The Time by the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page A

night, when we would get up a good blaze of driftwood . Once in early May she thought it would be warm enough to have a swim. I watched her, a tall woman in her late sixties wearing an optimistic straw hat and smoking a cigarette in an amber holder, splashing up and down. ‘Oh, do come in, my dear!’ Life, our multitudinous scraps of it, was a kind of pointillism which we tried to fix into shape. The ultimate joined-up writing. I veered between Tennysonian (Julian) cheerfulness and Hardy-like morbidity and once searched for the little building ‘for washed-up bodies’ in the churchyard.
    At Snape I had seen the gradual emptying of what was almost a malt city. One by one its workers fled. They had once walked or bicycled there in droves; some, after harvest, from as far away as West Suffolk to earn ‘Christmas money’, sleep in sheds and supplement their wages. Newson Garrett’s great enterprise on the sitehad lasted a century. Denis and Jane Garrett and I once went there to stare on that Victorian desolation. A malt barge rocked by the hard. Denis of course was looking at those plants which so soon come to occupy an abandoned site. The marshes were alive with birds. Iken glistened distantly. There seemed to be countless brick buildings all cobwebby, all deserted. We stood under the clock. Like all Victorian entrepreneurs, Newson Garrett worshipped time. The clock was going. We would watch a malthouse become a concert hall. To their horror, Newson and his wife would watch their daughter Elizabeth become a doctor. ‘The whole idea is so disgusting I could not entertain it for a moment!’ declared the father. ‘Oh, the disgrace!’ cried her mother. Snape Maltings at that moment was like ‘Nineveh that great city’ – teeming with workers. Now it was a desolation. But at the same time a starting point for the three of us; Denis would go on to his Cambridge Chair, Jane to become a distinguished social worker in Cambridge, and myself to writing.
    Although at this particular moment at Snape Maltings there were no plans, no sense at all of a common future – only a kind of mutuality, and a comfortableness with each other. And I suppose a taken-for-granted recognition of our always being together in some indefinable fashion. Whether our being deeply rooted in East Anglia in our various ways had anything to do with it, it is impossible to say. I suppose we just ‘fitted’.There was no analysis, just an accepted continuum. Standing under the Maltings arch after there were no more workers left to clock-in timed our future.

4 How I Came to Wormingford
    John Nash at Bottengoms

     

    The time by the sea was also in part the first time deeply inland at Bottengoms, the home of John and Christine Nash, in the village of Wormingford, eight miles north of Colchester. Not unlike Imogen Holst’s dutiful flights to Thaxted in some ways; she to her mother, myself to giving a hand.
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    John Nash first came to Wormingford in June 1929. It was a wet, cold month ‘and I began to tell myself, this is no place at all …’ His wife Christine, always less easily depressed, sent a Judge’s postcard of the Mill to her mother with the message, ‘Good river scenery. Think we may stay here.’ Christine had discovered this particular working-holiday cottage through an advertisement in a local paper, and after a fruitless search around Framlingham for a suitable spot where John could paint. Throughout her married life, making such reconnaissances, often two or three each year, ‘were part of my job’, she said. ‘I don’t wish to boast, but it was only the places which I did not go to look at first that weren’t successful.’ During the early years of their marriage she had vetted these painting locations by bicycle, pedalling for long distances all over southern England,and along the Gower peninsula, to find landscapes for John’s sketchbooks. These he would fill with pencil and wash drawings, complete with weather and colour