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Authors: Dr Ronald Blythe
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drowned sailors in Aldeburgh churchyard and the winter of 1953 when the North Sea filled his rooms. He had brought them together in a ferment of waves, hymns, terror and salvation. Amongst the guilds which traditionally re-enacted the drowning of the world in Genesis were the Shipwrights, Fishers, and Mariners. As with all Miracle Plays,
Noye’s Fludde
was performed, not during winter when real water would have passed through coastal towns, but at Corpus Christi in warm sunshine.
It would not be the sea which drove Britten from Crag House but its seasonal celebrants who would stand on the wall and watch him at work. He and Mary Potter exchanged houses the same day in 1957. I saw the pantechnicons pass each other. But for Mary it was a wrong move and soon she would be back at the Red House, the perfect third person. When Stephen Potter left her Ben said, ‘Now you must call yourself “Mary, Mrs Potter”.’ My first glimpse of her work was a big oil in Crag House showing a momentarily trapped seagull in a walled garden – presumably at the Red House. It was as much poetry as painting. Her art was shadowy, haunting, carefully unemphatic, though real and not dreamlike.
Seeing me glancing at the watermarks in the Festival Office, Elizabeth Sweeting said, ‘It was terrible!’ I noticed an element of thankfulness regarding her departure. We sat amongst the litter of her going. Mr Cullum the bank manager was furious at the plan to exchange her with Stephen Reiss. When she arrived Lord Harewood had hoped that the Festival would ‘belong to Aldeburgh and Suffolk in the sense that Mozart did to Salzburg’. When I arrived it lay to Stephen Reiss to achieve this. He appeared somehow hidden and yet powerful.
I should here say sorry to Stephen Reiss for not earning my keep. Also tell him how great he was in Aldeburgh terms. A rescuer. A rock. There were moments when the Festival would have foundered had it not been for him. Somehow tragic in himself I thought, he knew how to bring light into dark corners, to be strong when everyone and everything else went to pieces. He had come from the New Towns in Hertfordshire and possessed a Shavian common sense, and a way of crossing awkward boundaries. This was also Fidelity’s Quaker territory and between them she and Stephen held their sensible ground in the frequent tempests of the Festival.
I was too turned in on myself at this stage, not to say too awed by Ben, to recognise Stephen Reiss’s greatness . Fidelity Cranbrook’s understanding of it was all too plain. She would observe me as I took it in – orfailed to understand what was being said. The fact was that I wrote and wrote all day, read and dreamed. Words made a screen through which every other activity was filtered and made a kind of grudging entrance. All the same I found it impossible to call myself a writer. The first person to do so was Imogen Holst. Not even Christine Nash could do more at this stage than to tell people that I had gone to Aldeburgh ‘to write’. The stress must have shown because Ben asked, more than once, ‘Are you happy, Ronnie?’ He let off steam with strange war whoops. ‘Middle class, Ronnie; middle class!’ And, ‘I’m thirteen!’
I suppose I must have sounded confused at least to the old friends, James Turner, W. R. Rodgers, and R. N. Currey, all established poets and a generation older than me. One of our group activities had been to read George Herbert in country churches. Another was to think of ways to make book programmes for the BBC. The Third Programme had just been invented and ‘Bertie’ Rodgers was one of its stars which astonished us as he was rarely sober. And always broke. Yet he invented something called the Rodgers method of radio biography in which wonderful sound-portraits of Irish writers – W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore, and Æ – would be heard.
Bertie would appear in Aldeburgh now and then, always immensely late for the lunch I had spent all the
Noye’s Fludde
was performed, not during winter when real water would have passed through coastal towns, but at Corpus Christi in warm sunshine.
It would not be the sea which drove Britten from Crag House but its seasonal celebrants who would stand on the wall and watch him at work. He and Mary Potter exchanged houses the same day in 1957. I saw the pantechnicons pass each other. But for Mary it was a wrong move and soon she would be back at the Red House, the perfect third person. When Stephen Potter left her Ben said, ‘Now you must call yourself “Mary, Mrs Potter”.’ My first glimpse of her work was a big oil in Crag House showing a momentarily trapped seagull in a walled garden – presumably at the Red House. It was as much poetry as painting. Her art was shadowy, haunting, carefully unemphatic, though real and not dreamlike.
Seeing me glancing at the watermarks in the Festival Office, Elizabeth Sweeting said, ‘It was terrible!’ I noticed an element of thankfulness regarding her departure. We sat amongst the litter of her going. Mr Cullum the bank manager was furious at the plan to exchange her with Stephen Reiss. When she arrived Lord Harewood had hoped that the Festival would ‘belong to Aldeburgh and Suffolk in the sense that Mozart did to Salzburg’. When I arrived it lay to Stephen Reiss to achieve this. He appeared somehow hidden and yet powerful.
I should here say sorry to Stephen Reiss for not earning my keep. Also tell him how great he was in Aldeburgh terms. A rescuer. A rock. There were moments when the Festival would have foundered had it not been for him. Somehow tragic in himself I thought, he knew how to bring light into dark corners, to be strong when everyone and everything else went to pieces. He had come from the New Towns in Hertfordshire and possessed a Shavian common sense, and a way of crossing awkward boundaries. This was also Fidelity’s Quaker territory and between them she and Stephen held their sensible ground in the frequent tempests of the Festival.
I was too turned in on myself at this stage, not to say too awed by Ben, to recognise Stephen Reiss’s greatness . Fidelity Cranbrook’s understanding of it was all too plain. She would observe me as I took it in – orfailed to understand what was being said. The fact was that I wrote and wrote all day, read and dreamed. Words made a screen through which every other activity was filtered and made a kind of grudging entrance. All the same I found it impossible to call myself a writer. The first person to do so was Imogen Holst. Not even Christine Nash could do more at this stage than to tell people that I had gone to Aldeburgh ‘to write’. The stress must have shown because Ben asked, more than once, ‘Are you happy, Ronnie?’ He let off steam with strange war whoops. ‘Middle class, Ronnie; middle class!’ And, ‘I’m thirteen!’
I suppose I must have sounded confused at least to the old friends, James Turner, W. R. Rodgers, and R. N. Currey, all established poets and a generation older than me. One of our group activities had been to read George Herbert in country churches. Another was to think of ways to make book programmes for the BBC. The Third Programme had just been invented and ‘Bertie’ Rodgers was one of its stars which astonished us as he was rarely sober. And always broke. Yet he invented something called the Rodgers method of radio biography in which wonderful sound-portraits of Irish writers – W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore, and Æ – would be heard.
Bertie would appear in Aldeburgh now and then, always immensely late for the lunch I had spent all the
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