The Time by the Sea (8 page)

Working on the Festival finances with Stephen Reiss at eight o’clock each evening I recall how we would keep our lives separate and stick to the task in hand. Beth, his wife, would bring us coffee or a drink. The – to me – fairly incomprehensible papers would be sorted and filed, the Guarantors would be given first preference notification of seats, the Subscribers second. Stephen spoke softly and blinked through his glasses. He remained both ponderous and light-fingered, the pile of letters disappearing with speed plus heavy remarks. About eleven he would walk me to the pub corner and
pass over a fat bundle of correspondence for me to post. I knew nothing about him. Later, I would be told how he would move from project to project with little explanation. One of his moves was from Balliol College to Chelsea School of Art. His main task while we were working together on the Festival was to write a book on Aelbert Cuyp, the Dutch master of landscape with cows. Long after our meetings he would promote the work of my friend Peggy Somerville. He had – like Britten – been to post-war Germany in its ruin, and had been in charge of the cultural rehabilitation of Lubeck and Schleswig-Holstein. And like Kurt Hutton and Leon Laden, his eyes had not cleared from what he had seen. He moved swiftly when important things needed to be done, out-running committees. It was Stephen who saw the Snape malthouse as a wonderful concert hall, and who took
Idomeneo
to Blythburgh Church within hours of the Maltings Concert Hall burning down. The Festival seemed clogged up with committee matters but Stephen often left them behind, thinking as he did on another plane. This agility wasn’t present in his face, which was pale and sad. He would last a long time. Britten dedicated
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
to him. His carrying the Festival from Aldeburgh to Snape was momentous. And all achieved with a bewildering cut through bureaucracy. He fell from grace in 1971. The departure, though cataclysmic, was described by Stephen as a ‘difference of opinion’.

It was in 1971 that Peter Hall wanted to film
Akenfield
, a project which filled me with fear. We met for the first time in London. The book had upset him. It was as though he had encountered his ancestral Suffolk for the first time. He encouraged me to write a film
treatment
of it. The producer Rex Pyke gradually persuaded me that it could be done. I recalled a boyhood picture named
Man of Aran
directed by Robert J. Flaherty. And what was more, that my farmer neighbour at Great Glemham had acted in it as a sixteen-year-old. This in the Thirties. It was about a kelp economy on an Aran island where seaweed was inned with monotonous toil to make slippery fields. I also remembered Pier Paolo Pasolini’s masterpiece
The Gospel According to St Matthew
. The two films together were what finally persuaded me to go ahead with the Peter Hall film.

Peter Hall knew that funding such a film would be almost impossible and he began to see it as a triple venture by me, Benjamin Britten, and himself, all Suffolk-born men. In July 1972 I wrote fearfully to Britten, well aware of his dislike of film crews, telling him that the
Akenfield
film as created out of my book, which he had read enthusiastically, would be a kind of Thomas Hardy story. Britten adored Hardy and had set a number of his poems. But I added Robert Bresson and Pasolini to my persuaders. Greatly daring, for Britten detested suggestions, I said, ‘It would be a very serious film in which Peter Hall and myself will be absorbed as
people coming from many generations of Suffolk country people. It is a low-budget film, and except for perhaps two or three leading characters, will use real people and not actors’ (in the long run the leads were also locals). I had already had a talk about the film with Britten’s publisher, Donald Mitchell. Thus I continued, ‘It was immediately evident that we could not ask you to provide such film music in the ordinary sense. Instead, Donald told us of some unpublished music which exists which, if it could be extended, would be perfect for the film. Our plan would be to fit parts of the film to this music, and not to request you to write to the film. There is plenty of time, as the film has to be shot over the seasons …’ I went on that should Britten consent to this arrangement, the London
premiere
of the film would be used to raise money for the Snape Maltings Foundation.

What I do remember now was Ben’s dislike of other people’s projects. Twenty years earlier I had told Imogen Holst about the Quaker James Parnell, a hero of mine, John Nash having agreed that he would be the perfect subject for a Britten opera. Not that I would have been so presumptuous as to suggest this, but only to tell him a story which I knew would enthral him. I often told him tales. He would watch my face. This was the story about a teenage Quaker who had been murdered by the gaoler’s wife in Colchester Castle
during
the late seventeenth century.

At Colchester, in the Norman castle built of Roman bricks, and which rises from the floor of a temple dedicated to the Emperor Claudius, who was a god, there is a fireplace recess just by the entrance in which James Parnell, an eighteen-year-old who had preached to people as they left church on Sunday mornings, had been imprisoned. Parnell called churches ‘
steeple-houses
’ but apart from this he was peaceful and polite. But in Colchester particularly there was a rage against the Society of Friends and the mayor himself, with a band of Quaker-persecutors, would set out in the evenings to rout them out.

James Parnell had been converted to Quakerdom by George Fox. He had walked from Retford to Carlisle to meet him, this ‘Older in the Truth’. Captured, he was exhibited semi-naked in the fireplace at Colchester prison by the gaoler’s wife, and she and her friends would stand around to watch him climb down a rope to the floor for his food. Eventually, weak and ill, he fell, then died. The magistrates brought in a verdict of ‘suicide by fasting’. ‘I have seen great things,’ the dying boy told the embarrassed crowd.

At Friends House in Euston Square there is no doubt that he would have been a great writer. To me Parnell is a saint. I ‘hear’ him speaking and maybe singing. When I was taken to the new Meeting House at Bury St Edmunds I enquired, ‘Do Quakers sing?’ ‘If the spirit leads we do.’ So I hear music when I think of this
martyrdom. I would like to have talked to Ben about Quaker song.

One day I told this story to Imogen who guessed that I would tell it to Ben. We were working in her flat. Her alarm was real.

‘Oh, you mustn’t, dear. Promise me you won’t! He
hates
suggestions. Oh, please don’t tell him!’

‘I won’t, Imo … I won’t. I understand.’

Although I didn’t, not at that moment.

This ancient panic about not making any suggestions caught up with me as I wrote to Britten about Peter Hall’s
Akenfield
film. But he was easy, businesslike and approving. ‘What a good idea. Come over!’ So I
introduced
Peter Hall to him. I don’t think that they had met before. Peter, Ben, and I and perhaps Peter Pears and Rex Pyke, sat on the Red House steps in sunshine. Ben was easy, seemingly very happy, affectionate. He and Peter Hall got on well. Much later Peter would direct
Albert Herring
at Glyndebourne – with Suffolk accents – but now he was in imaginative full grasp of the nature of the
Akenfield
film. It would be Pasolini in Suffolk. Later Ben and I had our ritual walk round the garden.

The outcome of all this would be as tragic as Parnell’s brief existence. One of the countless ways to raise money for the Snape Concert Hall was for me to anthologise the twenty-five Programme Books. They were remarkable and nothing quite like them existed in the concert world. Beautifully and individually
designed, printed on good heavy paper, filled with East Anglian natural history as well as architectural history, gloriously illustrated by Kurt Hutton’s photographs, and with drawings and paintings, they were a Suffolk library in themselves. One morning John Jacob, now the Festival Secretary, arrived at my house with a carload of them and everything pertaining to them and told me, ‘Ben says make a book from them.’ There was the customary Aldeburgh hurry to get something done by yesterday. And there would be a hundred signed copies at
£
10. Ben said, ‘Who is going to pay
£
10 for a book?’ Faber Music, Britten’s publisher at the time, published it in 1972, and Ben, Peter, Imogen and I sat in the Festival office for hours, pushing the special edition from hand to hand as we wrote our names. It was a lovely day with the sun blazing through the windows and the sea benign.

Afterwards, coming down the stairs, Ben allowed Imogen and Peter Pears to go ahead. Then he said, ‘I can’t do the
Akenfield
score. I am ill. I have to have an operation. I’m sorry.’ I noticed that his usual lined face had been smoothed out with cortisone or some such drug. I was shocked. I didn’t know about his heart. We walked along the Crag Path in silence. The towers were as normal. Fishermen lounged as usual. The gulls cried perpetually. After a few steps he hugged me and went ahead. It was the last time I would see him other than as the grey shade at the rear of the brick Artistic
Directors’ box in the Maltings, where, usually in an overcoat, he would enter just before the performance, the ghost of his own reality.

When Denis and Jane Garrett and I went to Snape we would walk through the reedbeds to Iken, where St Botolph had his cell. All the way there was
reed-whispering
, and now and then the noisy rise of a bird. Britten had a hankering for his grave to be made in these reeds but it was out of the question. So much water. Thus Bob and Doris Ling, caretakers at the Maltings and before that gravediggers, compromised by lining his grave in the churchyard with these now still reeds. I never walk to Snape along the Sailors’ Path without hearing the music of
Curlew River
. There was initial consternation when Peter Pears sang the part of a woman looking for her son but the sometimes curious pitch of his voice, the loneliness and hauntedness, made it a memorable choice. These reed marshes make the sea appear far away. They create an optical illusion through which the old thatchers would chop their way. In and around them there would be constant toil. They set oriental standards in Suffolk, and, like the Fens, they promised poor health for their toilers. But the east winds seem less bitter there. These reedbeds and their subsequent marshlands have made a contrasting coastal universe, each with its separate sounds and climates, each with its scuttling occupants. Britten would wander along the wet paths, his curly head coming and going
through the dense reedheads. He liked company on his car jaunts but here he would usually be glimpsed
walking
alone. This, and on an Aldeburgh marsh, was where he got away. Although crowds were part of him. He was gregarious by nature and often he seemed to thrive in company and to find his own silence within it. This would amaze me.

The doctor had told Ben that he could complete his
Death in Venice
before the heart operation but nothing else. The operation was a disaster. He was fifty-nine. I was looking after John Nash when Britten died in 1976 and we watched his funeral on Anglia Television as it climbed up the hill. The hill which he would almost run up to meet Imogen when she briefly lived at Brown Acres behind the church, and up which she walked to bring me a cake. ‘It’s your birthday!’ or ‘It’s my
birthday
!’ Although it was neither.

Peter Hall and I sat on the grass at Charsfield
thinking
whose music we should now have for our film. He had a cassette player and we listened to a bar or two of Elgar’s First Symphony. No. Then he said, ‘Do you know this?’ It was Michael Tippett’s moodily brilliant
Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli
and its
suitability
caused us to scramble to our feet with relief. It was perfect.

7 Blythburgh

Angel boss, Blythburgh Church

It must have been as late as May, and perilously close to the opening of the Ninth Festival, when we were all at a Council in the Moot Hall, that it was decided a concert should be held in a church other than Aldeburgh. The clergy were still not used to such events and it was tempting fate. But Ben had
Blythburgh
in mind. If we were to be expansionist, where better to begin? Holy Trinity was itself a weathered work of art of unique beauty whose unknown creators we thought would make common cause with our aspirations. With only a few weeks to go, and
everyone
eager, how could it be done without upsetting the Reverend Arthur Thompson? He had been vicar there for close on forty years and might not wish to be disturbed. A letter? – too peri lous. A telephone call? – impolite.

‘We’ll send Ronnie,’ said Ben.

Nobody offered to drive me to Blythburgh, so I went on the bus. When I got there it was to find that the vicar lived at Walberswick. I walked across the common in glorious sunshine. All the birds were singing and the may was out in frothy abundance. Mr Thompson had not been told of my embassy so he came to the door
polite but puzzled. He was elderly and rumpled and faintly alarmed.

‘The Aldeburgh Festival,’ I repeated.

‘Is it a band?’

‘Sort of,’ I said.

‘In my church?’

‘It would of course be sacred music.’

He left to make us a cup of tea and to think before he answered.

‘You say next month – June?’

‘We would love to hold the concert then, sir.’

Much more thinking, then, ‘I don’t see why not.’

But there was hesitancy. Scared of returning to Ben and Stephen Reiss without a contract, and seeing that Mr Thompson was the kind of man who did not sign one, I plumped for ‘Perhaps you would like to ask the PCC?’ At which he exploded. He could do what he liked in his own church – ‘Never mind them!’

‘You wouldn’t mind us filling the big space at the back with extra chairs?’

‘Do what you like.’

My relief and gratitude and grin made him laugh. ‘You’ll do,’ he said. He walked with me a little way. ‘It’s a pretty place, isn’t it?’ he said. When I returned Stephen rang up for stack chairs from the Education people and I sat with Imogen in her flat putting the Blythburgh programme together. Her Purcell Singers were to present Palestrina’s
Stabat Mater
, Purcell’s
Magnificat
, Priaulx Rainier’s
Requiem
, Thomas Tomkins’s
O Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem
, and Bach’s
Komm, Jesu, Komm
. A substantial glory. Imogen was immensely excited. ‘Oh darling, darling!’ We had scrambled egg on toast.

This first Blythburgh concert brought me close to David Gascoyne, whose poem was set by Priaulx Rainier in her
Requiem
. I remember finding one of his lines, ‘darkness that burns like light, black light’ a brilliant metaphor for the Marian flushwork although, he said, it had not occurred to him at the time. It would be many years before we saw each other again. He had come to Essex University to receive an
hommage
in the form of a collection of poems by Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, and other contemporaries which I had to present to him at the end of a reading. He was
overwhelmed
and in tears. Our last meeting, in October 1983, was standing outside Marks and Spencer in Colchester High Street, with the crowds milling round us. He had been to see Cedric Morris at Benton End. I had been reading his
Paris Journals
. He gave me a little conversation about ageing, posting it to me a few days later. It was called ‘Sentimental Colloquy’:

Blythburgh became one of my dream places after the 1956 concert. I would cycle there and take up a kind of residency. The amazing church was a product of the strenuous piety and unfounded optimism with which the Middle Ages closed. Its wealth came from the sea. It stood above a fishing port and took its tithes from the herrings. These had to be eaten twice a week as food for fasts. When the Reformation banished this holy diet the church lost its revenues. Poverty, and not holy poverty by the sound of it, made itself felt. The River Blyth silted up, as did the harbour, and the not all that showy tower no longer looked down on boats, but on nothing which it had been built to recognise.

Yet the body of the building retained its splendour – time even added to it. The long arcade stayed assured, each downward tracery pencil fine, the repetition perfectly controlled. Blythburgh is a Job of a building, an architecture which has gone through every hazard before arriving at its current splendour, thunderclap and all. Its quality is not unlike one of those lustrated
ventilation bricks which have been laved by the sea – sucked smooth by it but retaining its purpose. Inside, the roof is very high and white and stencilled all over with green and crimson flowers. Everything is faded to perfection. Angels bear down on one from a safe height. They have been shot at – winged – yet still they soar. It is best to lie flat on the floor to watch their flight. They carry their wounds like martyrs. Their pinions beat the wooden sky. They sing eternally, ‘Komm, Jesu, Komm’, only in late Gothic.

There was rarely anyone there for this was a
pre-Pevsner
time and before Philip Larkin had written of ‘Church Going’. But one day I found a young man in his coffin. About my age, his plate said. He lay on tall trestles in the chancel. I sat with him for an hour. I said it was too soon for this. A woman arrived and swept and dusted around him.

Sometimes during these flights from novel-writing and Festival planning I tried to enter the medieval mind. It proved impossible. Trained historians and my wildly untrained conclusions got me only so far. Then a curtain was drawn. The thinking, language and usage of the materials which had constructed this place refused to cohere. I was left with what the Suffolk
historian
Walter Copinger said, what Julian Tennyson said, what M. R. James said, and not what its priests and carpenters said. It arose from convictions, patterns and fancies so unlike mine that it was useless to proceed
other than via Perpendicular and Decorated. Many years later writers such as Eamon Duffy, using the Reformation inventory of Long Melford Church, would take me further into Blythburgh than seemed possible at this moment. Even now the average parish church guidebook puts the cart before the horse. It deals
confidently
with architecture and its materials, stone, wood and glass, but sketchily and rather apologetically with what it terms ‘Symbolism’, the word it uses for Faith. It was this which expanded Blythburgh beyond its actual religious requirements. Everything went into it, from mystery to the mundane, from sex to immortality. As for poetry, this simply descended like Portia’s mercy. And will do so for as long as its arches stand.

These were the things I felt as I sat on each
behaviourist
bench in turn, made aware of the late medieval bottom and eye. I felt and saw to a feeble extent the pains and pleasures of the saints, and listened to the unfamiliar tellings of familiar stories. Earthly and unearthly love came together. I even imagined a
long-unheard
music being drawn down by music which would not have been heard here since the time it was composed. There are moments when what is ancient becomes bright and new. It is like propagating the seeds found in a sarcophagus.

I found that an essential difference between the medieval mind and our own was that it was incurious. It explored, amplified, decorated and taught only what
it knew. The great heresies themselves did not set out to provide another or better world. They grew out of the same inventive passion for life which produced Blythburgh, or Chartres Cathedral. There was no line between what was sacred and what was secular, but only a terrifying divide between heaven and hell. These were as geographic destinations as Rome or Ipswich, signposted and eventually reached.

Once, trying to make contact with those who sang and spoke in Blythburgh Church, or swung on rope ladders fixing angels, I read Chaucer’s
Troilus and Criseyde
. The Chaucers originated in Dennington not far away. Britten loved this church. He took young friends there and they wrote their names on the sand table – ‘Benjamin Britten’ – then obliterated them with the smoother. Dennington was a church where little had been turned out and where, like Blythburgh, there was much evidence of the counting of the hours. Time as both villages knew it still clunked away.

During the drastic nineteenth-century restoration of churches, when more damage was done to medieval architecture than by time and decay, William Morris used Blythburgh as a model for bodging. Such old buildings should be patched not ‘restored’. Aged twelve and seated next to his father, Morris would let his gaze roam around Canterbury Cathedral as he searched for the partnership which had made it,
heavenliness
and human-ness. Morris’s century was still an
age of ‘hands’, or the workforce stripped of its
personality
, and at its wor st tur ned into mere oper atives by Gradg rinds. In spite of this, William Morris saw hands which had created Canterbury Cathedral on ever y inch of its stone, glass and wood, which was why the building
lived
. It was his conversion, the birth of Ar ts and Crafts, and for him the death of ‘Progress’ via the machine.

For me at Blythburgh there were days when the medieval voice became positively colloquial, and the medieval artistry cheerfully workaday. Knight, artisan and peasant, priest and layman talked a lot here. W hat I ‘heard’ were Suffolk countr y voices and an awakened or recovered singing. I read about the Courts of Love presided over by Eleanor of Aquitaine which were music schools amongst other things, and whose ideals were car ried from kingdom to kingdom by singers –
troubadors
– and whose arts became part of the liturg y here.

Johan Huinzinga said that aristocratic life in the Middle Ages was a wholesale attempt to act the vision of a dream. W hat remains at Blythburgh is what remains of the free zing of this dream. What the builders set in stone, wood and glass, even in broken brick, should explain what they had in mind. Yet it cannot. And this is its wonder.