Free The Time by the Sea by Dr Ronald Blythe

bring us coffee or a drink. The – to me – fairly incomprehensible papers would be sorted and filed, the Guarantors would be given first preference notification of seats, the Subscribers second. Stephen spoke softly and blinked through his glasses. He remained both ponderous and light-fingered, the pile of letters disappearing with speed plus heavy remarks. About eleven he would walk me to the pub corner andpass over a fat bundle of correspondence for me to post. I knew nothing about him. Later, I would be told how he would move from project to project with little explanation. One of his moves was from Balliol College to Chelsea School of Art. His main task while we were working together on the Festival was to write a book on Aelbert Cuyp, the Dutch master of landscape with cows. Long after our meetings he would promote the work of my friend Peggy Somerville. He had – like Britten – been to post-war Germany in its ruin, and had been in charge of the cultural rehabilitation of Lubeck and Schleswig-Holstein. And like Kurt Hutton and Leon Laden, his eyes had not cleared from what he had seen. He moved swiftly when important things needed to be done, out-running committees. It was Stephen who saw the Snape malthouse as a wonderful concert hall, and who took
Idomeneo
to Blythburgh Church within hours of the Maltings Concert Hall burning down. The Festival seemed clogged up with committee matters but Stephen often left them behind, thinking as he did on another plane. This agility wasn’t present in his face, which was pale and sad. He would last a long time. Britten dedicated
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
to him. His carrying the Festival from Aldeburgh to Snape was momentous. And all achieved with a bewildering cut through bureaucracy. He fell from grace in 1971. The departure, though cataclysmic, was described by Stephen as a ‘difference of opinion’.
    It was in 1971 that Peter Hall wanted to film
Akenfield
, a project which filled me with fear. We met for the first time in London. The book had upset him. It was as though he had encountered his ancestral Suffolk for the first time. He encouraged me to write a film treatment of it. The producer Rex Pyke gradually persuaded me that it could be done. I recalled a boyhood picture named
Man of Aran
directed by Robert J. Flaherty. And what was more, that my farmer neighbour at Great Glemham had acted in it as a sixteen-year-old. This in the Thirties. It was about a kelp economy on an Aran island where seaweed was inned with monotonous toil to make slippery fields. I also remembered Pier Paolo Pasolini’s masterpiece
The Gospel According to St Matthew
. The two films together were what finally persuaded me to go ahead with the Peter Hall film.
    Peter Hall knew that funding such a film would be almost impossible and he began to see it as a triple venture by me, Benjamin Britten, and himself, all Suffolk-born men. In July 1972 I wrote fearfully to Britten, well aware of his dislike of film crews, telling him that the
Akenfield
film as created out of my book, which he had read enthusiastically, would be a kind of Thomas Hardy story. Britten adored Hardy and had set a number of his poems. But I added Robert Bresson and Pasolini to my persuaders. Greatly daring, for Britten detested suggestions, I said, ‘It would be a very serious film in which Peter Hall and myself will be absorbed aspeople coming from many generations of Suffolk country people. It is a low-budget film, and except for perhaps two or three leading characters, will use real people and not actors’ (in the long run the leads were also locals). I had already had a talk about the film with Britten’s publisher, Donald Mitchell. Thus I continued, ‘It was immediately evident that we could not ask you to provide such film music in the ordinary sense. Instead, Donald told us of some unpublished music which exists which, if it could be extended, would be perfect for the film. Our plan would be to fit parts of the film