The Time by the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

always by car, never on foot.
    John and Paul Nash, and their sister Barbara, were the children of a Buckinghamshire lawyer, William Nash, who became the Recorder of Abingdon. All three were inspired by the Chilterns’ beechwoods and chalky escarpments, and by such strange phenomena as theancient tumuli known as Wittenham Clumps. They lived at Iver Heath, then the deepest countryside during those pre-First World War days. One of their aunts had been engaged to Edward Lear and it was at her house that John first became influenced by comic drawings, as well as by Lear’s pale and exquisite watercolours of his travels. Both Paul and John were ‘pointed’ to painting by literature, this and their profound understanding of both the mystery and the practical lie of the land. It was John’s first intention to become a writer, and he apprenticed himself as a teenager to a local newspaper, learning shorthand and trying to learn style. But in 1912 a friend of Paul’s, the artist Claughton Pellew, took him off on a walking tour in Norfolk, talked to him, showed him what he was really seeing, which was line and colour, not words and plots, and sent him home to Iver determined now to paint, not write. His father, hearing the news, said John, cleared a space on the dining table and said, ‘You had better do it here.’ Paul was studying at the Slade. Should John go to an art school? ‘No,’ advised his brother. ‘The teaching will destroy the special “thing” which you possess, so teach yourself.’ It was daring advice but it proved right. I always remember old Mr Nash’s making a space on the table and saying ‘Do it here’ when John used to make a space for me on his painting table just before setting off on his work-holidays, so that I could write. But writers don’t like north-facing studios, so I would find a sunnierspot, although not confessing to this as I used to think that it would hurt his feelings to have his favourite worktop rejected. Ivy grew in a dense curtain across the studio windows and, when I tugged some of it off to let in light and view, John would murmur, ‘Poor ivy.’
    John’s discovery of Wormingford was partly due to the suggestion of Sir William Montagu-Pollock that he would find much to excite him in East Anglia – hence Christine’s search for a painting place near Framlingham . Thus two quite casual invitations to the area were to have far-reaching consequences. Claughton Pellew’s made him a painter; Sir William’s eventually led him to Bottengoms. Such are the small incidents which define what we are and where we should settle. For the whole of the Thirties the Stour Valley alternated with Cornwall and other places as a working-holiday venue. During John and Christine’s second visit in the summer of 1930, the old Mill burned down, and the nice clapboard bungalow with it. John’s sister Barbara was staying with them and she told me how they managed to rescue some of his pictures from the flames, though not all. This experience resulted in spasms of acute fire-anxiety later on, when they would beg me never to burn paper or ‘run with the lamps’, something I would never do, having been brought up with oil lamps. Christine loved their soft yellow light and the heat they generated , and their tongues of flame, so Pentecostal and comforting. She put off having electricity for ages sothat she didn’t have to give them up. For me they were glowing reminders of childhood, with their paraffin scented wicks and ‘Swan’ glass chimneys. Later at Bottengoms there would be Aladdin lamps with mantels and fat, battered parchment shades.
    For most of the time between the wars the Nashes were living at Meadle in Buckinghamshire. It was there that John did much of his remarkable wood engraving, where he began to make friends with great gardeners such as Clarence Elliott who owned the Six Hills Nursery at Stevenage, and where he painted a whole series of landscapes whose subtle mixture of