bats. The faint Sunday sounds of rural ‘rest’. Benjamin Britten had set some of Arthur Waley’s translations from the Chinese. Julian Bream played and Peter Pears sang. In the kitchen Hephzibah Menuhin and I tiptoed around setting out a hundred cups, and sometimes we crept to the door to watch as well as listen. Many of the songs were a thousand or more years old. Each one of them brief and fleeting. After an hour, maybe, came the ritual applause and bows. Ben left hurriedly; brushing past us on his way to the kitchen he muttered, ‘Pearls before swine’, but with a grin. Hephzibah and I looked at each other like people who have made a wrong judgement – who had not understood. Yet ever since, this Chinese/Suffolk singing has never left my ears.
The audience was released into the garden, all chatter and teaspoons, and more like freed chickens than swine. But who can say what is heard and not heard, felt or not felt? Before going to bed I looked up Arthur Waley inan anthology. When is the translator the poet? I read his version of ‘The Temple’ by Po Chu-i, which is a kind of Chinese George Herbert narration in which the poet makes a pilgrimage over pebbles to a place called the Settled Heart Stone. It is close to where Buddha preached his sutras and where the first monastery was founded. Peter Pears’s wailing voice led us to it, although in other ‘pathway’ words.
Benjamin Britten, like myself, had been drawn into the magic of Great Glemham House from the very beginning. The early Festival itself was made up in these rooms. There were photos of Ben – Shetland sweater, Peter – cricket jumper, Imogen – nameless skirts, and Eric Crozier – open-necked, in a circle of armchairs. And of Fidelity herself giving them anything they needed which she possessed.
The notorious rift when Eric Crozier would no longer be part of the circle was the only thing which was never explained to me. Not that I ever asked. His words are sung to so much of Britten’s early music, and his advice to found the Aldeburgh Festival had been so right, had resulted in such a successful venture, that his sudden absence made me pensive. He and his wife Nancy Evans lived in a cottage just behind mine. Our gardens came together in a pointed hedge, and we would talk through the leaves, when I would sometimes sense a great hurt and fury. It would be years later when I was working on an anthology of the Festival’squarter-century existence, and I came to Eric for information, and when he called several times to see if he was included, that the size of the injustice done to him became apparent. Yet he did not explain, and his look forbade me to ask. Did he see in me a loyalty to the Britten and Holst camp? ‘How strange of you not to ask outright what had happened,’ people say, ‘you being neighbours.’ But my not knowing was a kind of benefit. He and I and Nancy remained, rather absurdly, ‘ next-door neighbours’, and we gave each other fruit and veg over the hedge. I complimented Eric on his libretto for
Let’s Make an Opera
in which he and Ben had put all the Gathorne-Hardy children. Also on his words for Ben’s
Saint Nicolas
cantata, in which I had sung when it was first performed in Aldeburgh Church.
There would be other blow-ups anon. People going off like the Maidstone gun. Fidelity’s scathing sanity. Not to mention her frank enjoyment of the tantrums. And always, behind this, her enduring love.
6 Meeting Ben
Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten shopping in Aldeburgh High Street
In May 1955 Mr Cullum the bank manager sat me in his office to scold me for being
£
25 overdrawn. I told him that a cheque for this amount was on its way from the
London Magazine
but he was not assured. No more for me from Barclays until I was cleansed of debt. His son Jeremy was Benjamin Britten’s secretary and tennis partner, and Mr Cullum himself was the lover of Eliza beth Sweeting, the Festival Manager. Unbeknown to me, debt and
The audience was released into the garden, all chatter and teaspoons, and more like freed chickens than swine. But who can say what is heard and not heard, felt or not felt? Before going to bed I looked up Arthur Waley inan anthology. When is the translator the poet? I read his version of ‘The Temple’ by Po Chu-i, which is a kind of Chinese George Herbert narration in which the poet makes a pilgrimage over pebbles to a place called the Settled Heart Stone. It is close to where Buddha preached his sutras and where the first monastery was founded. Peter Pears’s wailing voice led us to it, although in other ‘pathway’ words.
Benjamin Britten, like myself, had been drawn into the magic of Great Glemham House from the very beginning. The early Festival itself was made up in these rooms. There were photos of Ben – Shetland sweater, Peter – cricket jumper, Imogen – nameless skirts, and Eric Crozier – open-necked, in a circle of armchairs. And of Fidelity herself giving them anything they needed which she possessed.
The notorious rift when Eric Crozier would no longer be part of the circle was the only thing which was never explained to me. Not that I ever asked. His words are sung to so much of Britten’s early music, and his advice to found the Aldeburgh Festival had been so right, had resulted in such a successful venture, that his sudden absence made me pensive. He and his wife Nancy Evans lived in a cottage just behind mine. Our gardens came together in a pointed hedge, and we would talk through the leaves, when I would sometimes sense a great hurt and fury. It would be years later when I was working on an anthology of the Festival’squarter-century existence, and I came to Eric for information, and when he called several times to see if he was included, that the size of the injustice done to him became apparent. Yet he did not explain, and his look forbade me to ask. Did he see in me a loyalty to the Britten and Holst camp? ‘How strange of you not to ask outright what had happened,’ people say, ‘you being neighbours.’ But my not knowing was a kind of benefit. He and I and Nancy remained, rather absurdly, ‘ next-door neighbours’, and we gave each other fruit and veg over the hedge. I complimented Eric on his libretto for
Let’s Make an Opera
in which he and Ben had put all the Gathorne-Hardy children. Also on his words for Ben’s
Saint Nicolas
cantata, in which I had sung when it was first performed in Aldeburgh Church.
There would be other blow-ups anon. People going off like the Maidstone gun. Fidelity’s scathing sanity. Not to mention her frank enjoyment of the tantrums. And always, behind this, her enduring love.
6 Meeting Ben
Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten shopping in Aldeburgh High Street
In May 1955 Mr Cullum the bank manager sat me in his office to scold me for being
£
25 overdrawn. I told him that a cheque for this amount was on its way from the
London Magazine
but he was not assured. No more for me from Barclays until I was cleansed of debt. His son Jeremy was Benjamin Britten’s secretary and tennis partner, and Mr Cullum himself was the lover of Eliza beth Sweeting, the Festival Manager. Unbeknown to me, debt and
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