The Time by the Sea

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  Watching him paint was a bewildering experience. He did no drawing, no preparation; using bright colours straight from the tube, he began at the top left-hand corner of the canvas and ended at the bottom right-hand corner. It would remind me of those transfers we put on the backs of our hands as children, peeling them off gradually to reveal the full picture.

  ‘Choose one for yourself,’ he said.

  I entered a dark old room off the kitchen and made out a backyard scene in the Algarve and dragged it towards him.

  ‘You like that?’

  ‘Thank you, Cedric.’

  It wasn’t signed so Maggi Hambling painted his name at the bottom. Washing hangs on the line, chickens run about. Lovely towers look down on a yard.

  ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘Aldeburgh.’

  Lett: ‘Have we been there?’

  I enjoyed Benton End best of all when John Nash was with me. It was then that I could walk behind the pair of them between the box-hedged iris beds and listen to gardening proper. So that when I came to Bottengoms for a day or two, and John Nash towards evening would say, ‘Shall we go and see the boys?’ and his wife would say, knowing that she would not have to cook the dinner, ‘Oh, do, dears. They are always so pleased to see you’, I felt a keen pleasure. A sense of belonging which so far Aldeburgh was denying me.

  Sometimes Kathleen Hale, who wrote Orlando the Marmalade Cat, would be there. And often the teenage Maggi Hambling, or the Welsh artist Glyn Morgan, known in his youth as ‘The Little Prince’ because he was so good-looking. And Millie the housekeeper, a mite unsteady by seven o’clock, would lay the long table with wooden plates which we wiped clean with a bit of bread between courses. And the only heating in the house, an electric bar above Cedric’s head, would be switched on and the toppling candelabra lit. The Benton End cats would disappear into the Suffolk darkness while Lett in his butcher’s apron would stand in the kitchen doorway and give us snippets of his and Cedric’s scandalous adventures long ago.

  ‘We were passing a café in the Rue de la Paix where two English ladies were sitting –

  ‘“Who are those two young men?”

  ‘“Oh, I think they come from Oxford.”

  ‘“Oxford Street you mean!”’

  Should Lett go too far he would find a note from Cedric in his jacket pocket next morning: ‘You were very bad last night.’

  Twentieth-century art gossip is peppered with Cedric encounters. Here is Roger Fry in 1925:

  I met a really interesting man, a young English artist, Cedric Morris; he really charmed me, very uneducated but ever so spontaneous and real …He was all temperament and sensibility and genuine stuff and très fin, and not at all a fool anywhere and I liked him.

  There was no music at Benton End – not a note. But always music at Bottengoms where there were two pianos. Schubert could be heard most evenings.

  As scribe to Benton End I was required to tactfully tone down some of Lett’s notes on Cedric for the Private View invitations. Here is Lett at his most florid:

  Cedric was born, of phenomenal vitality, on December 10th 1889. He was the eldest child of George Lockwood Morris of Sketty, Glamorgan (who, according to Burke, was descended from Owen Gwynedd, the last Prince of North Wales) … Bored and nonconformist in his father’s household, he made off to Canada. [He was actually sent off to New York with nine pounds to become a liftboy.] There he worked as a hired man on ranches in Ontario where the farmers seem rather to have taken advantage of his unusual energy and his naif ignorance of standard wages in the New World … Eighteen months later he seems to have been studying singing at the Royal College of Music with Signor Vigetti whose attempts at raising his light baritone to a tenor were unsuccessful. He determined to study painting in Paris … In Paris he industriously attended all the available ‘croquis libre’ classes at the Académies La Grande Chaumière and Collarossi, Académie Moderne (under Othon Friesz, André Lhote, and later Fernand Léger) …

  And so on, through gaudy Mediterranean travels, membership of the London Group and the Seven and Five (seven painters and five sculptors), helping to found Welsh Contemporary Art exhibitions between the wars, the settling down in Essex and Suffolk, and the post-war plant-hunting and winter travels, when Benton End was closed, and Lett went to Brown’s Hotel to ‘economise’.

  I once wrote that Cedric was a pagan who liked the sun on his back and the day’s colours in his eyes, and the tastes and sounds of Now. On a really beautiful afternoon at Benton End he could be found lurking amidst the huge blooms he had brought to Suffolk from the Mediterranean, and hugging the Now to him, his handsome brown old face tilted a little skywards and his body helplessly elegant in brown old clothes. And that a conducted tour through the beds was both learned and hilarious by then, Cedric himself becoming convulsed by the habits of some plants – and of some of the people who came to see them. I was always intrigued by his catlike satisfaction with present time. It caused his days to become so long that, in spite of a stream of visitors, an enormous amount of painting and gardening – and teaching – managed to get done.

  I was with him to the end. At ninety he cursed God, whom he still took to be some misery from Glamorgan, for ‘insulting’ him with old age but his sensuality never left him. He basked in the sun. Nobody has such a good time as a good-time Puritan. Being a non-Puritan, Lett had rather a bad time one way and another.

  ‘Not a boring thing,’ was Cedric’s accolade for the Bottengoms garden. Very old and near death, he asked me, ‘Do they touch your sleeve like this?’, giving a little attention-drawing pluck to his jacket. He was ninety-two. But in 1955 there was much time still to go.

  The only gardener to give an expert account of Cedric Morris’s plants, and his irises in particular, is Tony Venison. The Benton End Iris Party lives all over again when he speaks. Upward of a thousand blooms inhabited the box-hedged beds. Cedric adored painting them, taking them out of art nouveau, where they had decadently flourished for years and become symbolic of a movement, and making the gardening world see them as raunchy blooms ‘sticking their tongues out’, as one visitor said.

  Each plicata (folded leaf) appears to do no more than rise from the surface of poor soil with the strength of a dagger, before it flowers with an opulence which suggests so many moving silks, from those of a jockey to the banners of a knight. The petals are ‘falls’ and ‘standards’. When Richard Morphet from the Tate Gallery came to my house to write about them, he said that ‘Cedric is one of the most exceptional colourists in British twentieth-century art. It is not only the intensity of his colours that tells, but above all the originality and strange beauty of the relationships between them that he established.’

  I doubt if Cedric ever came to Aldeburgh or to the East Anglian coast. His coast was Portugal. There is no record of his ever walking from Benton End into Hadleigh High Street – into ‘the village’ as he called this borough … Once home from winters abroad, burdened with rolls of canvas tied up with hairy string, and bags of seeds and cuttings, he went nowhere. We came to him – to the expanding three-acre garden, to the iris capital. Not surprisingly it made me see what flowered in Aldeburgh. If there was one thing there which Cedric would have admired it would have been the tenacity of its plants and their stand against the wind, their salty hues and ample nature. The way in which they stood up to things. Both at Aldeburgh and Benton End there was a bravura performance of gardening, each so contrasting, each so colourful. Each filled with movement.

  When Kurt Hutton went to photograph Sir Cedric Morris at Benton End I saw how physically alike they were and, although German and Welsh, how similar in manners, and in how they were amused. Both had been on the Western Front, Cedric at Remounts behind the lines – and he who loathed horses! And Kurt as a cavalry officer. Not that any of this was mentioned. They met as artists – as outsiders. As part of my ever-growing Suffolk world. A painting of irises flared up behind Cedric’s brown head in the photograph. Like a floral battalio
n on the move. It was in the upstairs studio which was never used if there was the faintest possibility to be outside.

  16 Mr FitzGerald is in the Wood

  Ronald Blythe at Great Glemham

  In Aldeburgh various houses where Edward FitzGerald had lived were pointed out to me. He could not be said to have lived in any of them. Where Aldeburgh was concerned his living was done at sea. But I saw him haunting the beach at night as he compulsively made his way between the herring boats, recognised and unknown at the same time, his hat tied to his head with his shawl, his Irish eyes seeing and not seeing.

  I was given The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in Penzance when I was nineteen, and was as knocked out by it as any Victorian. FitzGerald had been introduced to the twelfth-century Persian astronomer–poet by an Ipswich boy, Edward Cowell, who said that he made it to live in a way that no translation has ever lived before. Be that as it may, no one bought it, and for years it languished with other little volumes in the booksellers’ tuppenny box. When at last it was discovered by an Oxford undergraduate it mesmerised the young. My favourite explanation of it was written by Angus Ross when he and I were contributors to The Penguin Companion to English Literature:

  Omar’s quatrains are spontaneous, occasional, short poems; FitzGerald makes them a continuous sequence, sometimes compressing more than one poem by Omar into one of his quatrains. The FitzGerald stanza, with its unrhymed, poised third line, is an admirable invention to carry the sceptical irony of the work and to accommodate the opposing impulses of enjoyment and regret … There is a desire to seize the enjoyment of the passing moment, moving through the day until, with the fall of evening, he laments the fading of youth and the approach of death. Several interests of the time, divine justice versus hedonism, science versus religion, and the prevailing taste for Eastern art and bric-a-brac were united in the poem.

  The fact was that when I was reading it in Cornwall, everyone else had ceased to do so. But for some reason what was fustian to others for me was fresh as a rose. He loved Aldeburgh, they said. But I doubt it. What he loved was the freedom of his boat and Posh Fletcher sailing it on the German Ocean. Fitz named it The Scandal after the main staple of Woodbridge, where the boat was moored. Although it was not his boat now, because he had given it to Posh. Posh, he told Alfred Tennyson, was beautiful like a Greek statue, thus a suitable companion for a gentleman, and he introduced them when the laureate was put up at the Bull in Woodbridge. Many years later an old man from the workhouse was seen burning a pile of letters on the beach. It was Posh Fletcher signing off. When I heard this I thought of Samuel Palmer’s son making a bonfire of his father’s paintings and drawings in a Cornish cove because he was ashamed of them.

  In 1960, staying at Great Glemham with Fidelity Cranbrook, I met a woman who was looking for someone to take on the last year of a tenancy. It was for one of those few-feet-from-the-road old farmhouses which may have been built ‘for company’, as it were. From which one could watch the world going by. This house was two miles from the grave of Edward FitzGerald. And only a mile away stretched the concrete plateau of a USAAF bomber station. My new house was owned by an old farmer named Harold French, who had used some of the compensation money for the turning of his fields into the aerodrome to mend the various properties he owned. Mine needed so much money to make it habitable that he called it French’s Folly. It was beam and plaster, pantile and, alas, concrete. On one side it looked out towards Maypole Hill and its oaks, and at the back to Dallinghoo Wield, an untouched sequence of elm-sheltered pastures across which Edward FitzGerald walked with his friend George Crabbe, son of the poet. Also with Lucy Barton, the daughter of the Quaker poet Bernard Barton. FitzGerald married her, which was a foolish thing to have done.

  Anyway, the nineteenth century was not so much heavy on my heels at this moment as was an elated feeling of having settled at last. In retrospect I can see why both Christine Nash and Imogen Holst were disappointed in me. I had vanished. Debach – where was that? Well, Debach, population about eighty, stands on high ground and through its name flows a minute stream which some call a ditch. All over Suffolk this village is know as Debach Post because had not a sign been pointing to it, travellers along the Roman road would have gone straight on, to Wickham Market. There was an 1857 church with a coffered ceiling borrowed from Carlisle Cathedral, a mighty rectory, a straggle of old cottages and Thirties council houses, and a pretty pre-1870 Education Act school which had become a garden shed. Edward FitzGerald and Lucy Barton liked to drop in to teach the farm labourers’ children now and then.

  Very soon after my move into this unknown world, I became a churchwarden, really to take charge of a redundancy. The barely attended church, floundering in cow parsley and rich grasses, darkened by lilacs, had lasted almost exactly a hundred years but now had to be closed. I was told to give its contents to neighbouring churches, a chest here, a huge chair there. In the vestry hung an ancient mirror with its backing, a blotter, hanging among the splinters. When I held the blotter up to what was left of the mirror I read, ‘Mr FitzGerald is in the wood.’

  He was also just down the road sleeping beneath a rose from Naishapur.

  I sometimes think that never blows so red

  The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;

  That every Hyacinth the Garden wears

  Dropt in her Lap from some once-lovely Head.

  While the Rose blows along the River Brink

  With old Khayyám the Ruby Vintage drink;

  And when the Angel with his darkest Draught

  Draws up to thee – take that, and do not shrink.

  Omar had a pupil, Kwajah Nizami of Samarkand, to whom he gave instruction for his burial: ‘My tomb shall be where the north wind can scatter it with rose petals.’ In the 1890s, with the Rubáiyát all the rage and the Omar Khayyám Club in full cry, travellers to Persia came home with shocking tales of the state of the poet’s tomb, which was a plaster structure without a name. Our minister in Tehran tackled the Shah about it. He was astounded when told that Britain was wild with Omar – ‘Why, he has been dead for a thousand years … we have got many better poets than Omar Khayyám.’ But of course they had not got an Edward FitzGerald. Meanwhile, back at the Club, there were rumours that its President, Sir Mortimer Darend, was hoping to be given the Persian Order of the Lion and the Sun. So the nameless grave crumbled and the rose thrived.

  An artist from the Illustrated London News went to see it and brought back hips from the rose to Kew, where it was propagated and brought forth medium-sized pink blooms, quartered with button eyes, and downy-grey leaves. A cutting from this bush was planted at the head of FitzGerald’s grave, where it would have done all right had his every visitor not taken further cuttings. I remember finding a kind of green stump.

  In the Seventies a later Shah, being told of this, commanded that six rose trees should surround FitzGerald. They could have made it difficult to read: ‘It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves’ – the FitzGeralds’ apology for such a strange member of the family. Someone who told the world that all his friends were loves. On a miserable November day I went to Boulge Church along with everyone for miles around to await the Persian Ambassador who was commanded to plant the Shah’s roses. It was wet and cold. Two front pews were roped off for the ambassadorial party. The electricity went off and some of us went out to collect paraffin lamps and candles. The organist played all the introits he knew many times. The Rector, Mr Braybrooke, then climbed the pulpit: ‘I am next in line, I suppose, to plant the roses.’ Whilst he was heeling them into the mud, a Rolls-Royce appeared on the concreted path through the sugarbeet, its pennant flapping. It sent the rooks up. The Ambassador was princely and smiling, very tall and wearing a coat with an Astrakhan collar. There were some smiling ladies. And a little boy.

  ‘Oh, you English – you are so prompt! We came Newmarket way and had lunch!’

  ‘We must give you some tea at the Rectory.’

  ‘The English are so
polite.’

  ‘We will charge him for the printing,’ said Mr Braybrooke.

  Some years after this Sylvia Townsend Warner came to see me en route to Peter Pears. When I told her this story – it was a November afternoon again – she insisted that we all drive down the road to look at Fitz’s grave: ‘Oh, I must see it!’

  She was writing the life of T. H. White and I was writing Akenfield, for which I had been stealing names from the Debach gravestones.

  Sylvia: ‘Names are so important, don’t you think?’

  We wondered where Shakespeare had found his names. Does anyone know?

  Sylvia: ‘Is Omar’s name on Fitz’s stone?’

  ‘Only his.’

  She was enthralled when I told her what happened to the FitzGerald crypt on the Debach and Boulge Flower and Vegetable Show day. It was a Gothic building with a flight of steps and a pair of doors, a heavy protective cast-iron fence and a curious solidity. At the Flower Show, the gates and the doors were flung wide and we could enter. It was one of the Flower Show’s sideshows. There were brass-studded purple coffins on stone shelves, one above the other, all very tidy as one should be in death.

  ‘Oh, we must see it!’

  I told Sylvia a joke about a Shah. ‘The Shah of Persia sat next to a Scottish lady in Edinburgh who said, “They tell me, Sire, that in your country you worship the sun.” “So would you, madam, if you had ever seen it.”’

  Sylvia: ‘All this Persian thing – in Suffolk! – Wonderful!’

  Persia had come to Suffolk in a fairly direct way. In terrible grief after his great friend William Browne, a Bedfordshire squire, had died in a riding accident, FitzGerald had met a youthful Ipswich linguist at a rectory party who said something like, ‘I could teach you Persian, sir.’ This is how masterpieces take root.