by Neil Powell
For a while, despite Robert’s habit of ‘asking his newly made & very intimate friends in’, the holiday went reasonably well: ‘Harry is terribly struck by his first visit to a theatre!’ Britten wrote on 18 August. ‘He is getting on very well with us.’ On 23 August, he had to attend the Boyd Neel Orchestra’s final rehearsal of Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge in London; his brother, who had other business there, accompanied him on an early train, leaving Harry in the care of his sister Beth, who had arrived in Cornwall with her future husband Kit a fortnight earlier. After the rehearsal and dinner with the Bridges, who were ‘very excited’ by the work, Britten went to meet Robert at Barbara’s flat, ‘to find them all wild with “in loco parentis” wrath at my so-called conceit and bumptiousness … we have (R. & I) a first-rate bust up, & part for rest of evening’.133 The two brothers reunited to catch the 2 a.m. train from Paddington although by the time they reached Cornwall they were at opposite ends of it: Robert at the back and Ben, having charmed his way into riding with the driver and fireman, in the cab for the last stage; the latter, as if in a scene from Night Mail, cheerfully showed him how the boiler worked. The next day he noted that the ‘split is very marked’, but added stoically: ‘Personally I’m not distressed.’ Harry, however, was distressed by something on or soon after 25 August – the evening Britten tuned in to Hilversum to hear his Bridge premiere – although we may never know quite what: the diary is uncharacteristically silent for five days. The boy returned to London, presumably accompanied on the train journey by one of the adults, and the holiday staggered miserably on until the end of the month.
What went wrong? Harry later told his wife and son that ‘he had been alarmed by what he understood as a sexual approach from Britten in his bedroom’.134 Those are the film-maker and writer John Bridcut’s words, of which the careful and crucial ones are ‘what he understood as’. It seems unlikely that the scrupulous Britten would have made ‘a sexual approach’ and almost inconceivable that he would have done so while sharing a small holiday bungalow with, among others, Robert and Beth; moreover, such behaviour would have run directly counter to the basis of his relationships with boys, which were founded on providing and sharing essentially innocent pleasures. Two possible explanations spring to mind. The likelier one is that Britten was indulging in some sort of horseplay, forgetful of the fact that Harry’s experience didn’t include the odd antics of prep-school boys and their eccentric masters; he had just heard the successful first broadcast of his splendid new work and may have been in a foolishly cheerful mood. A remoter possibility is that Harry had overheard the brothers arguing about the inadvisability of Ben travelling around the country with otherwise unaccompanied small boys – perhaps with some vivid expression of why this was such a bad idea – and, feeling in any case homesick and unhappy in the tense atmosphere, saw this as a way of enabling his departure. We know that the matter had been raised between Robert and Ben well before their London ‘bust up’ from a later diary entry: on 17 October, Britten records his lasting anger that ‘such things were said by a comparative stranger’,135 which implies one of those ‘newly made & very intimate friends’ from the second day of the holiday had been involved too. Harry himself curiously ‘suggested that the episode, whatever it was, happened on the second day of the holiday’;136 if it had actually been ‘a sexual approach’, he is unlikely to have waited until the thirteenth day before he reacted to it.
A good intention had badly misfired, and on such occasions the author of the intention may be hurt at least as deeply as the recipient. But it’s worth sparing a moment’s sympathy for the third party in the affair, Robert Britten. As the headmaster of a prep school, for whom any taint of sexual scandal involving a boy would have been professionally disastrous, he had reason to be appalled by his younger brother’s recklessness: he knew precisely what ‘in loco parentis’ meant and can hardly be blamed for feeling that Ben had been either cavalier or obtuse. Ben certainly seemed to have become emboldened, perhaps partly on account of his developing friendship with Christopher Isherwood who, like Auden (though in a less hectoring style), was keen that Britten should sort out his sexuality. As Isherwood wrote later: ‘We were extraordinarily interfering in this respect – as bossy as a pair of self-assured young psychiatrists.’137 On 25 June, Britten and Isherwood met for a meal and ‘a grand evening’: ‘He gives me sound advice about many things, & he being a grand person I shall possibly take it.’138 This advice, we can only guess, was carpe diem; by way of reinforcing it, the following week, Isherwood took Britten on what looks like a carefully planned nocturnal expedition:
After dinner I go out with Christopher Isherwood, sit for ages in Regent’s Park & talk very pleasantly & then on to Oddenino’s & Café Royal – get slightly drunk, & then at mid-night go to Jermyn St & have a turkish Bath. Very pleasant sensations – completely sensuous, but very healthy. It is extraordinary to find one’s resistance to anything gradually weakening. The trouble was that we spent the night there – couldn’t sleep a wink on the hard beds, in the perpetual restlessness of the surroundings.139
This does look obtuse: the Savoy Turkish Baths in Jermyn Street ‘was a commercial space in which men felt safe enough to have sex relatively openly – a public space which was, in effect, private’.140 But Britten’s apparent point-missing is teasingly deliberate: that wasn’t quite what he wanted and, rather to his credit, he resisted Isherwood’s attempt to badger him into it. They had evidently talked about Harry Morris during their long conversations for, a few days later, Britten invited them both to tea: he thought this a success – Harry ‘is a charming boy, & C. wanted to meet him’141 – but Isherwood may well have felt a bit puzzled. About this time, he rather helplessly asked Basil Wright: ‘Well, have we convinced Ben he’s queer, or haven’t we?’142
Two postscripts to the Harry Morris episode seemed to confirm Britten in his belief that he had nothing to be ashamed of. On 11 October, Harry came to tea: ‘I am surprised to find that after the slight over-dose of him in the summer, I am pleased to see him.’143 And on 24 February 1938, Britten visited the Morrises to discuss Harry’s future: noticing that the boy was a keen draughtsman, he thought he might be able (with Arthur Welford’s help) to guide him towards a career in architecture. ‘I go & see the Morris family about Harry’s future – architect or butcher – butcher wins. Take Harry to Film.’144 With ‘butcher wins’, he graciously admits defeat: he had done his best.
6
Mrs Britten’s death had enabled her son to buy the Old Mill; Peter Burra’s death had led to Britten’s friendship with Peter Pears. One signalled his intention to make his permanent home in Suffolk and eventually to reject London; the other, his emotional commitment to someone outside the flamboyantly bohemian Auden–Isherwood set. These were life-defining events, and their consequences were lifelong.
Immediately after the unhappy end of the Cornish holiday, Britten and Pears decided to share a London flat – ‘He’s a dear – & I’m glad I’m going to live with him’145 – although they weren’t to move in to 43 Nevern Square, SW5, until 16 March 1938. In any case, Beth’s forthcoming marriage meant leaving 559 Finchley Road and, as far as Ben was concerned, this couldn’t happen soon enough, even though it involved a complicated division of his belongings between Peasenhall (where they were both to be temporarily based), an outbuilding at the Old Mill and the room in Hampstead which he was to use when he had to be in London: ‘Beth & I are in such a state that we almost want to pack each other,’146 he told Mary Behrend on 17 October. They actually moved out three days later: ‘I am heartily glad to be rid of 559 Finchley Road – it might have been a nice house, but all these memories are too bitter – The loss of Mum & Pop, instead of lessening, seems to be more & more apparent every day.’147 Houses and their ghosts: it was a theme to which he would return, more than once. Pears, meanwhile, was about to leave for America for another two-month tour with the New English Singers. Writing from Peasenhall on 24 October, Britten (in
his earliest extant letter to Pears) not only wished him well on his travels but, very significantly, resolved to make the same journey: ‘I envy you alot going all over America – it would be good fun to go – In fact I must go myself before long – One of the thousand & one things I’m going to do before long.’ He forecast a winter of great compositional activity in his friend’s absence: he was ‘on first-rate terms with the Muse’, he said, and he promised ‘More songs, & with luck a piano concerto’. And there was another resolution: ‘Next year must be the beginning of grand things. Singing & life in general.’ In signing off with ‘All my love & Bon Voyage’, he styled himself, as Pears had done, ‘Benjie’.148
The songs Britten mentioned were the ongoing series of Auden settings, of which On This Island, Op. 11, was conceived as a first instalment: Sophie Wyss performed them, accompanied by the composer, in a BBC contemporary music concert on 19 November. The piano concerto was, at this point, little more than a vague ambition – though one strong enough for him to speak of it to Ralph Hawkes. Britten had recently completed a BBC commission, the incidental music for a religious programme, The Company of Heaven, broadcast on 29 September: it was performed by Sophie Wyss, Peter Pears and the BBC Chorus and Orchestra, conducted by Trevor Harvey. Although it contains the first music written by him specifically for Pears, a setting of ‘A thousand gleaming fires’ by Emily Brontë, Britten had become ‘bored’ with the rest of it: when he went over the score with Robin Whitworth, the programme’s producer, he rather sourly remarked that he seemed ‘pleased – so I suppose it’s the kind of stuff he wants’.149 But as the rehearsals progressed, he warmed to the work, until on the evening of the transmission he had to admit: ‘My side of it goes marvellously – & I do like some of it.’ He admitted that he didn’t really understand the programme, adding: ‘What interests me is that I have nice words to set.’150 A week later – having in the meantime been to Paris with the Bridges and returned to hear Boyd Neel give the London premiere of his Bridge variations at Wigmore Hall – he visited the Leeds Festival with the Behrends, who took him off to Haworth to see the Brontë parsonage: ‘Appallingly dark & bleak country – all stones are black – no wonder that Wuthering Heights ensued!’151 That evening they heard Lennox Berkeley conduct the first performance of his oratorio Jonah; Britten was to see a good deal of Berkeley during the remainder of 1937, as he completed the scoring of their ‘Catalan suite’, Mont Juic, which received its first performance in a BBC light music concert, conducted by Joseph Lewis, on 8 January 1938. He was also, at John Pudney’s request, writing the incidental music (which he thought ‘awful muck’) for a BBC series called Lines on the Map.
In much of this work, there’s a sense of loose ends being tied up, as if in preparation for some big new undertaking. On 14 December, Ralph Hawkes told Kenneth Wright at the BBC that Britten was keen to write a piano concerto for the following year’s Proms. Wright didn’t hesitate: he immediately invited Britten not only to produce the concerto but to perform it as soloist. Britten, however, did hesitate: he was in Peasenhall, suffering from the aftermath of dental problems combined with overwork and his usual winter cold, while preparing for his sister’s wedding; so he had excuses to cover what may well have been an attack of paralysing nervousness. On 16 January, he replied to Wright in a tone of transparently feigned lightness: ‘Anyhow of course I should be honoured to play the old Concerto at the Proms. next season. So far there’s not an awful lot written, but what there is in my head seems to me pretty satisfactory.’152
Beth Britten married Kit Welford at St Michael’s Church in Peasenhall on 22 January 1938. She was adamant that Ben should give her away, ‘as he had looked after me when I was ill and supported me through all the dreadful years when he and I had lost both our parents’, but Robert was equally convinced that he should do so: ‘there was practically a fight outside the Yoxford Arms where all the Britten contingent stayed the night before the wedding’.153 Perhaps this ludicrous scene came back to him later, when he was envisaging social mayhem in the not greatly dissimilar Loxford for Albert Herring. The bride had her way. The photographs taken on the day show Britten looking perfectly turned out, as he always was on such formal occasions, and wearing that enigmatic, slightly amused smile which would so often appear on his public face. Beth and Kit, not keen to stay on indefinitely at Peasenhall, were to have use of the Old Mill when they were not in London and would become its effective caretakers during Ben’s absence in America. This building, with its associated pleasures and traumas, was one of Britten’s two major concerns – the other was the piano concerto – during the first half of the year.
The previous July, just after he decided to buy the Old Mill, he had written of his prospective tenant, Lennox Berkeley: ‘He is a dear & I’m glad I’m going to live with him.’154 Those are exactly the words he would use, only five weeks later, about Pears and the flat in Nevern Square. The cynical reader will suspect him of a kind of Bunburyism, with one lover for the town and another for the country, but that wasn’t the case: for one thing, neither man was Britten’s lover, though each hoped to be; for another, Berkeley and Pears were perfectly good if not close friends with each other. Britten already had reservations about Berkeley: ‘I always feel better towards L.B. when I am with him,’155 he wrote on 20 September, a subtle remark which implies that he had doubts about his friend in absentia which were charmed away by his good company. These doubts had to do less with his music, about which Britten was generous, than with his unreciprocated sexual interest in Britten and his Catholicism. Berkeley spent Christmas 1937 in retreat at the Benedictine monastery of Solesmes in France and was in Paris, staying with his friend Jean Françaix, when he heard of Ravel’s death on 28 December; he attended the funeral on 30 December before returning to work on The Judgement of Paris, an uncommissioned ballet score which he tried unsuccessfully to place with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. However, after his return to London in February – with Françaix, who was to rehearse his Le roi nu with the Vic–Wells Ballet – he played through The Judgement of Paris at Sadler’s Wells to the company’s director Ninette de Valois, chief choreographer Frederick Ashton and music director Constant Lambert: Ashton agreed to choreograph it and a first performance was scheduled for 10 May.
Meanwhile, conversion of the Old Mill continued and the day when Britten could take possession neared. The sails and other apparatus had already been removed from the main round section and the roof lowered; the two circular rooms were to be his bedroom on the first floor and his studio beneath. The mill cottages were turned into Berkeley’s studio, bedrooms and a living room; these rooms were connected to the mill by a new single-storey construction housing boiler and bathroom with (an odd school-like feature) two adjacent shower heads. Britten was to have his piano in the round studio, while Berkeley’s would be at one end of the former cottages, as audibly distant as possible. But on 12 March, as Hitler invaded Austria, Britten thought it might never happen: ‘War within a month at least, I suppose & end to all this pleasure – end of Snape, end of Concerto, friends, work, love – oh, blast, blast, damn…’156 His pessimism was, for the time being, unjustified. The ‘great move’ began on 9 April and on 13 April Berkeley’s much-needed furniture and silver arrived; next day, Britten bought ‘a 2nd hand Morris 8 – for tootling about the place’157 and the rest of his own furniture arrived from store. But the building didn’t give up its past without a struggle: Beth remembered her brother trying to work in his studio accompanied by the resident insects, ‘sitting at his table with a ruler at his side and as the various creatures dropped he swotted them’.158
Almost at once, there was trouble at the Mill. Britten had engaged not only a housekeeper, Mrs Hearn, but an entire family, the Byes, to look after the place: Mrs Bye (ten shillings a week) helped the housekeeper, Mr Bye (another ten shillings) worked in the garden and Master Bye tended the boiler for five bob. Beth’s mother-in-law Mrs Welford, who had more experience of domestic management, quickly saw that th
e Byes were doing next to nothing for their £1 5s a week and advised Britten to sack the lot of them, which he did on 28 April. Meanwhile, his friend Poppy Vulliamy had persuaded him to take on a boy from her Basque refugee camp, Andoni Barrutia, who soon became bored and unhappy and upset Mrs Hearn: as with Harry Morris, he had assumed that a boy from a very different background would be like him, and the arrangement ended after a fortnight. Britten summarised these events in an exasperated letter to John Pounder, who had been staying at the Nevern Square flat while Pears was singing at Glyndebourne: ‘Briefly; the crisis has been: sacking of a complete family working here: reorganising of whole house: notice of housekeeper: pacifying of ditto: Andoni is going – which bleeds my heart but it better on the whole: And the moods & temperaments connected with all these.’159 ‘It’s been hard to work on top of it all,’ he told Ralph Hawkes on 5 May, ‘but I have been hard at the big B.B.C. Holy show & nearly got that off my chest.’ This was The World of the Spirit, to be broadcast at Whitsun. ‘I have had to put the old Concerto aside for a bit,’ he added, despite the fact that Henry Wood was impatient to see and hear it. ‘I wonder if you could use your proverbial tact & keep him quiet for a week or two to give me time to finish the sketch, prepare the two-piano version, & practise the damn thing.’160