Ronald Blythe's reminiscences of his time spent in Aldeburgh in the 1950s, helping with the running of the Festival there, reads like a Who's Who of the arts world. The Time by the Sea includes affectionate vignettes of friends such as Benjamin Britten, John Nash, E.M. Forster, but is as good on the 'walk-ons', the people who were not household names but who were nevertheless a grounding or enriching presence among the artists, writers and musicians: " ... Connie Winn who I used to think had escaped from a novel by E.F. Benson," "Millie the housekeeper, a mite unsteady by seven o'clock."
Cedric Morris is one of those with a chapter to himself, and this line particularly caught my eye: "I was always intrigued by his catlike satisfaction with present time. It caused his days to become so long that, in spite of a stream of visitors, an enormous amount of painting and gardening - and teaching - managed to get done." That's an attribute worth cultivating.
Ronald Blythe clearly has a gift for friendship, and his intimates and acquaintances - whether direct or at one or two removes - stretch across the years to form a web of connections as distinctive as the East Anglian landscape it overlays, his memories as evocative of person and place as any artist's rendering.
He has spent most of his life inland, but when he initially went to stay on the coast at Thorpeness it was to get on with a book: "Setting down the first words of a first novel was not unlike putting a toe in the North Sea when the weather warmed up. How far dare I go? There was a page of Quink then a page of Olympia typewriter letters. I saw that I was methodical if nothing [...] I had never slept so near to the sea before, not even in Cornwall. It was marvellously monotonous and apparently safe, unable to make the few yards to where I lay, a sea on a cosmic leash, rushing at me then pulled back. Yet it sucked at my pillow and clinked its shingly trinkets at my ear. It bayed and hissed and implored, and would do so for ever. I felt it dragging my new purpose from me. I told it, 'Wait until after breakfast and then you can have me, gale or no gale.'"
For more from Ronald Blythe, here's a post on In the Artist's Garden.