1 Fairhaven

Ronald Blythe at Thorpeness in 1955

Setting down the first words of a first novel was not unlike putting a toe in the North Sea when the weather warmed up. How far dare I go? There was a page of Quink then a page of Olympia typewriter letters. I saw that I was methodical if nothing. This novel I decided would be Forsterian or possibly Bowenesque, and carefully unoriginal. Its lovers would be ambiguous, needless to add, and confused about the approaching war, which, like Dylan Thomas, they would regard as a personal inconvenience. They would live in a thinly disguised Aldeburgh, lie to their mothers, tentatively explore each other’s bodies and emerging characters, and take a long time to grow up. You were not adult until you were twenty-one in 1939. For my anti-war hero siren voices would whisper literature, creating unrest and malcontentedness. Voices which had no idea what her hormones were telling her would confuse the girl. They got along fairly smartly on the typewriter but were often held up by a short story which had to be written that minute and posted off to the London Magazine or Chamber’s Journal. Very short stories were sent to V. S. Pritchett at the New Statesman. But this was in the near future.

The Now was a winter bungalow at Thorpeness on the Suffolk coast still littered with holiday reads. I picked them up where they fell. I took Indigo to bed. Its colourfulness warmed me up. It was of course about racism, love and cruelty, a theme which I reset in Suffolk. I wondered who Christine Weston was and how surprised she would be to know that her novel had somehow collided with my loneliness and first sentences. Indigo sprawled on the floor in the sea-deafening night that January week as I lay cocooned in Mrs Foljambe’s pitch pine, a gaudy tale left behind in summer. I read it in small snatches with the waves thumping the shingle for my attention. I had never slept so near to the sea before, not even in Cornwall. It was marvellously monotonous and apparently safe, unable to make the few yards to where I lay, a sea on a cosmic leash, rushing at me then pulled back. Yet it sucked at my pillow and clinked its shingly trinkets at my ear. It bayed and hissed and implored, and would do so for ever. I felt it dragging my new purpose from me. I told it, ‘Wait until after breakfast and then you can have me, gale or no gale.’

The snow had stopped then. There was fretted ice-spray all along the shore and the tide was lapping away at the ruined defences in a friendly manner. Safe in my duffel coat and yards of knitted scarf, I plodded along the bitter sand in the direction of Sizewell, instantly frozen but excited. It was cold beyond belief. I collected bits of painted boat and other driftwood to dry out in the shed. There were, I was told later, lumps of Southwold pier and future fuel from as far off as Norfolk, all waiting to make a blue salty blaze in the Delft grate. And I went on reading Indigo, sensing that it was there for some purpose as yet unknown, though time would tell. The sealed plate-glass ‘solar’, as Christine Nash enviously called it, warmed up at the merest touch of the sun whilst everywhere else stayed frigid. The Anglo-Indian novel complemented not only this Anglo-Indian house but in some strange way, since I had never been to India, something in myself. This is what fiction does.

The corrugated tin on the station roof cracked from accumulated heat and a variety of smells and sounds escaped from the population which milled on the platform. Threading this polymorphous mass were the usual complement of starving dogs and sidling women. The hot breath of the train and the steaming breath of humanity rose to a blue heaven where the everlasting kites wheeled and circled.

Hardyal stood beside his father; his heart was beating violently, his smile was fixed, great tears kept rising and subsiding in his eyes. Ganpat Rai would accompany his son to Calcutta and there Hardyal would be placed in the care of his friends, who were taking the same steamer to England.

‘You’ll like Colombo,’ Wall had told him, encouragingly. ‘The Galle Face, where a brown sea rolls up the beach … and where you pass the Island of Socota think of the pirates who still prey on coastal shipping. You’ll go up the Red Sea into Suez and you’ll look at the Mediterranean, and the Straits of Messina with the land olive-green in the early morning and Naples …’

Homesickness had made Aubrey Wall poetic. But to Hardyal everything seemed far away. The tennis party of a few days ago might have happened last year. An age had rolled over him, he felt stranded on a reef of loneliness …

Hardyal did not look back as the carriage rolled past the tennis court, between the gardenia hedges, past the women’s arbour where all was silent, through the gates, past the poppy-fields and the bazaar to the station. Now he stared past the end of the train to a tossing grey-green of trees. Beyond them lay Amritpore and everything he knew and had ever known, but already it had passed out of his reach, already it was immersed in itself, excluding them.

Re-reading Indigo I think of my friend Vikram Seth, who wasn’t born when I came to Thorpeness. Maybe he would scorn it. When he came to see me in Suffolk I showed him the great elm at Nayland which had escaped the plague and still rose to the skies. He brought me a birthday cake about six inches across.

Before setting out for Thorpeness I had written a little essay on George Crabbe. Naturally, one might say. Who else? One of my first walks was to where I thought his leech pond might be. How frequently as the boy-doctor of Aldeburgh he must have walked to it to fetch leeches for blood-lettings. But also to surreptitiously collect herbs for cures, because his patients found them laughable if not a cheat. Medicine! What next? Later he would describe this world, this flight from the coast to become a writer, to his son, beginning, ‘One happy morning …’. But he was not a Laurie Lee. In 1780, when he was twenty-six, and after ‘starving as an apothecary in a little venal borough in Aldeburgh Suffolk’, as he put it in a begging letter to Lord Shelburne, Crabbe fled to London, there to starve in earnest.

The Gordon Riots are in progress and sights far worse than he had seen before surround him the minute he leaves his lodgings. He is in tatters and he is ashamed. Anxiety consumes him. In an age of patronage no one will patronise him. To understand his despair one has to recall all the humiliations, his blacking-factory fate, which have pursued him since boyhood. He is a great writer but not an accommodating one. Finally he writes to Edmund Burke, who amazingly takes him into his house, listens to him, and reads him. All this after standing by the leech pond whose soggy patch I think I pass most weeks. Crabbe’s son said,

That’s the way! What inspired him was the Aldeburgh Parish Register. It would be the Borough’s downfall, and Benjamin Britten’s inspiration.

The poet Neil Powell, describing the leech pond’s later views of the holiday village of Thorpeness and Sizewell nuclear power station, said that if George Crabbe thought that the bleakness came from within himself¸ ‘he could not have chosen a better spot to complement it’. He remains our most uncomfortable poet even today; parson, doctor, botanist, and social historian rolled into one, Crabbe is amazing. But he never revoked the Aldeburgh sea and would ride miles just to stand and stare at it. No other sea would do. Maggi Hambling goes to stare at it every day.

Thorpeness was a fishing hamlet with a harbour which had suffered metamorphosis in 1912 and become everything that a colonialist on furlough could need. My bungalow had preceded it by some thirty years and was like a Raj dwelling which had been airlifted from the Hills to within feet of the North Sea like an Indian version of Holy House at Loretto. Lloyd-loom chairs, card tables, chintz, bright rugs, ashtrays. Benares brass. And threading through its chinks the everlasting timpani of stones, millions of them in endless movement, raking, clattering softly, wearing each other into spheres, which I found quite wonderful and missed terribly when I left. This shingle spit petered out just below me.

My landlord, Captain Foljambe, had bought the bungalow for his sons. But one had drowned in a yachting accident and the other never came. They were my age. The drowned boy was Christopher. I sent his father thirty shillings a week for what I often felt was an intrusion. I must leave in May – ‘In case we want it.’ May was light years from January. The lovers in my novel and 1939 itself could travel far by then. I wrote a short story about India which benefited from my not having been there and sent it to the Italian magazine Botteghe Oscure and also a story about a woman going crazy over shingle and sent it to John Lehmann. It was my walks to the post office which told me the strange tale of Thorpeness itself which was in its way a work of art, or hope, an Empire holiday camp for the stranded middle class, some of them hard at work where the sun never sets. Like St Petersburg, it was built on a marsh. It was the accomplishment of two Scots, a barrister named Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie and his inspirer – J. M. Barrie. The war had taken the shine off it when I was there. It had become a shabby film set for interwar dramas and the big cast of owners and servants looked as though they would never come back. Memsahibs, governesses, chauffeurs, amahs, gardeners, housemaids, all the children – Anglo-Indian boys like Hardyal – were no more. I was the only light drinker in the Dolphin, where the cover of Stuart Ogilvie’s play The Meadows of Makebelieve hung on the wall. A water tank disguised as the House in the Clouds needed a coat of paint. Every where I looked I saw the ghosts of Thirties golf, tennis, dances, picnics, gramophones, children splashing about, peeling walls and wild rockeries, lawns, tall climbers. Although here and there someone would be up a ladder and would call out, ‘Lovely day!’ An old woman from the pre-Ogilvie age did my washing for five shillings a fortnight, returning it wrapped up in the News of the World. It was a black clapboarded place piped with white which was at that moment pulling itself together for its third manifestation. Did James Barrie see it at its birth? I fancy not. Between the wars it offered some shelter from the storm and as I explored it in 1955 it spoke less of Peter Pan and Treasure Island and more of E. M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady and Richmal Crompton’s Just William. I saw that my characters must have nothing to do with it. They would have to live somewhere less reassuring – Aldeburgh of course.

This first night of my freelance days I went to bed very much awake. I unrolled a damp mattress, found some sheets, put on a fisherman’s jersey over my pyjamas – Christopher’s? – and felt strangely undisturbed. Outside the North Sea was roughing it up. I imagined Benjamin Britten as a little boy in bed above his father’s dental surgery on the front at Lowestoft listening to it day in, night out. The sash windows rattled. It wasn’t light until eight, when a snowy haze entered the room. I ran across the dunes, the thinning stones, the thickening sand to the water’s edge. And there it was, a sea standing like a wall with a trawler on a knife edge. Mornings are transformations. Britten once told me about them at Snape Mill. How he would leave a shiny black piano downstairs and find a matt white one when he woke up. Old, old flour would drift down on it from the seamy beams all night. I thought of it cancelling the black notes; and of his long knotted fingers finding them out.

Exploring the world of Seaside Bungalows Ltd, the enterprise which had transformed Thorpe into Thorpeness, I was more interested in the shore which had made my friend Denis Garrett a plant pathologist than in its Edwardian pleasures. He was one of the many Garretts who appeared to have fled from the family firms at Leiston and Snape to pursue his own path. We had met a few years before I became a writer, he and his wife Jane, her sister Juliet, the poet James Turner and, soon, there would be a little band of us finding our feet in a post-war universe by the North Sea. Also for me John Nash and his wife Christine Kühlenthal – my muse and the discoverer of the bungalow with the glass room on the shore. I imagined Denis as a lad passing by, eyes down, entirely absorbed as he would always be, utterly enthralled by plants whose only other plentiful habitation was on Chesil Bank in Dorset. Chesil from cisel, Old English for shingle. That summer I would see them myself for the first time, Denis showing them to me as we walked to the Martello Tower. Most famously the sea-pea and the sea-holly, both edible, the first when one was starving, the second when one was sampling the local haute cuisine. I asked John Nash to make drawings of them for the ninth Aldeburgh Festival Programme Book.

The sea-pea, Lathyrus maritimus, was famine food; sea-holly, Eryngium maritimum, delicious food when sexual appetite was at a low ebb. It was candied at Colchester, the centre of the eringoe trade, and was on the menu for centuries.

According to Geoffrey Grigson sea-holly roots grope through sand and shingle five or six feet, and have waxed leaves which reduce their respiration. Both plants – and a small apple tree – flower near Maggi Hambling’s memorial to Britten on the beach north of Aldeburgh. It takes time to realise how floral shingle is, how pale blue and pale grey, how burgeoning – and how local. Denis’s father Frank Garrett may have thought of it, and not poppies, on the Western Front. My father would have been at Gallipoli that year, another Suffolk boy out of his terrain. At Cambridge there would be a special Chair for Denis, to acknowledge his wonderfully practical botany – the diseases of corn and rice. Whether this grew out of his knowledge of the edible plants of his childhood which flourished between Thorpeness and Orford, I doubt. I never thought to ask him. His ashes dust Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire where on our walks he would be received like a prophet.

The Garretts were Aldeburgh. In the nineteenth century the family had built the Snape Maltings and the Leiston Ironworks. Newson Garrett’s daughters – Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (‘cousin Lizzy’) and Millicent Fawcett (‘cousin Millie’) – would go on to change the world for women. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was the first woman doctor and first woman mayor; her sister would become Dame Millicent Fawcett who frightened the politicians as a formidable advocate of women’s suffrage as well as helping to found Newnham College. We would listen to Denis’s wry family anecdotes. My favourite was when the widowed Dr Garrett Anderson moved from cold Alde House to a cosy flat in the stable, to the consternation of Aldeburgh. A deputation of aldermen visited her to persuade her to return to the great house and to her position in local society. Her fury was terrifying when the penny dropped. ‘Have you forgotten that your Maker was born in a stable?’ And there she stayed. When Denis and his wife and daughters came to Aldeburgh in the summer there was no mention of the Festival. They were neither for it nor against it. ‘Their Aldeburgh’ failed to contain it, being so full of other things. Such as tramping head down for miles and miles to renew contact with minute friends on the marsh or on the beach, to get healthily blown about, to feed me in pubs, but chiefly to take in their native air, the air of George Crabbe’s Borough:

After church on Sundays I would study the lichen on Church tower and on the drowned sailors’ tombs, as Crabbe had done, as he wrote what must be the finest botanical poem on the subject. The churchyard was huge and blowy. The vicar was Rupert Godfrey, a pale, still young man who had been in a Japanese prison camp, an ascetic who was uncomfortable with the Festival. He was on its Council and once caused sophisticated amusement when Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia was proposed for the 1954 Festival: ‘Can’t we have less rape?’ When I was told this I thought that maybe he would have been the only person present who could have seen rape. The war had lapped over us all, one way or another, leaving its sediment. I became fond of Rupert and his wife and wrote a new church guide for him, and got John Nash and Kurt Hutton to illustrate it. It sold for decades. Rupert worried about the behaviour of Festival audiences in church. He had a puritan streak which, like his face, contained a chilly beauty. It was unusual in the Fifties for parish churches to be commandeered for music festivals and sometimes I sensed that he would sooner not have had this. ‘Aldeburgh’ invaded his austerity, but, like the sea, he could do nothing about it. I think that the first church concerts had to be without applause. When a concert these days is clapped to a near-insane degree I think of Rupert. Crabbe had a bad time when he returned to Aldeburgh as curate. But he got his own back – and how! His bust stares up at John Piper’s Britten memorial window, stony-eyed. The window flames.

It was the exterior of Aldeburgh Church which spoke to Crabbe of immortality – those furry mosses, those botanically cancelled names: