The Time by the Sea (10 page)

Forster’s clothes were a miracle of drabness, I used to wonder where one could buy them. They were so careful in having nothing to say. But his talk! Imo’s talk. How can I recall her sentences but not his? The lopsided ness of life.

Imogen’s flat looked out on the High Street and towards the sea. The floor was covered with fresh coconut matting and a design for Honegger’s
King David
by Kokoschka hung on the wall. Seagulls would skirmish on the windowsills. Neat copy fluttered all over everything. Once when I went to Dartington they let me have her room which was uncannily similar to the Aldeburgh flat. There they spoke of her with
love-struck
awe, and with still a kind of mourning at her going. And I too was made aware of the wealth and comfort which she abandoned in 1951 for what at first was a virtual homelessness and a suitcase. Also a desert from a throne – not that this would have occurred to her. When we met in 1955 these losses had been
sensibly
replaced by her knowing the total dependency which Britten, the greatest English composer of the twentieth century, had on her. There was no one else. They were about the same age. They shared a similar
music culture and a similar drive, and in some ways they were equals.

As the Festival spread through the town, engulfing the Jubilee Hall, the Parish Church, the Baptist Chapel, the Moot Hall, the hotels and boarding houses, the beach, the very air, there were rumbles. But Imogen had only to walk down the High Street, her eyes fixed on no one or anything, than a kind of armistice ensued. She would ‘look straight past you’ but people
understood
. Should someone, not knowing the drill, bring her to a halt she might give them a full minute of her time. But no one for a minute thought that she was stuck up. Miss Holst had better things to do than
gossip
. She had no idea that she walked blindly through something approaching adoration, nor would it have pleased her to know it.

I would tell her about the circle at the far end of the town, the artists Juliet Laden and Peggy Somerville, and the writers who were often with me, and Imogen would say, ‘But don’t they like our Festival? – some do not.’ And I would say, ‘They don’t know it is ours.’ Which was true if strange. There was another
Aldeburgh
, another Suffolk. Some thought that the Festival was wearing me out and some that the shoemaker should stick to his lathe and just write. Their concern made me feel pleasantly hard done by. But the
contrasting
venues of Crag House and Brudenell House created a drama in my life, whilst the ancient basic Aldeburgh
of the fishermen enthralled me, it being so remote. I remember attempting to emulate Imogen’s indifference to accommodation, but this was impossible. And to both her and Christine Nash’s incomprehension I spent a lot of time making ‘a nest’. Their word.

Sometimes Ben would drop me off after a Festival meeting in his Rolls, and all at once I would feel troubled and lonely. Unsure of myself and ‘far from home’. Although the question was, ‘Where was home?’ And where should I be going? And, maybe, who with? When Imogen knocked on my door with a Cragg Sisters’ cake, it would be ‘Very nice, dear.’ But not looking around. All anyone needed was a chair, a table and a bed. Unless one was Benjamin Britten when a Miss Hudson was essential. I don’t think anyone ‘did’ for Imogen. She adored food and drink but was no cook. I was openly hungry half the time like a dog.

Imogen said in her diary:

But it was. On this occasion, ‘Miss Hudson had cooked a superb meal and we both felt better.’

Rehearsing on the Crag Path in the evening I would fetch fish and chips and we would sit on the wall in a line to eat them. But the real feed was in Juliet’s limitless kitchen at Brudenell House. Or a similar meal at Peggy Somerville’s limited table.

Imogen died early on a March morning in 1984. Might she have a sip of water – like a bird? After which ‘her head drooped gently sideways … and she slipped away’. I watched her funeral procession to where Ben lay in Aldeburgh churchyard on local tele vision. A
handful
of friends sang the five-part
Sanctus
by Clemens non Papa, a canon she had taught them, at her open grave. The last time I saw it, pointed sycamore leaves had covered it.

On 29 September 1952, her first day as an Aldeburgh inhabitant, she wrote in her diary:

9 Staverton – What Happened? – What Is Happening?

John Nash:
Staverton Thicks

 

One April morning in 1956 I made one of my planless walks from Slaughden towards Orford and with the usual elated feeling. There would be a wonder midway although I knew nothing of its existence. All I
experienced
at this moment was a tossing about of freedom. The sea was glorious and near at hand, the gulls screamed and the air was intoxicating. At Slaughden the Alde turned into the Ore, and the Aldeburgh Marshes became the Sudbourne Marshes. On the left were the Lantern and King's Marshes. Orford Castle was the obvious destination but like a boy leaving the biggest sweet in the bag until last, I turned right towards Butley. Somebody had told me that Chillesford Church tower was pink because it contained lots of coraline crag. But what drew me would be the stunted oaks and the limited nature of things. And yet at the same time the grandeur of things, for Victorian aristocrats had shot over these acres. So I saw Hansel and Gretel Lodge, and dark entrances to country houses, and signposts to Hollesley where Brendan Behan would be a Borstal Boy. This walk would become a preface to a guidebook as yet unwritten. The poor soil of the Suffolk sandlings had made for skimpy farming
but had provided the next best thing to Scotland for shoots.

Just below it there existed something else. Butley loomed large on my ‘Geographical' two-miles-to-
the-inch
map. A rivulet wriggled in its direction. And so I came to the Thicks a little way on the right of the Woodbridge road. It would play a large part in my imagination. I took all my friends there, the poet James Turner, John Nash, the Garretts, Richard Mabey. ‘Yes,' said Benjamin Britten, ‘I know it well.' John Nash had told me that when he was painting he ‘liked to have a dead tree in the landscape'. Except that Staverton Thicks was not dead, only perpetually dying. And thus everlastingly alive. Although with no apparent struggle. It showed its great age and exposed its ageing, and one flinched from such candour. But why had no one cleared it and replanted it? What had happened? What was happening?

An early friend of John Nash's youthful days was Sidney Schiff, the translator of Proust. Schiff had taken over as translator when Charles Scott Moncrieff died. John Nash gave me the first volume,
Time Regained
, which Schiff had given him. In it Schiff, who wrote under the name of Stephen Hudson, had put, ‘My dear John, I want you to have this book. Begin by reading from p. 210 to p. 274. If that means so much to you as I hope, begin at the beginning and read it
slowly
to the end. 30th March '32.'

These sixty or so pages describe a soliloquy on the artist–writer's life when, arriving late for a concert, he is put into the library until the first work is ended. His memory wanders back to the celebrated
memory-providing
madeleine and, although he is in Paris, to the Normandy coast, and takes in the decision to be either painter or writer. I had just read Sidney Schiff's
instructions
. Fragments of the soliloquy in the Paris library fluttered through my head as I walked towards Orford and penetrated the strange wood. Passages such as ‘the large bow-windows wide open to the sun slowly setting on the sea with its wandering ships, I had only to step across the window-frame, hardly higher than my ankle, to be with Albertine and her friends who were walking on the sea-wall' made me think of Juliet Laden and Peggy Somerville softly drawing in pastel the young people below, and how perfect it would be this very evening to be at Brudenell House telling them about my walk. I too was attempting to concentrate my mind on a compelling image, a cloud, a triangle, a belfry, a flower, a pebble. I wondered if I should make the lovers in my half-written novel walk this way. And then, thinking of Denis Garrett and his botanic company, I was startled when Proust includes him in these recommended pages – when the narrator says that his sorrows and joys

The writer envies the painter; he would like to make sketches and notes and, if he does so, he is lost …

John Nash sketched through a grid of lines and dotted in here and there ‘late afternoon', ‘browning grey', ‘still water', as reminders.

According to his youthful armour-bearer it was among the young oaks of Staverton that St Edmund was murdered by the Danes, tied naked to one of the trees and made a target for arrows. This armour-bearer lived, like the trees, to be very old and thus he was able to tell this execution to Athelstan, who told it to Dunstan, who told it to his friend Abbo of Fleury, who sensibly wrote it down.

The Thicks was also the scene of a Tudor picnic, when Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and his wife, Henry VIII's sister, spread linen in its shade, drank wine, sang songs and ate – what? This story delighted me as a kind of alfresco masque; when I imagined a pretty site a mile or so from the shield-bedecked Augustinian Priory, and some spontaneous desire to
make merry out of doors. But then I looked up the Duke – and what a monster! But a good-looking monster, one of the ‘new men' of the Reformation who had gone from strength to strength without losing his head. I see him lying full length on the then thick summer grass, the oaks above as young as he is, and by his side his wife Mary who was once Queen of France. Henry was furious when they married in Paris without his permission, but calmed down when her enormous dowry for the first husband was returned in
instalments
. In Suffolk they called her ‘the French queen', not the Duchess. She would have been buried in St Edmundsbury Abbey had not her brother pulled it down. But she can be found in a corner of St Mary's Church near by, the woman who ate – what? – in
Staverton
Thicks.

Hugh Farmer, into whose little wood I stole so long ago, himself describes it in a Festival Programme Book. He lived there and his account of it is incomparable. He tells of his life there in
A Cottage in the Forest
. But it has never been the adjunct of a great house.

I thought of Saxon and Viking princelings. The Thicks has a partly thwarted Phoenix ambition, to die and yet live. But the thing is itself a form of dying. The long-settled condition of these botanic infirmaries, for they exist here and there where a tidying hand has not invaded them, are a requiem. The rich deep mould of
their floor, the feeble barriers of guelder and hazel which let through the north-coast wind, the close canopy of undernourished branches which check full leafage, all these ‘disadvantages' are time-protracting. For an oak, a holly, the chief enemies of existence are parasitic fungi, canker caused by sunburn, frost aphis of one kind or another – and lightning. They say that it strikes an oak more than any other tree. Once, cycling from Framlingham on a storm-black afternoon, I saw lightning fire an old oak in a park. It blazed up only a few yards away with a mighty crackle of dead and living wood.

Most of the Staverton oaks are so near death that they seem to be nothing more than gnarled drums for the gales to beat. Yet so tenacious is their hold on life that the twigs sprouting from them are still April green. And come August ‘Lammas' growth will hide some shrivelled bole.

The mood of the Thicks depends on that of its visitor. I found it a contemplative, loving silence. Little or no birdsong. An absence of that rustling busyness created by small unseen animals. A carpet-soft humus deadened my every step. So soft was it that sparse forest flowers – sanicle shoots, wild strawberry, speedwell – can be trodden into it without injury. A sequence of glades has its own special senescence. It is like walking through an ill-lit gallery of sculpted last days. Except that here there is an endless putting off of last days.

As Staverton means a staked enclosure, what was it that was enclosed? And why were its ‘thicks' left to degenerate when the remainder of the forest was not allowed to? Why was it allowed to do what it liked? Yet it feels neither cursed nor abandoned. It is like a
woodland
mortuary, yet not tragic. Its enigma lies in some destiny which we now know nothing of. For some reason it was intentionally untouched – and staved in. It is grotesque, part a wood from Gormenghast, part a lecture on death, part a ruin of miscegenation. Holly props up oak; ivy alone flourishes. Wild creatures for the most part avoid it. It is botany as departure – yet neither root nor leaf ever goes.