The Time by the Sea (5 page)

Bottengoms, like a number of ancient houses in the neighbourhood, had been empty for some years when John decided to buy it. It was 1943. The house at Meadle had been let, he and Christine were absorbed in
war work, and for the first time in their marriage there was no home base. During the holidays at Wormingford and Wissington they had discovered on their walks and drives many forlorn cottages tumbling away in their jungly gardens; they were a common feature of the depressed countryside then. It was Christine who told me of her first close encounter with Bottengoms:

In an essay which I wrote later, I tried to envisage both the possibility and the impossibility of coming to live in such a place. I said that, although the house had suffered many of the typical vicissitudes of the long agricultural depression, having all its old fields and meadows annexed by a neighbouring farm, and showed in all sorts of ways how it had come down in the world from yeoman independence to eventually becoming a double-dweller for farmworkers, and ultimately to years of abandonment, it retained its own powerful ability to see out change in whatever form it happened to be. And Mr Lewis himself, before Bottengoms defeated him, had made an effort to hand it on in some kind of good order, for I discovered the following message written in pencil on the inside of a ‘Tenner’ cigarette box: ‘Feb 19th 1937 painted outside of this House and Distempered inside. H. W. Spooner and B. Welford, Nayland and Boxted.’ The box also contained a nail and a hazelnut. But the
collapse and slow vanishing of its pathways, barn, piggery and stackyard were another matter. There is little more daunting than a ruined farm. It is one of the saddest of sights. But John and Christine were far from being daunted. The past and the future of Bottengoms lay lightly on their conscience and imagination. In the middle of a war they could only think of what might be done
now
. When I think of them at this time, I am reminded of the celebrated Suffolk gardener John Tradescant who, in the turmoil of a battlefield, was seen, botanising during the carnage, bending down amid the swords and blood to collect some interesting plants. One of Christine’s favourite anecdotes was that whilst she examined the rambling ancient rooms, wondering how on earth she could make them habitable once more, John would be outside examining the soil in great excitement and saying, ‘Yes, yes, this would do, this would be perfect for my purpose.’ The purpose, of course, was to make the garden of his dreams.

A few months before his death, many years later, he published a little philosophical essay on his concept of gardening. The garden at Wormingford came into being because, as a small boy, John’s

John’s thankful relief at having escaped death in the First War was expressed in his celebrated painting
The Cornfield
, which is now in the Tate Gallery. His
gratitude
for being so eager to pick up the threads of his career after the Second World War found its outlet in transforming the jungle at Bottengoms into a haven for the kind of plants he needed to have around him. Carving this garden out was a tough business. With the assistance of his old friend John Langston and a
succession
of helpers from the village, the rubbish was cleared, many beds cut – including a large
palette-shaped
bed in front of the house – the horse-ponds cleaned out and planted with bamboo, gunnera, flags and huge marsh marigolds – ‘bull-buttercups’, the old Essex people used to call them – paths created and an orchard made. Shaping a new garden in an ancient spot is the kind of treat which does not come often in a
lifetime
. With the aid of a succession of jobbing gardeners (come to think of it, I can’t recall seeing John actually digging) a Nash jungle of old roses, bulbs and flowers of every kind replaced the bramble, elder and nettle jungle, and during high summer with very near the same density. Nightingales sang against the sound of the piano or the push-lawnmower and, in winter, owls hooted from the collapsing barn and sheds.

John’s plants were made to work for their living, as specimens for the books he illustrated, or as models for his students at the Royal College of Art and Colchester Art School. His favourite flower-painting courses were those held at Flatford:

Just as he was loath to part with his plant drawings, so he was with the blooms themselves after they had served their purpose in the studio. They would wither away into brown sticks on the windowsills. Pots of flowers, not so much arranged as perfectly tumbled together by Christine, stood in every room. Enough vegetables and fruit were grown to feed a large family
and village friends were accustomed to Christine’s
cri de coeur
on the telephone, ‘Please will you eat some of our beans.’ The kitchen garden consisted of two large beds on either side of a little greenhouse which had once belonged to Eric Ravilious – ‘He kept his bike in it.’ To the north of the kitchen garden reared an enormous holly hedge, to the east a bank of old roses. During the summer it was very secluded and hot, a good place to eat strawberries while reviewing novels. Over the holly hedge one could see the top branches of a Victorian orchard, only one tree of which still produced a little fruit, a d’Arcy Spice apple tree, much cherished. And all across the garden, splashing or silent, were streams and springs and ditches, Bottengoms’s own micro water-table.

So far as Wormingford was concerned, Christine’s was a high and loved profile, John’s somewhat
clandestine
and legendary. Both were everywhere, she where the people lived, he painting in the quiet half-lost dells and on the heights with their spectacular views of Suffolk, or fishing by the river.

It was the founding of the Dramatic Society in 1949 which was to make Christine such an integral part of Wormingford. Her training as an artist at the Slade before the First World War, her musicianship and knowledge of dancing, but above all her beautiful speaking voice, plus her love of young people, made her a fine actress and producer. The Village Hall had been
opened in March 1949 by Dr Thomas Wood and his wife St Osyth Mehalah. The Woods lived in Bures. Poor eyesight robbed Thomas Wood of what he might have achieved as a composer. Christine, who suffered from glaucoma much of her life, shared with him an ability not to let such handicaps ruin their lives. My only recollection of Dr Wood is being taught by him when I was a boy not to sing ‘Hearts of Oak’. His father had been a master mariner and he was famous for his sea songs. Mrs Wood’s parents, the Eustace-Smiths, lived at the Grove. Dr Wood had also been a great traveller at a time when very few people had travelled at all, had written a good autobiography,
True Thomas
(1936), and was a local celebrity. Just up the road from the Grove, running a market garden called Longacres, lived Guy Hickson, the brother of the future ‘Miss Marple’, Joan Hickson. Guy Hickson and Christine Nash, between them, were to develop the Wormingford Dramatic Society far beyond the usual village standards of acting. Photographs of their productions show a lot of the Bottengoms furniture and sometimes paintings by John, and Bottengoms itself became the costume department containing hundreds of dresses. Both John and
Christine
loved, or maybe understood, fancy-dress. Perhaps somebody should write about the passion for costume parties during the first decades of the century. The pinnacle of Christine’s dressing-up activities were her and Mary Doncaster’s exquisite ‘Georgian Assembly’
at the Minories in Colchester, where we all wore actual eighteenth-century clothes in a series of
tableaux vivants
. She had borrowed mine from Miss Oates at Gestingthorpe Hall, the sister of Captain Oates the Arctic explorer, who had himself worn them at a
fancy-dress
party. They were the wedding clothes of a young man who was married in 1749. Christine’s most
memorable
role was, perhaps, that of Lady Waldegrave in Winifred Beaumont’s play
The Key
(1960). I used to read to her as she made her Tudor dress, the half-blind eyes so strangely ‘seeing’ when it came to needlework.
Reading
aloud at Bottengoms after dinner was a regular habit – John playing the piano while the meal cooked, me reading aloud while it digested. They liked L. P. Hartley, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James (
The Spoils of Poynton
was a favourite), and Jane Austen. They both smoked as I read, the low-ceilinged room eventually, what with the lamps and cigarettes, and the coals
tumbling
through the bars of the grate, growing stuffily cosy and much appreciated by them both because of this. Summer excepted, they deplored open windows. Cats sprawled on Christine as she cut out and
embroidered
. Often John would sketch, puffing away.

Summer was the very reverse. In a sense there were no rooms, no indoors, then. The garden was full of chairs and tables, and there was a constant carrying of things out. John wore a strange white peaked cap with a flap at the back to prevent sunstroke, and which he
called ‘Rommel’, and Christine fine print dresses and straw hats. There was a litter of books, watering-cans, paintboxes, letters, plates and glasses all over the garden paths – there were no lawns proper – which Christine used to edge with a pair of old sheep-shears. They talked about the weather a great deal, tapped the inside and outside barometers, and listened to all the forecasts. Weather interested them, and they liked its extremes, its drama. Should they be away during a Wormingford gale or heatwave they wanted me to tell them every detail. Precious plants had to be guarded from frost or drought, and a long list of horticultural dos and don’ts was handed to me just before John drove off to paint in Scotland, Cornwall, or wherever.

John’s work routine scarcely changed at all during all his long career. A late-ish and what used to be described as a good breakfast, then a slipping away to the studio, where he’d paint from mid-morning until teatime. His method was to paint watercolours and oils from
lined-up
sketches made outdoors. The watercolours were painted on a large old scrubbed kitchen table, and the oils on an easel. He once told me: