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

One morning John Jacob, now the Festival Secretary, arrived at my house with a carload of them and everything pertaining to them and told me, ‘Ben says make a book from them.’ There was the customary Aldeburgh hurry to get something done by yesterday. And there would be a hundred signed copies at
£
10. Ben said, ‘Who is going to pay
£
10 for a book?’ Faber Music, Britten’s publisher at the time, published it in 1972, and Ben, Peter, Imogen and I sat in the Festival office for hours, pushing the special edition from hand to hand as we wrote our names. It was a lovely day with the sun blazing through the windows and the sea benign.
    Afterwards, coming down the stairs, Ben allowed Imogen and Peter Pears to go ahead. Then he said, ‘I can’t do the
Akenfield
score. I am ill. I have to have an operation. I’m sorry.’ I noticed that his usual lined face had been smoothed out with cortisone or some such drug. I was shocked. I didn’t know about his heart. We walked along the Crag Path in silence. The towers were as normal. Fishermen lounged as usual. The gulls cried perpetually. After a few steps he hugged me and went ahead. It was the last time I would see him other than as the grey shade at the rear of the brick ArtisticDirectors’ box in the Maltings, where, usually in an overcoat, he would enter just before the performance, the ghost of his own reality.
    When Denis and Jane Garrett and I went to Snape we would walk through the reedbeds to Iken, where St Botolph had his cell. All the way there was reed-whispering , and now and then the noisy rise of a bird. Britten had a hankering for his grave to be made in these reeds but it was out of the question. So much water. Thus Bob and Doris Ling, caretakers at the Maltings and before that gravediggers, compromised by lining his grave in the churchyard with these now still reeds. I never walk to Snape along the Sailors’ Path without hearing the music of
Curlew River
. There was initial consternation when Peter Pears sang the part of a woman looking for her son but the sometimes curious pitch of his voice, the loneliness and hauntedness, made it a memorable choice. These reed marshes make the sea appear far away. They create an optical illusion through which the old thatchers would chop their way. In and around them there would be constant toil. They set oriental standards in Suffolk, and, like the Fens, they promised poor health for their toilers. But the east winds seem less bitter there. These reedbeds and their subsequent marshlands have made a contrasting coastal universe, each with its separate sounds and climates, each with its scuttling occupants. Britten would wander along the wet paths, his curly head coming and goingthrough the dense reedheads. He liked company on his car jaunts but here he would usually be glimpsed walking alone. This, and on an Aldeburgh marsh, was where he got away. Although crowds were part of him. He was gregarious by nature and often he seemed to thrive in company and to find his own silence within it. This would amaze me.
    The doctor had told Ben that he could complete his
Death in Venice
before the heart operation but nothing else. The operation was a disaster. He was fifty-nine. I was looking after John Nash when Britten died in 1976 and we watched his funeral on Anglia Television as it climbed up the hill. The hill which he would almost run up to meet Imogen when she briefly lived at Brown Acres behind the church, and up which she walked to bring me a cake. ‘It’s your birthday!’ or ‘It’s my birthday !’ Although it was neither.
    Peter Hall and I sat on the grass at Charsfield thinking whose music we should now have for our film. He had a cassette player and we listened to a bar or two of Elgar’s First Symphony. No. Then he said, ‘Do you know this?’ It was Michael Tippett’s moodily brilliant
Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli
and its suitability caused us to scramble to our feet with relief. It was