18 The Sea

John Nash: Aldeburgh Beach

 

The sea, and whatever sea it happens to be, is in a permanent state of cancellation as far as human activity is concerned, eventually wiping out our every mark. Our history is eventually little more than the sea’s litter. My friend James Hamilton-Paterson, one of its greatest recorders, said that ‘the swimmer tries to remember what a mile looks like’. He was remembering how the sea takes our measurement. At Aldeburgh, although best of all on the north Cornwall coast, I give up attempting to keep in mind what is landward as I watch the sea hit the rocks like a restless sculptor with all the time in the world to shape them. My head becomes a tabula rasa on which the ocean is welcome to write poetry or gibberish without any guidance from me. Is this why old people retire to the south coast or Florida? Why their most treasured possession is a deck-chair? Not a bed in the opium den but a seat where the most wonderful monotony can drug the watcher into forgetting past, present and future. Should it be warm enough there is no reason why, at Eastbourne, sea-nirvana should not be reached by elevenses.

However it is a young me who takes to the hot shingle with a notebook, an unread book and a canvas windbreak in order to be hypnotised by the everlasting waves repetitively coming my way but never quite reaching me, and by the immensity of the water behind them. They make land seem a very trivial business.

Benjamin Britten, Lowestoftian from day one, might be said to have come out of the sea like one of those oceanic beings who blow horns in the cartouches of ancient maps. Unlike me he was oceanic from the start. Tides accompany his pulse, whereas my pulse is out of tune with the regular beat of the shore which I find wearying as well as stimulating. I have never seen Ben tired. He is either fully awake or sound asleep. His father’s house stared hard at the sea in all weathers. It had a basement from which on Monday washday steam would billow in soap clouds which added to the morning mist, his sister Beth told me. It is odd how disconnected bits of human information become free from one’s unforgetfulness, and gain importance. Thus the Lowestoft dentist’s house and the little boy on washday and the composing – like Mozart.

In 1955, the year I came to Aldeburgh, Ben wrote the following:

(Between the age of five and eighteen, Britten composed around 730 pieces of music.)

Beth Welford and I used to talk in the Bull Hotel at Woodbridge. Her marriage had broken up and she felt free. She told me about the descent of the Scottish herring ‘girls’ in Lowestoft and the fishmarkets where her mother helped to run a canteen. But what with the Depression and the disappearance of the herrings, the town during Britten’s boyhood had become a struggling place. His experience of it helped to create his Labour politics, as did the agricultural depression form mine. But Akenfield worried him. ‘Are you against our Suffolk farmers, Ronnie?’ How could I be? He then agreed. How could I be?

Our sea remained as it had been for ever. Out of it came his music. Supposing, like me, he had come from where he could not hear it?

‘Dear, the things you ask!’ said Imogen.

Preparatory to writing this note on it I would revisit it. I would walk from Thorpeness Bay to Orford with long rests here and there to find out if it was still speaking its mind. Once I had cleared mine of its literary lumber and its old emotions, and I had set my ear to its sound, it sang!

People who write never fail to catch its voice. It made the Second World War poet Alun Lewis desperately unhappy:

Burma would grant it. Everyone wishes that the herrings would come again. Swim in their millions from the Scottish islands to Cornwall. Be a silver multitude once more. In Eastern England their not arriving is still as though the moon had vanished. At least their plenty did not make us mad like the Swedes when herring gluts made the poor eat themselves crazy. ‘Pray to God the herrings never return!’ they said. It had been like Whisky Galore, only disgusting. Once in Sweden they took me to the smooth rocks above which the smokehouses and fishracks stood, and into the fishermen’s huts. There were group photographs like ‘The Class of ’93’. Males of all ages but with the same alcohol-blinded eyes and drink-sodden mouths. Boys and men who had drunk the winter darkness away. Which is why in Gothenburg you can’t have half a bitter without a government permit.

In Aldeburgh and Lowestoft and Newlyn, herring arrived regularly as clockwork until …? But the exact date is too awesome perhaps to be remembered. The Dutch called their herring fisheries ‘The Triumph of Holland’. Julian Huxley believed that the mystery of why the herrings stopped coming could never be solved.

I cooked them in oatmeal. ‘They filled you up.’ When I went to stay with James Turner in Cornwall, to be introduced to the last of the Newlyn School artists, themselves a rarity, we would walk round that fine harbour to see what was left of a huge fish industry being turned into watercolours. But I always tried to be alone at Land’s End and at remote points, and at D. H. Lawrence’s Zennor. Yet nothing there diminished Aldeburgh. Nothing modified its contemplative powers. Coasts provide the ultimate sites for meditation. Their tides can carry our penultimate thoughts. Wilkie Collins wrote a novel called No Name in Aldeburgh and it used to make me apply it to the seas in general.

Of course, like everyone else, I knew what George Crabbe thought of the German Ocean. His son was careful to write it down:

Edward FitzGerald saw the sea for the first time at Aldeburgh – ‘My old mumbojumbo sea’. He said that it redeemed Suffolk from dullness! He would lie by the mainmast of his schooner-yacht named The Scandal reading the Odyssey. Best of all, he sailed away with the beautiful Posh on a herring-lugger named The Meum and Tuum (The Mum and Tum to Suffolk). Posh was ‘broader and taller than all the rest; fit to be a leader of men, Body and Soul, looking now Ulysses-like’.

At first I thought that to ‘look’ at the sea was a landsman’s compulsion. Britten watched it all the time. Although I cannot recall his ever mentioning it. When visitors stood on the sea wall to watch him working he had to move to where he had to take a long view of it. A pearly distance was – the sea! It possessed its own talk. Tucked into a windbreak I would listen to a commotion of shouts and barks, birdsong, and little floating pennants of distant conversation. Up by the Martello the rigging of the Yacht Club could be orchestral. Fitted naked into the accommodating shingle on an August afternoon, I should have been writing, notebook and pencil being so near. But usually I did nothing. I listened. It was why I came there.