15 At Benton End

Sir Cedric Morris at Benton End

 

My coming to Aldeburgh took me out of easy reach of both John Nash’s Bottengoms and Cedric Morris’s Benton End, which had been up until then the most influential places in my life. Just a few miles apart in two distinctive river valleys, the Brett and the Stour, these ancient houses became countries which I felt I had shamefully deserted. I would make laborious journeys to them and at times would become homesick for them. At Bottengoms I would clean the Aladdin oil lamps; at Benton End I would breathe in the rich odour of garlic, wine and oil paint as others did the North Sea. I would always make careful plans when it was Bottengoms because John liked to meet me at Colchester station. But the pair of us would simply turn up at Benton End, usually in the late afternoon, when Lett Haines, resting between the 2.30 lunch and the 7.30 dinner, would lean from his bedroom window and eye us wickedly. We would then search for Cedric in the garden, led by pipe smoke.

‘Do you know what this is? I thought you had come to tell me.’

Should it be fine, old Benton End hands and still-nervous new Benton End hands would not look up from their easels as we passed. They were quite unlike the usual art students, being both emancipated and trapped by the Morris–Haines ethos. We would pass grand old ladies, boys from Hadleigh (‘the village’ to Lett and Cedric), and well-known artists having a ‘freshener’, botanists and students of all ages. The Fifties were the heyday of Cedric’s and Lett’s East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting, as well as the zenith of the Benton End irises. Neither human being nor plant could remain very long in the gravelly soil of this art-cum-garden institution without putting forth some extraordinary creation. Some lived in – three to a room – others put up in the little town.

None of us knew much about Cedric’s and Lett’s life before they came to Suffolk. I heard that they had met on Armistice night in Trafalgar Square, that Lett was married, that Cedric had been in his thirties, that Cornwall beckoned, then Paris. Now in their sixties, they were to us old men. Lett’s sophisticated talk and Cedric’s curious innocence of manner combined to tell us about a past which we found simply amazing. Not that they cared for questions, unless of course they were about art, gardening or food. Lett’s talk was unrestrained, sexy, funny, outrageous if possible. Cedric’s talk was in a quiet, mildly Welsh voice and much interrupted by giggles. If we joined in with these it was usually out of politeness, for what made him crease up with merriment was a mystery to us. It would be years later for me, as their literary executor, that the passionate and brave story of their lives would tumble from letters and bills, and most of all from pencil lines on dirty bits of paper. They had challenged Italian fascism. They had befriended gay men when they came out of prison. Lett had belonged to Ixion, the Anglo-German League which sought to bring sanity to the propaganda-maddened soldiers who had fought on the Western Front, and what mostly enthralled me, they had known everybody in 1920s Paris. Lett had been friends with D. H. Lawrence, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. And here he was in Suffolk cooking our meals.

Neither did I think of Cedric as a naturalist, a bird man, a botanist and plant-collector. In some ways he was not unlike the poet John Clare as he made friends with flowers. Lett was urban through and through, and for all his sexual capers and sociability essentially lonely. Young students called him ‘father’ and actually loved him. But for all the activity of Benton End and the affection it gave him, I used to think that he was out of place. He had promoted Cedric’s career and given him the lead. Both of them ignored the caste system and saw each person as distinctive and interesting – and even now and then brilliant. Lett’s eroticism was bisexual and successful, and Cedric’s little more than a naughtiness which we found impossible to share. In one way or another all of us ‘flowered’ at Benton End. It was three guineas a week, bring your own sheets.

The food was peasant French. They were friends of Elizabeth David and Cedric had illustrated her cookery books. The entire house could at times reek of garlic, herbs and wine. Considering the conversation at times, dinner was formal – a simplicity carried to some exquisite limit.

Now and then, when Cedric was to have a London exhibition, Lett would say to me, ‘Write the catalogue.’ His own background particulars were never quite the same, and I would protest, ‘But, you said this … or that.’

‘Never mind, dear boy, never mind.’

Of course I took Kurt Hutton to see them and recognised one of those indivisibilities of certain manners which belong to Europeanness. Cedric liked to harp on his Welshness but Paris and Rome, not to say Cornwall, had all made their mark.

Watching him paint was a bewildering experience. He did no drawing, no preparation; using bright colours straight from the tube, he began at the top left-hand corner of the canvas and ended at the bottom right-hand corner. It would remind me of those transfers we put on the backs of our hands as children, peeling them off gradually to reveal the full picture.

‘Choose one for yourself,’ he said.

I entered a dark old room off the kitchen and made out a backyard scene in the Algarve and dragged it towards him.

‘You like that?’

‘Thank you, Cedric.’

It wasn’t signed so Maggi Hambling painted his name at the bottom. Washing hangs on the line, chickens run about. Lovely towers look down on a yard.

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Aldeburgh.’

Lett: ‘Have we been there?’

I enjoyed Benton End best of all when John Nash was with me. It was then that I could walk behind the pair of them between the box-hedged iris beds and listen to gardening proper. So that when I came to Bottengoms for a day or two, and John Nash towards evening would say, ‘Shall we go and see the boys?’ and his wife would say, knowing that she would not have to cook the dinner, ‘Oh, do, dears. They are always so pleased to see you’, I felt a keen pleasure. A sense of belonging which so far Aldeburgh was denying me.

Sometimes Kathleen Hale, who wrote Orlando the Marmalade Cat, would be there. And often the teenage Maggi Hambling, or the Welsh artist Glyn Morgan, known in his youth as ‘The Little Prince’ because he was so good-looking. And Millie the housekeeper, a mite unsteady by seven o’clock, would lay the long table with wooden plates which we wiped clean with a bit of bread between courses. And the only heating in the house, an electric bar above Cedric’s head, would be switched on and the toppling candelabra lit. The Benton End cats would disappear into the Suffolk darkness while Lett in his butcher’s apron would stand in the kitchen doorway and give us snippets of his and Cedric’s scandalous adventures long ago.

‘We were passing a café in the Rue de la Paix where two English ladies were sitting –

‘“Who are those two young men?”

‘“Oh, I think they come from Oxford.”

‘“Oxford Street you mean!”’

Should Lett go too far he would find a note from Cedric in his jacket pocket next morning: ‘You were very bad last night.’

Twentieth-century art gossip is peppered with Cedric encounters. Here is Roger Fry in 1925:

There was no music at Benton End – not a note. But always music at Bottengoms where there were two pianos. Schubert could be heard most evenings.

As scribe to Benton End I was required to tactfully tone down some of Lett’s notes on Cedric for the Private View invitations. Here is Lett at his most florid:

And so on, through gaudy Mediterranean travels, membership of the London Group and the Seven and Five (seven painters and five sculptors), helping to found Welsh Contemporary Art exhibitions between the wars, the settling down in Essex and Suffolk, and the post-war plant-hunting and winter travels, when Benton End was closed, and Lett went to Brown’s Hotel to ‘economise’.

I once wrote that Cedric was a pagan who liked the sun on his back and the day’s colours in his eyes, and the tastes and sounds of Now. On a really beautiful afternoon at Benton End he could be found lurking amidst the huge blooms he had brought to Suffolk from the Mediterranean, and hugging the Now to him, his handsome brown old face tilted a little skywards and his body helplessly elegant in brown old clothes. And that a conducted tour through the beds was both learned and hilarious by then, Cedric himself becoming convulsed by the habits of some plants – and of some of the people who came to see them. I was always intrigued by his catlike satisfaction with present time. It caused his days to become so long that, in spite of a stream of visitors, an enormous amount of painting and gardening – and teaching – managed to get done.

I was with him to the end. At ninety he cursed God, whom he still took to be some misery from Glamorgan, for ‘insulting’ him with old age but his sensuality never left him. He basked in the sun. Nobody has such a good time as a good-time Puritan. Being a non-Puritan, Lett had rather a bad time one way and another.

‘Not a boring thing,’ was Cedric’s accolade for the Bottengoms garden. Very old and near death, he asked me, ‘Do they touch your sleeve like this?’, giving a little attention-drawing pluck to his jacket. He was ninety-two. But in 1955 there was much time still to go.

The only gardener to give an expert account of Cedric Morris’s plants, and his irises in particular, is Tony Venison. The Benton End Iris Party lives all over again when he speaks. Upward of a thousand blooms inhabited the box-hedged beds. Cedric adored painting them, taking them out of art nouveau, where they had decadently flourished for years and become symbolic of a movement, and making the gardening world see them as raunchy blooms ‘sticking their tongues out’, as one visitor said.

Each plicata (folded leaf) appears to do no more than rise from the surface of poor soil with the strength of a dagger, before it flowers with an opulence which suggests so many moving silks, from those of a jockey to the banners of a knight. The petals are ‘falls’ and ‘standards’. When Richard Morphet from the Tate Gallery came to my house to write about them, he said that ‘Cedric is one of the most exceptional colourists in British twentieth-century art. It is not only the intensity of his colours that tells, but above all the originality and strange beauty of the relationships between them that he established.’

I doubt if Cedric ever came to Aldeburgh or to the East Anglian coast. His coast was Portugal. There is no record of his ever walking from Benton End into Hadleigh High Street – into ‘the village’ as he called this borough … Once home from winters abroad, burdened with rolls of canvas tied up with hairy string, and bags of seeds and cuttings, he went nowhere. We came to him – to the expanding three-acre garden, to the iris capital. Not surprisingly it made me see what flowered in Aldeburgh. If there was one thing there which Cedric would have admired it would have been the tenacity of its plants and their stand against the wind, their salty hues and ample nature. The way in which they stood up to things. Both at Aldeburgh and Benton End there was a bravura performance of gardening, each so contrasting, each so colourful. Each filled with movement.

When Kurt Hutton went to photograph Sir Cedric Morris at Benton End I saw how physically alike they were and, although German and Welsh, how similar in manners, and in how they were amused. Both had been on the Western Front, Cedric at Remounts behind the lines – and he who loathed horses! And Kurt as a cavalry officer. Not that any of this was mentioned. They met as artists – as outsiders. As part of my ever-growing Suffolk world. A painting of irises flared up behind Cedric’s brown head in the photograph. Like a floral battalion on the move. It was in the upstairs studio which was never used if there was the faintest possibility to be outside.