The Time by the Sea

‘Very Quiet Here’ by U. A. Fanthorpe, reproduced by permission of R. V. Bailey; letter from Rosie Bailey to Nigel Weaver, reproduced by permission of R. V. Bailey; E. M. Forster,
The Hill of Devi
(1953), reproduced by permission of The Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, and The Society of Authors, as the E. M. Forster Estate; David Gascoyne, ‘Sentimental Colloquy’ from
A Vagrant and Other Poems
(1950), reproduced in
New Collected Poems
(Enitharmon Press, 2013); Benjamin Britten’s note on
Simple Symphony
reproduced by permission of The Britten–Pears Foundation; quotations from the diaries and other writings of Imogen Holst reproduced by permission of The Holst Foundation; and quotations from the writings of John and Christine Nash reproduced courtesy of Ronald Blythe, Trustee of The Nash Estate.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers would be pleased to rectify any omissions or errors brought to their notice at the earliest opportunity.

Listening

Listening has been a large part of my craft. It was William Sansom who used to give ‘Watching’ as his hobby in
Who’s Who
and it is true that writers are as watchful as cats. But what of listening? Or is listening an integral part of watching? I would like to isolate listening from the writer’s general function of obsessive
observation
and ask, do we, as poets, novelists and historians, ever attempt to examine or assess our own individual ear? Have we any idea of the range of our listening or of its selectivity? We know that we have long since become quite unashamed about our eavesdropping and we know that there is a subtle difference between what we set out to hear for the purposes of literature, and what we hear involuntarily. But what we do not know is the extent and pattern of our listening generally. It seems easier to describe what we normally
see
than what we normally hear. Even in the physical sense we allow the eye ranges and limitations which, unless we suffer from very considerable loss of hearing, we deny to the ear. Yet it is likely that the solitary nature of the act of writing, and the accumulative quiet in which most of us spend our working lives, affects our listening capacity, intensifying it in some, distorting it in others.

Listening in the strict sense of the word means to hear attentively. Yet literature abounds with remarkable things which the writer heard because he was
not
paying this kind of classroom attention, and by this I do not mean inner voices and the like, but actual sounds, usually sentences, floatingly acquired. Those speaking these sentences, did they but know that they were being so effortlessly intercepted, could say, ‘I am not talking to
you
!’ But as every writer knows at such a moment, they are! – and in riveting tones. His thoughts build up around these syllables which he could have missed had he been listening ‘attentively’ and his creativity comes into play.

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.

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.