The doctor had told Ben that he could complete his Death in Venice before the heart operation but nothing else. The operation was a disaster. He was fifty-nine. I was looking after John Nash when Britten died in 1976 and we watched his funeral on Anglia Television as it climbed up the hill. The hill which he would almost run up to meet Imogen when she briefly lived at Brown Acres behind the church, and up which she walked to bring me a cake. ‘It’s your birthday!’ or ‘It’s my birthday!’ Although it was neither.
Peter Hall and I sat on the grass at Charsfield thinking whose music we should now have for our film. He had a cassette player and we listened to a bar or two of Elgar’s First Symphony. No. Then he said, ‘Do you know this?’ It was Michael Tippett’s moodily brilliant Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli and its suitability caused us to scramble to our feet with relief. It was perfect.
7 Blythburgh
Angel boss, Blythburgh Church
It must have been as late as May, and perilously close to the opening of the Ninth Festival, when we were all at a Council in the Moot Hall, that it was decided a concert should be held in a church other than Aldeburgh. The clergy were still not used to such events and it was tempting fate. But Ben had Blythburgh in mind. If we were to be expansionist, where better to begin? Holy Trinity was itself a weathered work of art of unique beauty whose unknown creators we thought would make common cause with our aspirations. With only a few weeks to go, and everyone eager, how could it be done without upsetting the Reverend Arthur Thompson? He had been vicar there for close on forty years and might not wish to be disturbed. A letter? – too peri lous. A telephone call? – impolite.
‘We’ll send Ronnie,’ said Ben.
Nobody offered to drive me to Blythburgh, so I went on the bus. When I got there it was to find that the vicar lived at Walberswick. I walked across the common in glorious sunshine. All the birds were singing and the may was out in frothy abundance. Mr Thompson had not been told of my embassy so he came to the door polite but puzzled. He was elderly and rumpled and faintly alarmed.
‘The Aldeburgh Festival,’ I repeated.
‘Is it a band?’
‘Sort of,’ I said.
‘In my church?’
‘It would of course be sacred music.’
He left to make us a cup of tea and to think before he answered.
‘You say next month – June?’
‘We would love to hold the concert then, sir.’
Much more thinking, then, ‘I don’t see why not.’
But there was hesitancy. Scared of returning to Ben and Stephen Reiss without a contract, and seeing that Mr Thompson was the kind of man who did not sign one, I plumped for ‘Perhaps you would like to ask the PCC?’ At which he exploded. He could do what he liked in his own church – ‘Never mind them!’
‘You wouldn’t mind us filling the big space at the back with extra chairs?’
‘Do what you like.’
My relief and gratitude and grin made him laugh. ‘You’ll do,’ he said. He walked with me a little way. ‘It’s a pretty place, isn’t it?’ he said. When I returned Stephen rang up for stack chairs from the Education people and I sat with Imogen in her flat putting the Blythburgh programme together. Her Purcell Singers were to present Palestrina’s Stabat Mater, Purcell’s Magnificat, Priaulx Rainier’s Requiem, Thomas Tomkins’s O Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem, and Bach’s Komm, Jesu, Komm. A substantial glory. Imogen was immensely excited. ‘Oh darling, darling!’ We had scrambled egg on toast.
This first Blythburgh concert brought me close to David Gascoyne, whose poem was set by Priaulx Rainier in her Requiem. I remember finding one of his lines, ‘darkness that burns like light, black light’ a brilliant metaphor for the Marian flushwork although, he said, it had not occurred to him at the time. It would be many years before we saw each other again. He had come to Essex University to receive an hommage in the form of a collection of poems by Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, and other contemporaries which I had to present to him at the end of a reading. He was overwhelmed and in tears. Our last meeting, in October 1983, was standing outside Marks and Spencer in Colchester High Street, with the crowds milling round us. He had been to see Cedric Morris at Benton End. I had been reading his Paris Journals. He gave me a little conversation about ageing, posting it to me a few days later. It was called ‘Sentimental Colloquy’:
The evening in the towns when Summer’s over
Has always this infectious sadness, Conrad;
And when we walk together after rain
As darkness gathers in the public gardens,
There is such hopelessness about the leaves
That now lie strewn in heaps along each side
Of the wet asphalt paths, that as we turn
Back to the gardens’ closing gates, we two,
Though in our early twenties still, seem elderly,
Both of us Conrad, quietly quite resigned
And humbled into silence by the Fall …
Blythburgh became one of my dream places after the 1956 concert. I would cycle there and take up a kind of residency. The amazing church was a product of the strenuous piety and unfounded optimism with which the Middle Ages closed. Its wealth came from the sea. It stood above a fishing port and took its tithes from the herrings. These had to be eaten twice a week as food for fasts. When the Reformation banished this holy diet the church lost its revenues. Poverty, and not holy poverty by the sound of it, made itself felt. The River Blyth silted up, as did the harbour, and the not all that showy tower no longer looked down on boats, but on nothing which it had been built to recognise.
Yet the body of the building retained its splendour – time even added to it. The long arcade stayed assured, each downward tracery pencil fine, the repetition perfectly controlled. Blythburgh is a Job of a building, an architecture which has gone through every hazard before arriving at its current splendour, thunderclap and all. Its quality is not unlike one of those lustrated ventilation bricks which have been laved by the sea – sucked smooth by it but retaining its purpose. Inside, the roof is very high and white and stencilled all over with green and crimson flowers. Everything is faded to perfection. Angels bear down on one from a safe height. They have been shot at – winged – yet still they soar. It is best to lie flat on the floor to watch their flight. They carry their wounds like martyrs. Their pinions beat the wooden sky. They sing eternally, ‘Komm, Jesu, Komm’, only in late Gothic.
There was rarely anyone there for this was a pre-Pevsner time and before Philip Larkin had written of ‘Church Going’. But one day I found a young man in his coffin. About my age, his plate said. He lay on tall trestles in the chancel. I sat with him for an hour. I said it was too soon for this. A woman arrived and swept and dusted around him.
Sometimes during these flights from novel-writing and Festival planning I tried to enter the medieval mind. It proved impossible. Trained historians and my wildly untrained conclusions got me only so far. Then a curtain was drawn. The thinking, language and usage of the materials which had constructed this place refused to cohere. I was left with what the Suffolk historian Walter Copinger said, what Julian Tennyson said, what M. R. James said, and not what its priests and carpenters said. It arose from convictions, patterns and fancies so unlike mine that it was useless to proceed other than via Perpendicular and Decorated. Many years later writers such as Eamon Duffy, using the Reformation inventory of Long Melford Church, would take me further into Blythburgh than seemed possible at this moment. Even now the average parish church guidebook puts the cart before the horse. It deals confidently with architecture and its materials, stone, wood and glass, but sketchily and rather apologetically with what it terms ‘Symbolism’, the word it uses for Faith. It was this which expanded Blythburgh beyond its actual religious requirements. Everything went into it, from mystery to the mundane, from sex to immortality. As for poetry, this simply descended like Portia’s mercy. And will do so for as long as its arches stand.
&nbs
p; These were the things I felt as I sat on each behaviourist bench in turn, made aware of the late medieval bottom and eye. I felt and saw to a feeble extent the pains and pleasures of the saints, and listened to the unfamiliar tellings of familiar stories. Earthly and unearthly love came together. I even imagined a long-unheard music being drawn down by music which would not have been heard here since the time it was composed. There are moments when what is ancient becomes bright and new. It is like propagating the seeds found in a sarcophagus.
I found that an essential difference between the medieval mind and our own was that it was incurious. It explored, amplified, decorated and taught only what it knew. The great heresies themselves did not set out to provide another or better world. They grew out of the same inventive passion for life which produced Blythburgh, or Chartres Cathedral. There was no line between what was sacred and what was secular, but only a terrifying divide between heaven and hell. These were as geographic destinations as Rome or Ipswich, signposted and eventually reached.
Once, trying to make contact with those who sang and spoke in Blythburgh Church, or swung on rope ladders fixing angels, I read Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. The Chaucers originated in Dennington not far away. Britten loved this church. He took young friends there and they wrote their names on the sand table – ‘Benjamin Britten’ – then obliterated them with the smoother. Dennington was a church where little had been turned out and where, like Blythburgh, there was much evidence of the counting of the hours. Time as both villages knew it still clunked away.
During the drastic nineteenth-century restoration of churches, when more damage was done to medieval architecture than by time and decay, William Morris used Blythburgh as a model for bodging. Such old buildings should be patched not ‘restored’. Aged twelve and seated next to his father, Morris would let his gaze roam around Canterbury Cathedral as he searched for the partnership which had made it, heavenliness and human-ness. Morris’s century was still an age of ‘hands’, or the workforce stripped of its personality, and at its wor st tur ned into mere oper atives by Gradg rinds. In spite of this, William Morris saw hands which had created Canterbury Cathedral on ever y inch of its stone, glass and wood, which was why the building lived. It was his conversion, the birth of Ar ts and Crafts, and for him the death of ‘Progress’ via the machine.
For me at Blythburgh there were days when the medieval voice became positively colloquial, and the medieval artistry cheerfully workaday. Knight, artisan and peasant, priest and layman talked a lot here. W hat I ‘heard’ were Suffolk countr y voices and an awakened or recovered singing. I read about the Courts of Love presided over by Eleanor of Aquitaine which were music schools amongst other things, and whose ideals were car ried from kingdom to kingdom by singers – troubadors – and whose arts became part of the liturg y here.
Johan Huinzinga said that aristocratic life in the Middle Ages was a wholesale attempt to act the vision of a dream. W hat remains at Blythburgh is what remains of the free zing of this dream. What the builders set in stone, wood and glass, even in broken brick, should explain what they had in mind. Yet it cannot. And this is its wonder.
8 Imo
Imogen Holst conducting
After my duties for Stephen Reiss had been transferred to Miss Flo Powell, Imogen Holst took me over. And never was there a more sensible arrangement. Imogen had a long experience of assistants. Her treatment of them was a kind of authoritarian love. In 1955 she was forty-six but had taught so much, travelled so far, been Ben’s saviour for three amazing years, that she possessed a greater authority than she realised, and had little idea of the effect she had on me. Everything she said or required was like a gift. The plainness of her face was itself so total that it had become beautiful. Her voice was modulated, her laugh raucous. She liked men and was used to them. She had no notion of work time and leisure time, and she made me have no notion of these opposites either. We worked at her father’s desk, a big Arts and Crafts piece of furniture. We seemed to be huddled together at times. At some vague hour she would cry, ‘Food!’ and make scrambled eggs. Her dining table was a board laid over her bath. She would fling a check tablecloth over it and laugh when I couldn’t get my feet under it.
I was frequently at Little Easton Rectory at this time, and so could gossip about Thaxted. Canon John Barnett was himself a considerable musician and Imogen was amused by the fragmentary things I had learned from him. Or had especially liked. Reynaldo Hahn’s songs for instance. Hahn was a pupil of Massenet and Proust’s first lover, and the part-origin of the composer Vinteuil whose ‘little phrase’ haunts Remembrance of Things Past. The other was Henri Duparc.
But John Barnett’s enormous library of 78s also introduced me to Gustav Holst’s music and that of his contemporaries Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells, Arnold Bax, Frank Bridge and John Ireland, as well as Bach and Mozart. Each record would be denuded of its sleeve, lightly dusted with a velvet pad and placed on the turntable. Or the Canon would play for hours at the Steinway piano, cigarette ash – Balkan Sobranie – tumbling down his cassock. A huge, untidy, somewhat unwashed figure with stained teeth and a beautiful speaking voice, a widower with a love now of young men, he did little new in the parish. Once after a walk to Little Easton village itself he asked, ‘What is it like down there?’ He trundled about the Essex landscape giving inspired music talks to the Workers’ Educational Association. Now and then we went to Thaxted where Conrad Noel’s banners floated above the arches in what I always thought of as Gustav Holst’s church.
In 1912 the Countess of Warwick, née Frances Maynard and heir to vast Essex acres, became a socialist, eventually filling her farmhouses and cottages with musicians, actors and writers. Each of these buildings had a handprint with a coronet over it in the plaster – manus-Maynard. Solomon the pianist, Philip Guedalla the biographer and H. G. Wells, amongst the distinguished tenants, had cycled the lanes. John Barnett’s services were a kind of slovenly holiness, himself frequently in his pyjamas under his robes … But on Good Friday his Steinway would be hauled across the road by the farm labourers and placed on the chancel step where, during the Three Hours, people would come from near and far to listen to Bach. I took the poet James Turner there and he wrote:
Out of the West, out of the dying sun
The trumpet sounds.
Angels of flashing light be over me,
Thy garments like a gauze of setting sun.
Closing the epoch of a dying age.
The trumpet sounds.
Over the scandalous Hill, distantly proclaiming
A whisperer’s promise
Of the perfect oblation.
Gustav Holst, who had died in 1934, was still a potent force in this Essex countryside. Walking and cycling I could ‘hear’ him. He too had discovered it whilst tramping through a five days’ holiday during the winter of 1913. Most of all Thaxted, where he had put up for the night at the Enterprise in Town Street. In 1914 he rented a cottage from the Essex dialect writer S. L. Bensusan, whose nephew John Bensusan-Butt was a friend of mine. Imogen tells what happened next:
The cottage dated from 1614; it had a thatched roof, and open fireplaces, and a wonderful view across meadows and willow trees to the church spire in the distance. In the fields beyond our garden we could watch the farmer sowing the seed broadcast … Here in this quietness, my father, who had been rejected by the recruiting authorities as unfit for war service, was able to work at The Planets.
The Holsts lived in this house, Monk Street Cottage, until 1917, then they rented The Steps in the centre of Thaxted for the next eight years. One evening, working with Imogen, I happened to mention my weekend at Little Easton Rectory and she said, ‘That was our part of the country!’
In her 1952 diary, after she had taken neat copies of her work on Gloriana round to Ben, who had been in bed all day with a cold, the two of them settled for a drink – Drambuie, a favourite, for her and rum for him – during the course of which they discussed the future:
He said couldn’t I possibly arrange my work to stay here next year, and where did I really want to live. So I told him Thaxted was the only place but that I was too emotionally involved to live there just yet. And he said could I teach in London & live here the rest of the week & I said I could probably manage another year as freelance: – but that I’d have to learn to put my feet on the ground because I’d never been so happy for 3 months on end before. […] He said, ‘You’ve helped with Gloriana in more ways than you know.’
My closest relationship with Imogen was when Ben and Peter were far away in Bali and she more or less took charge of the 1956 Festival. I wasn’t aware of this at the time but I do remember an exultancy about her which was catching. Trailing up the stairs to her flat she called out, ‘The Festival is everything – everything – dear, isn’t it?’ And I felt a warning. But she set me to work on the Programme Book and, given a free hand with it, I was also aware of a rise in my status, or rather the realisation that she had, mercifully for him, stolen me from Stephen Reiss. Could Kurt Hutton take the pictures? Could John Nash do the line drawings? Might I discuss the printing with Benham’s of Colchester? Imogen’s own freedom was catching. It was when the cats are away the mice do play but also that change of the world thing which I now and then saw in her face, and which I later thought of as the breakthrough joy of early socialism – the expression of it which William Morris and the nineteenth-century Fabians possessed. There must be a portrait of Schubert but not that lozenge-shaped pair of spectacles. Imogen always knew where things were. She knew where he wasn’t wearing them. ‘He was beautiful.’ So we wrote to Munich for a drawing which entirely revised one’s concept of the young composer. I have kept the print to this day.
The Time by the Sea Page 7
