All language subtitles for Ronald Blythe - Working at Home (1983)

BIRDSONG

I was going to say that
it all began very simply,

going off to the Suffolk coast
to be a writer.

But, looking back, I can see that
it all began most precariously.

I can remember the actual day.

It was January
and snow was falling on the sea.

The situation was ordinary enough
in its way.

A young man beginning
to get published,

thick jerseys, a bike,

and just enough money to last
a few months if I was spartan.

But the real beginning
was childhood, of course.

As a boy from a rural family
apparently existing on air,

I saw a very little world indeed.

East Anglia was for me no more than
a tight circle of villages

around a market town,
plus an annually visited beach,

or rather a slipping wall
of cold shingle

which the sea monotonously
piled up and pulled down.

I felt the same parochial
tenderness about this sea

as I did about the meadows.

Fields, really, gone to weed because
of the agricultural depression.

As I sighted this quite
unimaginably immense liquid wall

at the end of the coast road,

with the Rotterdam-Harwich shipping
riding its horizon,

I can still recall how it sometimes
revoked everything I felt

for the interior.

The sea makes us treacherous.

It captures our senses and makes us
faithless to the land.

I found myself in a different state
by the sea.

Not freed, but in another kind
of captivity.

The entire ecology changes
long before one even suspects

the presence of the Suffolk sea.

A 12-mile belt of what we call
sandlings produces heaths

and coniferous forests -
pale, airy villages,

like meadows
and vast cloud formations.

This is the country of our
7th century Swedish kings

who lie buried in their ships
at Sutton Hoo and whose palace

is somewhere under the huge
NATO bomber base at Bentwaters.

JET ENGINE ROARS

Screaming sea birds and screaming
planes on practice runs

and often profound silences.

Also a cutting wind
and an intriguing marine flora,

which between them forced the gaze
downwards to the ground.

What half entranced, half shocked me
about this coast as a boy

was its prodigious wastefulness.

Here, nature was humanly
unmanageable and did what it liked.

Considering that a number
of important friendships

were getting themselves
established at this time,

it's strange that I still see it
as full of isolation.

These friends included my first
friends for life, as they say.

Most importantly, James Turner.

Turner was a fine nature poet.

We were both publishers' readers

and a lugubrious running
conversation

on how hard we had to toil at
this task went on for years.

But we both rather enjoyed it
and I think we were very good at it.

Although they contain close
literary and other friendships,

I still remember those beginning
years as intensely solitary.

MUSIC: Peter Grimes, Op. 33,
Interlude V by Benjamin Britten

This is where I began
to shape my new life.

I burned driftwood at night
and walked many miles every day.

I walked partly along the beach

and partly in the stories
I was working on.

I wrote in what a friend,
who found me this little house

by the North Sea,
called my solarium -

an old-fashioned sealed glass room
built out towards the sea

and which caught the sun
south, east and west.

To the north were the marshes

and the farmhouse which
Benjamin Britten was later to buy.

And there was a novel
lying on the windowsill.

It was called Indigo
by Christine Weston.

A novel about India.

It was the first book I read
as a writer in this house.

Although I seem to have stayed put,
I've always been enthralled

by travel and I like its
imaginative use in literature.

It was here at Aldeburgh that
both the local and world view,

if you like,
became far less separated

than they are usually
imagined to be.

A very great deal of reading
went on here.

My first poets were the poets
of the Second World War.

That is the poetry I began to buy.

Sidney Keys and the dazzling
Keith Douglas. Both killed.

I also read Auden and Eliot,
of course, and Edwin Muir.

But this listing of a few names
doesn't describe at all

what was happening to me then
in reading terms.

Sartre said people read

because they want to write

and that reading was a form of
rewriting, and I think this is true.

This beginner's house was found
for me by Christine Nash,

the wife of the artist John Nash.

She was the kind of woman who made
sure that you wouldn't plunge

out of your depth before she pushed
you off the diving board.

She had a gift for making cautious
people momentarily incautious

when it was absolutely necessary.

This is her when she was 18 in 1913.

It's a self-portrait.

She was a student at the Slade
at the time and sharing rooms

with Dora Carrington,
who told John Nash to marry her,

which he did towards the end
of the First World War.

They were middle age
when I met them.

Part of a group of painters
and writers who had come to live

in East Anglia immediately
after the last war.

It included Sir Cedric Morris

and the Canadian artist Hugh Cronyn,

who painted Christine
when she was old,

the Irish poet W.R. Rogers,

and, of course, James Turner.

It was Turner's form of conspiracy

which meant the most to me
at this time.

His very English mixture
of fierce opinions and delicacy.

It was James Turner who opened
the door of the West to me,

as Hardy wrote.

He used to come to Aldeburgh
quite often.

He stayed in this house
with a man named Edward Clodd

who popularised the writings
of Darwin and Thomas Huxley.

And he and other rationalists
used to come and stay here

during the First World War.

This house is built on
what they call the Crag Path,

and Benjamin Britten lived a little
further along on the other side.

It's called the Crag Path
because it's made of Coralline Crag

from the Plio-Pleistocene period,
which I've always thought

was a good address
for Victorian evolutionists.

When I think of Ben or the Nashes
or James Turner

or a surprising number of these
friends at the beginning,

if I can describe them like this,

I recognise a strong absence
of elegy in myself...

..for some of them are dead
and yet at the same time living,

because I'm living.

I suppose that must be it.

I sometimes read James Turner's
poems to Suffolk schoolchildren

when I go to talk to them
about books and writers

for the Eastern Arts Association's
Writers in School scheme.

I've never been a teacher
so it's all rather a novelty.

This poet, who was a friend
of mine, who's now dead,

lived in this village,

and one day the old man
who had to wind the clock up

and had done all his life
was too ill to go up the tower,

and rather than have the clock stop,

my friend, the writer, went up
each week to wind it up.

The clock was enormously old,
about 250 years old,

so he wrote this poem
and I'm going to read it to you.

It's called Church Clock Winding.

"So the men, the ancient men,
the men with curiously cut clothes,

"were this small.

"Small as this doorway in the arch
leading to steps

"cut like an apple core from
the rubble upthrust of the tower.

"43 triangular steps go upward
to the clock chamber.

"43 to that room.

"Then upwards still another
rock-hewn flight.

"The iron tongued, silent,
listless bells

"holding long echoes
of forgotten sound.

"And so the men, the ancient men,

"toiled 43 steps upward
with their clock,

"a huge black jangling
of wheels and cogs,

"steel ropes
and one great pendulum -

"a cyclops eye swinging eternally.

"But the men, the ancient men
who have no names,

"who brought here the clock
to mark the hours

"of their own
and others' lives and deaths,

"where are they now?"

Now, if you go up a church tower,
you think once a week

or once a month, somebody perhaps
for several generations

had to go up and wind
that great thing up,

which you can hear ticking away.

What I prefer really
is not reading poems

but speaking poems.

There were poets,
great poets like John Clare,

who I hope you'll read one day,
who used to have to,

because he had so much work to do,
as it were,

speak their poems aloud in the
daytime while they were doing...

He was doing farm work,
ploughing and things like that,

because he hadn't got the time
to write them down.

He had to memorise them. This is
how the poets shared the Bible,

like the people wrote the psalms...

CLASSICAL MUSIC

The village lies folded away
in one of the shallow valleys

which dip into the East Anglian
coastal plain.

It is not a particularly
striking place.

It says little at first meeting.

It occupies a little isthmus
of London clay

jutting from Suffolk's famous
shelly sands and is approached by

a spidery lane running off from the
bit of straight, as they call it,

meaning a handsome stretch of
Roman road apparently going nowhere.

It is the kind of road which hurries
one past the situation.

Centuries of traffic must
have passed within yards

of Akenfield without noticing it.

Akenfield was a combination
of witness, my own witness

and that of three generations,

and what you might call
the home-fed imagination.

I wrote it in this house
in which I lived for a long time.

16 years.

It was as good a place as any for
assessing oneself in the merry '60s,

although not for assessing
the world, you might think.

The road in front
was a kind of clock.

6:30, the farm men
and the road men on their bikes.

8:30, the schoolchildren on theirs

and office workers' cars
going to Ipswich.

And all the seasonal traffic,
of course.

Drills, pea lorries, harvesters.

A few yards away at the back,
it was totally different.

No time at all.

Just these ditches
and vast uncut may hedges,

which surrounded the fields
belonging to the house

when it was a farm.

On Saturday afternoons, the village
football club played visiting teams

in the meadow next to the house
with almost no spectators.

I used to laugh and say that
the house and its surroundings

were minimal situations which
encouraged a writer like myself

to fill them out
with my imagination.

But this was just a sort of
defensive thing one tells people.

Nothing around here
was minimal to me.

This place was a full
and intricate restatement

of everything which
my family had heard

and seen and understood
for hundreds of years.

And that was what Akenfield
was really about.

All my great elms have disappeared.

Those by the road had been broken
by a crashed plane

during the war, they said.

I dug up a lot of this plane -
a Spitfire,

when I made the kitchen garden
in 1960.

There were rusty instruments
full of worms

and thin metal panels
spread out under the grass.

Debbage Aerodrome was close by.

It was a marvellous walking place.

Larks and flowers.

There's something awful
about old concrete.

Something both squalid and sad,

like the crumbling stadiums
in Germany

where the Nazis used to
hold their rallies.

My anthology of the poetry and
stories of the Second World War,

called Writing in a War,
was inspired by this aerodrome

to some extent.

Old aerodromes
are very potent places.

"They told me when they cut
the ready wheat,

"the hares are suddenly homeless
and afraid

"and aimlessly run the stubble
with scared feet,

"finding no homes in sunlight
or in shade.

"It's morning, and the Hamptons
have returned.

"The crews are home, have stretched
and laughed and gone.

"Whence the planes came
and the bright neon burned,

"the sun has ridden the sky
and made the dawn.

"He walks distraught,
circling the landing ground,

"waiting the last one in
that won't come back.

"And like those hares,
he wanders 'round and 'round,

"lost and desolate on
the close-cropped track."

It's wonderful land all around here.

Some of the finest corn land
in Britain

came back from the wars, as it were.

Now the Akenfield harvests are cut
where the bombers were stationed.

ENGINE RUMBLES

"I'm a man on my own.

"I'm not interfered with much.

"I'm on the plough
and that's where I keep.

"I'm alone nearly all my work time
but I can't say that I feel lonely.

"Not ever. Not at all.

"People say, "There's Derek by
himself, up on the great old field,

""turning 'round, going back.

""He's lonely. He must be lonely."

"Not at all.

"What is lonely? I'm watching
the whole time, you see.

"I might have more than 100 birds
in my wake.

"It's surprisingly interesting.

"The gulls are with me, but now
and then it's nice to see a face

"and have a chat.

"Some people come past and speak
and that's good. Makes a break.

"After all, I'm a man, not a bird,
but, honestly...

"..if I knew that I was lonely,
I would pack it up tomorrow.

This is Charsfield Church, which
is my parish church for many years.

I could only have been
about ten or 11

when I first began to explore
old churches.

It had more to do with
inquisitiveness and magic

than religion and architecture.

They were all wide open,
morning, noon and night then,

and I used to wander miles
from one to another,

opening their vast carved doors,
climbing belfries,

staring, sniffing their strong
old scents,

reading inscriptions, poking about.

They were like stories
which one could actually enter

or alternative worlds without keys.

You just entered, stared,

listened to a curious sound
made by wind in high rooms

plus a ticking of clocks.

TICKING

"The most compelling building
in every English village and town

"is a parish church.

"It is the most history-soaked
artefact

"in the possession of a community.

"The very silence
of the huge arcaded room

"around which a visitor
casts his eye

"warns him not to draw hollow,
echoing conclusions.

"These are the walls within
which everything was said.

"Centuries of birth words,

"marriage words, law words.

"death words, gossip.

"The language of the hymn poets
and the songwriters.

"Of the Latin and English liturgies

"and the immense Bible translation
language.

"All this language said here
in the local accent.

"This place has witnessed through
the year the very creation

"of literary and colloquial English
as getting on for 1,000 years

"of sermons battered away
at human nature.

"So it is a house of words as well
as a house of wood and stone.

"No old Church can be understood
if one omits the eloquence factor."

Eloquence, too, on the tombstones,
of course.

These are John Constable's aunts
and uncles and cousins.

The Constables were all riverside
farmers and millers,

and John turned their fields and
buildings into what somebody called

part of the landscape
of every English mind.

MUSIC: Rondo Pastorale
by Ralph Vaughan Williams

This is Constable's river
and Gainsborough's river

and my river, too.

Gainsborough was born at Sudbury
where I spent my boyhood.

Acton, the village where I was born,
is about three miles to the east.

We were able to walk to it
entirely by fields and meadows,

and they had old, beautiful names.

The Spring Waters, the Long Pasture.

Of course, you only know a bit
of the river when you're young.

The "stickleback place"
and the "swimming place".

And, here, the "flood gates".

I was very frightened of this bit
of the river when I was a child.

I used to come across, there was a
plank bridge here, with my brother.

This noise of the water.

These are the common lands
of the town.

Tom Gainsborough painted
this portrait of his friends,

Robert Andrews and his wife,

on the hillside overlooking
these water meadows.

They must all three have walked
across them hundreds of times.

This river, the Suffolk Stour,

is the accident which brought
so much of my life together.

My old friend John Nash
first came to paint here,

where it flows through Wormingford,
in 1929.

It was during the summer holidays.

I found a postcard which his wife
had written to her mother,

which said, "Good river scenery.
I think we may stay here."

And they did, for the next 50 years.

Here they are at that moment,
discovering their new river

in a punt at Wormingford Mill.

MUSIC: Eclogue, Op. 10
by Gerald Finzi

They settled, as a matter of fact,
at almost the exact division

between the two river territories
of Constable and Gainsborough.

Not that they would have
thought much about either artist.

Their real passions
were for conversation

and music and gardening.

This is a film made about them in
1968, a few years before they died.

The music is what John
would have called a caper.

PIANO PLAYS

He was always very exact
about his life.

I like order in everything, really.

I like order in the landscape,
so that it suits my purpose

from the simplicity of design
and that sort of thing,

and I look for it.

And if you look long enough,
you can usually find it.

But I don't...

I don't change anything very much.

He was always painting the garden.

He made it during the '40s,
after he'd returned from the war.

It was his real passion.

Later on, I came to live here.

It was all very familiar to me

and had been part of my background
for most of my grown-up life.

But I never feel
that it is my garden.

He used to say,
"I know where everything is."

And of course he did.

He used to tap on the window
when I was weeding

and call out, "Mind your feet!"

And I can occasionally
hear this call still.

What delighted me about them
from the start

was that they never wanted
their friends to know them

and to talk to them
as a married couple,

but always as two people
who are conducting, sometimes,

two separate strands of friendship.

I used to write sitting on a bank
or in a meadow while John sketched.

After dinner, I used to read novels
to them.

We became in some kind of
unexplained, tacit sense, a family,

except that as in one's own family,

and particularly with regards
to one's parents,

instead of turning away
from too close a view,

my interest in them and in everybody
else I met during these years

was intense, penetrating.

Theirs could be, too. And very racy.

It was something they enjoyed in me,
I think - my writer's eye and ear.

It seems easier to describe
what we normally see

than what we normally hear.

We seem to allow the eye
ranges and limitations

which we deny to the ear.

Yet it is likely that
the solitary nature of writing

and the accumulative quiet
in which writers spend

most of their working lives
affects our listening capacity.

I have come to regard even
the most extrovert, colourful

and predictable people as mere
displays of the tip of the iceberg

so far as their full reality
is concerned.

And so the writer has to be
a listener in depth.

Not that he can hope to discover
much more of a fraction

of such a reality.

Yet, by listening to a particularly
individual pattern of words,

catching some telltale emphasis,

or by being able to realise
that something is being said

which a speaker may not
have been able to say before,

the writer is hearing all
those infinite possibilities

and experiences which lie
just under the surface of things.

Great novelists, especially,
have always revealed

historic movement and social change
and transition

in a kind of build up
of seemingly casual talk.

It's the latest model. It's British,
I suppose. That's the main thing.

But here is most of...

The French novelist Michel Tournier
has written a brilliant story

about what it is like to live
without hearing another man's talk.

It is called
Friday, or, The Other Island.

I suppose that all three
of my houses have been

rather like other islands.
Writers' houses tend to.

It is travel in every sense
of the word when I leave here.

When I was editing William Hazlitt,
I was very amused by his notion

of talk in the town
and silence in the country.

He actually hoped for anonymity
in the country.

What a hope!

The smaller the community,
the less cover.

BELLS RING

Work makes me travel,
sometimes abroad.

Usually it's libraries
and committees

in neighbouring towns
like Cambridge.

Two kinds of work,
as a matter of fact.

That to do with research
or a meeting

and that compulsive working
of the imagination

which goes on wherever
a writer happens to be.

In a street,

a train, an art gallery.

I got very intrigued by old age
a few years ago.

Real old age,
not this retirement business.

The final experience.

It struck me that this is a
profoundly interesting time of life

because it spreads over
more naturally

than at any other period
one has lived through into death.

Lots of people told me
that they would like to talk

about their senescence,
not their aches and pains

and pensions, but that it was
far too daring a subject.

My book, The View in Winter,
is a collection of travellers' tales

from the country of the very old.

Only those who have lived
a very long time can say

what it is like to be journeying
through this land.

"Sometimes the old check
on the marks they made

"when they were young.

"Even a signature on a tree

"or like the name which a boy carved
high up inside a Suffolk belfry

"when he was 18, which he climbed
the stairs to look at when he was 90

"and near to having it repeated
on a stone below.

"Often there's an intensely
resurgent interest

"in the long journey, just when
it is about to come to an end.

"It reminds me of Rousseau's

"'I only began to live when I
looked upon myself as dead.'

"It is the nature of old men
and women

"to become their own
confessors, poets,

"philosophers, apologists
and storytellers.

"But no single conclusion
can be deduced from what they say.

"Old age is full of death
and full of life.

"It is a disaster.

"It transcends desire
and is taunted by it.

"It is long enough, but it is
far from being long enough.

"As the poet Ruth Fainlight says,

"assume nothing at all.

"Even to hope that you might live
forever brings the end too close."

BIRDSONG

I still occasionally speculate what
it can be like to live somewhere

where the signposts are not
all pointing to the towns

and villages of childhood.

It is not as if,
as some writers have,

I made a vow to stick to
the home ground, but I never did.

And I've often thought that
there could be benefits

from giving it the slip
for a decade or two.

I could say that it had
some kind of pull, etc...

..but inertia comes into it.

On the other hand, I justify myself,

if a writer has stayed at home,
there is no doubt

that he suffers certain
home pressures

and his way of coping with
such stresses and strains

can be the strength of his work.