The Time by the Sea (6 page)

After Paul Nash’s death in 1946, his paints and other materials came to Bottengoms. Sorting them out told John things about his brother’s use of colour, and about his own use of colour, which he had not previously realised. It was a kind of revelation, a new
understanding
of yet another way in which they differed:

John liked company when sketching. Usually that of another working artist, Carel Weight in Cornwall, I remember, Edward Bawden in Shropshire and
Derbyshire
, and frequently myself in Suffolk. His personality alternated between long stretches of solitude in the studio and a sudden urgent need for conviviality. Our chief outings in search of the latter were to Benton End, Sir Cedric Morris’s and Arthur Lett-Haines’s famous art school at Hadleigh. Painting was rarely mentioned, it was always plants. Christine on the other hand preferred only the society of her few special friends, and disliked parties. The core of their social life during all the years that they were at Wormingford was a little inner circle referred to most affectionately, though with a touch of amusement, as ‘the Dear Ones’ (‘My Dear One is Mine’ – Matthew Arnold). In order to be practically and emotionally supportive, Dear Ones
had to be fairly near at hand or regular presences at Bottengoms. A number of them, naturally, were to be found in Wormingford itself.

As with so many writers and artists and composers, John’s work pattern and discipline had been formed at the very beginning of his career and had changed little since. There was hardly ever a day when he did not paint or draw, play the piano or potter about his garden. In 1969 I wrote a BBC2 film about him called
A Painter in the Country
. It was directed by John Read, the finest of all the Corporation’s art-film makers. It opened with a shot of John driving his car under a tunnel of leaves down to Bottengoms. But there was the Western Front to deal with, and some fifty illustrated books, and over a long and work-filled lifetime, landscapes of most of Britain, from Skye to St Austell, and collecting all the plants, and a thousand things for which Wormingford was but a base and a hub. But what a base and what a hub. Returning to it after a week or even only a day away, John would curse the ruts in the track and say, happily, ‘Back to the old homestead!’

He died aged eighty-four in September 1977, just a few months after Christine. In the March of this year he painted his last watercolour from a sketch made in Skye. Their grave is near the holly tree in the far hedge of the churchyard, just above the footpath to Bures and that wide panorama of Stour and fields and woodland which had so pleased him for half a century.

As I stood with John on the autumn grass, he mur mured, ‘The garden is going, I am going.’ Then, ‘What will you do down here when I am gone?’

Prevent the garden from going. Write. Continue. What else?

When John was ten he was given a book called
Eyes and No Eyes
, which was about being observant whilst on country walks. It was full of lessons which he never forgot. Toward the end of his life he was to write:

My main business at Wormingford has been to
continue
in my own way what went before, but on my own terms, and as best I can. With my youth crowded with artists, these last years are a kind of fulfilled silence in which a remote old farmhouse has collaborated with an unexpected enthusiasm. So I am fortunate. I too have made a habit of looking, of really seeing.

5 Fidelity

Fidelity Cranbrook and the Gathorne-Hardy children featured in
Let’s Make an Opera

In the early summer of 1955 I stayed at Great Glemham House for the first time; the Countess driving and asking shamelessly direct questions, swerving and laughing. Humphrey Repton had so planned the approach that one was halfway to it before it announced itself with Georgian panache. As we passed the pretty lodge Fidelity called out, ‘Mr Paternoster!’ Then came all the windows, roofs and frantic dogs. ‘She doesn’t bite – she just likes to give your ankle a little nip.’

The Gathorne-Hardys had come to Suffolk for the air just before the First World War. Their titles, Cranbrook and Medway, flowed happily enough alongside the Alde, which was a minor stream for the most part like the Lark, Linnet and Brett, where herons and kingfishers lived. Other than where they were bridged one would encounter them with surprise, having forgotten their existence. As country seats are inclined to do over the years, Great Glemham House had held back change, and the village and its fields, woods and lanes were still more or less exactly as George Crabbe, the rector, would have found them – although the previous mansion, a Tudor building, was set at the foot of the rise. He himself lived in Rendham, the neighbouring
village, from which at this moment Maggi Hambling drives to paint the Aldeburgh sea most days.

She explains this compulsion:

Fidelity too had reason to go there and reason to come back. A day or two later I walked down the park to explore the village. There was no sign of
conservation
. The park was walled in for a mile or two yet wide open to anyone. There was a well-cut flint church, a basic Victorian school, a pub, and a handful of painted cottages, some outlying farms, and that was all. The scene was both intimate and yet remote. Acton, where I was born, was exactly like this – though growing. Great Glemham was not extending. Neither was it frozen.

Actually my very first introduction to it was in the evening when Jock Cranbrook took me batting. We went out at dusk to smouldering rubbish dumps to
watch these eternally misunderstood creatures weaving and crying over them. All Gathorne-Hardys were high up in natural history, books, the Bench, local
government
, horticulture, and chairmanship, whilst remaining amateur and ‘free’. Fidelity was high up in tolerance and amusement. Her loud clear voice rose above the squalls. And most of all at the Aldeburgh Festival forays. They had made her Chairman from the very beginning, and it was one of their best achievements.

She was one of those classic inter-war blondes. Kurt Hutton would complain to her face about the strong line of her jaw, but I found her beautiful. Her tossing
honey-coloured
hair and her features, all eagerness, were quite wonderful. I can hear her laughing away all this with scorn. In retrospect I see her as one of those people who claim little because they know they have enough. She was a provider not a taker. Benjamin Britten, like the weather in the psalm, might rage, but Fidelity alone could call order. ‘Fidel! Fidel!’ Jock would shout. As there was nobody to answer the bells at the big house the two of them had acquired intimate raised voices. Quakers were practical and knew when to abandon quietness.

Jock had organised the bicentenary of George Crabbe two years before I arrived. It was now in his mind to let me have a cottage, make me a churchwarden and generally settle me. I can’t remember there being any consultation with the PCC. Taking me to the church
he told me about Crabbe’s Sunday habits. How in the darkening winter afternoons the poet would climb onto a seat by the window and cry, ‘Upon my word I cannot see – I must give you the rest when we meet again!’ And how when his tithes were due, he would climb down from the pulpit and say, ‘I must have some money, gentlemen.’ Jock was a famous bat man both in Suffolk and in Borneo. These creatures had been so absurdly fantasised by humanity that they needed an informed protector, and this was Jock Cranbrook. Bats are mammals which fly like birds. They tell each other where they are by means of echo-location. There are Greater bats and Lesser bats, the last with
horseshoe-shaped
nose leaves. And there are the delightful pipistrelles, the long-eared bats, and bats which like to fly over water. It was chilly searching for bats, even over bonfires; and we rubbed our hands. They flew very near to where George Crabbe had made a bonfire of his three novels. He must have had a double dose of
laudanum
that day to have been so reckless about it. There comes a moment in many novelists’ minds when they think of striking a match. Now and then we would poke the embers with a stick to make them flare.

Being a ‘what’s mine is yours’ person, Jock gave me free run of his library. ‘Read away, Ronnie.’ Just after harvest he and I would climb up ladders to the grain silos and run the cornseed through our fingers, testing its fullness. On warm days I wrote in the walled garden,
getting on with my novel, haunted by long-dead gardeners, armies of them. Their glasshouses and potting sheds; their serried rakes, spades and scythes hung on the wall in working order. There was a
captured
quiet and every now and then a briefly captured bird, like the gull in Mary Potter’s painting at Crag House. In spite of all this, at heart I was
directionless
. I could hardly explain this, it was so ungrateful. The young people in my novel were in a similar plight, or should we say interesting situation. I called it
A
Treasonable
Growth
from Wordsworth’s confession in
The Prelude
: ‘And most of all, a treasonable growth of indecisive judgements, that impaired and shook the mind’s simplicity.’

There were five children at Great Glemham House, Gathorne, Hughie, Juliet, Sophie, and Christina, whose godmother was Christine Nash. Ben had written
Let’s Make an Opera
for them, a William Blake
chimney-sweep
tale. I saw wherever I looked an interplay of life’s actuality, hopes and fantasies. It all seemed to work when Fidelity was around. Her husband, borrowing ‘a fiver till Thursday’ from the butler, would speed off to the County Council or the House of Lords, while she would say, rather like Christine, ‘Now, where would you like to write – we mustn’t freeze the muse.’ And I would make myself scarce in the walled garden when it was fine, or into my bedroom if it was not, in either corner out of place. Yet the pages piled up. There was so much
going on that it was hard to know what to put in or leave out.

Only fragments of what recurred there half a
century
ago hang around in my head like the dislodged tesserae of a once elaborate floor. One complete memory of all is the music. Concerts usually took place on summer afternoons in the drawing room. The
audience
spilled out onto the terrace. Stack chairs, the scent of tea. Heavy curtains into whose pelmets it was rumoured Jock had encouraged bats. The faint Sunday sounds of rural ‘rest’. Benjamin Britten had set some of Arthur Waley’s translations from the Chinese. Julian Bream played and Peter Pears sang. In the kitchen Hephzibah Menuhin and I tiptoed around setting out a hundred cups, and sometimes we crept to the door to watch as well as listen. Many of the songs were a
thousand
or more years old. Each one of them brief and fleeting. After an hour, maybe, came the ritual applause and bows. Ben left hurriedly; brushing past us on his way to the kitchen he muttered, ‘Pearls before swine’, but with a grin. Hephzibah and I looked at each other like people who have made a wrong judgement – who had not understood. Yet ever since, this Chinese/Suffolk singing has never left my ears.

The audience was released into the garden, all chatter and teaspoons, and more like freed chickens than swine. But who can say what is heard and not heard, felt or not felt? Before going to bed I looked up Arthur Waley in
an anthology. When is the translator the poet? I read his version of ‘The Temple’ by Po Chu-i, which is a kind of Chinese George Herbert narration in which the poet makes a pilgrimage over pebbles to a place called the Settled Heart Stone. It is close to where Buddha preached his sutras and where the first monastery was founded. Peter Pears’s wailing voice led us to it,
although
in other ‘pathway’ words.

Benjamin Britten, like myself, had been drawn into the magic of Great Glemham House from the very beginning. The early Festival itself was made up in these rooms. There were photos of Ben – Shetland sweater, Peter – cricket jumper, Imogen – nameless skirts, and Eric Crozier – open-necked, in a circle of armchairs. And of Fidelity herself giving them
anything
they needed which she possessed.

The notorious rift when Eric Crozier would no longer be part of the circle was the only thing which was never explained to me. Not that I ever asked. His words are sung to so much of Britten’s early music, and his advice to found the Aldeburgh Festival had been so right, had resulted in such a successful venture, that his sudden absence made me pensive. He and his wife Nancy Evans lived in a cottage just behind mine. Our gardens came together in a pointed hedge, and we would talk through the leaves, when I would sometimes sense a great hurt and fury. It would be years later when I was working on an anthology of the Festival’s
quarter-century existence, and I came to Eric for information, and when he called several times to see if he was included, that the size of the injustice done to him became apparent. Yet he did not explain, and his look forbade me to ask. Did he see in me a loyalty to the Britten and Holst camp? ‘How strange of you not to ask outright what had happened,’ people say, ‘you being neighbours.’ But my not knowing was a kind of benefit. He and I and Nancy remained, rather absurdly, ‘
next-door
neighbours’, and we gave each other fruit and veg over the hedge. I complimented Eric on his libretto for
Let’s Make an Opera
in which he and Ben had put all the Gathorne-Hardy children. Also on his words for Ben’s
Saint Nicolas
cantata, in which I had sung when it was first performed in Aldeburgh Church.

There would be other blow-ups anon. People going off like the Maidstone gun. Fidelity’s scathing sanity. Not to mention her frank enjoyment of the tantrums. And always, behind this, her enduring love.