The Time by the Sea

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  Imogen’s triumph at this moment was to reinstate her father’s one-act chamber opera Sāvitri. A previous attempt to stage it had been postponed and Albert Herring substituted in its place. The decision to make this change came after Imogen had to leave halfway through an Executive Committee meeting because of a rehearsal in Ipswich. The reason was its cost. It was to have been part of a double-bill which included The Soldier’s Tale. Now it would share the evening with her new presentation of John Blow’s Venus and Adonis. There was a fairly Wagnerian Gustav Holst in Sāvitri, and a thrilling Imogen in Venus and Adonis. Her genius was to work through old texts like the Aldeburgh wind, refreshingly if mercilessly. In this instance from a 1682 manuscript in the British Museum. She ended the Children’s Concert in the church with her father’s hymn ‘Turn back O man, forswear thy foolish ways’ which he had composed for Whitsun at Thaxted in the midst of the First World War’s appalling losses on the Western Front. Imo conducted 230 Suffolk children singing it on a summer’s afternoon at Aldeburgh. Both she and Ben had a kind of direct line to children. They would arrive with a mixture of resentfulness and bravado, and would leave quite changed.

  Sāvitri – the 1956 performance – revealed both Imogen’s and her father’s India. Gustav had been obsessed by Indian culture and Imo had spent two months studying Indian music at Tagore’s university in 1950–51 just before leaving Dartington and arriving in Aldeburgh. She wanted to collect Indian folk songs and she set about it much as her father’s generation had done before 1914. The brilliant singing teacher Pandit Onkaamda Thakar gave her a compacted study of an endless subject. Only an Imo could grasp what she did in so short a time. It was a two-way teaching. She learned; the Indians learned. They sang Britten and Bach, she found that their style of singing took a bit of getting used to – their habit of what we would call ‘scooping sounds’ distressing to Western ears until one has learned to accept it as ‘inevitable’.

  And now she and I, and E. M. Forster, were walking from Ben’s house to the Jubilee Hall to hear Sāvitri. At last. Aldeburgh itself was like a great song. Or was this because I had stopped being so anxious and was just looking and listening? Imogen sat between us at the front. The opera marked a high point in the performance of Gustav’s work. Her dutifulness towards him came second to her knowing its importance. She was still and absorbed.

  Holst had written his own libretto from a Sanskrit story in the Mahabharata. Satyavan, a woodman, comes home one evening to his wife Sāvitri, and hears a stranger moving in the forest. He raises his axe but the strength goes from his arms; the stranger is Death. Instead of cursing the intruder Sāvitri welcomes him. Death is so impressed by Sāvitri that he promises her anything she desires for herself¸ but she must ask nothing for her husband. She then makes a passionate appeal for life in all its fullness. But what is life without him? Death sees that he has been defeated and vanishes. For even Death is an illusion. Satyavan wakes with his wife’s arms around him. She tells him that a Holy One has visited them both – and blessed them.

  Arda Mandikian sang Sāvitri and Peter Pears Satyavan. Thomas Hemsley sang Death.

  One of those ridiculous but ineradicable things occurred as the three of us were leaving. Forster’s cap had fallen to the floor. When I rescued it I saw that it was covered with dust so I banged it on my knee. Instead of thanking me he was cross. Cross – or worse – too when on returning to Ben’s house in Crabbe Street he saw a big police notice fixed to the wall – to stop parking. These trifles seemed to have obliterated all that we had seen and heard. He was upset. I held his hand for a moment before he disappeared. But when we met for dinner at the Wentworth Hotel a little later he was happy again. Imogen was pushing the boat out, to use a suitable banality, and had ordered one of those snowy tables in the restaurant which I had only seen through the window, and the manager Lyn Pritt himself had seated us. I can’t recall what we talked about, only the moment, the noise of the sea, the privilege of it all. Imo loved a drink, or three drinks, so I expect there was wine. Maybe that which I had helped Lyn to cork and label in the Wentworth’s cellar.

  A year or two before, Forster had published The Hill of Devi, a collection of letters, including those from India where he was tutor to a Raja:

  Let me describe myself. Shoes – I had to take them off when the Palace was reached, so they don’t count. My legs were clad in jodhpurs made of white muslin. Hanging outside there was this youthful sirdar’s white shirt, but it was concealed by a waistcoat the colours of a Neapolitan ice – red, white and green, and this was almost concealed by my chief garment, a magnificent coat of claret-coloured silk, trimmed with gold. I have found out to whom this belonged. It came to below my knees and fitted round my wrists closely and very well, and closely to my body. Cocked rakishly over one ear was a Maratha Turban of scarlet and gold – not to be confused with the ordinary turban; it is a made affair, more like a cocked hat. Nor was this all. I carried in my left hand a scarf of orange-coloured silk with gold ends, and before the evening ended a mark like a loaf of bread was stamped on my forehead in crimson, meaning that I was of the sect of Shiva.

  Forster’s clothes were a miracle of drabness, I used to wonder where one could buy them. They were so careful in having nothing to say. But his talk! Imo’s talk. How can I recall her sentences but not his? The lopsided ness of life.

  Imogen’s flat looked out on the High Street and towards the sea. The floor was covered with fresh coconut matting and a design for Honegger’s King David by Kokoschka hung on the wall. Seagulls would skirmish on the windowsills. Neat copy fluttered all over everything. Once when I went to Dartington they let me have her room which was uncannily similar to the Aldeburgh flat. There they spoke of her with love-struck awe, and with still a kind of mourning at her going. And I too was made aware of the wealth and comfort which she abandoned in 1951 for what at first was a virtual homelessness and a suitcase. Also a desert from a throne – not that this would have occurred to her. When we met in 1955 these losses had been sensibly replaced by her knowing the total dependency which Britten, the greatest English composer of the twentieth century, had on her. There was no one else. They were about the same age. They shared a similar music culture and a similar drive, and in some ways they were equals.

  As the Festival spread through the town, engulfing the Jubilee Hall, the Parish Church, the Baptist Chapel, the Moot Hall, the hotels and boarding houses, the beach, the very air, there were rumbles. But Imogen had only to walk down the High Street, her eyes fixed on no one or anything, than a kind of armistice ensued. She would ‘look straight past you’ but people understood. Should someone, not knowing the drill, bring her to a halt she might give them a full minute of her time. But no one for a minute thought that she was stuck up. Miss Holst had better things to do than gossip. She had no idea that she walked blindly through something approaching adoration, nor would it have pleased her to know it.

  I would tell her about the circle at the far end of the town, the artists Juliet Laden and Peggy Somerville, and the writers who were often with me, and Imogen would say, ‘But don’t they like our Festival? – some do not.’ And I would say, ‘They don’t know it is ours.’ Which was true if strange. There was another Aldeburgh, another Suffolk. Some thought that the Festival was wearing me out and some that the shoemaker should stick to his lathe and just write. Their concern made me feel pleasantly hard done by. But the contrasting venues of Crag House and Brudenell House created a drama in my life, whilst the ancient basic Aldeburgh of the fishermen enthralled me, it being so remote. I remember attempting to emulate Imogen’s indifference to accommodation, but this was impossible. And to both her and Christine Nash’s incomprehension I spent a lot of time making ‘a nest’. Their word.

  Sometimes Ben would drop me off after a Festival meeting in his Rolls, and all at once I would feel troubled and lonely. Unsure of myself and ‘far from home’. Although the question was, ‘Where was home?’ And where should I be going? And, maybe, who with? When Imo
gen knocked on my door with a Cragg Sisters’ cake, it would be ‘Very nice, dear.’ But not looking around. All anyone needed was a chair, a table and a bed. Unless one was Benjamin Britten when a Miss Hudson was essential. I don’t think anyone ‘did’ for Imogen. She adored food and drink but was no cook. I was openly hungry half the time like a dog.

  Imogen said in her diary:

  When I went down the stairs Ben was putting his shoes on to walk uphill with me – he said wouldn’t I stay but I said no and then when he got to the door he looked so depressed that I said yes. So we had a drink … so we drank to wealth and he said ‘Good old Peter Grimes’ and we laughed a lot and he said he hoped I wouldn’t think that life at Aldeburgh was always like this so I assured him it was nothing after life at Dartington.

  But it was. On this occasion, ‘Miss Hudson had cooked a superb meal and we both felt better.’

  Rehearsing on the Crag Path in the evening I would fetch fish and chips and we would sit on the wall in a line to eat them. But the real feed was in Juliet’s limitless kitchen at Brudenell House. Or a similar meal at Peggy Somerville’s limited table.

  Imogen died early on a March morning in 1984. Might she have a sip of water – like a bird? After which ‘her head drooped gently sideways … and she slipped away’. I watched her funeral procession to where Ben lay in Aldeburgh churchyard on local tele vision. A handful of friends sang the five-part Sanctus by Clemens non Papa, a canon she had taught them, at her open grave. The last time I saw it, pointed sycamore leaves had covered it.

  On 29 September 1952, her first day as an Aldeburgh inhabitant, she wrote in her diary:

  Ben asked me in after a choir practice of Timon of Athens. We were talking about old age and he said that nothing could be done about it, and that he had a very strong feeling that people died at the right moment, and that the greatness of a person included the time when he was born and the time he endured, but that this was difficult to understand.

  THE SAYINGS OF IMOGEN

  On Bach

  He was spared the nineteenth-century craving for originality at any price.

  It would be fairly safe to guess that the first tune he ever heard was a hymn tune.

  In the prolonged hush before the expected ‘resurrection of the dead’ the harmonies move through remote regions that had never before been explored. And in the final ‘grant us thy peace’, the piercing notes of the trumpets mount higher and higher to their climax of gratitude.

  On Editing Other People’s Music

  This talk is concerned with the editor’s need for second thoughts; with the sight-reader’s struggles to disregard most of what is on the printed page; with the composer’s exasperation at having to fight against the publisher’s house rules, with the learner’s lack of definite instruction, the listener’s damaging preference for what he is used to, and with the danger of still believing everything that one has ever been taught.

  On Folk Music

  Looking through the early volumes of the Journal of the Folk-Song Society we can almost hear the ‘twiddles and bleating ornaments’ of Mr Joseph Taylor, carpenter; and the broad, even notes of Mr George Gouldthorpe, lime-burner, who ‘gave his tunes in all possible gauntness and barenness’; and the ‘pattering, bubbling, jerky, restless and briskly energetic effects’ of Mr George Wray, brickyard-worker and ship’s cook, who had a grand memory at the age of eighty and sang his innumerable verses with a jaunty contentment.

  Those who live in the North are used to keeping out the cold by singing with half-closed vowel sounds to prevent the gale-force wind from giving them toothache, and by dancing quick rhythms with all their energy.

  On Her Father

  Over tea in front of a blazing fire, he [Britten] suddenly said, ‘Did your father get terribly depressed?’ And then before I knew where I was I told him how I’d neglected G [Gustav] during the last 2 years of his life, being ambitious about jobs instead of ruling bar-lines for him, and how it was one more reason why it was lovely to be doing bar-lines in Gloriana. Ben said he’d been quite sure that he’d been responsible for his mother’s death & it had taken ages to realise that he hadn’t been.

  On Leaving Dartington for Aldeburgh

  Ben will realise that when one is always teaching amateurs and future professionals who are still immature, one needs constantly to be criticised on one’s own music by someone who one knows is a better musician than oneself. Now in South Devon, we had so many blessings but we hadn’t many musicians better than me at that time … I thought I mustn’t get into the habit of this. I remember walking round the garden in early spring and thinking, ‘Now, you could live here for the rest of your life.’ It seemed a kind of heaven on earth, and then thinking, ‘No, because you are a musician, and you have got to go on teaching and got to go on having really strict criticism.’

  In 1952 I came to live in Aldeburgh to help with what Britten described as ‘an infinity of things great and small’.

  On Noye’s Fludde

  The first plans were discussed on a long walk over the marshes with the rain streaming down our necks; not long afterwards we were buying china mugs from Mrs Beech in the High Street, to be slung up for the newly invented percussion instrument. I remember the concentration on Britten’s face as he tapped each mug with a wooden spoon.

  On the Advantages of Being Seventy

  I must make room to include the blessing of not having to go on buying new clothes when the old ones are not only tougher but are also much more beautiful. For special occasions in the Directors’ Box at the Maltings I’m still wearing the wool-embroidered evening jacket I bought for £5 in South Kensington in 1928.

  9 Staverton – What Happened? – What Is Happening?

  John Nash: Staverton Thicks

  One April morning in 1956 I made one of my planless walks from Slaughden towards Orford and with the usual elated feeling. There would be a wonder midway although I knew nothing of its existence. All I experienced at this moment was a tossing about of freedom. The sea was glorious and near at hand, the gulls screamed and the air was intoxicating. At Slaughden the Alde turned into the Ore, and the Aldeburgh Marshes became the Sudbourne Marshes. On the left were the Lantern and King’s Marshes. Orford Castle was the obvious destination but like a boy leaving the biggest sweet in the bag until last, I turned right towards Butley. Somebody had told me that Chillesford Church tower was pink because it contained lots of coraline crag. But what drew me would be the stunted oaks and the limited nature of things. And yet at the same time the grandeur of things, for Victorian aristocrats had shot over these acres. So I saw Hansel and Gretel Lodge, and dark entrances to country houses, and signposts to Hollesley where Brendan Behan would be a Borstal Boy. This walk would become a preface to a guidebook as yet unwritten. The poor soil of the Suffolk sandlings had made for skimpy farming but had provided the next best thing to Scotland for shoots.

  Just below it there existed something else. Butley loomed large on my ‘Geographical’ two-miles-to-the-inch map. A rivulet wriggled in its direction. And so I came to the Thicks a little way on the right of the Woodbridge road. It would play a large part in my imagination. I took all my friends there, the poet James Turner, John Nash, the Garretts, Richard Mabey. ‘Yes,’ said Benjamin Britten, ‘I know it well.’ John Nash had told me that when he was painting he ‘liked to have a dead tree in the landscape’. Except that Staverton Thicks was not dead, only perpetually dying. And thus everlastingly alive. Although with no apparent struggle. It showed its great age and exposed its ageing, and one flinched from such candour. But why had no one cleared it and replanted it? What had happened? What was happening?

  An early friend of John Nash’s youthful days was Sidney Schiff, the translator of Proust. Schiff had taken over as translator when Charles Scott Moncrieff died. John Nash gave me the first volume, Time Regained, which Schiff had given him. In it Schiff, who wrote under the name of Stephen Hudson, had put, ‘My dear John, I want you to have this book. Begin by reading from
p. 210 to p. 274. If that means so much to you as I hope, begin at the beginning and read it slowly to the end. 30th March ’32.’

  These sixty or so pages describe a soliloquy on the artist–writer’s life when, arriving late for a concert, he is put into the library until the first work is ended. His memory wanders back to the celebrated memory-providing madeleine and, although he is in Paris, to the Normandy coast, and takes in the decision to be either painter or writer. I had just read Sidney Schiff’s instructions. Fragments of the soliloquy in the Paris library fluttered through my head as I walked towards Orford and penetrated the strange wood. Passages such as ‘the large bow-windows wide open to the sun slowly setting on the sea with its wandering ships, I had only to step across the window-frame, hardly higher than my ankle, to be with Albertine and her friends who were walking on the sea-wall’ made me think of Juliet Laden and Peggy Somerville softly drawing in pastel the young people below, and how perfect it would be this very evening to be at Brudenell House telling them about my walk. I too was attempting to concentrate my mind on a compelling image, a cloud, a triangle, a belfry, a flower, a pebble. I wondered if I should make the lovers in my half-written novel walk this way. And then, thinking of Denis Garrett and his botanic company, I was startled when Proust includes him in these recommended pages – when the narrator says that his sorrows and joys