Read Online The Time by the Sea by Dr Ronald Blythe - Free Book Online
Authors: Dr Ronald Blythe
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probity were filling the arts at this moment. The Festival was overdrawn, like me, and Elizabeth, who was salaried, was having to leave. Some other method of running things was being discussed. After my interview I went next door to the baker’s and there met Juliet Laden who, seeing my worried face and hearing of my penury, at once wrote a cheque for
£
25. Returning with it to Mr Cullum, I expected joyfulness. Instead I received an even more anxious look. Not only was I the kind of new customer who was going to bother him, but a swift borrower to boot. He was now worldly-wise in Aldeburgh ways, the insecurity of people like myself, the flimsiness of our lives. But he was impressed by the signature. It reminded him of another new arrival, the divorced wife of Sir FrancisCook, now Mrs Laden, who had bought Brudenell House. The next morning the
London Magazine
cheque arrived. I mention these parsimonious facts because they somehow reflected ‘Aldeburgh’ in miniature at this moment, the scarcely now believable finances, the give and take, the wildly imaginative plans both to do our own work and also to run a unique music festival, now almost a decade old. Could it go on? This question was openly asked.
The solution was to replace the salaried Elizabeth Sweeting with the unsalaried Stephen Reiss who would be called the Responsible Organiser, and myself as his assistant at
£
150 per annum. What poor Stephen needed was not a young man who had run a literary society and hung a John Constable exhibition but a competent office worker. What he got was a financially illiterate novelist. My interview burns in my memory to this day, each minute of it fixed. The coming into the same room where a few months earlier I had worked on Morgan’s biography of his aunt, the woman who had saved him from having to get a job of any sort, and standing before Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and Stephen Reiss, the latter blinking through his glasses. Fidelity Cranbrook introduced me, she having been told by Christine Nash what a good arranger of lectures I had been in Colchester.
Ben and Peter were in shorts and I was wearing my tweed jacket and green corduroy trousers, and a tie.They stared gently at me. Stephen stood in the background an
éminence grise
to be. It would be brilliant whilst it lasted. Fidelity laughed and tossed her hair. I could tell that she had been told a lot about me, the Nashes and the Cranbrooks having been close friends since the Thirties. Country life, botany, and fishing especially had long bound them together. What with Cedric Morris and Denis Garrett, birds and flowers, landscape and agriculture were stalking me in all directions . As Britten could only love or hate, it was said, and did not possess a detached view on anything or anybody ¸ I suppose he should not have been present. But he was present and would be at even the most mundane affairs affecting the Festival. The question at this moment wasn’t so much ‘Can you help?’ but ‘When can you start?’ The room was dominated by bare legs, Peter’s so white and plump, Ben’s so ochre and knobbly. Doors were wide open fore and aft and a fresh breeze poured from the sea into Crabbe Street. So that was that.
‘Say goodbye to Elizabeth Sweeting, would you?’ said Lady Cranbrook. ‘She would like to see you.’ I had read her name on the first Programme Book. I found her in a little flood-stained room behind the Wentworth Hotel. The box files were marked with water. Two years earlier the mighty winter sea had broken all barriers from Canvey Island to the Wash, drowning many people and animals. Benjamin Britten himself had helped in bailing out Crag House and boats had beenrowed down the High Street. Five years later
Noye’s Fludde
, Britten’s setting of the Chester Miracle Play, would fill Orford Church with Suffolk schoolchildren in a storm of sea music. Britten had remembered the carved ark on the Duke of Norfolk’s tomb at Framlingham , the many
£
25. Returning with it to Mr Cullum, I expected joyfulness. Instead I received an even more anxious look. Not only was I the kind of new customer who was going to bother him, but a swift borrower to boot. He was now worldly-wise in Aldeburgh ways, the insecurity of people like myself, the flimsiness of our lives. But he was impressed by the signature. It reminded him of another new arrival, the divorced wife of Sir FrancisCook, now Mrs Laden, who had bought Brudenell House. The next morning the
London Magazine
cheque arrived. I mention these parsimonious facts because they somehow reflected ‘Aldeburgh’ in miniature at this moment, the scarcely now believable finances, the give and take, the wildly imaginative plans both to do our own work and also to run a unique music festival, now almost a decade old. Could it go on? This question was openly asked.
The solution was to replace the salaried Elizabeth Sweeting with the unsalaried Stephen Reiss who would be called the Responsible Organiser, and myself as his assistant at
£
150 per annum. What poor Stephen needed was not a young man who had run a literary society and hung a John Constable exhibition but a competent office worker. What he got was a financially illiterate novelist. My interview burns in my memory to this day, each minute of it fixed. The coming into the same room where a few months earlier I had worked on Morgan’s biography of his aunt, the woman who had saved him from having to get a job of any sort, and standing before Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and Stephen Reiss, the latter blinking through his glasses. Fidelity Cranbrook introduced me, she having been told by Christine Nash what a good arranger of lectures I had been in Colchester.
Ben and Peter were in shorts and I was wearing my tweed jacket and green corduroy trousers, and a tie.They stared gently at me. Stephen stood in the background an
éminence grise
to be. It would be brilliant whilst it lasted. Fidelity laughed and tossed her hair. I could tell that she had been told a lot about me, the Nashes and the Cranbrooks having been close friends since the Thirties. Country life, botany, and fishing especially had long bound them together. What with Cedric Morris and Denis Garrett, birds and flowers, landscape and agriculture were stalking me in all directions . As Britten could only love or hate, it was said, and did not possess a detached view on anything or anybody ¸ I suppose he should not have been present. But he was present and would be at even the most mundane affairs affecting the Festival. The question at this moment wasn’t so much ‘Can you help?’ but ‘When can you start?’ The room was dominated by bare legs, Peter’s so white and plump, Ben’s so ochre and knobbly. Doors were wide open fore and aft and a fresh breeze poured from the sea into Crabbe Street. So that was that.
‘Say goodbye to Elizabeth Sweeting, would you?’ said Lady Cranbrook. ‘She would like to see you.’ I had read her name on the first Programme Book. I found her in a little flood-stained room behind the Wentworth Hotel. The box files were marked with water. Two years earlier the mighty winter sea had broken all barriers from Canvey Island to the Wash, drowning many people and animals. Benjamin Britten himself had helped in bailing out Crag House and boats had beenrowed down the High Street. Five years later
Noye’s Fludde
, Britten’s setting of the Chester Miracle Play, would fill Orford Church with Suffolk schoolchildren in a storm of sea music. Britten had remembered the carved ark on the Duke of Norfolk’s tomb at Framlingham , the many
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