The Time by the Sea (14 page)

14 Sleeping in the Moot Hall

The Moot Hall, Aldeburgh, 1924

Who else has done it? Bored aldermen, centuries of thieves? It is an enchanting building. You expect to be able to lift the roof off and see the fretwork animals lying inside two by two until the dove returns with its twig. George Crabbe’s only reference to it is as a prison. But he does give one of his rare benign portraits of an Aldeburgh official when he writes about its function in the shape of a fisherman mayor, a ‘short stout person in good brown broad-cloth’ coloured ‘seaman’s blue’, who has ‘been a fisher from his earliest days’ and ‘placed his nets within the Borough’s bay’.

Where, ‘by his skates, his herrings and his sols’ he has amassed a small fortune of twelve hundred pounds. Which he kept in a box under the bed. My neighbour Eric had done this, and with exactly the same amount. So when the currency changed in 1972 he was in a panic for unlike the mayor he couldn’t read or write, although I did discover that he could ‘draw’ his name. We sat a whole evening at my kitchen table as I taught him the value of the new coins and notes. And it took a whole week to persuade him to take his twelve hundred pounds of old money to the village post office.

As I made my bed in the Moot Hall it was a comfort to think of the mayor and his home savings and
fisher-blue
suit. Denis Garrett told me that when his cousin Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became mayor she took one look at the moth-eaten robes which generations of men had decked themselves in, the hat particularly, and had a dressmaker design something new and delightful for her to parade down the High Street in. The massive civic chair from which she ruled the corporation roost stood at the head of the table and I hung my shirt and trousers on it. There was a trapped June warmth in the heavy old chamber and a kind of boarded-up smell of meetings, crime and importance. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and a whole gallery of worthies eyed me from their massive frames. The sea rocked the pebbles
perpetually
as usual just outside. Someone had rigged up a camp bed and brought blankets. I had brought pyjamas.

As well as mayors, the toiling naked bodies of J.-F. Millet’s peasants surrounded me. The mayors were static, the peasants all movement. Their most celebrated stillness was in the famous and much reproduced study called
The Angelus
, when they heard the church bell, heart-stopping in its devotion, over the fields calling for prayer. The oldest bell in Suffolk still hangs against the spire of Hadleigh Church, put up there in 1280. But even if it was rung there would be nobody in the fields to hear it say
Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae
– ‘The angel of the Lord brought tidings to Mary’.

J.-F. Millet had been hugely influential. Everyone from Daumier to Van Gogh had made copies of his drawings. Bernard Berenson had called him ‘the
stupendous
Millet’, and Roger Fry had described him as one of the great Moderns. But by the Fifties he had been reduced to
The Angelus
only, and this sentimentally. Sir Kenneth Clark, who had been brought up at Orford and who knew the Suffolk fieldworkers, had organised an exhibition of Millet’s drawings to restore a
comprehension
of physical toil and its art. ‘No painter of the nineteenth century except Van Gogh’, he wrote, ‘makes us think more seriously about the question how far art should concern itself with the great issues of human life.’

Clark had borrowed the drawings from Paris on the condition they were never to be left unattended. Thus my going to bed in the Moot Hall.

‘Who will guard them?’

‘Ronnie,’ said Ben.

Needless to say that I dreamt of Peter Grimes being tried on the same floorboards. When the scandal of his treatment of boys broke and he came before the mayor and corporation, they recommended him to take ‘a freeman whom thou durst not beat, not the defenceless children turned out of workhouses’. But Crabbe is enthralled by human compulsions, none stronger than to be cruel, violent, and excited by helplessness. Grimes’s sentence was isolation. It caused him to become insane
and thus more violent still. His sentence was that of the scapegoat, a person driven from the herd so that all crimes against boys, a convention then, might be heaped upon him, freeing the conventional beaters from guilt. That Grimes was not imprisoned or hanged puzzles the modern reader. What he was given in this actual
building
was advice to choose legally protected apprentices, not unprotected orphans. Crabbe’s real fascination with Grimes is the effect of social isolation and guilt on him. This poet is the master of madness. This pretty
building
was only a few steps from his birthplace, and further then from the sea. Its enchanting carved brick chimneys are early Victorian and ‘borrowed’.

I locked the door, as I was told to do, before I went to sleep. Relieved by the day guard at eight in the
morning
, I bought two herrings for breakfast and went home to write my novel.

Half a century later Jane Garrett and I stood in this council chamber to see, not French fieldworkers, but the history of the Garrett family, the makers of farm machines and the monumental maltsters of Leiston and Snape, and reigning over them little imperious
Elizabeth
in her regalia. And there was the same richly enclosed odour which never left this room even when the windows were wide. The stocks had occupied one of the niches outside where I often sat to read.

East Anglia’s J.-F. Millet was – still is – Harry Becker. It was at his exhibition in Ipswich that I last saw
Stephen Reiss. Becker’s maternal grandfather had been a Baron and Chamberlain to the Grand-Ducal court of Hesse-Darmstadt but his father had settled in Colchester, renting the Minories, a great town-house which eventually would be the home of my friend John Bensusan-Butt. John was related to the Pissarros and Lucien Pissarro often came to stay there during the First World War. Harry Becker was born in the Minories in 1865. His descent, if one may describe it as such, from German aristocrat to penniless painter in the Suffolk fields was like one of Zola’s remorseless novels. And yet he was able to show not only the degradation of the farm labourers at this time, when British agriculture was in the doldrums, and the servitude of those who kept it going through decades of slump, but also their physical strength, their actual movement as they toiled, and even their grandeur. The Waveney Valley farmer–novelist Henry Rider Haggard watched his men lay field drains in midwinter and was mystified by their grim acceptance of existence. Its reality was confirmed in Mary Mann’s shocking
Tales of Dulditch
, her stories of farm labour in Norfolk. A Victorian rector made the labourers and their families stand outside his church whatever the weather until their betters were seated. Then they could come in and sit at the far back. Thomas Hardy knew them as great singers and fiddlers, also at the west end, but elevated to musical heights which
carried
worship beyond hardship, rank or what was
thought possible. Their studded boots struck sparks from the floor slabs. Both he and his father were skilled violinists and good singers, and helped to raise the roof.

Harry Becker’s fall yet paradoxical rise to greatness was his becoming himself the horseman (ploughman) ditcher and shepherd as he worked, feeling their skilled movements in his own body – and being financially levelled to their existence. He and his wife Georgina settled in the Blyth Hundred, as remote a farming area as might be discovered at the turn of the twentieth
century
, a land which was still neo-medieval in many ways, lost, yet profoundly known to its inhabitants. Becker’s penury went so deep that he would be seen sizing sacks to paint on. But it was his drawings which said more than any writer could about the people who worked the land. Their faces are usually turned away. Their clothes are voluminous, the trousers stringed below the knee so that insects were prevented from reaching their genitals, their movements accurate. Those same
movements
as in
Piers Plowman
or in
East of Eden
. Scything is one of Becker’s perfect observations. But there is a brotherhood between Harry Becker in Suffolk and J.-F. Millet in France. So I thought as much about him as I did of the latter’s work as the early light from the North Sea penetrated the limited windows of the Moot Hall. What the Garretts did at Leiston was to invent ways of obliterating sheer physical labour, to be able to lift eyes – and eventually after World War II to lay the
foundation of a farming which is virtually worker-free. So that I can now walk for miles in the Stour Valley through perfect corn and vegetable acres without
seeing
a soul at work. Without catching the bait-time talk and the thump of horses. Just in a new silence. Not even the Angelus bell, so no prayer, no hands together, no bowed head. And no arthritic flesh. And no movement unless the wind and rain makes it. Becker drew
field-women
– those same ‘daughters of Tess’ and who, like her, were out in all weathers. Hardy describes a farmer’s wife having to do landwork after it had ruined him.

As a boy I saw pea fields crowded with pickers, beet fields lined with singlers, and the last of the harvest fields full of, well, everybody. Now David tills and sows my old seventy acres all by himself. But he would make a good Millet, a good Becker, although he makes none of the old farming movements, but sits aloft of them all.

But all rural writers mourn what they believe was a better life, that of the day before yesterday. Robert Bloomfield’s
The Farmer’s Boy
is a wistful idyll created in London. John Constable’s favourite word for his countryside was ‘serene’. George Crabbe in
The Village
weeps for the desertion of the land, and his merciless account of what happens to farmworkers when they can no longer work is unbearable. John Clare’s arthritic father was made to chip stones to mend the Helpstone road when he could no longer sow and thresh. He was fifty, a famous storyteller and a good singer; George Crabbe would have taken a rounded view of such a man. He discovered in the Aldeburgh hovels undiminished people whose condition, as it was called, had not robbed them of intelligence and dignity, and whose lives ennoble
The Borough
. Drawn though Crabbe was to the dreadfulness of things, the Aldeburgh poor had to be celebrated.

For many years I lived in Debach and walked in Edward FitzGerald’s and Crabbe’s son’s world. They had trodden every footpath, seen my trees, passed my house and were my neighbours. On this flat land they had accomplished my two classics, a ‘translation’ and a biography. To which I would add
Akenfield
– my view of things. George Crabbe junior was elusive, being overshadowed by his father. But Fitz had stayed vivid as eccentrics are apt to do. I frequently passed him, imaginatively speaking, on his way to the sea, drifting
towards the fishermen, grand, extraordinary, indifferent to comment. And his letters! Volumes of them, I would read them in the long grass by his grave and less than a mile from where they were written.

In nearby Parham other letters had arrived. Young George Crabbe was hoping ‘to finish my book entirely … sometimes I think I cannot fail. Within these three or four days I’ve been remarkably high in spirits. I have somewhat exhausted them by writing upwards of thirty pages.’

The judgement of Aldeburgh was on its way. The Moot Hall would speak its mind. The French toilers on its walls would be translated and society high and low would be stripped naked. Although for some reason, especially in East Anglia, George Crabbe continues to be more mentioned than read.

15 At Benton End

Sir Cedric Morris at Benton End

My coming to Aldeburgh took me out of easy reach of both John Nash’s Bottengoms and Cedric Morris’s Benton End, which had been up until then the most influential places in my life. Just a few miles apart in two distinctive river valleys, the Brett and the Stour, these ancient houses became countries which I felt I had shamefully deserted. I would make laborious journeys to them and at times would become homesick for them. At Bottengoms I would clean the Aladdin oil lamps; at Benton End I would breathe in the rich odour of garlic, wine and oil paint as others did the North Sea. I would always make careful plans when it was Bottengoms because John liked to meet me at Colchester station. But the pair of us would simply turn up at Benton End, usually in the late afternoon, when Lett Haines, resting between the 2.30 lunch and the 7.30 dinner, would lean from his bedroom window and eye us wickedly. We would then search for Cedric in the garden, led by pipe smoke.

‘Do you know what this is? I thought you had come to tell me.’

Should it be fine, old Benton End hands and
still-nervous
new Benton End hands would not look up from
their easels as we passed. They were quite unlike the usual art students, being both emancipated and trapped by the Morris–Haines ethos. We would pass grand old ladies, boys from Hadleigh (‘the village’ to Lett and Cedric), and well-known artists having a ‘freshener’, botanists and students of all ages. The Fifties were the heyday of Cedric’s and Lett’s East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting, as well as the zenith of the Benton End irises. Neither human being nor plant could remain very long in the gravelly soil of this art-
cum-garden
institution without putting forth some
extraordinary
creation. Some lived in – three to a room – others put up in the little town.

None of us knew much about Cedric’s and Lett’s life before they came to Suffolk. I heard that they had met on Armistice night in Trafalgar Square, that Lett was married, that Cedric had been in his thirties, that Cornwall beckoned, then Paris. Now in their sixties, they were to us old men. Lett’s sophisticated talk and Cedric’s curious innocence of manner combined to tell us about a past which we found simply amazing. Not that they cared for questions, unless of course they were about art, gardening or food. Lett’s talk was
unrestrained
, sexy, funny, outrageous if possible. Cedric’s talk was in a quiet, mildly Welsh voice and much
interrupted
by giggles. If we joined in with these it was usually out of politeness, for what made him crease up with merriment was a mystery to us. It would be years
later for me, as their literary executor, that the
passionate
and brave story of their lives would tumble from letters and bills, and most of all from pencil lines on dirty bits of paper. They had challenged Italian fascism. They had befriended gay men when they came out of prison. Lett had belonged to Ixion, the
Anglo-German
League which sought to bring sanity to the propaganda-maddened soldiers who had fought on the Western Front, and what mostly enthralled me, they had known everybody in 1920s Paris. Lett had been friends with D. H. Lawrence, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. And here he was in Suffolk cooking our meals.

Neither did I think of Cedric as a naturalist, a bird man, a botanist and plant-collector. In some ways he was not unlike the poet John Clare as he made friends with flowers. Lett was urban through and through, and for all his sexual capers and sociability essentially lonely. Young students called him ‘father’ and actually loved him. But for all the activity of Benton End and the affection it gave him, I used to think that he was out of place. He had promoted Cedric’s career and given him the lead. Both of them ignored the caste system and saw each person as distinctive and interesting – and even now and then brilliant. Lett’s eroticism was bisexual and successful, and Cedric’s little more than a naughtiness which we found impossible to share. In one way or another all of us ‘flowered’ at Benton End. It was three guineas a week, bring your own sheets.

The food was peasant French. They were friends of Elizabeth David and Cedric had illustrated her cookery books. The entire house could at times reek of garlic, herbs and wine. Considering the conversation at times, dinner was formal – a simplicity carried to some
exquisite
limit.

Now and then, when Cedric was to have a London exhibition, Lett would say to me, ‘Write the catalogue.’ His own background particulars were never quite the same, and I would protest, ‘But, you said this … or that.’

‘Never mind, dear boy, never mind.’

Of course I took Kurt Hutton to see them and
recognised
one of those indivisibilities of certain manners which belong to Europeanness. Cedric liked to harp on his Welshness but Paris and Rome, not to say Cornwall, had all made their mark.

Watching him paint was a bewildering experience. He did no drawing, no preparation; using bright colours straight from the tube, he began at the top left-hand corner of the canvas and ended at the bottom
right-hand
corner. It would remind me of those transfers we put on the backs of our hands as children, peeling them off gradually to reveal the full picture.

‘Choose one for yourself,’ he said.

I entered a dark old room off the kitchen and made out a backyard scene in the Algarve and dragged it towards him.

‘You like that?’

‘Thank you, Cedric.’

It wasn’t signed so Maggi Hambling painted his name at the bottom. Washing hangs on the line, chickens run about. Lovely towers look down on a yard.

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Aldeburgh.’

Lett: ‘Have we been there?’

I enjoyed Benton End best of all when John Nash was with me. It was then that I could walk behind the pair of them between the box-hedged iris beds and listen to gardening proper. So that when I came to Bottengoms for a day or two, and John Nash towards evening would say, ‘Shall we go and see the boys?’ and his wife would say, knowing that she would not have to cook the dinner, ‘Oh, do, dears. They are always so pleased to see you’, I felt a keen pleasure. A sense of belonging which so far Aldeburgh was denying me.

Sometimes Kathleen Hale, who wrote
Orlando the Marmalade Cat
, would be there. And often the teenage Maggi Hambling, or the Welsh artist Glyn Morgan, known in his youth as ‘The Little Prince’ because he was so good-looking. And Millie the housekeeper, a mite unsteady by seven o’clock, would lay the long table with wooden plates which we wiped clean with a bit of bread between courses. And the only heating in the house, an electric bar above Cedric’s head, would be switched on and the toppling candelabra lit. The Benton End cats would disappear into the Suffolk darkness
while Lett in his butcher’s apron would stand in the kitchen doorway and give us snippets of his and Cedric’s scandalous adventures long ago.

‘We were passing a café in the Rue de la Paix where two English ladies were sitting –

‘“Who are those two young men?”

‘“Oh, I think they come from Oxford.”

‘“Oxford Street you mean!”’

Should Lett go too far he would find a note from Cedric in his jacket pocket next morning: ‘You were very bad last night.’

Twentieth-century art gossip is peppered with Cedric encounters. Here is Roger Fry in 1925:

There was no music at Benton End – not a note. But always music at Bottengoms where there were two pianos. Schubert could be heard most evenings.

As scribe to Benton End I was required to tactfully tone down some of Lett’s notes on Cedric for the Private View invitations. Here is Lett at his most florid:

And so on, through gaudy Mediterranean travels, membership of the London Group and the Seven and Five (seven painters and five sculptors), helping to found Welsh Contemporary Art exhibitions between the wars, the settling down in Essex and Suffolk, and
the post-war plant-hunting and winter travels, when Benton End was closed, and Lett went to Brown’s Hotel to ‘economise’.

I once wrote that Cedric was a pagan who liked the sun on his back and the day’s colours in his eyes, and the tastes and sounds of Now. On a really beautiful afternoon at Benton End he could be found lurking amidst the huge blooms he had brought to Suffolk from the Mediterranean, and hugging the Now to him, his handsome brown old face tilted a little skywards and his body helplessly elegant in brown old clothes. And that a conducted tour through the beds was both learned and hilarious by then, Cedric himself becoming convulsed by the habits of some plants – and of some of the people who came to see them. I was always intrigued by his catlike satisfaction with present time. It caused his days to become so long that, in spite of a stream of visitors, an enormous amount of painting and gardening – and teaching – managed to get done.

I was with him to the end. At ninety he cursed God, whom he still took to be some misery from Glamorgan, for ‘insulting’ him with old age but his sensuality never left him. He basked in the sun. Nobody has such a good time as a good-time Puritan. Being a non-Puritan, Lett had rather a bad time one way and another.

‘Not a boring thing,’ was Cedric’s accolade for the Bottengoms garden. Very old and near death, he asked me, ‘Do they touch your sleeve like this?’, giving a little
attention-drawing pluck to his jacket. He was
ninety-two
. But in 1955 there was much time still to go.

The only gardener to give an expert account of Cedric Morris’s plants, and his irises in particular, is Tony Venison. The Benton End Iris Party lives all over again when he speaks. Upward of a thousand blooms inhabited the box-hedged beds. Cedric adored painting them, taking them out of art nouveau, where they had decadently flourished for years and become symbolic of a movement, and making the gardening world see them as raunchy blooms ‘sticking their tongues out’, as one visitor said.

Each plicata (folded leaf) appears to do no more than rise from the surface of poor soil with the strength of a dagger, before it flowers with an opulence which
suggests
so many moving silks, from those of a jockey to the banners of a knight. The petals are ‘falls’ and ‘
standards
’. When Richard Morphet from the Tate Gallery came to my house to write about them, he said that ‘Cedric is one of the most exceptional colourists in British twentieth-century art. It is not only the
intensity
of his colours that tells, but above all the originality and strange beauty of the relationships between them that he established.’

I doubt if Cedric ever came to Aldeburgh or to the East Anglian coast. His coast was Portugal. There is no record of his ever walking from Benton End into Hadleigh High Street – into ‘the village’ as he called
this borough … Once home from winters abroad, burdened with rolls of canvas tied up with hairy string, and bags of seeds and cuttings, he went nowhere. We came to him – to the expanding three-acre garden, to the iris capital. Not surprisingly it made me see what flowered in Aldeburgh. If there was one thing there which Cedric would have admired it would have been the tenacity of its plants and their stand against the wind, their salty hues and ample nature. The way in which they stood up to things. Both at Aldeburgh and Benton End there was a bravura performance of
gardening
, each so contrasting, each so colourful. Each filled with movement.