His successor, Canon Oram, entered it for a competition. I wasn’t told about it and went to a City church in London to receive my prize – £150. John Betjeman sat in the crypt beaming behind a pot of flowers. There were refreshments, wine and canapés on a table. The barrel ceiling was studded with marble tablets. The author of the first-prize church guide could not be present so his rector accepted it for him. When John Betjeman gave me the second-prize cheque Canon Oram snatched it from my hand and put it in his pocket with, ‘I think this belongs to us’ – i.e. Aldeburgh Church. John Betjeman rose and pointed at me. Canon Oram gave me a hug; but not the cheque. Walking in the late afternoon sunshine to Liverpool Street station I began to rehearse the preliminary rites of Canon Oram’s unfrocking. I was later told that at the PCC meeting he had said that if it had not been for his entering my guide for the competition no one would have heard of it, I being so hopeless about such things. And he wrote me a letter of thanks for my generosity. And the guide would sell for half a century. I gave a copy to Ben and did not put two shillings in the box.
12 At the Uplands
Extract from Records of the Borough of Aldeburgh: The Order Book 1549–1631
I heard that Benjamin Britten dreaded the meetings he had to have with Rupert Godfrey to do with the hiring, if that is the word, of the Parish Church for the Festival concerts as much as Rupert Godfrey dreaded his having to discuss them with him. Until I was sent to Blythburgh in 1956 to negotiate with a beyond-Aldeburgh church the increasing presence at home needed great tact. It was not only the performances but rehearsals, the rearrangement of seating, the introduction of stages and, sometimes, all the requirements of a concert hall being met with. Rupert wrote and spoke, ‘Remember you are in a church.’ Yet the music and those listening to it denied secularity. A forgotten holiness was making itself known. One look at Imogen’s face as she conducted the rehearsal for Ben’s Saint Nicolas cantata, for example.
I was singing in this when, in the midst of the rehearsal, an impressive European bass came into the church and Imogen dropped her baton and ran to him. He was wondering where he was to stay – the Uplands of course! ‘Oh, you are so lucky!’ cried Imo. He had walked from the station with a heavy case. No, of course it wasn’t far – it was just across the road. And out they went together. In a minute or two Imo returned and we began singing again. Perhaps ten minutes passed before there were amazed shouts. The bass had returned, disbelief in his voice. Imogen, all of us, stood transfixed. After a kind of roaring we began to hear what was being said. ‘Never, never have I been so treated! Never, never!’ He had been taken through the hotel and into the garden and been shown ‘a chicken hut’!
He had in fact been shown Aldeburgh’s highest form of accommodation, one of the pretty brick lodges in Connie Winn’s garden. These were craved for by visitors. They were unique. And in the main house itself there was comfort and taste – and food – such as no conventional hotel could ever dream of offering to a visitor. The Uplands was run by Connie Winn who I used to think had escaped from a novel by E. F. Benson. She was the daughter of the late Arthur Winn, the best Aldeburgh historian, whose work I devoured and which was the kind of brilliant putting together of often fragmentary facts, which I adored. He was the kind of lifetime researcher of actuality for which no writer of fiction could cease to be grateful. Connie was his only child. She had inherited the Uplands. It was where George Crabbe had been apprenticed to an apothecary, and where Newson Garrett had put down his Aldeburgh roots.
When Ashley Courtenay stayed there in 1950 – Let’s Halt Awhile in Britain – he found the Uplands
like an exclusive London club. It does not even bear a number on its portal … I found myself in an old-world atmosphere of grace and welcome, warmth and comfort … I stepped through the Regency drawing room into the garden, and, in the shade of a gnarled mulberry tree, talked with Miss Connie Winn in what someone described as ‘the best hotel in England’ … I looked through the Visitors’ Book. It was a Who’s Who of the arts, and of the golfers and the yachting world … I noted the books, the flowers, the modern comforts …
And when I was taken there by Denis and Jane Garrett, we all noted – it was impossible not to – the butler sitting a few feet off doing petit point between courses, and Connie seated at the head of the long table which was anything than a version of an inn’s ‘ordinary’ such as George Herbert described. The Uplands was extraordinary. So was Connie. She painted, of course. Her butler and cook had been with her for ever, of course. Her intention was to cast her spell, especially at dinner. It had something to do with the country-house pleasures of the Edwardians, their essential simplicity and ‘everything of the best’. This meant a certain fadedness.
‘Heavens!’ said Imo, having got the singer into the Wentworth. ‘Now, where were we?’ This may have been the recorded Saint Nicolas, I am not sure. Sometimes an interruption becomes the only memory. Connie Winn ran art classes and my friend Anthony Atkinson told me that his life class was heavily subscribed by elderly gentlemen students. There was a plaque to Newson Garrett, the builder of the Maltings. In a sense all the ‘remarkableness’ of Aldeburgh found a footing in this house, it had been a short-stay on-the-way address for so many.
But Connie’s father Arthur Winn would have been uncomfortable with his daughter’s version of the town. In 1925 he had found Aldeburgh’s Order Book for 1549–1631.
‘The writing is good as a whole … but it has been necessary to revive the ink in many places before transcription was possible.’ And so whilst others were deep in the Twenties, playing golf and 78s, he was deep in an Aldeburgh which was not submerged in George Crabbe, an extraordinary Shakespearean task which was more akin to The Tempest than to Suffolk.
We were distracted by Eden and Suez; I was absorbed by Arthur Winn and his ‘briefe note where to find everie ordere’. Thus these Tudor and Jacobean instructions on how to be a true Aldeburgh burgess, having at one’s fingertips
an order for strangers coloringe themselves to be free (black people whitening their bodies), an order for fishing doles, for digging of sand, for stallers of the market, for spirlinge boats for going to the sea upon Christmas daie, for those that are talken of this Towne in inconvenient places, for imprisonment, for carts, for marketfare, for an order for going to the Skarborrowe seas, for making Apprentices free, for gravell, for gowns, so helpe you God and his Sonne Jesus Christ.
I praised her father to Connie. ‘Him and his old books, dear.’
The town had a long tradition of acting as isolated communities often do. Connie’s father Arthur Winn discovered in the Aldeburgh Order Book and elsewhere a great emphasis on municipal, rather than religious, parade and dressing up. Also that it was a stop high on the travelling players’ list:
They travelled in caravans, with their wives, children and servants, living in covered carts, wagons and tents … the journey always made at walking pace … A circuit round England often lasted three years or even longer; the Earl of Leicester’s Servants were here in 1573 … the Queen’s Players seemed to have delighted Aldeburgh audiences more frequently than others. The following are the names of other companies rewarded by the bailiffs: Lord Bath’s Players, Lord Sheffield’s Players, Lord Robert’s Players, Lord Howard’s Players, Her Majesty’s Players.
Whether Aldeburgh had its own Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the Order Book doesn’t say. Maybe climbing the rough road to public worship in their showy gowns was amateur theatre enough.
Imo’s enthusiasm for there being no non-performers in life made her keen to have the local players in The Dumb Wife of Cheapside, a comedy by Ashley Dukes, and for me to describe it. It was all about Alderman Groat who is married to a pretty wife – who is dumb. He calls in the medics – against legal advice. The apothecary–attorney is much against having anything done. It is best to leave well alone. But when the apothecary, the surgeon and the lawyer join forces a miracle has to happen, and Mrs Groat’s tongue is released. She now talks non-s
top. Her voice is heard all over Cheapside. Her garrulity drives London mad … Who or what can shut her up – or just give her pause? Dukes has stolen his play from Rabelais but it is a lively theft.
People once had fishy names – Bass, Carpe, Crabbe, Pike, Playce, Sammon, Shrimpe, Spratt, Turbutte, Wale, Whiting. Food included a lot of ‘mackeral fare’. There were many drownings and local men and unknown men washed up by the sea were carried in the same coffin to their graves. Strong winds were not able to blow away the smells which filled the church and the rushes, broom and straw which carpeted it became ‘verie noisome’. Hence the following bill for perfume (only an historian like Arthur Winn would have a nose for such items):
To Gates for pfume 4d
for pfumes and Frankinsence 1s 2d
To Mr Oldringe for pfume oyle and Frankinsence for the Church 1s 6d
To Mr Oldringe for pfumes at Christide and Easter 3s 0d
For rushes for the Towne Hall 10d
The most poignant expense at the Parish Church was the ten shillings paid to Robert Fowler in the seventeenth century ‘for looking to the clock and for killing owles’.
Having just been given her father’s book (by Rupert Godfrey) I ached to talk about it to Connie Winn. But somehow she had left Aldeburgh for E. F. Benson’s Rye, and was out of reach.
13 My Guru
James Turner, 1951
James Turner’s protective anxiety that ‘Aldeburgh’ would take me over had substance. Although, during those post-war years, it was he who had taken all of us over, myself especially. It was one of those book-laden friendships which dominate youth. We talked, dreamt and ‘lived’ writing. He and I, not quite a generation apart, could think of nothing else. I would give up being a librarian because of him. His wife Cathy, plain-speaking and challenging, kept the pair of us in some kind of check. She broke in on our conversation when she thought us too far sunk – ‘James!’ It was like calling a dog to heel, I used to think, resenting her authority. But she knew what the rest of us failed to comprehend, that the bouts of ‘bronchitis’ she would nurse him through were in reality tuberculosis. She took him home early and I said that she was like Jane Austen’s Mr Woodhouse, who thought that the sooner any party ended the better.
James was a shabby, pipe-smoking, round-shouldered poet in his forties with rich dark hair and a captivating voice. He was passionate, fired up and every inch a guru. Women adored him. Ours was one of those friendships of the time which was fuelled by the freedom of the war being over. Limitless possibilities stretched before us. He wrote stories about strong women and vulnerable young men, country houses and ghosts. Also some good poems. His intention was to be like Cecil Day-Lewis whose prose alter ego was ‘Nicholas Blake’. But James did not possess an alter ego. He was complicatedly in his books rolled up into a single voice. We, myself especially, lacked all criticism. He was our pattern.
Following James in his schemes and in his bewitching talk, his strait-lacedness and his constant house moves became for some of us a Pied Piper business. I suppose what occurred was that he seemed to me like the personification of a ‘road’ which I had to take, although heaven knows how. But it was no discipleship. Simply some kind of mutual progress which would make our ‘way’ the easier.
In 1947 James Turner had bought all that remained of Borley Rectory on the Suffolk–Essex border, a grim coach-house opposite the parish church – notionally though not truthfully ‘the most haunted house in England’. We met the same month. He intended to grow mushrooms in the sheds, sell them to London hotels and make his fortune immediately cartloads of horse manure arrived at the gate. James’s chief rival in this field was the artist Christopher Perkins who had built an actual mushroom factory in Sudbury, which was a far cry from tumbledown sheds. He labelled his harvest ‘the food of the gods’. There was room for us all, he assured us. The mushrooms would allow us to write, paint, idle even. They would keep us. I helped turn the horse manure in the dark stables. It steamed in the blackness whilst the mushrooms themselves gave off a psychedelic glow. We picked the mysterious fungi which seemed to come from nothing overnight, with a smell that was both deathly and promising, and filled the rush punnets. The London hotels, James told us, were craving for them. His enthusiasms were our gospel.
Amazingly, we found our fantasies underwritten as it were by two masterpieces, Titus Groan and Gormenghast. Printed in hard-to-read black letter, these novels overwhelmed the pair of us. One day Christopher Perkins gave a dance in his ancient house where my partner was like a James Turner heroine, although not a lady. An acrobat in fact, from a local act called ‘The Garcia Three’. She was strangely muscled and her bare arms were like a boxer’s. As we whirled around I told her about Mervyn Peake’s novels as at that time neither James nor myself could talk of anything else.
‘I know him,’ she said.
I did not believe her. I actually considered her illiterate. But the following morning she asked me to meet him – James Turner too. At 7 p.m. we appeared at a cottage in Bulmer, a village next to Borley, and were taken into a room hung with framed circus posters which advertised the Garcia Three’s parents having performed before the crowned heads of Europe. There was a blazing fire and on a couch – Mervyn Peake. He was tall, with sunken violet eyes.
We talked sotto voce in the hot little room about the grotesque element in Charles Dickens, the physical distortion of so many characters, his pathetic, even ruthless exhibition of the malformed, the held-back sex because of his polite readership, and the exposed pitiableness of both his London and his countryside. The elderly parent-artists brought us cake and wine and made us all welcome, whilst their daughters amused themselves at our expense. Doubting Thomases!
Mervyn said that he had so hated being in the army that he had created an alternative world – Gormenghast, into which he could flee. This world was a kingdom-size castle. There was a women’s unit near by where he met the two sisters whose bodies were like those of boxers. They modelled for him. They became friends – hence his being here. He and I also joined up, as it were. We wrote to each other, he in brown ink and stiff brown writing paper. He sent me his poems, The Glassblowers. I confessed to him how I wanted to stop being a librarian and become a freelance writer and he said I should. I found his wife Maeve Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night which she longed to read. And he asked me to stay with them in Kent – but I never went. Just as I was devoted to James Turner, so I was to Mervyn Peake. All this in my late twenties. When I went to Aldeburgh James believed that it would ‘corrupt’ the growing literary scene which he and I were becoming part of – that it would take me away from where I belonged.
Soon after this James and Cathy went to Cornwall, and a flood of letters began. Not only were they psychics, they were also movers. They would turn down a house for its absence of ghosts just as most people would for its lack of plumbing. Continuing to be overpowered by James, I wrote ghost stories for his anthologies without in the least believing in them, although fascinated by the genre – and of course by M. R. James. And eventually by Henry James when Britten composed The Turn of the Screw. M. R. James used to stay with his grandparents just below Aldeburgh Church and, it was said, experienced his first ghost in the church when he was a child, rushing from it during a service, terrified and at the same time observing it.
When I told James that I was about to try to put down roots as a full-time writer in Aldeburgh it momentarily halted him in his tracks. He looked at me gravely. Aldeburgh was not for him. But it took me ages to accept that he and I ran along different tracks. For example, I thought that everyone was a child of the Beveridge Report, and that the re-emergence of Churchill and the ‘Suez’ question were no more than part of the death throes of the old politics. What I failed to recognise was that James wanted the old days back. Yet it was he who introduced me to Benton End and to all kinds of people both in Suffolk and Cornwall whose lives were wildly unconventional. I was twenty-five when he took me to meet Cedric Morris and Lett Haines,
unconscious denizens of the old, dying bohemia.
We wrote copiously to each other for the rest of his life – he in a spiky gothic hand, or on a tall Remington, myself with a gentle underlying apology for going my own way. I spent Christmas with them and they examined me for signs of East Anglian corruption, as they asked direct questions. Especially about money. ‘And Benjamin Britten – how are you getting along with him?’
Soon Mervyn Peake would slip from our sight into a truly Gormenghast sickness. Soon he would be unreachable. His letters fall about in old elastic bands. James Turner’s fill a box. Mine to him are inextricably in Australia, guarded by Cathy’s only relative, someone none of us had heard of. Scraps of our early days flutter about like old decorations. Mervyn’s puzzled question, ‘Why had the publisher printed Titus Groan in black letter?’ James Turner’s worrying, ‘How can you expect to write in Aldeburgh?’
The Fifties were a glorious age for fiction. Should I even now find a copy of A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen, Picnic at Sakkara by P. H. Newby, Confessions of Felix Krull by Thomas Mann, The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay, or The Flight from the Enchanter by Iris Murdoch in the bookcase, I am back to a roaring shore with the fishermen saying to each other, ‘There he is. Hasn’t he got work to do?’ Oh, bright post-war world to have such novelists in it! In Cornwall James was saying much the same. The wildness of the rocks suited him better than the wildness of the shingle. We would sit on the dizzy headlands and let the Atlantic rollers drug us into mindlessness. Whereas Aldeburgh’s sea conversed with me, James’s sea was a great sound without words. Although, not with all its listeners. A few miles further on the twenty-nine-year-old church restorer Thomas Hardy had found his Emma. And astounding words of love at the last.
The Time by the Sea Page 11