16 Mr FitzGerald is in the Wood

Ronald Blythe at Great Glemham

 

In Aldeburgh various houses where Edward FitzGerald had lived were pointed out to me. He could not be said to have lived in any of them. Where Aldeburgh was concerned his living was done at sea. But I saw him haunting the beach at night as he compulsively made his way between the herring boats, recognised and unknown at the same time, his hat tied to his head with his shawl, his Irish eyes seeing and not seeing.

I was given The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in Penzance when I was nineteen, and was as knocked out by it as any Victorian. FitzGerald had been introduced to the twelfth-century Persian astronomer–poet by an Ipswich boy, Edward Cowell, who said that he made it to live in a way that no translation has ever lived before. Be that as it may, no one bought it, and for years it languished with other little volumes in the booksellers’ tuppenny box. When at last it was discovered by an Oxford undergraduate it mesmerised the young. My favourite explanation of it was written by Angus Ross when he and I were contributors to The Penguin Companion to English Literature:

The fact was that when I was reading it in Cornwall, everyone else had ceased to do so. But for some reason what was fustian to others for me was fresh as a rose. He loved Aldeburgh, they said. But I doubt it. What he loved was the freedom of his boat and Posh Fletcher sailing it on the German Ocean. Fitz named it The Scandal after the main staple of Woodbridge, where the boat was moored. Although it was not his boat now, because he had given it to Posh. Posh, he told Alfred Tennyson, was beautiful like a Greek statue, thus a suitable companion for a gentleman, and he introduced them when the laureate was put up at the Bull in Woodbridge. Many years later an old man from the workhouse was seen burning a pile of letters on the beach. It was Posh Fletcher signing off. When I heard this I thought of Samuel Palmer’s son making a bonfire of his father’s paintings and drawings in a Cornish cove because he was ashamed of them.

In 1960, staying at Great Glemham with Fidelity Cranbrook, I met a woman who was looking for someone to take on the last year of a tenancy. It was for one of those few-feet-from-the-road old farmhouses which may have been built ‘for company’, as it were. From which one could watch the world going by. This house was two miles from the grave of Edward FitzGerald. And only a mile away stretched the concrete plateau of a USAAF bomber station. My new house was owned by an old farmer named Harold French, who had used some of the compensation money for the turning of his fields into the aerodrome to mend the various properties he owned. Mine needed so much money to make it habitable that he called it French’s Folly. It was beam and plaster, pantile and, alas, concrete. On one side it looked out towards Maypole Hill and its oaks, and at the back to Dallinghoo Wield, an untouched sequence of elm-sheltered pastures across which Edward FitzGerald walked with his friend George Crabbe, son of the poet. Also with Lucy Barton, the daughter of the Quaker poet Bernard Barton. FitzGerald married her, which was a foolish thing to have done.

Anyway, the nineteenth century was not so much heavy on my heels at this moment as was an elated feeling of having settled at last. In retrospect I can see why both Christine Nash and Imogen Holst were disappointed in me. I had vanished. Debach – where was that? Well, Debach, population about eighty, stands on high ground and through its name flows a minute stream which some call a ditch. All over Suffolk this village is know as Debach Post because had not a sign been pointing to it, travellers along the Roman road would have gone straight on, to Wickham Market. There was an 1857 church with a coffered ceiling borrowed from Carlisle Cathedral, a mighty rectory, a straggle of old cottages and Thirties council houses, and a pretty pre-1870 Education Act school which had become a garden shed. Edward FitzGerald and Lucy Barton liked to drop in to teach the farm labourers’ children now and then.

Very soon after my move into this unknown world, I became a churchwarden, really to take charge of a redundancy. The barely attended church, floundering in cow parsley and rich grasses, darkened by lilacs, had lasted almost exactly a hundred years but now had to be closed. I was told to give its contents to neighbouring churches, a chest here, a huge chair there. In the vestry hung an ancient mirror with its backing, a blotter, hanging among the splinters. When I held the blotter up to what was left of the mirror I read, ‘Mr FitzGerald is in the wood.’

He was also just down the road sleeping beneath a rose from Naishapur.

Omar had a pupil, Kwajah Nizami of Samarkand, to whom he gave instruction for his burial: ‘My tomb shall be where the north wind can scatter it with rose petals.’ In the 1890s, with the Rubáiyát all the rage and the Omar Khayyám Club in full cry, travellers to Persia came home with shocking tales of the state of the poet’s tomb, which was a plaster structure without a name. Our minister in Tehran tackled the Shah about it. He was astounded when told that Britain was wild with Omar – ‘Why, he has been dead for a thousand years … we have got many better poets than Omar Khayyám.’ But of course they had not got an Edward FitzGerald. Meanwhile, back at the Club, there were rumours that its President, Sir Mortimer Darend, was hoping to be given the Persian Order of the Lion and the Sun. So the nameless grave crumbled and the rose thrived.

An artist from the Illustrated London News went to see it and brought back hips from the rose to Kew, where it was propagated and brought forth medium-sized pink blooms, quartered with button eyes, and downy-grey leaves. A cutting from this bush was planted at the head of FitzGerald’s grave, where it would have done all right had his every visitor not taken further cuttings. I remember finding a kind of green stump.

In the Seventies a later Shah, being told of this, commanded that six rose trees should surround FitzGerald. They could have made it difficult to read: ‘It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves’ – the FitzGeralds’ apology for such a strange member of the family. Someone who told the world that all his friends were loves. On a miserable November day I went to Boulge Church along with everyone for miles around to await the Persian Ambassador who was commanded to plant the Shah’s roses. It was wet and cold. Two front pews were roped off for the ambassadorial party. The electricity went off and some of us went out to collect paraffin lamps and candles. The organist played all the introits he knew many times. The Rector, Mr Braybrooke, then climbed the pulpit: ‘I am next in line, I suppose, to plant the roses.’ Whilst he was heeling them into the mud, a Rolls-Royce appeared on the concreted path through the sugarbeet, its pennant flapping. It sent the rooks up. The Ambassador was princely and smiling, very tall and wearing a coat with an Astrakhan collar. There were some smiling ladies. And a little boy.

‘Oh, you English – you are so prompt! We came Newmarket way and had lunch!’

‘We must give you some tea at the Rectory.’

‘The English are so polite.’

‘We will charge him for the printing,’ said Mr Braybrooke.

Some years after this Sylvia Townsend Warner came to see me en route to Peter Pears. When I told her this story – it was a November afternoon again – she insisted that we all drive down the road to look at Fitz’s grave: ‘Oh, I must see it!’

She was writing the life of T. H. White and I was writing Akenfield, for which I had been stealing names from the Debach gravestones.

Sylvia: ‘Names are so important, don’t you think?’

We wondered where Shakespeare had found his names. Does anyone know?

Sylvia: ‘Is Omar’s name on Fitz’s stone?’

‘Only his.’

She was enthralled when I told her what happened to the FitzGerald crypt on the Debach and Boulge Flower and Vegetable Show day. It was a Gothic building with a flight of steps and a pair of doors, a heavy protective cast-iron fence and a curious solidity. At the Flower Show, the gates and the doors were flung wide and we could enter. It was one of the Flower Show’s sideshows. There were brass-studded purple coffins on stone shelves, one above the other, all very tidy as one should be in death.

‘Oh, we must see it!’

I told Sylvia a joke about a Shah. ‘The Shah of Persia sat next to a Scottish lady in Edinburgh who said, “They tell me, Sire, that in your country you worship the sun.” “So would you, madam, if you had ever seen it.”’

Sylvia: ‘All this Persian thing – in Suffolk! – Wonderful!’

Persia had come to Suffolk in a fairly direct way. In terrible grief after his great friend William Browne, a Bedfordshire squire, had died in a riding accident, FitzGerald had met a youthful Ipswich linguist at a rectory party who said something like, ‘I could teach you Persian, sir.’ This is how masterpieces take root.

I had been in my new old house only a month when an ancient man asked if he could scythe the paddock. We were sitting by the Rayburn and above it was the only photograph of Edward FitzGerald which existed. Or rather there was a pair of them from an Ipswich shop, one looking up, one looking down. He called the latter ‘the old philosopher’.

Davy, the old man remarked, ‘I knew he.’

‘You couldn’t have done. He died years before you were born.’

‘Had a boat, didn’t he?’

‘He did.’

‘I knew he.’

My house was protected at the back by a pond called a cattle moat. Even so, Harold’s cows would now and then splash through it and surge onto the lawn. Usually in the small hours. It was a dreaded sound, the heavy breathing on the walls, the wrecking feet. I would rush out in my pyjamas and drive them onto the road and into the first meadow I could find. Harold the landlord’s advice was to fill in their footprints with sand – ‘You’d never know they’d been there.’

He and his elderly sister were frightened of thunderstorms. They would ring up at three in the morning: ‘Can you come round?’ They had come to Suffolk from Devon in 1919 when, as people said, ‘You had to sell a sheep to pay the men.’ Air Ministry compensation had transformed them: a Jaguar – I watched them blackberrying in it, slowly driving from bush to bush on waste land – a swimming pool, but still that old carefulness. He would bring me a mass of pea hulm which the lorries had left on the hedges as they rocked off to the Birds Eye factory. ‘Enough for a meal,’ he would say. Once when they went away the hotel put them into a double bed and it was ‘All right.’ Their innocence touched me. It was real.

Alone at Boulge and in what now seems to be always early summer, I would lie in the maidenhair and ox-eye daisies by FitzGerald’s grave and read a book. His lodge turned Thirties bungalow was near by and I handed out prize money at the celebrated Debach and Boulge Flower Show in it. Not that there was the least sign of his occupancy left. But the footpaths led straight to him in every direction. He filled the local pillar boxes with some of the best letters in the language. I found myself knowing FitzGerald through and through via his letters, which were indiscreet to a fault – as letters should be. And yet through my imagination and by living just up the road. And by talking to my shepherd neighbour from the Highlands who now lived on the FitzGeralds’ Home Farm, but who would not have been interested in him.

The airfield had redirected so many of his walks. These were strewn with the dead. Dance-band music blared into his silence. Longings for Ohio and New York met with his indifference to where he happened to be. Why is there no longing for Ireland? Or for Cambridge, if it came to that. In his letters to Carlyle and Tennyson he mocked his few miles. But he could be formidable and attacked ignorant squires who cut down great trees. He heard church bells, this being ringing country. But I doubt if he knew that a bell at Charsfield was inscribed, ‘Box of sweet honey, I am Michael’s bell’, only in Latin of course. He was not at all archaeological. Time for him was measured by the fall of petals, the taste of wine, friendships.

At Aldeburgh I used to wonder why he never came into Ben’s and Imogen’s thinking. But, born just before the First World War, they could have seen him among the bric-a-brac, trashily clothed in soft leathers and velvets. In Woodbridge I met Miss Howe, daughter of his housekeeper, who kept a shop in Church Street, and who brought out his inkpot and shawl to show me. All this would again have struck Ben and Imo as frowsty.

Driving across Naseby battlefield the other day, we passed and repassed one of those house-size container vehicles which read, ‘Debach Enterprises’ in big letters. Now it is certain that if my landlord’s cornfields had not been flattened with Aldeburgh shingle by Irish labour, no one in Leicestershire could ever have read ‘Debach’.

My landlord and his sister bought a pair of Newmarket racehorses with the airfield money, calling them Debach Boy and Debach Girl. Listening to a race on the radio they heard the commentator cry, ‘De Bark Boy, De Bark Boy!’

‘Really,’ they said, ‘you would think that an educated person would know how to pronounce Debach [Debbidge].’

All it has on the two-and-a-half-inch-to-the-mile map is ‘Airfield disused’. No astronomers’ language. No hint that it would be in use by Debach Enterprises and its far-flung customers, and known in Birmingham – and all over the world. What a way for a hamlet to go!