The Time by the Sea

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  Adrian Bell was some ten years younger than John, a loquacious and idealistic person whose trilogy, Corduroy, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree, had established him as one of the best rural writers of his day. John rented a cottage called The Thatch near Creems – and near the Fox Inn – and they saw a lot of each other. Once the local boys challenged them to bring a canoe down the Stour from Sudbury to Bures, the state of the river, due to the farming depression, the collapse of barge transport and neglect generally, making it virtually invisible here and there in mid-summer, so dense were the weeds, so overgrown the trees on its banks. Some of the now unwanted barges which John Constable had painted had been scuttled at Ballingdon, and lay just below the surface of the water like vast black motionless fish. John and Adrian did sail a canoe all this choked length, though with every imaginable difficulty. Bures bridge was lined with cheering lads as they passed beneath, hot, scratched, exhausted, but triumphant. In 1939 John and Adrian collaborated on a book, Men and the Fields, which was a work of homage to the farmers and farmworkers of England, particularly to those who, in those hard-up times, were struggling to hold together the semi-ruined agriculture of the Stour Valley. Both Adrian’s books and John’s paintings reflect what might be described as a lyrical realism, a deep knowledge of farming plus a pleasure in the designs which, for many centuries, it had carved across the English landscape. For Adrian it was a peopled countryside; for John, a land of plants and shapes whose human occupation was explained in terms of workaday litter, binders, fencing, shepherds’ huts, gravel diggings and carts. There cannot be many villages like Wormingford and Wissington, and their environs, which have been the attention of two such excellent chroniclers.

  Adrian Bell wrote in his diary,

  August 1935

  Picture seeking with John Nash. Found something much to his purpose in Kid’s Hole at the back of Green’s. The artists, man and wife, staying in Greens are stanced opposite here daily, doing a scene in which the Finch harvest-team figures, have to move every time wagon leaves stack. In a great hurry because last load being put on stack, and he hadn’t half finished horses and wagon. John wants to do a picture of the valley from under the elm, but dismayed by my warning him that he may find others sitting about.

  Bottengoms, like a number of ancient houses in the neighbourhood, had been empty for some years when John decided to buy it. It was 1943. The house at Meadle had been let, he and Christine were absorbed in war work, and for the first time in their marriage there was no home base. During the holidays at Wormingford and Wissington they had discovered on their walks and drives many forlorn cottages tumbling away in their jungly gardens; they were a common feature of the depressed countryside then. It was Christine who told me of her first close encounter with Bottengoms:

  I knew it for years before we lived here. I used to see it from the track down below when we rented a cottage by the river. But I’d never approached it from the road until 1943, when a friend told us that it might be possible to buy it. The farmer who owned it had had it standing empty for eight years, and he’d come to the conclusion that a few hundred pounds was really more valuable to him than just to see it falling into decay. So I came by Chamber’s bus from Colchester and walked down the track, which in those days was a leafy bower with hedges meeting overhead, so one walked through a tunnel of greenery. As I walked, I saw an old man coming up the track with a bag over his shoulder, and a stick. We stopped and said Good Morning, and he said, ‘I’m the postman. My name is Death.’ That was a very good opening. I went on down past the house which was actually impossible to get near to. The nettles and elders were right up to the top of the ground-floor windows. There was no trace of a garden, no sign of a path. So I continued down the track and sat for a long time under a willow tree by a barn and I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, but absolutely impossible to contemplate as a house to live in. The idea of reclaiming it, and maintaining it even if we could reclaim it, seemed even more formidable. I must have stayed there under the willow tree at least an hour before, very regretfully, I walked back up the leafy track.

  In an essay which I wrote later, I tried to envisage both the possibility and the impossibility of coming to live in such a place. I said that, although the house had suffered many of the typical vicissitudes of the long agricultural depression, having all its old fields and meadows annexed by a neighbouring farm, and showed in all sorts of ways how it had come down in the world from yeoman independence to eventually becoming a double-dweller for farmworkers, and ultimately to years of abandonment, it retained its own powerful ability to see out change in whatever form it happened to be. And Mr Lewis himself, before Bottengoms defeated him, had made an effort to hand it on in some kind of good order, for I discovered the following message written in pencil on the inside of a ‘Tenner’ cigarette box: ‘Feb 19th 1937 painted outside of this House and Distempered inside. H. W. Spooner and B. Welford, Nayland and Boxted.’ The box also contained a nail and a hazelnut. But the collapse and slow vanishing of its pathways, barn, piggery and stackyard were another matter. There is little more daunting than a ruined farm. It is one of the saddest of sights. But John and Christine were far from being daunted. The past and the future of Bottengoms lay lightly on their conscience and imagination. In the middle of a war they could only think of what might be done now. When I think of them at this time, I am reminded of the celebrated Suffolk gardener John Tradescant who, in the turmoil of a battlefield, was seen, botanising during the carnage, bending down amid the swords and blood to collect some interesting plants. One of Christine’s favourite anecdotes was that whilst she examined the rambling ancient rooms, wondering how on earth she could make them habitable once more, John would be outside examining the soil in great excitement and saying, ‘Yes, yes, this would do, this would be perfect for my purpose.’ The purpose, of course, was to make the garden of his dreams.

  A few months before his death, many years later, he published a little philosophical essay on his concept of gardening. The garden at Wormingford came into being because, as a small boy, John’s

  knowledge and interest in plants had been stimulated by an excellent governess whose services we shared with a neighbour’s children. Also, down the road there were five maiden ladies, whose garden was a delight and where again we came in for instruction of a gentle nature. Each old lady preserved her own childhood plot apart from the main garden, and the somewhat unkempt box-edged borders were full of ‘treasures’. At home I thought to take our own garden in hand. It had never been planned and contained few plants except some rosebeds edged with ‘Mrs Sinkins’ Pinks. Father’s full-size croquet lawn dominated everything and money was not forthcoming for the purchase of new plants. A lasting memory was a colony of Campanula rapunculoides, wisely imprisoned between the morning-room wall and the path, while Eccremocarpus scaber ran into a Gloire de Dijon near by. I still have this latter combination in my garden today.

  John’s thankful relief at having escaped death in the First War was expressed in his celebrated painting The Cornfield, which is now in the Tate Gallery. His gratitude for being so eager to pick up the threads of his career after the Second World War found its outlet in transforming the jungle at Bottengoms into a haven for the kind of plants he needed to have around him. Carving this garden out was a tough business. With the assistance of his old friend John Langston and a succession of helpers from the village, the rubbish was cleared, many beds cut – including a large palette-shaped bed in front of the house – the horse-ponds cleaned out and planted with bamboo, gunnera, flags and huge marsh marigolds – ‘bull-buttercups’, the old Essex people used to call them – paths created and an orchard made. Shaping a new garden in an ancient spot is the kind of treat which does not come often in a lifetime. With the aid of a succession of jobbing gardeners (come to think of it, I can’t recall seeing John actually digging) a Nash jungle of old roses, bulbs and flowers of every kind replaced the bramble, elder and nettle jungle, and during high
summer with very near the same density. Nightingales sang against the sound of the piano or the push-lawnmower and, in winter, owls hooted from the collapsing barn and sheds.

  John’s plants were made to work for their living, as specimens for the books he illustrated, or as models for his students at the Royal College of Art and Colchester Art School. His favourite flower-painting courses were those held at Flatford:

  For many years I conducted a course on Plant Illustration at the Flatford Mill Field Studies Centre. This started chiefly with the ideal of drawing the British Flora, but a visit to a local garden full of rare bulbs and herbaceous exotica led to defections from the original purpose. [This ‘local’ garden was that of Sir Cedric Morris at Hadleigh.] There was no wish to spurn the humble forms of our native flora, but they stood a poor chance against the riches of colour and the wealth of form provided by the garden exotics. We wanted to draw our plants with some freedom, giving them air and light, and some decorative values, but at the same time to conform to the title of our course. The distinction between a good and a bad plant drawing is hard to make … For nearly seventy years I have drawn plants for love or necessity and have not destroyed even slight sketches or notes in case they should be needed for reference (publishers can have an awkward habit of asking for illustrations in the ‘dead’ season). In any case, I feel a slight pencil flourish even of part of a plant is more valuable than a photograph. The open innocent countenance of Daisy or Anemone may seem easy to draw, but they too can be a snare, and sometimes I prefer the hooded Labiates, helmeted Monkshood and Balsam, or the leering countenance of Foxglove and Penstemon.

  Just as he was loath to part with his plant drawings, so he was with the blooms themselves after they had served their purpose in the studio. They would wither away into brown sticks on the windowsills. Pots of flowers, not so much arranged as perfectly tumbled together by Christine, stood in every room. Enough vegetables and fruit were grown to feed a large family and village friends were accustomed to Christine’s cri de coeur on the telephone, ‘Please will you eat some of our beans.’ The kitchen garden consisted of two large beds on either side of a little greenhouse which had once belonged to Eric Ravilious – ‘He kept his bike in it.’ To the north of the kitchen garden reared an enormous holly hedge, to the east a bank of old roses. During the summer it was very secluded and hot, a good place to eat strawberries while reviewing novels. Over the holly hedge one could see the top branches of a Victorian orchard, only one tree of which still produced a little fruit, a d’Arcy Spice apple tree, much cherished. And all across the garden, splashing or silent, were streams and springs and ditches, Bottengoms’s own micro water-table.

  So far as Wormingford was concerned, Christine’s was a high and loved profile, John’s somewhat clandestine and legendary. Both were everywhere, she where the people lived, he painting in the quiet half-lost dells and on the heights with their spectacular views of Suffolk, or fishing by the river.

  It was the founding of the Dramatic Society in 1949 which was to make Christine such an integral part of Wormingford. Her training as an artist at the Slade before the First World War, her musicianship and knowledge of dancing, but above all her beautiful speaking voice, plus her love of young people, made her a fine actress and producer. The Village Hall had been opened in March 1949 by Dr Thomas Wood and his wife St Osyth Mehalah. The Woods lived in Bures. Poor eyesight robbed Thomas Wood of what he might have achieved as a composer. Christine, who suffered from glaucoma much of her life, shared with him an ability not to let such handicaps ruin their lives. My only recollection of Dr Wood is being taught by him when I was a boy not to sing ‘Hearts of Oak’. His father had been a master mariner and he was famous for his sea songs. Mrs Wood’s parents, the Eustace-Smiths, lived at the Grove. Dr Wood had also been a great traveller at a time when very few people had travelled at all, had written a good autobiography, True Thomas (1936), and was a local celebrity. Just up the road from the Grove, running a market garden called Longacres, lived Guy Hickson, the brother of the future ‘Miss Marple’, Joan Hickson. Guy Hickson and Christine Nash, between them, were to develop the Wormingford Dramatic Society far beyond the usual village standards of acting. Photographs of their productions show a lot of the Bottengoms furniture and sometimes paintings by John, and Bottengoms itself became the costume department containing hundreds of dresses. Both John and Christine loved, or maybe understood, fancy-dress. Perhaps somebody should write about the passion for costume parties during the first decades of the century. The pinnacle of Christine’s dressing-up activities were her and Mary Doncaster’s exquisite ‘Georgian Assembly’ at the Minories in Colchester, where we all wore actual eighteenth-century clothes in a series of tableaux vivants. She had borrowed mine from Miss Oates at Gestingthorpe Hall, the sister of Captain Oates the Arctic explorer, who had himself worn them at a fancy-dress party. They were the wedding clothes of a young man who was married in 1749. Christine’s most memorable role was, perhaps, that of Lady Waldegrave in Winifred Beaumont’s play The Key (1960). I used to read to her as she made her Tudor dress, the half-blind eyes so strangely ‘seeing’ when it came to needlework. Reading aloud at Bottengoms after dinner was a regular habit – John playing the piano while the meal cooked, me reading aloud while it digested. They liked L. P. Hartley, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James (The Spoils of Poynton was a favourite), and Jane Austen. They both smoked as I read, the low-ceilinged room eventually, what with the lamps and cigarettes, and the coals tumbling through the bars of the grate, growing stuffily cosy and much appreciated by them both because of this. Summer excepted, they deplored open windows. Cats sprawled on Christine as she cut out and embroidered. Often John would sketch, puffing away.

  Summer was the very reverse. In a sense there were no rooms, no indoors, then. The garden was full of chairs and tables, and there was a constant carrying of things out. John wore a strange white peaked cap with a flap at the back to prevent sunstroke, and which he called ‘Rommel’, and Christine fine print dresses and straw hats. There was a litter of books, watering-cans, paintboxes, letters, plates and glasses all over the garden paths – there were no lawns proper – which Christine used to edge with a pair of old sheep-shears. They talked about the weather a great deal, tapped the inside and outside barometers, and listened to all the forecasts. Weather interested them, and they liked its extremes, its drama. Should they be away during a Wormingford gale or heatwave they wanted me to tell them every detail. Precious plants had to be guarded from frost or drought, and a long list of horticultural dos and don’ts was handed to me just before John drove off to paint in Scotland, Cornwall, or wherever.

  John’s work routine scarcely changed at all during all his long career. A late-ish and what used to be described as a good breakfast, then a slipping away to the studio, where he’d paint from mid-morning until teatime. His method was to paint watercolours and oils from lined-up sketches made outdoors. The watercolours were painted on a large old scrubbed kitchen table, and the oils on an easel. He once told me:

  I found that working outside and working inside on one painting made a division of feeling about it. There were the spontaneous strokes in the open, and then, indoors, the intellect started to intervene. So in the end I left that method and from then on I have worked from my drawings, in which I indicate form with washes of colour. Also, I like to work in comfort. Outside, I see what I want to do by just choosing my position. I don’t alter things a great deal. I make a practical drawing and if I want to develop it into something larger I spread it out, quite meticulously, so that every tree, field and bank is in the place where I want it. When I’m on the spot I suppose I’m rather like one of those sporting dogs who is let into a field to flush the game. At some point he stops and thinks, ‘Ah, there’s something here! There’s something here!’ And then there is what they call the genius loci or spirit of the place which has to be felt, and is felt. I also like order in the landscape, and if I look long enough I usually find it, though this is not
to say that I am emotionally cold towards what I am seeing and painting. Far from it. Landscape often excites me. Take the landscape round here at Wormingford and nearby Essex and Suffolk, some would find it pretty tame. There are no hills worth speaking of. A hill of 200 feet here is equivalent to one of 600 feet in the Chilterns almost. Yet there is a subtlety about this Wormingford countryside which I feel and see, but which remains very difficult to define. It leads one on a constant challenge. But if I have what they call a private vision of it, then it is so private that I hardly know what it is myself! You know, I never look for more than the reality, the farming, the trees, the river. I suppose the poetry gets into the reality.

  After Paul Nash’s death in 1946, his paints and other materials came to Bottengoms. Sorting them out told John things about his brother’s use of colour, and about his own use of colour, which he had not previously realised. It was a kind of revelation, a new understanding of yet another way in which they differed: