The Time by the Sea (12 page)

‘No, no, Leon, he is our host. You must say, “Good evening”.’

And I would wonder what orders Leon had heard when the Nazis overran Holland. Juliet fed us on
bolognese
, huge panfuls of it. As neither Peggy Somerville nor I could drive, she took us around in a three-wheeled car from which the floor had vanished. We would watch the road flying under our feet. Peggy lived with her blind mother at Westleton.

‘Tell me what you saw today. Tell me where you are going tomorrow. Will you really read to me? Oh, darling!’

I chopped up wood for the fire. Should I mention Juliet’s husband Peggy would look troubled. Nothing was said. But then the silence of Leon and our silence about him was hugely eloquent. No need for words when it came to the unspeakable Holocaust.

‘Marry Peggy,’ said Juliet.

I could not tell her why this was impossible, or that Peggy showed no sign of wanting to marry anyone. There were other silences then. Stephen Reiss would appreciate and understand her work and after her death
make it widely known. Juliet would divorce Leon and move impulsively across Suffolk, leaving each house more colourful and yet with an added remoteness. None of these friends came to the Festival. It was as though it wasn’t there. When I arrived in the evening for the bolognese and to see the new pastels, and have a warm by the gas stove, I would chat about it. I told Juliet that the setting by her uncle Martin (Martin Shaw) of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem ‘God’s Grandeur’ had been sung by Peter Pears at the very first concert and she would give the little smile with which she held the world away from her. But we never ceased to do the things which belonged to her beloved realm of colour. One was going to the fair. Juliet, Peggy and I would drown in its blaring music and spend a fortune on the roundabout and swings. It was held on the waste ground which led to Slaughden. They wore stiff cotton dresses with dirndl waists and rope sandals, and had flying hair. We shouted like children.

I had met Martin Shaw before I came to Aldeburgh. The Shaws were Southwold people. Martin and Gordon Craig had sat on the beach there before the First World War planning revolutionary new ways to simplify theatre production. They were to be English
Stanislavskys
. Martin himself was tragically dramatic. A ‘
port-wine
’ birthmark exactly halved his face which was handsome and aquiline. He stood whenever he could in white-side profile. We were curious to know how far
down it went. He, Percy Dearmer and Ralph Vaughan Williams had created – ‘edited’ would hardly do –
The Oxford Book of Carols
. All the Aldeburgh composers and singers adored this compilation and I often felt that Imogen inherited some of her joy from it.

But Juliet’s sister Jane was angry with Martin Shaw’s ‘churchiness’. ‘He could have been an international stage designer and composer.’ Aldeburgh was where Jane Garrett and I began a lifelong friendship. Just as she
regretted
Uncle Martin’s church music, so she regretted my Festival work. ‘You should be
writing
.’ But I was – all the time. ‘What are they making you do now?’ She would say that her marriage to Denis Garrett was like the peace between the Montagues and Capulets, the ‘two houses which had been at varience with each other’ in their case being Perkins’s Diesel Engines and
Garrett’s
Leiston Works; two firms which had transformed agriculture. Denis Garrett was literally at the root of the matter. Aldeburgh for them was marine plants, not music.

They met Kurt of course. They spoke a common scholarly, radical language and they were not in any way provincial. And certainly not completely localised like me. Kurt and Gretl were amused by my constant talk of Suffolk. They had come to Aldeburgh for the climate and had never so much as thought of its
hinterland
. The Garretts lived in Cambridge and although we spent weeks exploring the Fens, Denis’s heart and soul were on the few miles of beach between Leiston and
Orford. Jane’s was anywhere in the world for she was enthralled by every inch of it. Aldeburgh was part of her marriage contract – and her love for Denis. Thus we drifted and toiled through the Fifties, young, a little inner society making its way to nowhere in particular. Political events such as Suez were ‘noises off’. Although what had happened to Leon, Kurt and Gretl would never be this, and I understood it from the first.

Kurt plunged into the sea whatever the temperature. A large tawny old man, he was asking it to prolong his existence. He looked remarkably Aryan to have a ‘J’ on his passport. Knowing nothing about him at this time I did not glimpse the cavalry officer or the Oxford law student. But I could see the sunken lines made by
tuberculosis
on his face. When
Picture Post
asked George VI which of their photographers they should send to take his portrait, he said, ‘The nice, quiet German
gentleman
.’ The Aldeburgh sea crashed and roared, hissed and crunched below all kinds of incomers at this time, providing rough horizons. Britten would run into it late at night carrying a towel. Jo Ackerley, coming to observe it for the first time, marvelled that I could reach it with bare feet. He thought it was the flint equivalent of walking on hot coals.

Britten commissioned Martin Shaw’s setting of ‘God’s Grandeur’ for the first Festival concert. Peter Pears sang it – his first Aldeburgh song. All I can recall of him was a quiet watchfulness as Ben spoke, a nervous
smile, a self-protective courtesy. He liked artists and collected paintings. He would ask me about John Nash and Cedric Morris. He had a special love of what are now called the New Romantics, John Minton, John Craxton. I think that Britten was more taken with the surprising things to be found in Suffolk churches. They found a fresh symbolism in his music.

11 At Strafford House

Edward Clodd – Portrait by John Collier

Most evenings between writing my novel and toiling on the Festival I would walk along the Crag Path to be loved and fed by Juliet Laden. On the way I would pass Strafford House with its attention-drawing plaque to Edward Clodd. This was where he held his Whitsun weekends for Rationalists. Stimulated by W. R. Rodgers’s Third Programme Dublin biographies, I began to
consider
a radio reconstruction of these Victorian parties. I tried the notion out on Imogen.

‘What a splendid idea!’

One of Imogen’s virtues was that she always knew exactly when to go on and when not to begin.

‘Clodd’s widow lives up by the golf course.’

‘His
widow
?’

The famous rationalist was born in 1840.

‘His second wife.’

Clodd married Phyllis Rope in 1914. She was a young biologist. He was seventy-four. I found her address in the telephone book and wrote to her. Her companion, Miss Grant-Duff, let me in, a tall smiling woman. Their bungalow was de luxe with a polished parquet floor. A gun was propped up by the hat-stand. ‘Rabbits,’ explained Miss Grant-Duff. ‘Or golfers!’ Tea had been
laid in the sparkling kitchen. A big fruitcake and generous cups. Buttoned leather armchairs. An Aga warm as toast. And Edward Clodd’s
Memories
and Joseph McCabe’s
Edward Clodd
on a side table.

‘Mrs Clodd won’t be long – the books we give you.’

She steered herself through the stepless door
apologetically
, one hand on the wheel of the invalid chair, the other held out towards me.

‘Oh, you are young!’

She was a bag of bones in a pretty summer dress. She hung to one side. Miss Grant-Duff filled the teapot. I sat between them and felt unable to get out my
notebook
and pencil. Mrs Clodd said, ‘You are sitting in Thomas Hardy’s chair – from Strafford House.’ And from then on Clodd’s widow and myself were engulfed in a torrent of literary reminiscences.

‘You realise, Mr Blythe, that this is all hearsay! Ladies were not permitted to be a mile from those Whitsun dos.’

I explained how I hoped to reconstruct a kind of Rationalist evening with Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, George Gissing – all of them at dinner in Strafford House.

‘How clever!’

Mrs Clodd looked exhausted and once Miss
Grant-Duff
had to steady her cup. But when I rose to leave they cried, ‘Not yet!’ and ‘Have some more cake.’ When I glanced at the two Clodd books they said again, ‘They
are for you.’ I wrote in them, ‘Given to me by Mrs Clodd’.
Memories
was dedicated ‘To my comrade-wife’.

Phyllis Rope had accompanied him as far as she could. A few days after my visit she and Miss
Grant-Duff
left a note for the gardener on the kitchen table telling him not to go into the bedroom but to call the police. I have forgotten exactly how they rationally ended their brave lives – pills, I think. Edward Clodd died two years after Thomas Hardy in 1930. They cremated him in Ipswich and rowed with his ashes, beyond the outer shoal which faced Strafford House. ‘He died in the Epicurean faith,’ they said.

On 11 May 1912 Thomas Hardy sent an Aldeburgh postcard to his sister Kate with ‘Very quiet here.’ It would find its way to U. A. Fanthorpe. Her friend Rosie Bailey tells how. They had met my friend Nigel Weaver at Saffron Walden, and had given poetry readings at the Fry Gallery.

Edward Clodd and the Aldeburgh Rationalists were worried about Thomas Hardy’s church attendance. Their anti-faith pleasantries could hit a brick wall.

‘We generally snatched a day from Whitsuntide’, wrote Clodd,

Probably thinking of walks on the Aldeburgh marshes, Hardy said, ‘I keep on the causeway between the bogs of optimism and pessimism’, when Clodd’s guests were discussing novels. George Meredith was a fellow guest. He had worked as a reader for Chapman and Hall and had turned down Thomas Hardy’s first novel
The Poor Man and the Lady
. Now Hardy was the greatest writer of the age. And there they were, all crammed together in Clodd’s nice house with its double balconies, and the herring boats tipping the horizon, talking shop but now and then having to defend
themselves
against the coarseness of male conversation. The common bond was non-belief. But it took many forms. In Edward Clodd it had none of Matthew Arnold’s melancholy washed-away certainties as he sat on Dover Beach, but contained an irrepressible thankfulness as the shingle in front of Strafford House repeated to him over and over again its scientific facts. It had dictated to him a bestseller called
The Childhood of the World
(1873), for Clodd was nothing if not evangelistic. As a
boy he had been imprisoned by Aldeburgh Baptists, made to sing horrible hymns and believe horrible tales, and in a horrible chapel. Although bile coloured the last. Built the year he was born, it remains a perfect brick box for language. Its dimensions and furnishings are still all that the speaking voice needs. And no sooner had I read Clodd’s antipathy for it than E. M. Forster decided to talk about him in it.

Clodd was robust and emancipated. He went into the City aged fourteen as a clerk in the Joint Stock Bank and retired from it when he was seventy-five. He became a clubman – the Savile and Athenaeum – and a brilliant populariser of the new Darwinian landscape. He turned his parents’ cottage into an elegant seaside villa in which, every Whitsun, he entertained most of the new God-emancipated world, T. H. Huxley, Sir Leslie Stephen, Sir Frederick Pollock, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, George Meredith. He took them through the Suffolk lanes in his carriage and up the Alde in his boat. He is one of the great Victorian
name-droppers
– although never those of his wife and seven children. Where did they spend their Whitsun? He adored the cadences of the Authorised Version of the Bible and read them as literature not religion. And all should have gone swimmingly had it not been for Hardy. You knew where you were with Edward
Whymper
–
Scrambles Amongst the Alps
– who, when asked if he would have porridge said that he would rather leave
the house! Whymper’s role in a climbing accident – that he had cut the rope which held four other climbers in order to save his own skin, and sent them to their deaths, hung around him. When Thomas Hardy saw the Matterhorn, this never-to-be-cleared-up accusation was remembered.

In 1865 Whymper himself wrote: ‘They passed from our sight uninjured, disappeared one by one, and fell from precipice to precipice on to the Matterhorn
Gletscher
below, a depth of nearly 4000 feet.’ You could not have written this if you had cut the rope. In 1916 Hardy read his poem to Whymper. The great climber filled Strafford House with pipe smoke. I imagined the tobacco-stained ceilings, the fetid bedrooms, the cook and the maid, the robust talk, the toasts to the death of God. The Fabians saw Strafford House as a comedy. They held their summer school at Stratford St Andrew just down the road. H. G. Wells satirised Clodd as ‘Boon’ in a wicked novel. Conventional Suffolk wondered what on earth it had done to bring all these peculiar people to it – socialism! But Edward Clodd was not a socialist. He was the grandson of a Greenland
whaler, a non-stop reader and talker, a giver not a taker, and what we can only conclude must have been some kind of enchanter. Or how else can he have filled Strafford House, Whitsun after Whitsun, and his London residence with the Who’s Who of
post-Darwinian
Thought?

‘Yes, dear, try,’ Imogen had replied. But somehow the second Mrs Clodd and her friend said, ‘Don’t.’ It was they who attracted me, not the smoky old clubman and his certainties, his energy, his undoubted brilliance with the London Joint Stock Bank. Edward Clodd, thou shouldst be living at this hour. Not all Victorian banks were steady as a rock, and their diceyness became a lever with which to upset the action in Victorian fiction. It was riches to rags when a Joint Stock Bank failed. It was suicide, the debtor’s prison, the bailiffs, the shame. Clodd should have run them all. It was when he was made Chairman of the Rationalist Press Association in 1906 that H. G. Wells saw him for the first time and hit him hard. In a man who had read so much, done so much, been respected so much,
Boon
was a terrible blow. It was also not a very good book.

From now on and until I left Aldeburgh I ceased to think about the radio play. Or in Strafford House’s case, the recovery of its conversation, and Thomas Hardy’s unsatisfactory answers in particular. In 1978, when Macmillan published the New Wessex Edition of Hardy’s work, P. N. Furbank asked me to edit
A Pair
of Blue Eyes
, which was Proust’s favourite Hardy novel. I was myself by then half in Cornwall. The Aldeburgh Hardy, with its picture of him and his second wife seated by the laundry in front of Strafford House, had been overtaken by the St Juliot Hardy, and by Emma wildly riding above Beeny Cliff in her blue dress. And by the 1912 love poems which I read over and over again. Ben set some of them for Peter to sing.