Benjamin Britten Read online

  Among Edith Britten’s circle of musical acquaintances was Audrey Alston, a clergyman’s wife who lived at Framingham Earl, just south of Norwich. Her son John was almost the same age as Benjamin; the two boys would play duets together, each mother privately certain that her own son would be the greater musician. Audrey herself was the viola player in the Norwich String Quartet and in 1923, when he was ten years old, she took Benjamin on as a viola pupil. She was evidently a fine musician and a gifted teacher, but her influence was to be even more momentous in other ways. Firstly, and most simply, she got Ben away from Kirkley Cliff Road, Lowestoft, which contained his entire life: family, home, piano teacher, pre-prep school and prep school. Secondly, she encouraged him to attend concerts in Norwich: since his father refused to have either a gramophone or a radio in the house, his childhood experience of live performance had been restricted to what was possible in the sitting room or at church (he said that his early knowledge of orchestral music came from ‘ploughing through the great symphonies’ in piano duet arrangements with family or friends). Thirdly, she was a friend of the composer Frank Bridge, who stayed with the Alstons when he conducted The Sea at the Norwich Triennial Festival in October 1924 and again three years later when he returned to conduct the premiere of the festival’s commission, Enter Spring. On this occasion, Audrey Alston introduced her promising pupil, still a thirteen-year-old in his last year at prep school, to the composer: it was a meeting which was to have the most profoundly influential and far-reaching consequences for Benjamin Britten’s musical future.

  Thus, the answer to the simpler question – ‘Where did his musical skills come from?’ – is actually quite straightforward: from his genes; from his mother and his uncle; from a piano teacher in Suffolk and a viola teacher in Norfolk; from home and church. In all this, his experience was not so different from that of thousands of other children: when he claimed, in 1968, to have ‘come from a very ordinary middle-class family’,8 he was almost telling the truth. Attempting to answer the more difficult question – ‘Where did his music come from?’ – will suggest, among other things, why that ‘almost’ is there.

  We need, first of all, to return to Kirkley Cliff: to the fact that it is, precisely, a cliff, although a fairly modest one. The sound of the North Sea – or the German Ocean, as it was still called in 1913 – rattling over the pebbled beach and beating against it was Ben’s constant childhood companion from the day he was born; he once told Donald Mitchell that ‘the sound of rushing water’9 was his earliest memory, although to his sister Beth he said, more prosaically, that the sound he remembered was the gas hissing as he was born. As a boy, he would spend hours on the beach below the family home, often playing a solitary version of tennis against the concrete wall at the foot of the cliff; he was a strong swimmer, too, unintimidated by rough seas or tricky cross-currents. Even when he was a student in London he longed to return to the sea; and, from the moment he bought the Old Mill at Snape in 1937 until his death in 1976, his own permanent home would always be within a mile or two of it. He always needed, he said in 1960, ‘that particular kind of atmosphere that the house on the edge of the sea provides’.10 But if the North Sea can be companionable, it can also be destructive. The Brittens’ aptly named Nanny Walker always took the children on interesting afternoon walks and, when asked where they were going, liked to reply, ‘There and back to see how far it is’:11 a favourite destination was nearby Pakefield, so they could discover whether any more houses had lately fallen over the cliff. Today, the lanes there still peter out uncertainly where other vanished lanes should be, while the parish church stands within a few feet of the coastal path, rather than in a village centre. And the sea has a further effect on the lives of those who grow up or live adjacent to it: the ordinarily accessible world is reduced by half. The inland dweller has four points of the compass and all the directions in between to choose from; the inhabitant of Lowestoft cannot, except by swimming or taking a boat, go anywhere in the 180 degrees between north and south via east. Suffolk coastal places share a sense of being at the end of the road: this genius loci contains feelings of limitation and restraint which can also be intensely creative.

  Secondly, there is the matter of young Benjamin’s relationship with his family. His sister Beth said that their mother spoilt her younger son terribly: there was some excuse, for he had been dangerously ill with pneumonia at the age of three months and may only have survived because Edith, who was breastfeeding him, ‘expressed the milk, and fed him with a fountain-pen filler, [when] he was too weak to suck’.12 It was fortunate for Ben, Beth thought, that he hadn’t been an only child, for in that case Edith’s devotion might have been calamitously suffocating; but in crucial respects he was an only child. His brother, with whom he didn’t especially get on, was six years older: too distant, in the telescoped time scheme of childhood, to be useful as a near-contemporary companion and for much of the time away from home as a boarder at Oakham School. His sisters were largely excluded from his private world of music, although Beth would make an exception for the military bands who played on the South Pier, especially the Grenadier Guards, ‘for both Ben and I had a crush on the conductor and would dare each other to speak to him’.13 However, the whole family would participate in plays and pantomimes: at the age of six, Benjamin appeared at the local Sparrow’s Nest Theatre in a production of Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, playing the part of Tom, ‘dressed in skin-coloured tights with tiny fins sewn to his shoulders and heels’.14 He also wrote plays of his own, often about what he called ‘The Royal Falily’ (an early and curiously prescient enthusiasm), as well as poems with excruciating Cole Porteresque rhymes: ‘Poor wee pussie cat! / Oh! a matter of fact, / you’re much nicer / than all the mice er!!!’15 But these were in every sense diversions from the main focus of his creative talent. That Robert Britten could appear to be sternly unsympathetic – ‘hard’ on his younger son is a word that recurs in contemporary recollections of him – seems simply to have strengthened Benjamin’s musical resolve, as well as helping to shape a ruthlessly competitive side of his character which was strikingly unlike any stereotype of the sensitive, introverted composer.

  Mr Britten made a decent living from dentistry; but with a house to run, including servants and nannies, and four children to educate at fee-paying schools, his resources were often stretched; he was, said his younger daughter, ‘not a mean man, but expenses weighed heavily on him’.16 The composer’s ‘ordinary middle-class’ background certainly included the ordinary middle-class game of keeping up appearances. One such appearance, as we’ve already seen, was the impression created for visitors and passers-by that the household was continually engaged in civilised music-making. Another was the Brittens’ Sunday-morning departure for church in the family car: once there, however, Robert would drop off his wife and children before driving away to call on patients, invariably ending up at a farmhouse pub in the appropriately named village of Sotterley; after Sunday lunch, he would wallow in his weekly hot bath (he took cold baths on weekdays) before setting off to enjoy an evening with his chums at the Royal Yacht Club in Lowestoft. It’s a useful reminder that Robert was a more complex character than he may have at first appeared: although he was a conventionally authoritarian father, who expected his children to stand when he entered a room, there was also a hint of rebellious independence about him. In this combination of opposites, he suddenly seems much more like his younger son than we might otherwise have guessed.

  Benjamin’s childhood geographical environment and the tensions within his family both fostered the sense of apartness which is a prerequisite of creativity. So – a little more surprisingly, since it offered nothing in the way of musical education – did his prep school, South Lodge.

  2

  Britten supplied his own account of his schooldays at South Lodge in the sleeve note he contributed to the 1955 Decca recording – by the New Symphony Orchestra of London, conducted by Eugene Goossens – of his Simple Symphony:
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  Once upon a time there was a prep-school boy. He was called Britten mi., his initials were E.B., his age was nine, and his locker was number seventeen. He was quite an ordinary little boy; he took his snake-belt to bed with him; he loved cricket, only quite liked football (although he kicked a pretty ‘corner’); he adored mathematics, got on all right with history, was scared by Latin Unseen; he behaved fairly well, only ragged the recognised amount, so that his contacts with the cane or the slipper were happily rare (although one nocturnal expedition to stalk ghosts left its marks behind); he worked his way up the school slowly and steadily, until at the age of thirteen he reached that pinnacle of importance and grandeur never to be quite equalled in later days: the head of the Sixth, head-prefect, and Victor Ludorum. But … there was one curious thing about this boy: he wrote music. His friends bore with it, his enemies kicked a bit but not for long (he was quite tough), the staff couldn’t object if his work and games didn’t suffer. He wrote lots of it, reams and reams of it. I don’t really know when he had time to do it. In those days, long ago, prep-school boys didn’t have much free time; the day started with early work at 7.30, and ended (if you were lucky not to do extra prep.) with prayers at 8.0 – and the hours in between were fully organised. Still there were odd moments in bed, there were half holidays and Sundays too, and somehow these reams and reams got written. And they are still lying in an old cupboard to this day – string quartets (six of them); twelve piano sonatas; dozens of songs; sonatas for violin, sonatas for viola and ’cello too; suites, waltzes, rondos, fantasies, variations; a tone-poem Chaos and Cosmos; a tremendous symphony, for gigantic orchestra including eight horns and oboe d’amore (started on January 17 and finished February 28); an oratorio called Samuel; all the opus numbers from 1 to 100 were filled (and catalogued) by the time Britten mi. was fourteen.

  Of course they aren’t very good, these works; inspiration didn’t always run very high, and the workmanship wasn’t always academically sound, and although our composer looked up oboe d’amore in the orchestra books, he hadn’t much of an idea of what it sounded like; besides, for the sake of neatness, every piece had to end precisely at the bottom of the right-hand page, which doesn’t always lead to a satisfactory conclusion. No, I’m afraid they aren’t very great; but when Benjamin Britten, a proud young composer of twenty (who’d already had a work broadcast), came along and looked in this cupboard, he found some of them not too uninteresting; and so, rescoring them for strings, changing bits here and there, and making them more fit for general consumption, he turned them into a SIMPLE SYMPHONY, and here it is.17

  Subjecting a sleeve note to close reading might seem odd, but this is an extraordinary document. We need to bear in mind the date, 1955, for two reasons: firstly, because the archness of tone, though unquestionably present, would have seemed far less obtrusive at the time; secondly, because the recent spate of high-profile homosexual arrests and prosecutions – Britten himself was interviewed by the police in December 1953 – made this a dangerous moment for self-revelation. But self-revelation there certainly is, if we care to look for it. To start with, there is the insistence, exactly consistent with his assertion that he came ‘from a very ordinary middle-class family’ but contradicted by almost everything else in the piece, that ‘Britten minor’ – his brother Bobby would have been styled ‘Britten major’ – was ‘quite an ordinary little boy’. In the opening lines, ‘quite’ appears no fewer than four times, and on each occasion its qualifying effect is crucial: here, it means that he wasn’t at all ordinary. In ‘only quite liked football’, it firmly implies that there was something wrong with football, rather than with Britten minor, whose ability to rise above this mundane game is at once confirmed by his kicking ‘a pretty “corner”’ as a casually parenthetical skill. The ‘pinnacle of importance and grandeur never to be quite equalled’, destablised by its ironic ‘quite’, topples towards insignificance; while the mock-modesty of ‘he was quite tough’ manages to suggest that he may have been very tough indeed.

  The dated prep-school slang was both an enduring habit – throughout his life, Britten used the School Boy’s Pocket Diary, delightedly entering his personal details in the conventional juvenile fashion – and a code. In fondly recalling his locker number, he discloses his continuing affection or even need for school-like order; while his reference to the snake-belt which he took to bed with him suggests something still more personal, a talismanic, almost fetishistic attachment to objects associated with his schooldays. No one coming across the note in 1955 would have been in the least bothered by the ‘contacts’ with cane and slipper, which were still commonplace implements of prep-school discipline, but an attentive reader might have been struck by the mixture of coyness and relish of ‘left its marks behind’ in the subsequent parenthesis: the merest hint of a preoccupation which was to recur in his work. And as for that ‘pinnacle of importance and grandeur’, it is comical partly because we will more readily associate such terms as ‘the Sixth’ with an eighteen-year-old on his way to university than with a thirteen-year-old at prep school and partly because, even as prep schools go, South Lodge was a small one with fewer than fifty pupils: a school photograph of 1923 shows thirty-seven.18 The hours of study may have been long, but there is no evidence to suggest that the academic standards were at all exceptional. Yet it was precisely this – in the dialectical fashion which is so often the way with creativity – that led the young Britten to compose music: paradoxically, had he been given more time and encouragement to do so at school, he would almost certainly have written much less. South Lodge provided him with the sense of pressure and discipline which would always be a feature of his working habits as a composer. ‘I often thank my stars,’ he said in a 1960 BBC interview with his friend the Earl of Harewood, ‘that I went to a rather strict school where one was made to work and I can, without much difficulty, sit down at 8.30 or 9 o’clock in the morning and work straight through the morning until lunchtime.’19

  South Lodge was a tall and exceptionally ugly early-Victorian house on the opposite side of Kirkley Cliff Road, adjacent to the beach and the sea; the school had been founded in 1862. Soon after Britten went there as a day boy in September 1922, its proprietor, ‘an ancient clergyman named Phillips’,20 sold it to his mathematics master, Thomas Jackson Elliott Sewell MA MC, known to parents as ‘The Captain’ and to pupils as ‘The Beak’. Sewell was not just a close neighbour of the Brittens; he had taught Ben’s elder brother Bobby and courted his twenty-year-old sister Barbara, before dropping her in favour of a young woman whose dowry enabled him to buy the school. Since this completely disrupted Barbara’s life – she left home, trained as a health visitor in London and formed a relationship with an older woman, whom even the Britten parents must have recognised as a lesbian – it seems a little strange that Sewell remained sufficiently in favour with the family for Ben to have been sent to his school; but the compensatory advantages included proximity to home and to his music teacher, Ethel Astle, as well as relative cheapness compared with boarding at some more distant establishment. Yet it seems that he may have boarded briefly at South Lodge – perhaps while his parents were away from home for some reason – since, in the Harewood interview quoted above, he said that he ‘used to disconcert the other children by writing music in the dormitory and all that kind of thing’.21

  His days there were less cloudless than he later chose to recall. Although records of South Lodge are sparse – the school, which was twice destroyed by fire,22 moved premises several times, ending up at Old Buckenham Hall in Norfolk – it’s clear that ‘Britten mi.’ spent much of his time towards the bottom of his form. Like his father, he notably failed to subscribe to some aspects of the place’s conservative orthodoxy: a master, perhaps Sewell himself, once barked at him, ‘Stand up the boy whose father voted Liberal!’23 In his final term, he wrote an essay on the subject of ‘Animals’ which caused deep offence and received a mark of nought because it protested against bloodsports and cruelt
y instead of taking the approved pro-hunting, pro-shooting line: he thus anticipated the adult self who in 1931 would set to music W. H. Davies’s anti-hunting poem ‘Sport’ and in 1936 compose Our Hunting Fathers in collaboration with Auden. The Britten scholar Mervyn Cooke says that, as a result of the ‘Animals’ essay, Britten ‘left his prep school in disgrace’,24 but this is an overstatement: both his mathematical ability and his outstanding success in the Associated Board’s music exams had made him too conspicuous a favourite of Sewell’s to be undone by a single essay. Even though there was ‘no music at all’ at South Lodge, according to Britten (apart, he added, from ‘the end of each term, on the last evening’ when ‘we sang some songs’),25 Sewell was shrewd enough to realise that this remarkable young musician, whom he envisaged as a future concert pianist rather than as a composer, might bring honour and prestige to the school. Britten was also a successful sportsman, vice captain of his school’s cricket team and junior county tennis champion, yet even on the cricket pitch he wouldn’t be allowed to forget his musical destiny. ‘For this reason,’ his schoolfriend Alan Lyon, who was the team captain, remembered, ‘he always had to field in the deep and when a high ball was hit to him the Headmaster, Captain Sewell, fearing for his fingers, would shout from the boundary, “You’re not to catch it, Britten! You’re not to catch it!”’26

  Although Sewell was an able teacher of mathematics and of classics, this is not why he was chiefly remembered by his pupils. One recalled that he was ‘very fond of beating boys – which one didn’t understand in those days … at that age. But obviously there must have been a little bit of a fixation.’27 ‘You got beaten on the slightest pretext, with a hell of a palaver,’ said Britten’s South Lodge friend John Pounder. ‘For really extra special beatings the whole school was assembled, and the criminal was brought out before them, and then was led away to a dormitory above the school room. We always said that Sewell liked beating boys, but we were much too frightened to complain.’28 Sewell, according to another contemporary, removed boys’ trousers and underpants before beating them ‘to enable me to see what I am doing’.29 Interviewed by the Guardian in 1971, Britten said: ‘I can remember the first time – I think it was the very first day that I was in a school – that I heard a boy being beaten, and I can remember my absolute astonishment that people didn’t immediately rush to help him. And to find that it was sort of condoned and accepted was something that shocked me very much.’30 That is a different tone from his 1955 recollection of South Lodge, and a different kind of partial truth: what he didn’t – and couldn’t – say on either occasion was that Sewell’s fondness for beating ‘left its marks behind’ in a more complicated psychological way. It would be naive to accept at face value the suggestion that Britten was simply dismayed by violent corruption of the young, which is why it became a recurring theme in his work; there’s too much obsession and excitement for that to be the whole truth. But what we might more usefully do is to accept calmly that his sexual character contained a sadomasochistic element which he transformed into a source of creative energy while, no less admirably, treating the sequence of boys to whom he became devoted with exemplary gentleness and generosity.