had been forming a reserve like albumen in the ovule of a plant. It is from this that the plant draws its nourishment in order to transform itself into seed at a time when one does not yet know what the embryo of the plant is developing, though chemical phenomena and secret but very active respirations are taking place in it. Thus my life had been lived in constant contact with the elements which would bring about its ripening …
The writer envies the painter; he would like to make sketches and notes and, if he does so, he is lost …
John Nash sketched through a grid of lines and dotted in here and there ‘late afternoon’, ‘browning grey’, ‘still water’, as reminders.
According to his youthful armour-bearer it was among the young oaks of Staverton that St Edmund was murdered by the Danes, tied naked to one of the trees and made a target for arrows. This armour-bearer lived, like the trees, to be very old and thus he was able to tell this execution to Athelstan, who told it to Dunstan, who told it to his friend Abbo of Fleury, who sensibly wrote it down.
The Thicks was also the scene of a Tudor picnic, when Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and his wife, Henry VIII’s sister, spread linen in its shade, drank wine, sang songs and ate – what? This story delighted me as a kind of alfresco masque; when I imagined a pretty site a mile or so from the shield-bedecked Augustinian Priory, and some spontaneous desire to make merry out of doors. But then I looked up the Duke – and what a monster! But a good-looking monster, one of the ‘new men’ of the Reformation who had gone from strength to strength without losing his head. I see him lying full length on the then thick summer grass, the oaks above as young as he is, and by his side his wife Mary who was once Queen of France. Henry was furious when they married in Paris without his permission, but calmed down when her enormous dowry for the first husband was returned in instalments. In Suffolk they called her ‘the French queen’, not the Duchess. She would have been buried in St Edmundsbury Abbey had not her brother pulled it down. But she can be found in a corner of St Mary’s Church near by, the woman who ate – what? – in Staverton Thicks.
Hugh Farmer, into whose little wood I stole so long ago, himself describes it in a Festival Programme Book. He lived there and his account of it is incomparable. He tells of his life there in A Cottage in the Forest. But it has never been the adjunct of a great house.
The trees consist chiefly of oaks of every conceivable shape, although none is of very great height, and of an age estimated at between seven and eight centuries. Many are stag-headed because, until its abolition a century and a half ago, there was a right for local people to top and lop the trees for fuel. Many of them are hollow and hollies and elder seeds brought by birds have rooted and grown up from the crowns, so that sometimes a tree grows out of a tree … There is a tradition that this is a Druidic grove and at night, when the owls are crying and the gaunt arms of the ancient trees seem outstretched to clutch, this is an eerie place … A remnant of primeval forest. A very ancient plantation to provide the Priory with fuel and timber for building … What does it matter? Staverton Park is probably the oldest living survival in East Anglia, a strange place, history and tradition apart, with a character all its own. On a still midsummer night when the nightjars churn, and the roding woodcock croak overhead, in deep winter when the snow under the hollies is crimsoned by the berries dropped by ravenous birds, or at autumn dusk when the mist rises wraithlike from the stream and the rusty wailing of the stone curlew sounds across the trees, it has a magical beauty.
I thought of Saxon and Viking princelings. The Thicks has a partly thwarted Phoenix ambition, to die and yet live. But the thing is itself a form of dying. The long-settled condition of these botanic infirmaries, for they exist here and there where a tidying hand has not invaded them, are a requiem. The rich deep mould of their floor, the feeble barriers of guelder and hazel which let through the north-coast wind, the close canopy of undernourished branches which check full leafage, all these ‘disadvantages’ are time-protracting. For an oak, a holly, the chief enemies of existence are parasitic fungi, canker caused by sunburn, frost aphis of one kind or another – and lightning. They say that it strikes an oak more than any other tree. Once, cycling from Framlingham on a storm-black afternoon, I saw lightning fire an old oak in a park. It blazed up only a few yards away with a mighty crackle of dead and living wood.
Most of the Staverton oaks are so near death that they seem to be nothing more than gnarled drums for the gales to beat. Yet so tenacious is their hold on life that the twigs sprouting from them are still April green. And come August ‘Lammas’ growth will hide some shrivelled bole.
The mood of the Thicks depends on that of its visitor. I found it a contemplative, loving silence. Little or no birdsong. An absence of that rustling busyness created by small unseen animals. A carpet-soft humus deadened my every step. So soft was it that sparse forest flowers – sanicle shoots, wild strawberry, speedwell – can be trodden into it without injury. A sequence of glades has its own special senescence. It is like walking through an ill-lit gallery of sculpted last days. Except that here there is an endless putting off of last days.
As Staverton means a staked enclosure, what was it that was enclosed? And why were its ‘thicks’ left to degenerate when the remainder of the forest was not allowed to? Why was it allowed to do what it liked? Yet it feels neither cursed nor abandoned. It is like a woodland mortuary, yet not tragic. Its enigma lies in some destiny which we now know nothing of. For some reason it was intentionally untouched – and staved in. It is grotesque, part a wood from Gormenghast, part a lecture on death, part a ruin of miscegenation. Holly props up oak; ivy alone flourishes. Wild creatures for the most part avoid it. It is botany as departure – yet neither root nor leaf ever goes.
10 At 36 Crag Path
The Hutton family at 36 Crag Path
When the Allied armies reached Belsen and the other concentration camps such was the terrible bureaucracy of death that all the other horrors of war paled before it. Not only soldiers and statesmen, religious leaders and welfare workers felt it their duty to see Belsen, but poets, artists, musicians and philosophers too. The most distinctive memory I have of the two Jewish friends I had in Aldeburgh in the Fifties was their silence on the Holocaust. Leon Laden, a Dutch Jew, had married the artist Juliet Perkins and had come to live in Brudenell House, and Kurt Hutton and his wife Gretl had come to live at 36 Crag Path. Leon said that he was writing a thriller. He sat at his desk all day. A dozen or so HB pencils of various lengths were arranged in meticulous order like organ pipes. Our wonder was what sentences had worn them down, for not a word emerged from the study. His wife Juliet and her friend Peggy Somerville, who had been together at the Royal Academy School before the war, did pastels. Kurt Hutton had come to Aldeburgh in the late Forties, partly for his health, partly to photograph it for Picture Post. The Ladens heated Brudenell House by leaving the gas stove on all the time, and the Huttons heated 36 Crag Path by leaving a big paraffin stove at the top of the stairs on all the time. Such decadence amazed Aldeburgh. It was a little flicker of Europeanism. Far away, long ago, a front door was being opened in Vienna, in Berlin. No sooner had my muse Christine Nash sat in the flat which Imogen Holst found me, than she went out and bought me an Aladdin stove and gallons of paraffin. I used it meanly, having been brought up on the advice, ‘Put another jersey on.’ Both Brudenell House and 36 Crag Path became ‘safe houses’ from the rigours of the Aldeburgh Festival. In them my disparate Jews maintained a matching silence on the enormity which had swept them into Suffolk.
I too found the matchless crime of the Holocaust so wicked, so incredible, that I had to reduce it, if this could ever be the word, to a single illustration of its evil. At a photographic exhibition in London I saw a group of gypsy lads standing in the snow on Christmas Eve, taking their turn to be gassed, whilst candles shone in the window of a guard’s house. They were naked, beautiful, waiting. It could have been this picture which gave me the entrée to Kurt Hutton’s
black-and-white photo-journalism. It belongs to the classic period of the camera which produced such artists as Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Breton, dark-room Modernists whose images define the inter-war years, often beyond words. Kurt Hutton began to use a Leica as early as 1927 when he had established a studio in Berlin, first working with a conventional camera and a quarter-plate reflex. But the Leica cut the umbilical cord which bound him to static equipment. It made him think and see differently. He described this transition a few months before he came to Aldeburgh.
Why do I photograph the way I do? Because it is the only way to achieve what appeals to me most in photography … There is, of course, photography making no claim to naturalness which may be of high artistic value, but that is something altogether different. I am talking about simple straightforward photography. Its results should strike you as being alive. By this I mean a photograph should suggest that behind the face there is a thinking and feeling human being. The posed photograph so often shows a blank mask. The subject is aware of nothing but the camera and is as paralysed by it as a rabbit by the snake … But it is not much use having the quickness and all the resources to steal pictures if you do not know what pictures to steal … People in themselves have got to mean something to the photographer …
I have no idea what I meant to Kurt and Gretl Hutton. Imogen Holst introduced us. She was the only person who pronounced ‘Kurt’ correctly. We all said ‘Kurt’ to rhyme with ‘shirt’. Historically their partnership, Kurt with his eye, Gretl in the darkroom, would produce a visual record of the Aldeburgh Festival from its beginning without parallel. And also of ‘my East Anglia’ as I led them to the most unlikely spots, Little Gidding, Newmarket, Flatford Mill, and to Sir Cedric Morris and John Nash, looking up from their gardens. Gretl drove. Off we went to steal pictures, with my accompanying words, not captions. I would now and then catch Kurt biting back his amusement. I was the same age as his son Peter. I never knew until many years later that he had served in the Hitler Youth and that Kurt had ‘J’ for ‘Jew’ on his passport. Or that Gretl had been a Viennese dress designer.
In fact Kurt Hutton was really Kurt Hübschmann, a cavalry officer who had won an Iron Cross, Second Class, at Verdun, who had briefly studied Law at Oxford, and whose father had been a Professor of Comparative Philology.
Peter Hutton and I began a lifelong friendship on the Crag Path. His son Sebastian is my godson. I remember carrying him in my arms around Durham Cathedral and pausing at St Cuthbert’s tomb with its stripped feeling. Not far away the Weir – water – roared down its rockface. No Leica to catch this Hutton moment. Letters held us together when Peter and his family settled in New South Wales … In Aldeburgh, usually in order to make an early start on one of our (my) photo-journalist outings, I slept in a front bedroom and would get up at six just to look out of the window. Sometimes the enigmatic old man humping a sack who used to pass at Thorpeness would appear. Or fishermen to start the day’s idleness. Well-dressed women walked their dogs or just themselves in the keen morning air, ladies with time on their hands and little balconies. Fidelity Cranbrook called them ‘the abandonees’. Might not their husbands have died in the war? ‘No, dear.’ They came into their own at Festival time, selling programmes, showing people to their seats. Their children appeared from distant public schools during the holidays. What on earth do they do all day? ‘Nothing, dear.’ Like the fishermen. Unlike Kurt, who swam until he was crimson, then strolled around with his camera, carefully alone, helplessly European, helplessly active. Never belonging. Like Leon Laden, only differently.
Refugees were too busy extricating themselves from the disaster to do much assimilating. My favourite war-time poet was Sidney Keyes, killed in the Western Desert. He wrote:
The ones who took to garrets and consumption
In foreign cities, found a deeper dungeon
Than any Dachau. Free but still confined
The human lack of pity split their mind.
Ben revealed his Europeanism all the time. Whilst I, who had been nowhere and whose friendship with two Jewish doctors in particular had merely shown up my provincialism, had to fight my way out of my limitations. It would be the Huttons, and later Erwin and Sophie Stein, she with her tumbling laughter and open-armed approach, who would dissolve my primness. I would walk into Ben’s house, which seemed to be always full of people, and hear its tensions being swept away by Sophie’s unrestricted happiness.
Now and then Kurt and Gretl would frighten me with a bogeyman named Simon Guttmann. Would they, could they, allow an innocent such as me to meet Simon Guttmann? Unbeknown to me our joint photo-journalism was passing through his hands. Was he their agent? ‘Agent!’ Their eyes would meet. But they were, I soon realised, genuinely alarmed by what Guttmann would think when he received our joint efforts. My words, Kurt’s pictures. My subjects – Little Gidding, the Yearling Sales at Newmarket, a Woodbridge auction, the Field Study Centre at Flatford Mill, Sir Cedric Morris’s art school at Hadleigh. Kurt’s account of Guttmann verged on the shocking … He made him sound like Quilp crossed with Goebbels.
One day, with exaggerated concern for my safety, they sent me to Guttmann. My shield would be that other than their comic libels I could know nothing about him, not being a photographer. They saw me off with pantomime prayers. Imogen was on the train, music paper spread over her knees. She was not to be spoken to. A little smile then the bent head. Somewhere off Regent Street, maybe, up two flights of bare stairs, there he was, fixed in a hard chair. They said that when this had to become a wheelchair it also became a chariot of fire. Aldeburgh seemed continents away.
‘Sir, sir.’
He was slight, intense. And although I didn’t know it, the master of European photo-journalism. He was in his sixties. He held out his hand for copy but all I had were suggestions. He listened to them irritably. He did not ask after Kurt. He did not stand up when I left what seemed like days afterwards, but took my hand gently.
‘What should I tell Kurt, Mr Guttmann?’
‘Tell him that you met me.’
And so, vacant and yet somehow fulfilled, it was back to Liverpool Street. I kept thinking of the nervous studies of Ben and Peter and of myself when I wasn’t looking, and of likenesses which I would never quite catch, those of friends who had managed to escape the death camps.
Guttmann himself had crossed the Spanish border on all fours. When he got to London he worked for Richard Crossman in Holborn, producing Free French magazines. He was born in Vienna in 1891. In his late teens he became a member of the ‘Neue Club’, a café group which read poetry and sang in Berlin. Guttmann brought the artists of Die Brücke to the Neue Club. When the Kaiser’s war was declared Guttmann pretended that he was suffering from TB in order to avoid being called up and went to live in Switzerland. In 1917, with the world order breaking up, he moved to Zurich where he met Hugo Ball and took part (auctioning a doll) in the first Dada Cabaret at the Club Voltaire. After the war he met Mayakovsky in Moscow. In 1928 Guttmann found his apex, Dephot, a firm which supplied pictures and stories for the picture-paper industry in Germany. He also found a young photographer named Hübschmann – Kurt Hutton. Dephot was the first agency to supply stories and not just captions to pictures.
I saw Guttmann saying to himself, ‘So this is what the great Kurt Hutton is doing in the country – this young man’s photo-tales. Farming! George Herbert! Little Gidding! Horses!’ But Guttmann himself had been guilty of wild undertakings. When Stefan Lorent founded and edited Picture Post in 1938 Kurt, a major contributor of the photo-essay, had said, ‘You will find Guttmann extremely difficult.’ Later it would be Guttmann who taught Tom Hopkinson, Lorent’s successor, this journalistic art. Picture Post now makes amazing reading–viewing.
I told Guttmann that Kurt and I would like to make a photo-essay about pike-fishing in the River Stour. What did he think? He looked confused. Many years later I read his obituary in The Times and saw that I had got off easy:
Grace Robert
son, photo-journalist of the 50s, describes Guttmann’s method of teaching. ‘He threw my enlargements – fruit of long hours in the darkroom – on the floor and stamped on them. His eyes flashed with anger behind his spectacles as he muttered, “Kurt Hutton would never have taken pictures like these.”’
Simon Guttmann died aged ninety-nine in 1990, the last of the Expressionists. He, Kurt and Gretl Hutton, Leon Laden and the shy woman from Summerhill School at Leiston carried with them the terror of their time. It never quite vanished. I continue to pore over Kurt’s Aldeburgh which for two years was my Alde burgh. I suspect that Guttmann was unable to ‘see’ it. When I remember Simon Guttmann I also remember Rilke.
Look, the last hamlet of words, and, higher, (but still how small!) yet one remaining farmstead of feeling: d’you see it?
Brudenell House, where Leon and Juliet lived, was gaunt and pebble-dashed outside and ‘Charleston’ inside. Juliet had painted the woodwork green, cobalt, and dull gold. She kept it warm by leaving the lit gas stove on more or less permanently. On a fine day she and Peggy Somerville sat in the open window drawing swimmers and sunbathers, passing children, the sea and the boats. And there were lovely intimate Bonnard-ish interiors of the breakfast table and ourselves reading in wicker chairs. Now and then Leon would leave his life for our life. We would go to the pub and he would tell the landlord, ‘Gif me some beer.’
‘No, no, Leon, he is our host. You must say, “Good evening”.’
And I would wonder what orders Leon had heard when the Nazis overran Holland. Juliet fed us on bolognese, huge panfuls of it. As neither Peggy Somerville nor I could drive, she took us around in a three-wheeled car from which the floor had vanished. We would watch the road flying under our feet. Peggy lived with her blind mother at Westleton.
The Time by the Sea Page 9