The Time by the Sea

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  I had been in my new old house only a month when an ancient man asked if he could scythe the paddock. We were sitting by the Rayburn and above it was the only photograph of Edward FitzGerald which existed. Or rather there was a pair of them from an Ipswich shop, one looking up, one looking down. He called the latter ‘the old philosopher’.

  Davy, the old man remarked, ‘I knew he.’

  ‘You couldn’t have done. He died years before you were born.’

  ‘Had a boat, didn’t he?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘I knew he.’

  My house was protected at the back by a pond called a cattle moat. Even so, Harold’s cows would now and then splash through it and surge onto the lawn. Usually in the small hours. It was a dreaded sound, the heavy breathing on the walls, the wrecking feet. I would rush out in my pyjamas and drive them onto the road and into the first meadow I could find. Harold the landlord’s advice was to fill in their footprints with sand – ‘You’d never know they’d been there.’

  He and his elderly sister were frightened of thunderstorms. They would ring up at three in the morning: ‘Can you come round?’ They had come to Suffolk from Devon in 1919 when, as people said, ‘You had to sell a sheep to pay the men.’ Air Ministry compensation had transformed them: a Jaguar – I watched them blackberrying in it, slowly driving from bush to bush on waste land – a swimming pool, but still that old carefulness. He would bring me a mass of pea hulm which the lorries had left on the hedges as they rocked off to the Birds Eye factory. ‘Enough for a meal,’ he would say. Once when they went away the hotel put them into a double bed and it was ‘All right.’ Their innocence touched me. It was real.

  Alone at Boulge and in what now seems to be always early summer, I would lie in the maidenhair and ox-eye daisies by FitzGerald’s grave and read a book. His lodge turned Thirties bungalow was near by and I handed out prize money at the celebrated Debach and Boulge Flower Show in it. Not that there was the least sign of his occupancy left. But the footpaths led straight to him in every direction. He filled the local pillar boxes with some of the best letters in the language. I found myself knowing FitzGerald through and through via his letters, which were indiscreet to a fault – as letters should be. And yet through my imagination and by living just up the road. And by talking to my shepherd neighbour from the Highlands who now lived on the FitzGeralds’ Home Farm, but who would not have been interested in him.

  The airfield had redirected so many of his walks. These were strewn with the dead. Dance-band music blared into his silence. Longings for Ohio and New York met with his indifference to where he happened to be. Why is there no longing for Ireland? Or for Cambridge, if it came to that. In his letters to Carlyle and Tennyson he mocked his few miles. But he could be formidable and attacked ignorant squires who cut down great trees. He heard church bells, this being ringing country. But I doubt if he knew that a bell at Charsfield was inscribed, ‘Box of sweet honey, I am Michael’s bell’, only in Latin of course. He was not at all archaeological. Time for him was measured by the fall of petals, the taste of wine, friendships.

  At Aldeburgh I used to wonder why he never came into Ben’s and Imogen’s thinking. But, born just before the First World War, they could have seen him among the bric-a-brac, trashily clothed in soft leathers and velvets. In Woodbridge I met Miss Howe, daughter of his housekeeper, who kept a shop in Church Street, and who brought out his inkpot and shawl to show me. All this would again have struck Ben and Imo as frowsty.

  Driving across Naseby battlefield the other day, we passed and repassed one of those house-size container vehicles which read, ‘Debach Enterprises’ in big letters. Now it is certain that if my landlord’s cornfields had not been flattened with Aldeburgh shingle by Irish labour, no one in Leicestershire could ever have read ‘Debach’.

  My landlord and his sister bought a pair of Newmarket racehorses with the airfield money, calling them Debach Boy and Debach Girl. Listening to a race on the radio they heard the commentator cry, ‘De Bark Boy, De Bark Boy!’

  ‘Really,’ they said, ‘you would think that an educated person would know how to pronounce Debach [Debbidge].’

  All it has on the two-and-a-half-inch-to-the-mile map is ‘Airfield disused’. No astronomers’ language. No hint that it would be in use by Debach Enterprises and its far-flung customers, and known in Birmingham – and all over the world. What a way for a hamlet to go!

  17 The Airfield

  James Hamilton-Paterson

  Debach and Boulge stand at a conjunction of Suffolk’s light and heavy land. To the north-west lies ‘the ol’ clay’, to the south-east the sandlings, and the sea. Here, there and everywhere black plantations thrived for the shoots. One winter a plantation was bowed to the ground by an army of rooks. The sandlings shade off all that is emphatic in our landscape. But the old clay never stops declaring its presence. ‘Loving-land’ the old farmworkers used to call it as it clung to their boots.

  Debach airfield hung on to signs of its wartime inhabi tants. I sometimes found letters in a rolling American hand in its concrete crevasses. The saluting base had sockets for all the flags. Now learner drivers sped where the bombers took off. When James Hamilton-Paterson and I became friends in the Sixties I discovered that he was fascinated by aviation. This was made known to me, not on Debach airfield but in my own garden. We were clearing a patch in which to grow vegetables when we began pulling out thin sheets of what looked like tin. Then we exhumed what seemed to be old clocks. And then we knew what we had found – a Spitfire.

  Neighbours said, ‘Oh, yes, poor lad. He flew off early one morning from Woodbridge and hit your elms – which cut his head off! His head was up the tree and his body was still strapped in the cockpit!’

  James and I washed the instruments in the sink and stacked the Spitfire sheets against the garage.

  He and I were introduced after he had won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry at Oxford. He sat on the bench above the moat – ‘I think I could be happy here.’ He had just returned from searching for Che Guevara in South America. Everyone I knew was searching for something or somebody, the Maharishi, the Beatles, Flower Power, whilst I did not seem to be searching for anything, and was thought to have found it. But I hadn’t. James Hamilton-Paterson and I were not seekers at this time other than after the means to exist. He sat in his room and wrote children’s novels, and eventually, elsewhere, a masterpiece called Playing with Water which he dedicated to me.

  Seas, oceans, not Suffolk ponds, would preoccupy him. Aeroplanes too. We walked the Dallinghoo Wield and he would fill his pockets with tin shirt buttons lost by farmworkers, also fossils; pouring these finds out on the kitchen table. I re-read Playing with Water because amongst all his books it ‘holds’ what we were then before either of us became what we are now. He was – is – tall, fair, patrician and unprovincial. Free of those things which have tied me to a small scene. Debach, the tiniest place imaginable, stays expanded by his friendship.

  They were digging up Sutton Hoo again when I was there and I would cycle over to watch the amazing sand ship taking shape; the sand prow, the sand ribs, the sand keel. The sand destination. Once when the archaeologists had rigged up a vast plastic sheet against some likely rain and had taken their shirts off, the Saxon galleon looked as though it was in full sail and would reverse its voyage up the Deben and carry its memory of garnets, gold, harp, standard and banqueting silver to Scandinavia, leaving us with just a hole in the gorse.

  Arrow-straight roads run to the sea from here. The featurelessness of them creates a kind of calm. The sandlings is a land specialising in departures and in returnings. Alun Lewis, stationed here during the last war, found it more than he could bear:

  From Orford Ness to Shingle Street

  The grey disturbance lifts its head

  And one by one, reluctantly,

  The living come back slowly from the dead.

  James Hamilton-Paterson and I borrowed his mother’s car to savour Dunwich. I
knew exactly what Dunwich tasted like but it was all new to him. The cliff was sprigged with yellow bones where the final churchyard was crumbling into the waves. James found a perfect white and pale-gold skull, emptying the fine sand from it and placing it on the back seat. Five years later his mother rang to ask, ‘I’ve found a skull in a biscuit tin. What shall I do with it?’ I buried it in my wood. No rites, other than tenderness. No sea sounds. My mulch filled the whirled hollow of its ears. James sent me a seahorse from the Philippines in exchange. We had an investment in fragments.

  I wrote:

  Winter reveals vivid contrasts between the water patterns of the two lands which meet at Debach. On the sandlings they are anarchic, spilling far over for miles beyond the estuarial limits and flooding the shallow valleys of the Stour, Orwell, Deben, Alde and Blyth. Thin bright lakes spread themselves with what appears to be a colourless deliberation round our traditional defences. On the heavy land being ploughed in front of my house the water is still disciplined by medieval utility measures and few Debach walkers could guess at the number of its moats, wells, ditches and ponds. There is such a variety of quiet trapped waters, few of them to be seen until one almost tumbles into them. The field ditches between me and Maypole Hill stay workaday as they churn incredible volumes of Tiber-yellow liquid through icy cuts only half-a-dozen feet below the growing crops. The sound of all this half-hidden, half-heard water is the voice of our arable winter. No babbling brook but ‘a cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart, and in the wood the furious winter blowing’. Except that in East Anglia the blowing tends to arrive with the spring. It is no wonder that the oldest man-made structure in Suffolk, according to M. R. James, is a wind-shelter near Ipswich.

  And there is Shingle Street from which Irish labourers brought countless stones to make the runways. The stones there exist in such mesmerising quantities that, like stars, one must stop counting or weighing and even thinking in numbers. A mile from my house the bombers trundled over them on their death runs. Pre-war maps directed us to brick-lined moats, shadows of cottages, suggestions of paths, hints of population. Perhaps two thousand years of agriculture and rural habitation all smoothed out. But the same air. The same plants. The seasonal birds coming and going as they did above the Western Front. And a handful of things which only Edward FitzGerald might recognise.

  James and I went to Aldeburgh, of course. Went all over the county. He was bemused by my Anglicanism, I was unnerved by his detachment. If I can see a long way in East Anglia, he can see continental distances, ocean depths – and flight paths. He is a master of minutiae and of great things. Also, like me, solitary. Debach became our interpreter, this hamlet, shorn now of its crowning glory, the elms. I try to go this way to Aldeburgh – to anywhere past Ipswich. The church is now a house, and the family which live in it garden among graves, and look out on fields which have shed their concrete. But Dallinghoo Wield retains its old surface on which curious objects still linger. French’s Folly has changed its name once more. But Debach is not a name one can do anything about. It clings to its post.

  18 The Sea

  John Nash: Aldeburgh Beach

  The sea, and whatever sea it happens to be, is in a permanent state of cancellation as far as human activity is concerned, eventually wiping out our every mark. Our history is eventually little more than the sea’s litter. My friend James Hamilton-Paterson, one of its greatest recorders, said that ‘the swimmer tries to remember what a mile looks like’. He was remembering how the sea takes our measurement. At Aldeburgh, although best of all on the north Cornwall coast, I give up attempting to keep in mind what is landward as I watch the sea hit the rocks like a restless sculptor with all the time in the world to shape them. My head becomes a tabula rasa on which the ocean is welcome to write poetry or gibberish without any guidance from me. Is this why old people retire to the south coast or Florida? Why their most treasured possession is a deck-chair? Not a bed in the opium den but a seat where the most wonderful monotony can drug the watcher into forgetting past, present and future. Should it be warm enough there is no reason why, at Eastbourne, sea-nirvana should not be reached by elevenses.

  However it is a young me who takes to the hot shingle with a notebook, an unread book and a canvas windbreak in order to be hypnotised by the everlasting waves repetitively coming my way but never quite reaching me, and by the immensity of the water behind them. They make land seem a very trivial business.

  Benjamin Britten, Lowestoftian from day one, might be said to have come out of the sea like one of those oceanic beings who blow horns in the cartouches of ancient maps. Unlike me he was oceanic from the start. Tides accompany his pulse, whereas my pulse is out of tune with the regular beat of the shore which I find wearying as well as stimulating. I have never seen Ben tired. He is either fully awake or sound asleep. His father’s house stared hard at the sea in all weathers. It had a basement from which on Monday washday steam would billow in soap clouds which added to the morning mist, his sister Beth told me. It is odd how disconnected bits of human information become free from one’s unforgetfulness, and gain importance. Thus the Lowestoft dentist’s house and the little boy on washday and the composing – like Mozart.

  In 1955, the year I came to Aldeburgh, Ben wrote the following:

  Once upon a time there was a prep-school boy. He was called Britten mi., his initials were E.B., his age was nine, and his locker number was seventeen … There was one curious thing about this boy: he wrote music … He wrote lots of it, reams and reams of it.

  (Between the age of five and eighteen, Britten composed around 730 pieces of music.)

  Beth Welford and I used to talk in the Bull Hotel at Woodbridge. Her marriage had broken up and she felt free. She told me about the descent of the Scottish herring ‘girls’ in Lowestoft and the fishmarkets where her mother helped to run a canteen. But what with the Depression and the disappearance of the herrings, the town during Britten’s boyhood had become a struggling place. His experience of it helped to create his Labour politics, as did the agricultural depression form mine. But Akenfield worried him. ‘Are you against our Suffolk farmers, Ronnie?’ How could I be? He then agreed. How could I be?

  Our sea remained as it had been for ever. Out of it came his music. Supposing, like me, he had come from where he could not hear it?

  ‘Dear, the things you ask!’ said Imogen.

  Preparatory to writing this note on it I would revisit it. I would walk from Thorpeness Bay to Orford with long rests here and there to find out if it was still speaking its mind. Once I had cleared mine of its literary lumber and its old emotions, and I had set my ear to its sound, it sang!

  People who write never fail to catch its voice. It made the Second World War poet Alun Lewis desperately unhappy:

  From Orford Ness to Shingle Street

  The grey disturbance spreads

  Washing the icy seas on Deben Head …

  The soldier leaning on the sandbagged wall

  Hears in the combers’ curling rush and crash

  His single self-centred monotonous wish …

  Burma would grant it. Everyone wishes that the herrings would come again. Swim in their millions from the Scottish islands to Cornwall. Be a silver multitude once more. In Eastern England their not arriving is still as though the moon had vanished. At least their plenty did not make us mad like the Swedes when herring gluts made the poor eat themselves crazy. ‘Pray to God the herrings never return!’ they said. It had been like Whisky Galore, only disgusting. Once in Sweden they took me to the smooth rocks above which the smokehouses and fishracks stood, and into the fishermen’s huts. There were group photographs like ‘The Class of ’93’. Males of all ages but with the same alcohol-blinded eyes and drink-sodden mouths. Boys and men who had drunk the winter darkness away. Which is why in Gothenburg you can’t have half a bitter without a government permit.

  In Aldeburgh and Lowestoft and Newlyn, herring arrived regularly as clockwork until …? But the exact date is too aweso
me perhaps to be remembered. The Dutch called their herring fisheries ‘The Triumph of Holland’. Julian Huxley believed that the mystery of why the herrings stopped coming could never be solved.

  I cooked them in oatmeal. ‘They filled you up.’ When I went to stay with James Turner in Cornwall, to be introduced to the last of the Newlyn School artists, themselves a rarity, we would walk round that fine harbour to see what was left of a huge fish industry being turned into watercolours. But I always tried to be alone at Land’s End and at remote points, and at D. H. Lawrence’s Zennor. Yet nothing there diminished Aldeburgh. Nothing modified its contemplative powers. Coasts provide the ultimate sites for meditation. Their tides can carry our penultimate thoughts. Wilkie Collins wrote a novel called No Name in Aldeburgh and it used to make me apply it to the seas in general.

  Of course, like everyone else, I knew what George Crabbe thought of the German Ocean. His son was careful to write it down:

  The only great object of nature that appeared to strike him was the sea. This had been the commanding sublimity of his childhood, and once in after-life, having been deprived of a sight of it for a considerable time, he rode sixty miles and back merely for the pleasure of beholding it, and enjoying one plunge into its waves. This is the only impulse of a poetical character to be met with in his career!

  Edward FitzGerald saw the sea for the first time at Aldeburgh – ‘My old mumbojumbo sea’. He said that it redeemed Suffolk from dullness! He would lie by the mainmast of his schooner-yacht named The Scandal reading the Odyssey. Best of all, he sailed away with the beautiful Posh on a herring-lugger named The Meum and Tuum (The Mum and Tum to Suffolk). Posh was ‘broader and taller than all the rest; fit to be a leader of men, Body and Soul, looking now Ulysses-like’.