The Time by the Sea (3 page)
Read The Time by the Sea Online
Authors: Dr Ronald Blythe
John Nash:
Sea Holly
As a teenager I was captivated by Julian Tennyson’s
Suffolk Scene
. It accompanied me on countless bike rides. I knew it by heart. Much later his brother Hallam became a close friend and I met their father Sir Charles Tennyson who was almost a hundred years old, an elegant ancient man who used to live in Aldeburgh, then in Peasenhall. Julian had written about the Martello Tower and with this robust chapter in mind I followed him to it. He had written
Suffolk Scene
on foot and on his bike. So at Thorpeness I read him yet again. He had asked for comparatively little in life, just to edit a sporting magazine when the war was over. All he begged was the freedom of a bird. Sir Charles sent me the family photograph album and told me as much about him as anyone could, his brother Hallam included. In 1939 he joined up, carrying with him books by George Borrow, Richard Jefferies, and Robert Nichols. Also the first page of
In Memoriam
in manuscript. His father said, ‘Oh, if only you could have seen the English countryside before cars!’
Julian had seen the Aldeburgh marshes and the coastal sandlings at the end of their popular reputation for wretchedness, superstition and crime. And before the
repair of their complex network of ancient dykes and sea walls. Not that either was much good. Generations of marshmen had toiled futilely against the sea’s merciless encroachments, tiny Sisyphuses or grown-up children turning out mud castles which could only be washed away. Julian had lifted his eyes. From his day on the Suffolk marshes and sandlings, that ten-mile border which stretches between the arable soil and the shore would acquire its present status of a wild-life haven. He wrote,
When I lived in Aldeburgh I used to lie awake at night listening to the curlews flying over the town. They seemed to have a route which passed directly over our house. Often as many as six flocks would come over together, heading northwards, and when their last calls had died away on the thin air, I would gradually doze off in the long and even silence. ‘Cur-leek-leek, curr-leek-leek, cu-r-r-r-r-leek’ – they were coming south this time and, drowsy as I was, that shrill bubbling whistle would sent me rushing to the window to peer among the stars and catch the vague shapes as they swept over the hill and down towards the marshes. Then I would fall asleep wondering whether these were the same birds that passed and re-passed along that aerial road in the night, or whether by mutual agreement they were carrying on a system of exchange in the marshes up and down the coast.
Curlews are shy and mysterious, and I found them the most restless birds on the river. Even in winter they were always on the move, as if they couldn’t be satisfied with the same place for very long, and must be up and away looking for
something
new. Night after night they went, wailing their frustrations; but in April, when they left for their breeding ground and the flocks came over all night long, there was a purposeful, almost triumphant feeling in those sharp voices. The notes were quicker and higher, and sometimes they lacked the hesitant, purring quaver altogether.
I never realised my ambition of taking a census of the spring passage of the curlews … When I went to live inland I found that what I missed most of all was the calling of sea and marsh birds in the night. There is something sad and strange and lonely in the sudden, piercing voice that comes out of the darkness above you, the voice of a bird travelling at sixty miles an hour …
My practice was to work on my novel in the morning and to explore the coast in the early afternoon. This was short and I often walked home in the dark. I
borrowed
local books from the Aldeburgh Public Library where Miss Redstone advised me. She introduced me to Miss Howe, whose mother had been housekeeper to Edward FitzGerald. Miss Howe showed me his shawl
and his inkpot. I had entered a world of wanderers and coastal seamen, people who made an uncertain way in life. As the days lengthened so did my mileage. Orford and Kessingland needed early starts. Then there came the dramatic hold-up at Slaughden, just south of
Aldeburgh
, of the Martello Tower, the last of them to be built.
Something about the Suffolk coast made it an open invitation to an invader, first Napoleon, then Hitler it was thought. It was Captain William Ford who
suggested
that we should copy a circular tower he had seen the Royal Navy bombard – but to no effect – at Martello Point in Corsica in 1794. One hundred and three Martello Towers were built, all made of brick, the largest and northernmost in Suffolk, at Aldeburgh. This was a vast quatrefoil sloping shape standing in a brick saucer, its walls eight feet thick and thirty-three feet high. It was the ultimate expression of the sandcastle turned out of a tin pail into a sand moat. Tastelessly, considering its sad history, a jazz-age eyrie had been constructed on its roof. Yacht Club lanyards rattled in the wind below it and there was a rearing tarred Peggotty-boat with white windows near by. George Crabbe’s humiliation at Slaughden, his tough experience heaving the salt barrels about, took place long before the Martello Tower existed. They said it was stuffed with French prisoners after Waterloo, neglected,
forgotten
creatures. It was their cries I heard, not the poet’s resentment. I thought I heard them singing, ‘Do not
weep for me, Lisette, let not grief your beauty stain.’ I saw them carving fishbones and writing graffiti on the bricks, and being thrown grub like animals. Later on this year I would climb into it, and be shocked by its brick power. Julian Tennyson regarded it cheerfully. ‘Had Napoleon landed … it would have been Corsican against Corsican.’ He too had climbed in and surprised a courting couple with his wicked shrieks. It was a Sunday afternoon.
A Martello Tower is beyond being war litter like redundant anti-tank scaffolding, minefields and barbed wire. Most of this had gone without trace in 1955. But not the signature of the great 1953 flood, which was still writ large wherever I went. It was sordid, a mark of wretchedness, a reminder of what the North Sea could do if it chose. There having been a two-centuries gap since it behaved so nastily, the general feeling from Canvey to the Wash was that it would not do anything like it again for ages. But serious defences were being built. Those built by the Catchment Board from the White Lion to the Brudenell Hotel by the end of 1949 proved useless on the night of 31 January–1 February 1953. The sea rose over them and filled the town at will. It wanted to show that it could do what it liked. Yet near as they were these dramas of the coast became a past history to me as the present enormity of being ‘a writer’ itself became a kind of flooding claim, needing to obliterate everything that had gone before. Far from
this being a self-certainty, I could only mention it to my friend James Turner, since I was in full imitation of what he had done many years before. He watched me anxiously, spoke a lot about money and did not approve of ‘Aldeburgh’.
But Denis Garrett did, although never in Festival terms. By coming to Aldeburgh I had entered Denis’s ‘holy ground’. In the summer of 1955 he showed it to me as he plant-hunted on the shingle. Bending from the hip without bending the knees, he would look closely and adoringly at sea-holly, sea-pea and all the other shingle plants, tenderly regarding them like a returning prodigal.
Our first impressions of a town are likely to remain to some extent. Mine of Aldeburgh in the winter of 1955 have stayed indelible although a great many later sights of it have extended or balanced these. After the shore I trod the borough. The High Street must have had herds then carriages in mind – like Long Melford and Hadleigh. Newson Garrett and Victorian
cold-climate
enthusiasts had put a halt to Georgian decay with flashing plate-glass windows and massive gables. Whilst flood-boards remained propped along the Crag Path, balconies were being strengthened. The light was brilliant. It poured in from all corners of the sky. There were ‘marine residences’ on the high ground and strong terraces broken here and there by ancient cottages which Crabbe would have known. The Moot Hall, once
in the centre, stood like a beautiful Tudor toy almost on the beach. Like Thorpeness, there was evidence of the fantasy life of the Edwardians, a love of sundials, a play of decorative stones. Almost everything that had been built since, maybe since the 1820s, had been confidently and handsomely created, although a Garrett mercantile insistence touched every brick. However, there remained a hard speculative element in the recent architecture. But it was not ‘sea-side-y’. Neither was it charming like Southwold. Or resortish like almost every other coastal place. There was something powerful about it which was not easy to fathom and which made the decision to found a festival of music and the arts there so soon after the rough ways of the Second World War either foolhardy or challenging. And yet I don’t believe that either of these hazards so much as entered the heads of Eric Crozier (the suggester) or Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. The more likely reason was the useful Jubilee Hall, which Skelton Anderson, Elizabeth’s husband, had built to celebrate Victoria’s sixty years on the throne. He also created the golf course and might now be seen as a kind of rural Albert to his wife’s reign over the borough.
Alde House, where Elizabeth Garrett Anderson had lived, had been divided into flats when I was there. Norah, the widow of the poet Robert Nichols, lived in one of them and she lent me books. Here and there all over Aldeburgh there was this cultured residue of a
previous age, some of it going back to the visits of Thomas Hardy and George Meredith, and, in Miss Howe’s case, to Edward FitzGerald. Past and present concertinaed. From feeling stranded I began to feel that I was in great company, although staying solitary all the same. I expect I must have poured these confused thoughts out to Norah Nichols, as I had done to
Christine
Nash, whose common sense had landed me on the shingle beach. Christine would drive over from
Wormingford
to see how I was getting on, sometimes staying the night, when we would get up a good blaze of
driftwood
. Once in early May she thought it would be warm enough to have a swim. I watched her, a tall woman in her late sixties wearing an optimistic straw hat and smoking a cigarette in an amber holder, splashing up and down. ‘Oh, do come in, my dear!’ Life, our
multitudinous
scraps of it, was a kind of pointillism which we tried to fix into shape. The ultimate joined-up writing. I veered between Tennysonian (Julian)
cheerfulness
and Hardy-like morbidity and once searched for the little building ‘for washed-up bodies’ in the churchyard.
At Snape I had seen the gradual emptying of what was almost a malt city. One by one its workers fled. They had once walked or bicycled there in droves; some, after harvest, from as far away as West Suffolk to earn ‘Christmas money’, sleep in sheds and supplement their wages. Newson Garrett’s great enterprise on the site
had lasted a century. Denis and Jane Garrett and I once went there to stare on that Victorian desolation. A malt barge rocked by the hard. Denis of course was looking at those plants which so soon come to occupy an abandoned site. The marshes were alive with birds. Iken glistened distantly. There seemed to be countless brick buildings all cobwebby, all deserted. We stood under the clock. Like all Victorian entrepreneurs, Newson Garrett worshipped time. The clock was going. We would watch a malthouse become a concert hall. To their horror, Newson and his wife would watch their daughter Elizabeth become a doctor. ‘The whole idea is so disgusting I could not entertain it for a moment!’ declared the father. ‘Oh, the disgrace!’ cried her mother. Snape Maltings at that moment was like ‘Nineveh that great city’ – teeming with workers. Now it was a desolation. But at the same time a starting point for the three of us; Denis would go on to his Cambridge Chair, Jane to become a distinguished social worker in Cambridge, and myself to writing.
Although at this particular moment at Snape
Maltings
there were no plans, no sense at all of a common future – only a kind of mutuality, and a comfortableness with each other. And I suppose a taken-for-granted recognition of our always being together in some indefinable fashion. Whether our being deeply rooted in East Anglia in our various ways had anything to do with it, it is impossible to say. I suppose we just ‘fitted’.
There was no analysis, just an accepted continuum. Standing under the Maltings arch after there were no more workers left to clock-in timed our future.