Greatly daring, for Britten detested suggestions, I said, ‘It would be a very serious film in which Peter Hall and myself will be absorbed as people coming from many generations of Suffolk country people. It is a low-budget film, and except for perhaps two or three leading characters, will use real people and not actors’ (in the long run the leads were also locals). I had already had a talk about the film with Britten’s publisher, Donald Mitchell. Thus I continued, ‘It was immediately evident that we could not ask you to provide such film music in the ordinary sense. Instead, Donald told us of some unpublished music which exists which, if it could be extended, would be perfect for the film. Our plan would be to fit parts of the film to this music, and not to request you to write to the film. There is plenty of time, as the film has to be shot over the seasons …’ I went on that should Britten consent to this arrangement, the London premiere of the film would be used to raise money for the Snape Maltings Foundation.

  What I do remember now was Ben’s dislike of other people’s projects. Twenty years earlier I had told Imogen Holst about the Quaker James Parnell, a hero of mine, John Nash having agreed that he would be the perfect subject for a Britten opera. Not that I would have been so presumptuous as to suggest this, but only to tell him a story which I knew would enthral him. I often told him tales. He would watch my face. This was the story about a teenage Quaker who had been murdered by the gaoler’s wife in Colchester Castle during the late seventeenth century.

  At Colchester, in the Norman castle built of Roman bricks, and which rises from the floor of a temple dedicated to the Emperor Claudius, who was a god, there is a fireplace recess just by the entrance in which James Parnell, an eighteen-year-old who had preached to people as they left church on Sunday mornings, had been imprisoned. Parnell called churches ‘steeple-houses’ but apart from this he was peaceful and polite. But in Colchester particularly there was a rage against the Society of Friends and the mayor himself, with a band of Quaker-persecutors, would set out in the evenings to rout them out.

  James Parnell had been converted to Quakerdom by George Fox. He had walked from Retford to Carlisle to meet him, this ‘Older in the Truth’. Captured, he was exhibited semi-naked in the fireplace at Colchester prison by the gaoler’s wife, and she and her friends would stand around to watch him climb down a rope to the floor for his food. Eventually, weak and ill, he fell, then died. The magistrates brought in a verdict of ‘suicide by fasting’. ‘I have seen great things,’ the dying boy told the embarrassed crowd.

  At Friends House in Euston Square there is no doubt that he would have been a great writer. To me Parnell is a saint. I ‘hear’ him speaking and maybe singing. When I was taken to the new Meeting House at Bury St Edmunds I enquired, ‘Do Quakers sing?’ ‘If the spirit leads we do.’ So I hear music when I think of this martyrdom. I would like to have talked to Ben about Quaker song.

  One day I told this story to Imogen who guessed that I would tell it to Ben. We were working in her flat. Her alarm was real.

  ‘Oh, you mustn’t, dear. Promise me you won’t! He hates suggestions. Oh, please don’t tell him!’

  ‘I won’t, Imo … I won’t. I understand.’

  Although I didn’t, not at that moment.

  This ancient panic about not making any suggestions caught up with me as I wrote to Britten about Peter Hall’s Akenfield film. But he was easy, businesslike and approving. ‘What a good idea. Come over!’ So I introduced Peter Hall to him. I don’t think that they had met before. Peter, Ben, and I and perhaps Peter Pears and Rex Pyke, sat on the Red House steps in sunshine. Ben was easy, seemingly very happy, affectionate. He and Peter Hall got on well. Much later Peter would direct Albert Herring at Glyndebourne – with Suffolk accents – but now he was in imaginative full grasp of the nature of the Akenfield film. It would be Pasolini in Suffolk. Later Ben and I had our ritual walk round the garden.

  The outcome of all this would be as tragic as Parnell’s brief existence. One of the countless ways to raise money for the Snape Concert Hall was for me to anthologise the twenty-five Programme Books. They were remarkable and nothing quite like them existed in the concert world. Beautifully and individually designed, printed on good heavy paper, filled with East Anglian natural history as well as architectural history, gloriously illustrated by Kurt Hutton’s photographs, and with drawings and paintings, they were a Suffolk library in themselves. One morning John Jacob, now the Festival Secretary, arrived at my house with a carload of them and everything pertaining to them and told me, ‘Ben says make a book from them.’ There was the customary Aldeburgh hurry to get something done by yesterday. And there would be a hundred signed copies at £10. Ben said, ‘Who is going to pay £10 for a book?’ Faber Music, Britten’s publisher at the time, published it in 1972, and Ben, Peter, Imogen and I sat in the Festival office for hours, pushing the special edition from hand to hand as we wrote our names. It was a lovely day with the sun blazing through the windows and the sea benign.

  Afterwards, coming down the stairs, Ben allowed Imogen and Peter Pears to go ahead. Then h
e said, ‘I can’t do the Akenfield score. I am ill. I have to have an operation. I’m sorry.’ I noticed that his usual lined face had been smoothed out with cortisone or some such drug. I was shocked. I didn’t know about his heart. We walked along the Crag Path in silence. The towers were as normal. Fishermen lounged as usual. The gulls cried perpetually. After a few steps he hugged me and went ahead. It was the last time I would see him other than as the grey shade at the rear of the brick Artistic Directors’ box in the Maltings, where, usually in an overcoat, he would enter just before the performance, the ghost of his own reality.

  When Denis and Jane Garrett and I went to Snape we would walk through the reedbeds to Iken, where St Botolph had his cell. All the way there was reed-whispering, and now and then the noisy rise of a bird. Britten had a hankering for his grave to be made in these reeds but it was out of the question. So much water. Thus Bob and Doris Ling, caretakers at the Maltings and before that gravediggers, compromised by lining his grave in the churchyard with these now still reeds. I never walk to Snape along the Sailors’ Path without hearing the music of Curlew River. There was initial consternation when Peter Pears sang the part of a woman looking for her son but the sometimes curious pitch of his voice, the loneliness and hauntedness, made it a memorable choice. These reed marshes make the sea appear far away. They create an optical illusion through which the old thatchers would chop their way. In and around them there would be constant toil. They set oriental standards in Suffolk, and, like the Fens, they promised poor health for their toilers. But the east winds seem less bitter there. These reedbeds and their subsequent marshlands have made a contrasting coastal universe, each with its separate sounds and climates, each with its scuttling occupants. Britten would wander along the wet paths, his curly head coming and going through the dense reedheads. He liked company on his car jaunts but here he would usually be glimpsed walking alone. This, and on an Aldeburgh marsh, was where he got away. Although crowds were part of him. He was gregarious by nature and often he seemed to thrive in company and to find his own silence within it. This would amaze me.