10 At 36 Crag Path

The Hutton family at 36 Crag Path

When the Allied armies reached Belsen and the other concentration camps such was the terrible bureaucracy of death that all the other horrors of war paled before it. Not only soldiers and statesmen, religious leaders and welfare workers felt it their duty to see Belsen, but poets, artists, musicians and philosophers too. The most distinctive memory I have of the two Jewish friends I had in Aldeburgh in the Fifties was their silence on the Holocaust. Leon Laden, a Dutch Jew, had married the artist Juliet Perkins and had come to live in Brudenell House, and Kurt Hutton and his wife Gretl had come to live at 36 Crag Path. Leon said that he was writing a thriller. He sat at his desk all day. A dozen or so HB pencils of various lengths were arranged in meticulous order like organ pipes. Our wonder was what sentences had worn them down, for not a word emerged from the study. His wife Juliet and her friend Peggy Somerville, who had been together at the Royal Academy School before the war, did pastels. Kurt Hutton had come to Aldeburgh in the late Forties, partly for his health, partly to photograph it for Picture Post. The Ladens heated Brudenell House by leaving the gas stove on all the time, and the Huttons heated 36 Crag Path by leaving a big paraffin stove at the top of the stairs on all the time. Such decadence amazed Aldeburgh. It was a little flicker of Europeanism. Far away, long ago, a front door was being opened in Vienna, in Berlin. No sooner had my muse Christine Nash sat in the flat which Imogen Holst found me, than she went out and bought me an Aladdin stove and gallons of paraffin. I used it meanly, having been brought up on the advice, ‘Put another jersey on.’ Both Brudenell House and 36 Crag Path became ‘safe houses’ from the rigours of the Aldeburgh Festival. In them my disparate Jews maintained a matching silence on the enormity which had swept them into Suffolk.

I too found the matchless crime of the Holocaust so wicked, so incredible, that I had to reduce it, if this could ever be the word, to a single illustration of its evil. At a photographic exhibition in London I saw a group of gypsy lads standing in the snow on Christmas Eve, taking their turn to be gassed, whilst candles shone in the window of a guard’s house. They were naked, beautiful, waiting. It could have been this picture which gave me the entrée to Kurt Hutton’s black-and-white photo-journalism. It belongs to the classic period of the camera which produced such artists as Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Breton, dark-room Modernists whose images define the inter-war years, often beyond words. Kurt Hutton began to use a Leica as early as 1927 when he had established a studio in Berlin, first working with a conventional camera and a quarter-plate reflex. But the Leica cut the umbilical cord which bound him to static equipment. It made him think and see differently. He described this transition a few months before he came to Aldeburgh.

I have no idea what I meant to Kurt and Gretl Hutton. Imogen Holst introduced us. She was the only person who pronounced ‘Kurt’ correctly. We all said ‘Kurt’ to rhyme with ‘shirt’. Historically their partnership, Kurt with his eye, Gretl in the darkroom, would produce a visual record of the Aldeburgh Festival from its beginning without parallel. And also of ‘my East Anglia’ as I led them to the most unlikely spots, Little Gidding, Newmarket, Flatford Mill, and to Sir Cedric Morris and John Nash, looking up from their gardens. Gretl drove. Off we went to steal pictures, with my accompanying words, not captions. I would now and then catch Kurt biting back his amusement. I was the same age as his son Peter. I never knew until many years later that he had served in the Hitler Youth and that Kurt had ‘J’ for ‘Jew’ on his passport. Or that Gretl had been a Viennese dress designer.

In fact Kurt Hutton was really Kurt Hübschmann, a cavalry officer who had won an Iron Cross, Second Class, at Verdun, who had briefly studied Law at Oxford, and whose father had been a Professor of Comparative Philology.

Peter Hutton and I began a lifelong friendship on the Crag Path. His son Sebastian is my godson. I remember carrying him in my arms around Durham Cathedral and pausing at St Cuthbert’s tomb with its stripped feeling. Not far away the Weir – water – roared down its rockface. No Leica to catch this Hutton moment. Letters held us together when Peter and his family settled in New South Wales … In Aldeburgh, usually in order to make an early start on one of our (my) photo-journalist outings, I slept in a front bedroom and would get up at six just to look out of the window. Sometimes the enigmatic old man humping a sack who used to pass at Thorpeness would appear. Or fishermen to start the day’s idleness. Well-dressed women walked their dogs or just themselves in the keen morning air, ladies with time on their hands and little balconies. Fidelity Cranbrook called them ‘the abandonees’. Might not their husbands have died in the war? ‘No, dear.’ They came into their own at Festival time, selling programmes, showing people to their seats. Their children appeared from distant public schools during the holidays. What on earth do they do all day? ‘Nothing, dear.’ Like the fishermen. Unlike Kurt, who swam until he was crimson, then strolled around with his camera, carefully alone, helplessly European, helplessly active. Never belonging. Like Leon Laden, only differently.

Refugees were too busy extricating themselves from the disaster to do much assimilating. My favourite war-time poet was Sidney Keyes, killed in the Western Desert. He wrote:

Ben revealed his Europeanism all the time. Whilst I, who had been nowhere and whose friendship with two Jewish doctors in particular had merely shown up my provincialism, had to fight my way out of my limitations. It would be the Huttons, and later Erwin and Sophie Stein, she with her tumbling laughter and open-armed approach, who would dissolve my primness. I would walk into Ben’s house, which seemed to be always full of people, and hear its tensions being swept away by Sophie’s unrestricted happiness.

Now and then Kurt and Gretl would frighten me with a bogeyman named Simon Guttmann. Would they, could they, allow an innocent such as me to meet Simon Guttmann? Unbeknown to me our joint photo-journalism was passing through his hands. Was he their agent? ‘Agent!’ Their eyes would meet. But they were, I soon realised, genuinely alarmed by what Guttmann would think when he received our joint efforts. My words, Kurt’s pictures. My subjects – Little Gidding, the Yearling Sales at Newmarket, a Woodbridge auction, the Field Study Centre at Flatford Mill, Sir Cedric Morris’s art school at Hadleigh. Kurt’s account of Guttmann verged on the shocking … He made him sound like Quilp crossed with Goebbels.

One day, with exaggerated concern for my safety, they sent me to Guttmann. My shield would be that other than their comic libels I could know nothing about him, not being a photographer. They saw me off with pantomime prayers. Imogen was on the train, music paper spread over her knees. She was not to be spoken to. A little smile then the bent head. Somewhere off Regent Street, maybe, up two flights of bare stairs, there he was, fixed in a hard chair. They said that when this had to become a wheelchair it also became a chariot of fire. Aldeburgh seemed continents away.

‘Sir, sir.’

He was slight, intense. And although I didn’t know it, the master of European photo-journalism. He was in his sixties. He held out his hand for copy but all I had were suggestions. He listened to them irritably. He did not ask after Kurt. He did not stand up when I left what seemed like days afterwards, but took my hand gently.

‘What should I tell Kurt, Mr Guttmann?’

‘Tell him that you met me.’

And so, vacant and yet somehow fulfilled, it was back to Liverpool Street. I kept thinking of the nervous studies of Ben and Peter and of myself when I wasn’t looking, and of likenesses which I would never quite catch, those of friends who had managed to escape the death camps.

Guttmann himself had crossed the Spanish border on all fours. When he got to London he worked for Richard Crossman in Holborn, producing Free French magazines. He was born in Vienna in 1891. In his late teens he became a member of the ‘Neue Club’, a café group which read poetry and sang in Berlin. Guttmann brought the artists of Die Brücke to the Neue Club. When the Kaiser’s war was declared Guttmann pretended that he was suffering from TB in order to avoid being called up and went to live in Switzerland. In 1917, with the world order breaking up, he moved to Zurich where he met Hugo Ball and took part (auctioning a doll) in the first Dada Cabaret at the Club Voltaire. After the war he met Mayakovsky in Moscow. In 1928 Guttmann found his apex, Dephot, a firm which supplied pictures and stories for the picture-paper industry in Germany. He also found a young photographer named Hübschmann – Kurt Hutton. Dephot was the first agency to supply stories and not just captions to pictures.

I saw Guttmann saying to himself, ‘So this is what the great Kurt Hutton is doing in the country – this young man’s photo-tales. Farming! George Herbert! Little Gidding! Horses!’ But Guttmann himself had been guilty of wild undertakings. When Stefan Lorent founded and edited Picture Post in 1938 Kurt, a major contributor of the photo-essay, had said, ‘You will find Guttmann extremely difficult.’ Later it would be Guttmann who taught Tom Hopkinson, Lorent’s successor, this journalistic art. Picture Post now makes amazing reading–viewing.

I told Guttmann that Kurt and I would like to make a photo-essay about pike-fishing in the River Stour. What did he think? He looked confused. Many years later I read his obituary in The Times and saw that I had got off easy:

Simon Guttmann died aged ninety-nine in 1990, the last of the Expressionists. He, Kurt and Gretl Hutton, Leon Laden and the shy woman from Summerhill School at Leiston carried with them the terror of their time. It never quite vanished. I continue to pore over Kurt’s Aldeburgh which for two years was my Alde burgh. I suspect that Guttmann was unable to ‘see’ it. When I remember Simon Guttmann I also remember Rilke.

Brudenell House, where Leon and Juliet lived, was gaunt and pebble-dashed outside and ‘Charleston’ inside. Juliet had painted the woodwork green, cobalt, and dull gold. She kept it warm by leaving the lit gas stove on more or less permanently. On a fine day she and Peggy Somerville sat in the open window drawing swimmers and sunbathers, passing children, the sea and the boats. And there were lovely intimate Bonnard-ish interiors of the breakfast table and ourselves reading in wicker chairs. Now and then Leon would leave his life for our life. We would go to the pub and he would tell the landlord, ‘Gif me some beer.’

‘No, no, Leon, he is our host. You must say, “Good evening”.’

And I would wonder what orders Leon had heard when the Nazis overran Holland. Juliet fed us on bolognese, huge panfuls of it. As neither Peggy Somerville nor I could drive, she took us around in a three-wheeled car from which the floor had vanished. We would watch the road flying under our feet. Peggy lived with her blind mother at Westleton.

‘Tell me what you saw today. Tell me where you are going tomorrow. Will you really read to me? Oh, darling!’

I chopped up wood for the fire. Should I mention Juliet’s husband Peggy would look troubled. Nothing was said. But then the silence of Leon and our silence about him was hugely eloquent. No need for words when it came to the unspeakable Holocaust.

‘Marry Peggy,’ said Juliet.

I could not tell her why this was impossible, or that Peggy showed no sign of wanting to marry anyone. There were other silences then. Stephen Reiss would appreciate and understand her work and after her death make it widely known. Juliet would divorce Leon and move impulsively across Suffolk, leaving each house more colourful and yet with an added remoteness. None of these friends came to the Festival. It was as though it wasn’t there. When I arrived in the evening for the bolognese and to see the new pastels, and have a warm by the gas stove, I would chat about it. I told Juliet that the setting by her uncle Martin (Martin Shaw) of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem ‘God’s Grandeur’ had been sung by Peter Pears at the very first concert and she would give the little smile with which she held the world away from her. But we never ceased to do the things which belonged to her beloved realm of colour. One was going to the fair. Juliet, Peggy and I would drown in its blaring music and spend a fortune on the roundabout and swings. It was held on the waste ground which led to Slaughden. They wore stiff cotton dresses with dirndl waists and rope sandals, and had flying hair. We shouted like children.

I had met Martin Shaw before I came to Aldeburgh. The Shaws were Southwold people. Martin and Gordon Craig had sat on the beach there before the First World War planning revolutionary new ways to simplify theatre production. They were to be English Stanislavskys. Martin himself was tragically dramatic. A ‘port-wine’ birthmark exactly halved his face which was handsome and aquiline. He stood whenever he could in white-side profile. We were curious to know how far down it went. He, Percy Dearmer and Ralph Vaughan Williams had created – ‘edited’ would hardly do – The Oxford Book of Carols. All the Aldeburgh composers and singers adored this compilation and I often felt that Imogen inherited some of her joy from it.

But Juliet’s sister Jane was angry with Martin Shaw’s ‘churchiness’. ‘He could have been an international stage designer and composer.’ Aldeburgh was where Jane Garrett and I began a lifelong friendship. Just as she regretted Uncle Martin’s church music, so she regretted my Festival work. ‘You should be writing.’ But I was – all the time. ‘What are they making you do now?’ She would say that her marriage to Denis Garrett was like the peace between the Montagues and Capulets, the ‘two houses which had been at varience with each other’ in their case being Perkins’s Diesel Engines and Garrett’s Leiston Works; two firms which had transformed agriculture. Denis Garrett was literally at the root of the matter. Aldeburgh for them was marine plants, not music.

They met Kurt of course. They spoke a common scholarly, radical language and they were not in any way provincial. And certainly not completely localised like me. Kurt and Gretl were amused by my constant talk of Suffolk. They had come to Aldeburgh for the climate and had never so much as thought of its hinterland. The Garretts lived in Cambridge and although we spent weeks exploring the Fens, Denis’s heart and soul were on the few miles of beach between Leiston and Orford. Jane’s was anywhere in the world for she was enthralled by every inch of it. Aldeburgh was part of her marriage contract – and her love for Denis. Thus we drifted and toiled through the Fifties, young, a little inner society making its way to nowhere in particular. Political events such as Suez were ‘noises off’. Although what had happened to Leon, Kurt and Gretl would never be this, and I understood it from the first.

Kurt plunged into the sea whatever the temperature. A large tawny old man, he was asking it to prolong his existence. He looked remarkably Aryan to have a ‘J’ on his passport. Knowing nothing about him at this time I did not glimpse the cavalry officer or the Oxford law student. But I could see the sunken lines made by tuberculosis on his face. When Picture Post asked George VI which of their photographers they should send to take his portrait, he said, ‘The nice, quiet German gentleman.’ The Aldeburgh sea crashed and roared, hissed and crunched below all kinds of incomers at this time, providing rough horizons. Britten would run into it late at night carrying a towel. Jo Ackerley, coming to observe it for the first time, marvelled that I could reach it with bare feet. He thought it was the flint equivalent of walking on hot coals.

Britten commissioned Martin Shaw’s setting of ‘God’s Grandeur’ for the first Festival concert. Peter Pears sang it – his first Aldeburgh song. All I can recall of him was a quiet watchfulness as Ben spoke, a nervous smile, a self-protective courtesy. He liked artists and collected paintings. He would ask me about John Nash and Cedric Morris. He had a special love of what are now called the New Romantics, John Minton, John Craxton. I think that Britten was more taken with the surprising things to be found in Suffolk churches. They found a fresh symbolism in his music.