MISTRESS ford Sir John! Art thou there, my deer, my male deer?
FALSTAFF My doe with the black scut! Let the sky rain potatoes; let it thunder to the tune of Green Sleeves, hail kissing-comfits and snow eringoes …
According to Geoffrey Grigson sea-holly roots grope through sand and shingle five or six feet, and have waxed leaves which reduce their respiration. Both plants – and a small apple tree – flower near Maggi Hambling’s memorial to Britten on the beach north of Aldeburgh. It takes time to realise how floral shingle is, how pale blue and pale grey, how burgeoning – and how local. Denis’s father Frank Garrett may have thought of it, and not poppies, on the Western Front. My father would have been at Gallipoli that year, another Suffolk boy out of his terrain. At Cambridge there would be a special Chair for Denis, to acknowledge his wonderfully practical botany – the diseases of corn and rice. Whether this grew out of his knowledge of the edible plants of his childhood which flourished between Thorpeness and Orford, I doubt. I never thought to ask him. His ashes dust Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire where on our walks he would be received like a prophet.
The Garretts were Aldeburgh. In the nineteenth century the family had built the Snape Maltings and the Leiston Ironworks. Newson Garrett’s daughters – Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (‘cousin Lizzy’) and Millicent Fawcett (‘cousin Millie’) – would go on to change the world for women. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was the first woman doctor and first woman mayor; her sister would become Dame Millicent Fawcett who frightened the politicians as a formidable advocate of women’s suffrage as well as helping to found Newnham College. We would listen to Denis’s wry family anecdotes. My favourite was when the widowed Dr Garrett Anderson moved from cold Alde House to a cosy flat in the stable, to the consternation of Aldeburgh. A deputation of aldermen visited her to persuade her to return to the great house and to her position in local society. Her fury was terrifying when the penny dropped. ‘Have you forgotten that your Maker was born in a stable?’ And there she stayed. When Denis and his wife and daughters came to Aldeburgh in the summer there was no mention of the Festival. They were neither for it nor against it. ‘Their Aldeburgh’ failed to contain it, being so full of other things. Such as tramping head down for miles and miles to renew contact with minute friends on the marsh or on the beach, to get healthily blown about, to feed me in pubs, but chiefly to take in their native air, the air of George Crabbe’s Borough:
The bounding marsh-bank and the blighted tree;
The water only, when the tides were high,
When low, the mud half cover’d and half dry;
The sunburnt tar that blisters on the planks,
The heaps of entangled weeds that slowly float,
As the tide rolls by the impeded boat.
After church on Sundays I would study the lichen on Church tower and on the drowned sailors’ tombs, as Crabbe had done, as he wrote what must be the finest botanical poem on the subject. The churchyard was huge and blowy. The vicar was Rupert Godfrey, a pale, still young man who had been in a Japanese prison camp, an ascetic who was uncomfortable with the Festival. He was on its Council and once caused sophisticated amusement when Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia was proposed for the 1954 Festival: ‘Can’t we have less rape?’ When I was told this I thought that maybe he would have been the only person present who could have seen rape. The war had lapped over us all, one way or another, leaving its sediment. I became fond of Rupert and his wife and wrote a new church guide for him, and got John Nash and Kurt Hutton to illustrate it. It sold for decades. Rupert worried about the behaviour of Festival audiences in church. He had a puritan streak which, like his face, contained a chilly beauty. It was unusual in the Fifties for parish churches to be commandeered for music festivals and sometimes I sensed that he would sooner not have had this. ‘Aldeburgh’ invaded his austerity, but, like the sea, he could do nothing about it. I think that the first church concerts had to be without applause. When a concert these days is clapped to a near-insane degree I think of Rupert. Crabbe had a bad time when he returned to Aldeburgh as curate. But he got his own back – and how! His bust stares up at John Piper’s Britten memorial window, stony-eyed. The window flames.
It was the exterior of Aldeburgh Church which spoke to Crabbe of immortality – those furry mosses, those botanically cancelled names:
The living stains which Nature’s hand alone,
Profuse of life, pours forth upon the stone.
I would walk through Crabbe’s churchyard reading names to Godfrey. Once I began explaining that the Ropes were Rationalists and he said coldly, ‘Never mind the Rationalists.’ But in Aldeburgh one had to mind them. Its climate and bitter history had made them a force to be reckoned with. Under our feet were the rough worshippers, the sea-killed men and boys, the real Ellen Orford, a woman who could not forget, the shore gentry, the medieval mind itself – and ‘seeds to our eyes invisible’.
But this is running ahead. It is January and thin snow falls unceasingly. The church tower, the small town, are smudges. The birds alone are distinct.
2 Morgan
E. M. Forster
A week or so after settling into Fairhaven I walked into Aldeburgh to buy food. It was still snowing but in a faint, whirling way which hid the sea and the marsh. Coming from the opposite direction, blinded like me, an elderly man was stepping it out. It was E. M. Forster, a recognisable figure even if I had never seen him before: we passed each other silently, packed snow deadening our footsteps. He walked quickly, lightly, even youthfully one might say. He wore a tweed overcoat and a flat cap. Returning about two hours later I found a page from a pocketbook thrust under the door – there was no letter-box. It read:
4 Crabbe Street,
Saturday
Dear Mr Blythe,
If you are free today and can come in for a drink, we shall be very pleased to see you.
Yours sincerely,
E. M. Forster
Bewildered, troubled by this – its unlikelihood – I went of course. Four Crabbe Street was Benjamin Britten’s house. Forster let me in, shook my duffel coat before hanging it up, showed me into a room where every surface, including the piano, was littered with paper slips, and said, ‘Sebastian Sprott.’ They were indexing Marianne Thornton, the ‘domestic biography’ of the aunt whose money had given Forster financial freedom. They were gentle and charming. Indexing being part of my trade as a librarian, I made short work of that for her biography.
As we gathered up the slips Forster said, ‘We eat at lunchtime’, and fetched sherry and biscuits. And of course, ‘What are you reading, Mr Blythe?’ I should have replied Indigo, or Camus, but for some reason I answered, ‘Elizabeth Bowen’, causing their eyes to meet. It made me defend her, at which they too praised her. I felt shy and vulnerable, immensely hungry, and unable to explain myself. I wondered how and when to leave. At about nine Forster helped me on with my coat and said that they couldn’t thank me enough for my assistance. Starving and cold, I went to the White Lion Hotel and sat by a great fire, feeling that I had failed some kind of test. But shopping in Aldeburgh the following week, Forster hurried from Britten’s house to greet me. He hoped that I was looking after myself. He carried my straw fish-basket. He bought Quink in the bookshop. He hoped – felt sure – that I would not always be alone. His voice was disconcertingly youthful, his features rather foxy, although with fine eyes behind the glasses. And now we talked easily about literature and about ourselves. Thorpeness was indeed odd, though ‘most interesting’. It was the moment to ask, ‘How could you know I was there – a totally unknown young man hoping to become a writer?’ But some rule which I couldn’t understand stopped me from saying it. I wrote in my diary, ‘It has begun.’ ‘Now the fishmonger’s, did you say, Ronald?’ Now the baker’s on the corner. Now the observing glance.
Britten and Forster were old friends when I met them in 1955. Forster’s BBC talk on Crabbe, printed in the Listener in 1941 and read by Britten and Peter Pears in California, h
ad famously returned them to their rightful element. Morgan, as I was soon awkwardly to call him, had been present at the first night of Peter Grimes a decade earlier, when he was stunned by the glory of the music but shocked by the liberties taken with George Crabbe’s devastating poem The Borough. ‘Well might you warn me that the libretto departed from Crabbe,’ he wrote to Eddy Sackville-West. ‘I thought it did so disastrously¸ and it was so insistent both as narrative and psychology that it imperilled the opera, especially at the end.’ Bit by bit I would learn that Forster’s understanding of Crabbe, still a little-read genius, was profound. So what was it that upset him in Peter Grimes? It was that Ellen Orford and Peter Grimes, who had no contact at all with each other in The Borough, had become old friends in the opera, Ellen schoolmarmishly respectable, Peter helplessly the local bad lot. Crabbe could not be so elementary, so crass.
The Borough is a series of ‘Letters’ from Aldeburgh. Candour is their watchword. Ellen Orford makes her appearance in the twentieth Letter, Peter Grimes in the twenty-second Letter. Ellen is now an old blind widow who has been a schoolteacher but also a Hardy-like plaything of fate. A less-like Ellen of the opera could not be imagined. Her husband was a violent brute, one of her sons was hanged, another drowned. Awfulness follows awfulness in lengthy statements. Her role in the poem is of a stoic, someone whose ‘senses fail not at all’ and who at last comes to ‘my winter calm of life’. Crabbe could have been reading The Book of Job. Ellen Orford’s Letter is so terrible that the reader can barely continue. Peter Grimes’s Letter shows insanity as a mercy; Ellen’s sanity as a torment. The Borough is a masterpiece, as is the music of Peter Grimes. Somewhere in between the librettist Montagu Slater has taken his liberties with a shocking text.
The young Benjamin Britten put what could not be said into music and orchestrated Aldeburgh’s sea and climate itself. He also found in George Crabbe’s pity for the victims of child labour, a commonplace in his time, a text for that ‘pity’ for boyhood which would so compulsively run flame-like through Britten’s work, and throughout his life. Forster of course¸ having been shown the ruthless convention of the librettist in Peter Grimes, had dealt with Billy Budd, and with huge respect for Herman Melville.
That autumn I found the second edition of Forster’s Alexandria: A History and Guide in the second-hand book rack near the newsagent’s – ‘by E. M. Forster M.A. Cantab, L.L.D. Aberdeen’ and published in Alexandria in 1938. ‘To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen’ – Plotinus. Now it remains my conviction that this work is not less than the novels as a compendium of Forster’s thinking and beliefs. I intended to get him to sign it when he next came to Aldeburgh but something told me that it would be a mistake. It had lemon-coloured hardboard covers, many maps and designs, photographs, and 218 pages. I treasure it still. Unbeknown to me at this time Forster would lecture on it at the next Festival, the one for which I would edit the Programme Book in 1956.
Its second importance for me was that it introduced me to Constantine Cavafy – the poet who stood at a slight angle to the universe when Forster lived in Alexandria. No guide to Alexandria could leave out Cavafy. So Forster included what would be my first encounter with him. ‘Ithaca’ I would of course have to find for myself. Forster placed Cavafy’s poem between his history of Alexandria and the guide to his own exploration of it. Cavafy had died in 1933 and his presence haunts the second edition of Forster’s book.
The Alexandria I knew and loved belongs to the war years. I was very happy there, in the intervals of my work, and gradually fell in love with many of her inhabitants and the whole of her past. She was then a tousled unsmartened sort of place … Hadra was still a lake, Marabout a desert island, Montazah a convalescents’ paradise … it was permissible to bathe in the Friars’ Pool without wearing any costume. All this has vanished with the advent of modernity and the Corniche Road, and few except myself will regret it. I realised what was coming a few years back, when I paid a brief visit and lost my way as I came out of the new railway station. What a humiliating experience for the author of the Guide … I desire to thank certain friends who are no longer alive. They belonged to many nationalities.
They included his first lovers. He was in his late thirties and Alexandria had conquered Weybridge. He dedicated ‘this volume to one of them, to C. P. Cavafy, Greek by birth, Alexandrian in spirit, and a great poet. Abingdon, England.’ So here is my first knowledge of Cavafy, as chosen by E. M. Forster. I read it sitting on Aldeburgh beach.
THE GOD ABANDONS ANTONY
When at the hour of midnight
an invisible choir is suddenly heard passing
with exquisite music, with voices –
Do not lament your fortune that at last subsides,
your life’s work that has failed, your schemes that have proved illusions.
But like a man prepared, like a brave man,
bid farewell to her, to Alexandria who is departing.
Above all, do not delude yourself, do not say that it is a dream,
that your ear was mistaken.
Do not condescend to such empty hopes.
Like a man for long prepared, like a brave man,
like the man who was worthy of such a city,
go to the window firmly,
and listen with emotion
but not with the prayers and complaints of the coward
(Ah! supreme rapture!)
listen to the notes, to the exquisite instruments of the mystic choir,
and bid farewell to her, to Alexandria whom you are losing.
Forster was a spellbinding lecturer, the ‘old Cambridge’ accent, if it can be called that, the witty sadness, the glinting glasses, the admitting of his hearers into the Forsterian country.
Sitting in the Jubilee Hall on a Sunday afternoon, thanks to the clumsy volume in my bag I saw young Morgan approaching the Rue Lepsius and Cavafy waiting for him in his grandly furnished and poverty-stricken house, and then not finding this address, that association.
I never found them again – so quickly lost
Those poetical eyes, that face
Pale … in the darkening of the street.
It would have been years after I left Aldeburgh that I discovered Cavafy’s ‘Ithaca’, years after Morgan and I walked to the Martello. My novel A Treasonable Growth was published a decade before his death in 1970. In it my Forsterian lovers watch from the Town Steps:
There was a bench at the top of the Steps. Richard flopped down and stared at the glittering sea. The Town Steps, forty or fifty of them, swept away in a torrent of shallow treads … the sea seemed to be both below and above him … Coasters looking sacred in their anchored stillness balanced perilously on the horizon, their illuminations, larger, lower stars. He could just make out the danger signs. The Greek letter held high over the deep had a curious bitterness. As well as warning, there was something kill-joy in its angularity. It should have been a good place in which to think … But he couldn’t think. He could only remember.
3 Travelling with Julian
John Nash: Sea Holly
As a teenager I was captivated by Julian Tennyson’s Suffolk Scene. It accompanied me on countless bike rides. I knew it by heart. Much later his brother Hallam became a close friend and I met their father Sir Charles Tennyson who was almost a hundred years old, an elegant ancient man who used to live in Aldeburgh, then in Peasenhall. Julian had written about the Martello Tower and with this robust chapter in mind I followed him to it. He had written Suffolk Scene on foot and on his bike. So at Thorpeness I read him yet again. He had asked for comparatively little in life, just to edit a sporting magazine when the war was over. All he begged was the freedom of a bird. Sir Charles sent me the family photograph album and told me as much about him as anyone could, his brother Hallam included. In 1939 he joined up, carrying with him books by George Borrow, Richard Jefferies, and Robert Nichols. Also the first page of In Memoriam in manuscript. His father said, ‘Oh, if only you cou
ld have seen the English countryside before cars!’
Julian had seen the Aldeburgh marshes and the coastal sandlings at the end of their popular reputation for wretchedness, superstition and crime. And before the repair of their complex network of ancient dykes and sea walls. Not that either was much good. Generations of marshmen had toiled futilely against the sea’s merciless encroachments, tiny Sisyphuses or grown-up children turning out mud castles which could only be washed away. Julian had lifted his eyes. From his day on the Suffolk marshes and sandlings, that ten-mile border which stretches between the arable soil and the shore would acquire its present status of a wild-life haven. He wrote,
When I lived in Aldeburgh I used to lie awake at night listening to the curlews flying over the town. They seemed to have a route which passed directly over our house. Often as many as six flocks would come over together, heading northwards, and when their last calls had died away on the thin air, I would gradually doze off in the long and even silence. ‘Cur-leek-leek, curr-leek-leek, cu-r-r-r-r-leek’ – they were coming south this time and, drowsy as I was, that shrill bubbling whistle would sent me rushing to the window to peer among the stars and catch the vague shapes as they swept over the hill and down towards the marshes. Then I would fall asleep wondering whether these were the same birds that passed and re-passed along that aerial road in the night, or whether by mutual agreement they were carrying on a system of exchange in the marshes up and down the coast.
Curlews are shy and mysterious, and I found them the most restless birds on the river. Even in winter they were always on the move, as if they couldn’t be satisfied with the same place for very long, and must be up and away looking for something new. Night after night they went, wailing their frustrations; but in April, when they left for their breeding ground and the flocks came over all night long, there was a purposeful, almost triumphant feeling in those sharp voices. The notes were quicker and higher, and sometimes they lacked the hesitant, purring quaver altogether.
The Time by the Sea Page 2