The Time by the Sea (7 page)

6 Meeting Ben

Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten shopping in Aldeburgh High Street

In May 1955 Mr Cullum the bank manager sat me in his office to scold me for being
£
25 overdrawn. I told him that a cheque for this amount was on its way from the
London Magazine
but he was not assured. No more for me from Barclays until I was cleansed of debt. His son Jeremy was Benjamin Britten’s secretary and tennis partner, and Mr Cullum himself was the lover of Eliza beth Sweeting, the Festival Manager.
Unbeknown
to me, debt and probity were filling the arts at this moment. The Festival was overdrawn, like me, and Elizabeth, who was salaried, was having to leave. Some other method of running things was being discussed. After my interview I went next door to the baker’s and there met Juliet Laden who, seeing my worried face and hearing of my penury, at once wrote a cheque for
£
25. Returning with it to Mr Cullum, I expected joyfulness. Instead I received an even more anxious look. Not only was I the kind of new customer who was going to bother him, but a swift borrower to boot. He was now worldly-wise in Aldeburgh ways, the insecurity of people like myself, the flimsiness of our lives. But he was impressed by the signature. It reminded him of another new arrival, the divorced wife of Sir Francis
Cook, now Mrs Laden, who had bought Brudenell House. The next morning the
London Magazine
cheque arrived. I mention these parsimonious facts because they somehow reflected ‘Aldeburgh’ in miniature at this moment, the scarcely now believable finances, the give and take, the wildly imaginative plans both to do our own work and also to run a unique music festival, now almost a decade old. Could it go on? This question was openly asked.

The solution was to replace the salaried Elizabeth Sweeting with the unsalaried Stephen Reiss who would be called the Responsible Organiser, and myself as his assistant at
£
150 per annum. What poor Stephen needed was not a young man who had run a literary society and hung a John Constable exhibition but a competent office worker. What he got was a financially illiterate novelist. My interview burns in my memory to this day, each minute of it fixed. The coming into the same room where a few months earlier I had worked on Morgan’s biography of his aunt, the woman who had saved him from having to get a job of any sort, and standing before Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and Stephen Reiss, the latter blinking through his glasses. Fidelity Cranbrook introduced me, she having been told by Christine Nash what a good arranger of lectures I had been in Colchester.

Ben and Peter were in shorts and I was wearing my tweed jacket and green corduroy trousers, and a tie.
They stared gently at me. Stephen stood in the
background
an
éminence grise
to be. It would be brilliant whilst it lasted. Fidelity laughed and tossed her hair. I could tell that she had been told a lot about me, the Nashes and the Cranbrooks having been close friends since the Thirties. Country life, botany, and fishing especially had long bound them together. What with Cedric Morris and Denis Garrett, birds and flowers, landscape and agriculture were stalking me in all
directions
. As Britten could only love or hate, it was said, and did not possess a detached view on anything or
anybody
¸ I suppose he should not have been present. But he was present and would be at even the most mundane affairs affecting the Festival. The question at this moment wasn’t so much ‘Can you help?’ but ‘When can you start?’ The room was dominated by bare legs, Peter’s so white and plump, Ben’s so ochre and knobbly. Doors were wide open fore and aft and a fresh breeze poured from the sea into Crabbe Street. So that was that.

‘Say goodbye to Elizabeth Sweeting, would you?’ said Lady Cranbrook. ‘She would like to see you.’ I had read her name on the first Programme Book. I found her in a little flood-stained room behind the Wentworth Hotel. The box files were marked with water. Two years earlier the mighty winter sea had broken all barriers from Canvey Island to the Wash, drowning many people and animals. Benjamin Britten himself had helped in bailing out Crag House and boats had been
rowed down the High Street. Five years later
Noye’s Fludde
, Britten’s setting of the Chester Miracle Play, would fill Orford Church with Suffolk schoolchildren in a storm of sea music. Britten had remembered the carved ark on the Duke of Norfolk’s tomb at
Framlingham
, the many drowned sailors in Aldeburgh
churchyard
and the winter of 1953 when the North Sea filled his rooms. He had brought them together in a ferment of waves, hymns, terror and salvation. Amongst the guilds which traditionally re-enacted the drowning of the world in Genesis were the Shipwrights, Fishers, and Mariners. As with all Miracle Plays,
Noye’s Fludde
was performed, not during winter when real water would have passed through coastal towns, but at Corpus Christi in warm sunshine.

It would not be the sea which drove Britten from Crag House but its seasonal celebrants who would stand on the wall and watch him at work. He and Mary Potter exchanged houses the same day in 1957. I saw the
pantechnicons
pass each other. But for Mary it was a wrong move and soon she would be back at the Red House, the perfect third person. When Stephen Potter left her Ben said, ‘Now you must call yourself “Mary, Mrs Potter”.’ My first glimpse of her work was a big oil in Crag House showing a momentarily trapped seagull in a walled garden – presumably at the Red House. It was as much poetry as painting. Her art was shadowy, haunting, carefully unemphatic, though real and not dreamlike.

Seeing me glancing at the watermarks in the Festival Office, Elizabeth Sweeting said, ‘It was terrible!’ I noticed an element of thankfulness regarding her departure. We sat amongst the litter of her going. Mr Cullum the bank manager was furious at the plan to exchange her with Stephen Reiss. When she arrived Lord Harewood had hoped that the Festival would ‘belong to Aldeburgh and Suffolk in the sense that Mozart did to Salzburg’. When I arrived it lay to Stephen Reiss to achieve this. He appeared somehow hidden and yet powerful.

I should here say sorry to Stephen Reiss for not earning my keep. Also tell him how great he was in Aldeburgh terms. A rescuer. A rock. There were moments when the Festival would have foundered had it not been for him. Somehow tragic in himself I thought, he knew how to bring light into dark corners, to be strong when everyone and everything else went to pieces. He had come from the New Towns in
Hertfordshire
and possessed a Shavian common sense, and a way of crossing awkward boundaries. This was also Fidelity’s Quaker territory and between them she and Stephen held their sensible ground in the frequent tempests of the Festival.

I was too turned in on myself at this stage, not to say too awed by Ben, to recognise Stephen Reiss’s
greatness
. Fidelity Cranbrook’s understanding of it was all too plain. She would observe me as I took it in – or
failed to understand what was being said. The fact was that I wrote and wrote all day, read and dreamed. Words made a screen through which every other activity was filtered and made a kind of grudging entrance. All the same I found it impossible to call myself a writer. The first person to do so was Imogen Holst. Not even Christine Nash could do more at this stage than to tell people that I had gone to Aldeburgh ‘to write’. The stress must have shown because Ben asked, more than once, ‘Are you happy, Ronnie?’ He let off steam with strange war whoops. ‘Middle class, Ronnie; middle class!’ And, ‘I’m thirteen!’

I suppose I must have sounded confused at least to the old friends, James Turner, W. R. Rodgers, and R. N. Currey, all established poets and a generation older than me. One of our group activities had been to read George Herbert in country churches. Another was to think of ways to make book programmes for the BBC. The Third Programme had just been invented and ‘Bertie’ Rodgers was one of its stars which astonished us as he was rarely sober. And always broke. Yet he invented something called the Rodgers method of radio biography in which wonderful sound-portraits of Irish writers – W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore, and Æ – would be heard.

Bertie would appear in Aldeburgh now and then, always immensely late for the lunch I had spent all the morning cooking, he and his Danish wife Marianne. His
soft weary voice suggested a conversational exhaustion. The fact was that although he never stopped talking he never stopped listening. Conor Cruise O’Brien said that Bertie’s eyes were ‘large, prominent, lustrous, suited to a hypnotist, or a Swami. They also seemed to be, in some strange way, turned off, not looking. He listened like a blind man.’ And there was something ‘a little pastoral, as well as a little clinical’ about this listening which made it disconcerting. Although one eventually told him anything and everything, the distinct
fastidiousness
of his nature prohibited shapeless outpourings. He would say that men and women were ‘as honest as the day is long, and no longer’.

He enters the Aldeburgh scene at this point because, listening to my diatribe about money, he promptly solved everything by whispering over his drink, ‘You must be a publisher’s reader.’ Thirty shillings a report. He sent me off to Ian Hamilton. The only person I knew who wrote about being a publisher’s reader was William Plomer. And he was part of the Aldeburgh scene. He and Ralph Currey, my other Colchester poet, were South Africans. Bertie Rodgers in the Aldeburgh pubs was a sight to be seen. But not, as the beer disappeared, always a voice to be heard as it grew softer and softer.

‘Can you hear me, Ronnie?’

‘No, Bertie.’

‘If you’d had the drink you could.’

Observing Bertie Rodgers, I began to observe myself. Shouldn’t writing make me look for his philosophy – or at least something akin to his temperament? Whether listening to friends or enemies, he worked on the principle that everybody’s stories were fine if he thought that the speaker himself believed they were. Balancing the vanities and the decencies of human nature, Bertie arrived at his kind of accuracy by means of give and take.

When my father died in 1957 I gave Bertie his Donegal tweed suit. He looked fine in it. When I wrote
Akenfield
Bertie gave me Rider Haggard’s
Rural England
. But what he most gave me that first year on the Suffolk coast was a sense of inclusion. Our mutual friend James Turner did the opposite. He believed that Aldeburgh would corrupt me. That going there was my initial error. He is ‘the Poet’ in
Akenfield
. As I couldn’t possibly be like Bertie Rodgers, then I must be like him. But the brief time there would make me unlike either of them, or anyone, unless in some strangely hoping way, at least at the beginning, like Imogen Holst. An absurd comparison of course. When I told Christine Nash this she didn’t flinch. She gave me furniture to make the flat which Imo found for me by pointing to an ad in the house agent Tuohy’s window, and said that all she asked of me was to
settle
. With whom? was what I was thinking. The question was deep down
preoccupying
. Imo herself had settled in a flat above Tuohy’s.

Life at Crag House was most unsettled. People came and went, doors were never closed, cars went back and forth to Saxmundham station like rockets. Mr Baggott at the newsagent’s was selling postcards of it and gawpers stood on the sea wall. It was unbearable. But Miss Hudson, the housekeeper, produced meals
whatever
the number round the table with a bewildering efficiency. Imogen had a three-and-sixpenny lunch at the Cragg Sisters’ restaurant every day. I lived on herrings and bread and counted pennies – even when the publisher’s reader fortune began to pour in. My first manuscript was
The History of the Pig
. But then an American magazine paid me a hundred pounds for a short story. When I took it to Barclays bank it was taken to Mr Cullum, who peered at me through his door. I went to the Thursday sale at the scouts’ hut and bought things for the flat with it.