The Time by the Sea

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  Inevitably James Turner sold Primrose Cottage for the enormous sum of £7,000. Malcolm Arnold bought it. He and I went up into his music room.

  ‘No piano, Malcolm?’

  ‘No piano, Ronnie.’

  We all met again on Boxing Day.

  ‘How are you getting along with Ben?’

  How was I?

  Malcolm’s new wife and new son came in to be kissed.

  At three o’clock, the gale blowing, I said, ‘Malcolm, isn’t there anything to eat?’

  A two-foot-long Melton Mowbray pie appeared. All I can remember now is the drink and the food. And the miraculous blotto drive home. And Malcolm like Croesus because of the film money. And a music room with nothing in it. And Malcolm Arnold somehow not being where he should be. Although where was that? When he came to us for a return drink he said that he was writing Cornish brass-band music.

  ‘They don’t like hearing Malcolm swear,’ said James when they had gone.

  ‘But they all swear.’

  ‘Not like Malcolm.’

  I walked the whole length of Constantine Bay before I left. The blue sea was hazy, restrained and immense. It vanished from sight when I found a place to sprawl in the dunes, yet remained omnipresent allowing nothing else to sound or impose.

  ‘Come again,’ said Malcolm, James, everyone.

  ‘There is a nice cottage up the road,’ said Cathy. ‘Only £800. Think about it.’

  14 Sleeping in the Moot Hall

  The Moot Hall, Aldeburgh, 1924

  Who else has done it? Bored aldermen, centuries of thieves? It is an enchanting building. You expect to be able to lift the roof off and see the fretwork animals lying inside two by two until the dove returns with its twig. George Crabbe’s only reference to it is as a prison. But he does give one of his rare benign portraits of an Aldeburgh official when he writes about its function in the shape of a fisherman mayor, a ‘short stout person in good brown broad-cloth’ coloured ‘seaman’s blue’, who has ‘been a fisher from his earliest days’ and ‘placed his nets within the Borough’s bay’.

  Where, ‘by his skates, his herrings and his sols’ he has amassed a small fortune of twelve hundred pounds. Which he kept in a box under the bed. My neighbour Eric had done this, and with exactly the same amount. So when the currency changed in 1972 he was in a panic for unlike the mayor he couldn’t read or write, although I did discover that he could ‘draw’ his name. We sat a whole evening at my kitchen table as I taught him the value of the new coins and notes. And it took a whole week to persuade him to take his twelve hundred pounds of old money to the village post office.

  As I made my bed in the Moot Hall it was a comfort to think of the mayor and his home savings and fisher-blue suit. Denis Garrett told me that when his cousin Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became mayor she took one look at the moth-eaten robes which generations of men had decked themselves in, the hat particularly, and had a dressmaker design something new and delightful for her to parade down the High Street in. The massive civic chair from which she ruled the corporation roost stood at the head of the table and I hung my shirt and trousers on it. There was a trapped June warmth in the heavy old chamber and a kind of boarded-up smell of meetings, crime and importance. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and a whole gallery of worthies eyed me from their massive frames. The sea rocked the pebbles perpetually as usual just outside. Someone had rigged up a camp bed and brought blankets. I had brought pyjamas.

  As well as mayors, the toiling naked bodies of J.-F. Millet’s peasants surrounded me. The mayors were static, the peasants all movement. Their most celebrated stillness was in the famous and much reproduced study called The Angelus, when they heard the church bell, heart-stopping in its devotion, over the fields calling for prayer. The oldest bell in Suffolk still hangs against the spire of Hadleigh Church, put up there in 1280. But even if it was rung there would be nobody in the fields to hear it say Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae – ‘The angel of the Lord brought tidings to Mary’.

  J.-F. Millet had been hugely influential. Everyone from Daumier to Van Gogh had made copies of his drawings. Bernard Berenson had called him ‘the stupendous Millet’, and Roger Fry had described him as one of the great Moderns. But by the Fifties he had been reduced to The Angelus only, and this sentimentally. Sir Kenneth Clark, who had been brought up at Orford and who knew the Suffolk fieldworkers, had organised an exhibition of Millet’s drawings to restore a comprehension of physical toil and its art. ‘No painter of the nineteenth century except Van Gogh’, he wrote, ‘makes us think more seriously about the question how far art should concern itself with the great issues of human life.’

  Clark had borrowed the drawings from Paris on the condition they were never to be left unattended. Thus my going to bed in the Moot Hall.

  ‘Who will guard them?’

  ‘Ronnie,’ said Ben.

  Needless to say that I dreamt of Peter Grimes being tried on the same floorboards. When the scandal of his treatment of boys broke and he came before the mayor and corporation, they recommended him to take ‘a freeman whom thou durst not beat, not the defenceless children turned out of workhouses’. But Crabbe is enthralled by human compulsions, none stronger than to be cruel, violent, and excited by helplessness. Grimes’s sentence was isolation. It caused him to become insane and thus more violent still. His sentence was that of the scapegoat, a person driven from the herd so that all crimes against boys, a convention then, might be heaped upon him, freeing the conventional beaters from guilt. That Grimes was not imprisoned or hanged puzzles the modern reader. What he was given in this actual building was advice to choose legally protected apprentices, not unprotected orphans. Crabbe’s real fascination with Grimes is the effect of social isolation and guilt on him. This poet is the master of madness. This pretty building was only a few steps from his birthplace, and further then from the sea. Its enchanting carved brick chimneys are early Victorian and ‘borrowed’.

  I locked the door, as I was told to do, before I went to sleep. Relieved by the day guard at eight in the morning, I bought two herrings for breakfast and went home to write my novel.

  Half a century later Jane Garrett and I stood in this council chamber to see, not French fieldworkers, but the history of the Garrett family, the makers of farm machines and the monumental maltsters of Leiston and Snape, and reigning over them little imperious Elizabeth in her regalia. And there was the same richly enclosed odour which never left this room even when the windows were wide. The stocks had occupied one of the niches outside where I often sat to read.

  East Anglia’s J.-F. Millet was – still is – Harry Becker. It was at his exhibition in Ipswich that I last saw Stephen Reiss. Becker’s maternal grandfather had been a Baron and Chamberlain to the Grand-Ducal court of Hesse-Darmstadt but his father had settled in Colchester, renting the Minories, a great town-house which eventually would be the home of my friend John Bensusan-Butt. John was related to the Pissarros and Lucien Pissarro often came to stay there during the First World War. Harry Becker was born in the Minories in 1865. His descent, if one may describe it as such, from German aristocrat to penniless painter in the Suffolk fields was like one of Zola’s remorseless novels. And yet he was able to show not only the degradation of the farm labourers at this time, when British agriculture was in the doldrums, and the servitude of those who kept it going through decades of slump, but also their physical strength, their actual movement as they toiled, and even their grandeur. The Waveney Valley farmer–novelist Henry Rider Haggard watched his men lay field drains in midwinter and was mystified by their grim acceptance of existence. Its reality was confirmed in Mary Mann’s shocking Tales of Dulditch, her stories of farm labour in Norfolk. A Victorian rector made the labourers and their families stand outside his church whatever the weather until their betters were seated. Then they could come in and sit at the far back. Thomas Hardy knew them as great singers and fiddlers, also at the west end, but elevated to musical heights which carried worship beyond har
dship, rank or what was thought possible. Their studded boots struck sparks from the floor slabs. Both he and his father were skilled violinists and good singers, and helped to raise the roof.

  Harry Becker’s fall yet paradoxical rise to greatness was his becoming himself the horseman (ploughman) ditcher and shepherd as he worked, feeling their skilled movements in his own body – and being financially levelled to their existence. He and his wife Georgina settled in the Blyth Hundred, as remote a farming area as might be discovered at the turn of the twentieth century, a land which was still neo-medieval in many ways, lost, yet profoundly known to its inhabitants. Becker’s penury went so deep that he would be seen sizing sacks to paint on. But it was his drawings which said more than any writer could about the people who worked the land. Their faces are usually turned away. Their clothes are voluminous, the trousers stringed below the knee so that insects were prevented from reaching their genitals, their movements accurate. Those same movements as in Piers Plowman or in East of Eden. Scything is one of Becker’s perfect observations. But there is a brotherhood between Harry Becker in Suffolk and J.-F. Millet in France. So I thought as much about him as I did of the latter’s work as the early light from the North Sea penetrated the limited windows of the Moot Hall. What the Garretts did at Leiston was to invent ways of obliterating sheer physical labour, to be able to lift eyes – and eventually after World War II to lay the foundation of a farming which is virtually worker-free. So that I can now walk for miles in the Stour Valley through perfect corn and vegetable acres without seeing a soul at work. Without catching the bait-time talk and the thump of horses. Just in a new silence. Not even the Angelus bell, so no prayer, no hands together, no bowed head. And no arthritic flesh. And no movement unless the wind and rain makes it. Becker drew field-women – those same ‘daughters of Tess’ and who, like her, were out in all weathers. Hardy describes a farmer’s wife having to do landwork after it had ruined him.

  One frail who bravely tilling

  Long hours in gripping gusts,

  Was mastered by their chilling,

  And now his ploughshare rusts.

  So savage winter catches

  The breath of limber things,

  And what I love he snatches,

  And what I love not, brings.

  As a boy I saw pea fields crowded with pickers, beet fields lined with singlers, and the last of the harvest fields full of, well, everybody. Now David tills and sows my old seventy acres all by himself. But he would make a good Millet, a good Becker, although he makes none of the old farming movements, but sits aloft of them all.

  But all rural writers mourn what they believe was a better life, that of the day before yesterday. Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy is a wistful idyll created in London. John Constable’s favourite word for his countryside was ‘serene’. George Crabbe in The Village weeps for the desertion of the land, and his merciless account of what happens to farmworkers when they can no longer work is unbearable. John Clare’s arthritic father was made to chip stones to mend the Helpstone road when he could no longer sow and thresh. He was fifty, a famous storyteller and a good singer; George Crabbe would have taken a rounded view of such a man. He discovered in the Aldeburgh hovels undiminished people whose condition, as it was called, had not robbed them of intelligence and dignity, and whose lives ennoble The Borough. Drawn though Crabbe was to the dreadfulness of things, the Aldeburgh poor had to be celebrated.

  For many years I lived in Debach and walked in Edward FitzGerald’s and Crabbe’s son’s world. They had trodden every footpath, seen my trees, passed my house and were my neighbours. On this flat land they had accomplished my two classics, a ‘translation’ and a biography. To which I would add Akenfield – my view of things. George Crabbe junior was elusive, being overshadowed by his father. But Fitz had stayed vivid as eccentrics are apt to do. I frequently passed him, imaginatively speaking, on his way to the sea, drifting towards the fishermen, grand, extraordinary, indifferent to comment. And his letters! Volumes of them, I would read them in the long grass by his grave and less than a mile from where they were written.

  In nearby Parham other letters had arrived. Young George Crabbe was hoping ‘to finish my book entirely … sometimes I think I cannot fail. Within these three or four days I’ve been remarkably high in spirits. I have somewhat exhausted them by writing upwards of thirty pages.’

  The judgement of Aldeburgh was on its way. The Moot Hall would speak its mind. The French toilers on its walls would be translated and society high and low would be stripped naked. Although for some reason, especially in East Anglia, George Crabbe continues to be more mentioned than read.

  15 At Benton End

  Sir Cedric Morris at Benton End

  My coming to Aldeburgh took me out of easy reach of both John Nash’s Bottengoms and Cedric Morris’s Benton End, which had been up until then the most influential places in my life. Just a few miles apart in two distinctive river valleys, the Brett and the Stour, these ancient houses became countries which I felt I had shamefully deserted. I would make laborious journeys to them and at times would become homesick for them. At Bottengoms I would clean the Aladdin oil lamps; at Benton End I would breathe in the rich odour of garlic, wine and oil paint as others did the North Sea. I would always make careful plans when it was Bottengoms because John liked to meet me at Colchester station. But the pair of us would simply turn up at Benton End, usually in the late afternoon, when Lett Haines, resting between the 2.30 lunch and the 7.30 dinner, would lean from his bedroom window and eye us wickedly. We would then search for Cedric in the garden, led by pipe smoke.

  ‘Do you know what this is? I thought you had come to tell me.’

  Should it be fine, old Benton End hands and still-nervous new Benton End hands would not look up from their easels as we passed. They were quite unlike the usual art students, being both emancipated and trapped by the Morris–Haines ethos. We would pass grand old ladies, boys from Hadleigh (‘the village’ to Lett and Cedric), and well-known artists having a ‘freshener’, botanists and students of all ages. The Fifties were the heyday of Cedric’s and Lett’s East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting, as well as the zenith of the Benton End irises. Neither human being nor plant could remain very long in the gravelly soil of this art-cum-garden institution without putting forth some extraordinary creation. Some lived in – three to a room – others put up in the little town.

  None of us knew much about Cedric’s and Lett’s life before they came to Suffolk. I heard that they had met on Armistice night in Trafalgar Square, that Lett was married, that Cedric had been in his thirties, that Cornwall beckoned, then Paris. Now in their sixties, they were to us old men. Lett’s sophisticated talk and Cedric’s curious innocence of manner combined to tell us about a past which we found simply amazing. Not that they cared for questions, unless of course they were about art, gardening or food. Lett’s talk was unrestrained, sexy, funny, outrageous if possible. Cedric’s talk was in a quiet, mildly Welsh voice and much interrupted by giggles. If we joined in with these it was usually out of politeness, for what made him crease up with merriment was a mystery to us. It would be years later for me, as their literary executor, that the passionate and brave story of their lives would tumble from letters and bills, and most of all from pencil lines on dirty bits of paper. They had challenged Italian fascism. They had befriended gay men when they came out of prison. Lett had belonged to Ixion, the Anglo-German League which sought to bring sanity to the propaganda-maddened soldiers who had fought on the Western Front, and what mostly enthralled me, they had known everybody in 1920s Paris. Lett had been friends with D. H. Lawrence, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. And here he was in Suffolk cooking our meals.

  Neither did I think of Cedric as a naturalist, a bird man, a botanist and plant-collector. In some ways he was not unlike the poet John Clare as he made friends with flowers. Lett was urban through and through, and for all his sexual capers and sociability essentially lonely. Young studen
ts called him ‘father’ and actually loved him. But for all the activity of Benton End and the affection it gave him, I used to think that he was out of place. He had promoted Cedric’s career and given him the lead. Both of them ignored the caste system and saw each person as distinctive and interesting – and even now and then brilliant. Lett’s eroticism was bisexual and successful, and Cedric’s little more than a naughtiness which we found impossible to share. In one way or another all of us ‘flowered’ at Benton End. It was three guineas a week, bring your own sheets.

  The food was peasant French. They were friends of Elizabeth David and Cedric had illustrated her cookery books. The entire house could at times reek of garlic, herbs and wine. Considering the conversation at times, dinner was formal – a simplicity carried to some exquisite limit.

  Now and then, when Cedric was to have a London exhibition, Lett would say to me, ‘Write the catalogue.’ His own background particulars were never quite the same, and I would protest, ‘But, you said this … or that.’

  ‘Never mind, dear boy, never mind.’

  Of course I took Kurt Hutton to see them and recognised one of those indivisibilities of certain manners which belong to Europeanness. Cedric liked to harp on his Welshness but Paris and Rome, not to say Cornwall, had all made their mark.