Free The Time by the Sea by Dr Ronald Blythe Page A

to this music, and not to request you to write to the film. There is plenty of time, as the film has to be shot over the seasons …’ I went on that should Britten consent to this arrangement, the London premiere of the film would be used to raise money for the Snape Maltings Foundation.
    What I do remember now was Ben’s dislike of other people’s projects. Twenty years earlier I had told Imogen Holst about the Quaker James Parnell, a hero of mine, John Nash having agreed that he would be the perfect subject for a Britten opera. Not that I would have been so presumptuous as to suggest this, but only to tell him a story which I knew would enthral him. I often told him tales. He would watch my face. This was the story about a teenage Quaker who had been murdered by the gaoler’s wife in Colchester Castle during the late seventeenth century.
    At Colchester, in the Norman castle built of Roman bricks, and which rises from the floor of a temple dedicated to the Emperor Claudius, who was a god, there is a fireplace recess just by the entrance in which James Parnell, an eighteen-year-old who had preached to people as they left church on Sunday mornings, had been imprisoned. Parnell called churches ‘ steeple-houses ’ but apart from this he was peaceful and polite. But in Colchester particularly there was a rage against the Society of Friends and the mayor himself, with a band of Quaker-persecutors, would set out in the evenings to rout them out.
    James Parnell had been converted to Quakerdom by George Fox. He had walked from Retford to Carlisle to meet him, this ‘Older in the Truth’. Captured, he was exhibited semi-naked in the fireplace at Colchester prison by the gaoler’s wife, and she and her friends would stand around to watch him climb down a rope to the floor for his food. Eventually, weak and ill, he fell, then died. The magistrates brought in a verdict of ‘suicide by fasting’. ‘I have seen great things,’ the dying boy told the embarrassed crowd.
    At Friends House in Euston Square there is no doubt that he would have been a great writer. To me Parnell is a saint. I ‘hear’ him speaking and maybe singing. When I was taken to the new Meeting House at Bury St Edmunds I enquired, ‘Do Quakers sing?’ ‘If the spirit leads we do.’ So I hear music when I think of thismartyrdom. I would like to have talked to Ben about Quaker song.
    One day I told this story to Imogen who guessed that I would tell it to Ben. We were working in her flat. Her alarm was real.
    ‘Oh, you mustn’t, dear. Promise me you won’t! He
hates
suggestions. Oh, please don’t tell him!’
    ‘I won’t, Imo … I won’t. I understand.’
    Although I didn’t, not at that moment.
    This ancient panic about not making any suggestions caught up with me as I wrote to Britten about Peter Hall’s
Akenfield
film. But he was easy, businesslike and approving. ‘What a good idea. Come over!’ So I introduced Peter Hall to him. I don’t think that they had met before. Peter, Ben, and I and perhaps Peter Pears and Rex Pyke, sat on the Red House steps in sunshine. Ben was easy, seemingly very happy, affectionate. He and Peter Hall got on well. Much later Peter would direct
Albert Herring
at Glyndebourne – with Suffolk accents – but now he was in imaginative full grasp of the nature of the
Akenfield
film. It would be Pasolini in Suffolk. Later Ben and I had our ritual walk round the garden.
    The outcome of all this would be as tragic as Parnell’s brief existence. One of the countless ways to raise money for the Snape Concert Hall was for me to anthologise the twenty-five Programme Books. They were remarkable and nothing quite like them existed in the concert world. Beautifully and individuallydesigned, printed on good heavy paper, filled with East Anglian natural history as well as architectural history, gloriously illustrated by Kurt Hutton’s photographs, and with drawings and paintings, they were a Suffolk library in themselves.