The Time by the Sea (9 page)

8 Imo

Imogen Holst conducting

After my duties for Stephen Reiss had been transferred to Miss Flo Powell, Imogen Holst took me over. And never was there a more sensible arrangement. Imogen had a long experience of assistants. Her treatment of them was a kind of authoritarian love. In 1955 she was forty-six but had taught so much, travelled so far, been Ben’s saviour for three amazing years, that she
possessed
a greater authority than she realised, and had little idea of the effect she had on me. Everything she said or required was like a gift. The plainness of her face was itself so total that it had become beautiful. Her voice was modulated, her laugh raucous. She liked men and was used to them. She had no notion of work time and leisure time, and she made me have no notion of these opposites either. We worked at her father’s desk, a big Arts and Crafts piece of furniture. We seemed to be huddled together at times. At some vague hour she would cry, ‘Food!’ and make scrambled eggs. Her dining table was a board laid over her bath. She would fling a check tablecloth over it and laugh when I couldn’t get my feet under it.

I was frequently at Little Easton Rectory at this time, and so could gossip about Thaxted. Canon John Barnett
was himself a considerable musician and Imogen was amused by the fragmentary things I had learned from him. Or had especially liked. Reynaldo Hahn’s songs for instance. Hahn was a pupil of Massenet and Proust’s first lover, and the part-origin of the composer Vinteuil whose ‘little phrase’ haunts
Remembrance of Things Past
. The other was Henri Duparc.

But John Barnett’s enormous library of 78s also introduced me to Gustav Holst’s music and that of his contemporaries Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells, Arnold Bax, Frank Bridge and John Ireland, as well as Bach and Mozart. Each record would be denuded of its sleeve, lightly dusted with a velvet pad and placed on the turntable. Or the Canon would play for hours at the Steinway piano, cigarette ash – Balkan Sobranie –
tumbling
down his cassock. A huge, untidy, somewhat unwashed figure with stained teeth and a beautiful speaking voice, a widower with a love now of young men, he did little new in the parish. Once after a walk to Little Easton village itself he asked, ‘What is it like down there?’ He trundled about the Essex landscape giving inspired music talks to the Workers’ Educational Association. Now and then we went to Thaxted where Conrad Noel’s banners floated above the arches in what I always thought of as Gustav Holst’s church.

In 1912 the Countess of Warwick, née Frances
Maynard
and heir to vast Essex acres, became a socialist, eventually filling her farmhouses and cottages with
musicians, actors and writers. Each of these buildings had a handprint with a coronet over it in the plaster –
manus
-Maynard. Solomon the pianist, Philip Guedalla the biographer and H. G. Wells, amongst the
distinguished
tenants, had cycled the lanes. John Barnett’s services were a kind of slovenly holiness, himself
frequently
in his pyjamas under his robes … But on Good Friday his Steinway would be hauled across the road by the farm labourers and placed on the chancel step where, during the Three Hours, people would come from near and far to listen to Bach. I took the poet James Turner there and he wrote:

Gustav Holst, who had died in 1934, was still a potent force in this Essex countryside. Walking and cycling I could ‘hear’ him. He too had discovered it whilst tramping through a five days’ holiday during the winter of 1913. Most of all Thaxted, where he had put
up for the night at the Enterprise in Town Street. In 1914 he rented a cottage from the Essex dialect writer S. L. Bensusan, whose nephew John Bensusan-Butt was a friend of mine. Imogen tells what happened next:

The Holsts lived in this house, Monk Street Cottage, until 1917, then they rented The Steps in the centre of Thaxted for the next eight years. One evening, working with Imogen, I happened to mention my weekend at Little Easton Rectory and she said, ‘That was our part of the country!’

In her 1952 diary, after she had taken neat copies of her work on
Gloriana
round to Ben, who had been in bed all day with a cold, the two of them settled for a drink – Drambuie, a favourite, for her and rum for him – during the course of which they discussed the future:

My closest relationship with Imogen was when Ben and Peter were far away in Bali and she more or less took charge of the 1956 Festival. I wasn’t aware of this at the time but I do remember an exultancy about her which was catching. Trailing up the stairs to her flat she called out, ‘The Festival is everything –
everything
– dear, isn’t it?’ And I felt a warning. But she set me to work on the Programme Book and, given a free hand with it, I was also aware of a rise in my status, or rather the realisation that she had, mercifully for him, stolen me from Stephen Reiss. Could Kurt Hutton take the pictures? Could John Nash do the line drawings? Might I discuss the printing with Benham’s of Colchester? Imogen’s own freedom was catching. It was when the cats are away the mice do play but also that change of the world thing which I now and then saw in her face, and which I later thought of as the breakthrough joy of early socialism – the expression of it which William
Morris and the nineteenth-century Fabians possessed. There must be a portrait of Schubert but not that lozenge-shaped pair of spectacles. Imogen always knew where things were. She knew where he wasn’t wearing them. ‘He was
beautiful
.’ So we wrote to Munich for a drawing which entirely revised one’s concept of the young composer. I have kept the print to this day.

Imogen’s triumph at this moment was to reinstate her father’s one-act chamber opera
Sāvitri
. A previous attempt to stage it had been postponed and
Albert Herring
substituted in its place. The decision to make this change came after Imogen had to leave halfway through an Executive Committee meeting because of a rehearsal in Ipswich. The reason was its cost. It was to have been part of a double-bill which included
The Soldier’s Tale
. Now it would share the evening with her new presentation of John Blow’s
Venus and Adonis
. There was a fairly Wagnerian Gustav Holst in
Sāvitri
, and a thrilling Imogen in
Venus and Adonis
. Her genius was to work through old texts like the Aldeburgh wind, refreshingly if mercilessly. In this instance from a 1682 manuscript in the British Museum. She ended the Children’s Concert in the church with her father’s hymn ‘Turn back O man, forswear thy foolish ways’ which he had composed for Whitsun at Thaxted in the midst of the First World War’s appalling losses on the Western Front. Imo conducted 230 Suffolk children singing it on a summer’s afternoon at Aldeburgh. Both she and
Ben had a kind of direct line to children. They would arrive with a mixture of resentfulness and bravado, and would leave quite changed.

Sāvitri
– the 1956 performance – revealed both Imogen’s and her father’s India. Gustav had been obsessed by Indian culture and Imo had spent two months studying Indian music at Tagore’s university in 1950–51 just before leaving Dartington and arriving in Aldeburgh. She wanted to collect Indian folk songs and she set about it much as her father’s generation had done before 1914. The brilliant singing teacher Pandit Onkaamda Thakar gave her a compacted study of an endless subject. Only an Imo could grasp what she did in so short a time. It was a two-way teaching. She learned; the Indians learned. They sang Britten and Bach, she found that their style of singing took a bit of getting used to – their habit of what we would call ‘scooping sounds’ distressing to Western ears until one has learned to accept it as ‘inevitable’.

And now she and I, and E. M. Forster, were walking from Ben’s house to the Jubilee Hall to hear
Sāvitri
. At last. Aldeburgh itself was like a great song. Or was this because I had stopped being so anxious and was just looking and listening? Imogen sat between us at the front. The opera marked a high point in the
performance
of Gustav’s work. Her dutifulness towards him came second to her knowing its importance. She was still and absorbed.

Holst had written his own libretto from a Sanskrit story in the
Mahabharata
. Satyavan, a woodman, comes home one evening to his wife Sāvitri, and hears a stranger moving in the forest. He raises his axe but the strength goes from his arms; the stranger is Death. Instead of cursing the intruder Sāvitri welcomes him. Death is so impressed by Sāvitri that he promises her anything she desires for herself¸ but she must ask nothing for her husband. She then makes a passionate appeal for life in all its fullness. But what is life without him? Death sees that he has been defeated and vanishes. For even Death is an illusion. Satyavan wakes with his wife’s arms around him. She tells him that a Holy One has visited them both – and blessed them.

Arda Mandikian sang Sāvitri and Peter Pears
Satyavan
. Thomas Hemsley sang Death.

One of those ridiculous but ineradicable things occurred as the three of us were leaving. Forster’s cap had fallen to the floor. When I rescued it I saw that it was covered with dust so I banged it on my knee. Instead of thanking me he was cross. Cross – or worse – too when on returning to Ben’s house in Crabbe Street he saw a big police notice fixed to the wall – to stop parking. These trifles seemed to have obliterated all that we had seen and heard. He was upset. I held his hand for a moment before he disappeared. But when we met for dinner at the Wentworth Hotel a little later he was happy again. Imogen was pushing the boat out, to use a
suitable banality, and had ordered one of those snowy tables in the restaurant which I had only seen through the window, and the manager Lyn Pritt himself had seated us. I can’t recall what we talked about, only the moment, the noise of the sea, the privilege of it all. Imo loved a drink, or three drinks, so I expect there was wine. Maybe that which I had helped Lyn to cork and label in the Wentworth’s cellar.

A year or two before, Forster had published
The Hill of Devi
, a collection of letters, including those from India where he was tutor to a Raja: