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Time By The Sea
The Time by the Sea is about Ronald Blythe's life in Aldeburgh during the 1950s. He had originally come to the Suffolk coast as an aspiring young writer, but found himself drawn into Benjamin Britten's circle and began working for the Aldeburgh Festival. Although befriended by Imogen Holst and by E M Forster, part of him remained essentially solitary, alone in the landscape while surrounded by a stormy cultural sea. But this memoir gathers up many early experiences, sights and sounds: with Britten he explored ancient churches; with the botanist Denis Garrett he took delight in the marvellous shingle beaches and marshland plants; he worked alongside the celebrated photo-journalist Kurt Hutton. His muse was Christine Nash, wife of the artist John Nash.
Published to coincide with the centenary of Britten's birth, this is a tale of music and painting, unforgettable words and fears. It describes the first steps of an East Anglian journey, an intimate appraisal of a vivid and memorable time.
Published to coincide with the centenary of Britten's birth, this is a tale of music and painting, unforgettable words and fears. It describes the first steps of an East Anglian journey, an intimate appraisal of a vivid and memorable time.
272 pages, Paperback
First published June 4, 2013
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About the author
Ronald Blythe
92 books37 followersRonald Blythe CBE was one of the UK's greatest living writers. His work, which won countless awards, includes Akenfield (a Penguin 20th-Century Classic and a feature film), Private Words, Field Work, Outsiders: A Book of Garden Friends and numerous other titles. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded their prestigious Benson Medal in 2006. In 2017, he was appointed CBE for services to literature
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
August 22, 2020
"We walked along the Crag path in silence. The towers were as normal. Fisherman lounged as usual. The gulls cried perpetually. After a few steps he hugged me and went ahead. It was the last time I would see him..." On his friendship with Benjamin Britten.
What a wonderful book. Ronald Blythe's time in Aldeburgh during the 1950s was an exciting yet meaningful experience. He became friends with Benjamin Britten, Imogen Holst, Adrian Bell, E. M. Forster and many more familiar artists, writers and musicians. He writes about Aldeburgh and the sea as though they are human, and I can understand that - they mean such a lot to him, and he measures his emotions through the waves and the weather. It is during this time that he becomes an aspiring writer as well as working to organise the Aldeburgh Festival. Some days you will find him out with one artist as they sketch the reeds of the rivers, the next he is invited to another artist's house for a bohemian evening of fun and gaiety. Regardless of his relationship with the people he meets, overall he is still an introvert, a solitary man who much prefers his own company. I can understand this too. It seems that Aldeburgh gives him the strength and will to work, more than any other place in the world. I listened to Holst and Britten as I read this, and I have fallen in love with Ronald Blythe's beautiful writing. For me, this seems to describe living by the sea in a way I couldn't even have imagined.
What a wonderful book. Ronald Blythe's time in Aldeburgh during the 1950s was an exciting yet meaningful experience. He became friends with Benjamin Britten, Imogen Holst, Adrian Bell, E. M. Forster and many more familiar artists, writers and musicians. He writes about Aldeburgh and the sea as though they are human, and I can understand that - they mean such a lot to him, and he measures his emotions through the waves and the weather. It is during this time that he becomes an aspiring writer as well as working to organise the Aldeburgh Festival. Some days you will find him out with one artist as they sketch the reeds of the rivers, the next he is invited to another artist's house for a bohemian evening of fun and gaiety. Regardless of his relationship with the people he meets, overall he is still an introvert, a solitary man who much prefers his own company. I can understand this too. It seems that Aldeburgh gives him the strength and will to work, more than any other place in the world. I listened to Holst and Britten as I read this, and I have fallen in love with Ronald Blythe's beautiful writing. For me, this seems to describe living by the sea in a way I couldn't even have imagined.
September 1, 2014
I’ve rarely read a book, after reading which, the floor was strewn with so many dropped names. With chapters named “Meeting Ben” (Benjamin Britten), “Imo” (Imogen Holst), “Morgan” (E. M. Forster) the book ploughed on relentlessly emphasising the connections he had made with the artistic elite & dwellers of the country house set.
There were some good points to the book. I particularly enjoyed the first chapter describing his stay in a beach bungalow as he attempted to launch a writing career, & the chapter about Staverton. Particularly the latter was written more objectively & spoke of the place itself, rather than continuing his relentless but usually inconsequential “me” centred anecdotes about his artistic & social connections.
He had a certain similarity to DeQuincey writing about the Lake Poets. He also was a man trying to add to his own kudos by emphasising his connections with those he sees as the great & the good. There was also a parallel in that, just as DeQuincey stayed with the Wordsworths at Dove Cottage & then moved in when they left, Blythe stayed with John Nash & his wife, and then moved in to their house after they had gone.
All-in-all an ok little read if you’re prepared to put up with the irritations & jarrings.
There were some good points to the book. I particularly enjoyed the first chapter describing his stay in a beach bungalow as he attempted to launch a writing career, & the chapter about Staverton. Particularly the latter was written more objectively & spoke of the place itself, rather than continuing his relentless but usually inconsequential “me” centred anecdotes about his artistic & social connections.
He had a certain similarity to DeQuincey writing about the Lake Poets. He also was a man trying to add to his own kudos by emphasising his connections with those he sees as the great & the good. There was also a parallel in that, just as DeQuincey stayed with the Wordsworths at Dove Cottage & then moved in when they left, Blythe stayed with John Nash & his wife, and then moved in to their house after they had gone.
All-in-all an ok little read if you’re prepared to put up with the irritations & jarrings.
August 18, 2019
Slight misnomer - Blythe shares memories from a number of locations in Suffolk, inland and coastal, and describes them all beautifully. His writing isn't always easy to follow - time jumps around and he writes as though we know many of the people. As a huge Suffolk fan, I preferred the place-writing to the people-writing but I did enjoy them both.
February 9, 2023
The Time by the Sea by Ronald Blythe
Rarely have I read a book containing so much name dropping. Barely two pages go by without being introduced to another person. What makes it more infuriating is that Ronald Blythe expects you to have heard of them. He doesn't bother to give you a line of who they are and what they do, but launches into a description of them. He or his publisher knows it's an oversight, because at the back of the book are four pages of "selected personalia."
Here's a test to see if you've heard of some of these real people the author met and fraternised with in Aldeburgh between 1955 and 1958. Cedric Morris and Lett Haines? Edward Clodd perhaps? Edward Fitzgerald ? How about James Turner?
No, neither had I.
Though irritating, it was also fascinating to learn of all these notable people of their time who'd lived or visited the Suffolk coastal town. Ronald Blythe met many of them in the space of the three years he was there or thereabouts helping the composer Benjamin Britten organise the first and later famous Aldeburgh Festivals.
He appears to be one of those few people able to mix socially and make friends with people from all walks of life. One moment he's living the bohemian lifestyle with gay couple artists Cedric and Letts; the next he's taking sherry and biscuits with novelist EM Forster, he's socialising and working with Gustav Holst's daughter Imogen, and eventually settles down with the artist John Nash and his wife Christine. There's a wonderful chapter called How I Came To Wormingford, which is in Essex rather than Suffolk. He lived in the same old farmhouse which is restored from its ramshackle state by the painter and his wife, till the end of his life earlier this year. He inherited the house from Nash and his wife.
I never knew Thomas Hardy had stayed in Aldeburgh and worshipped at its famous parish church. Ronald Blythe reminds us of how the great novelist admired the poor farm labourers who were forced to wait outside church for the hoi polloi to arrive and then given any spare seats at the back. Hardy "knew them as great fiddlers and singers." Hardy had stayed in Aldeburgh as a guest of Edward Clodd who held meetings for rationalists at Stafford House. Blythe lived too late to meet Clodd but relates reminscences of his meeting with Clodd's second wife as he quizzes her for literary memories.
Ronald Blythe brings the 1950's Aldeburgh to life . He arrives in the town shortly after the great flood of 1953 and notes how many of the seafront properties were flooded. I didn't realise Aldeburgh had been affected but it's quite understandable looking at the low gradient the town stands in relation to the sea and how the River Alde creeps round the back of the town from Orfordness.
Of all the people he meets and gets to know, Benjamin Britten comes across as Aldeburgh's No.1 fan. Blythe writes that the sea at Aldeburgh was crucial to Britten's writing. He was ftom Lowestoft originally, growing up there as the town became depressed when the herring industry crashed. What Britten witnessed made him, writes Blythe, a Labour supporter and adds that a similar depression in agriculture made him a Labour man too. Britten, writes Blythe, watched the sea, "all the time." When visitors to the town came to look in on him, he would evade their view and move somewhere else in the house where he couldn't be spotted but still look out to sea.
For Blythe himself, the sea at Aldeburgh is threatening in its vastness and force but he's comforted in that it never reaches him. But, more importantly to him, it's the sound of the sea at Aldeburgh that makes it magical.
The reader is introduced to a place in Suffolk called Debach. An American air force second world war airfield was based there, and Blythe writes of discovering a crashed Spitfire buried in the back garden of a friend there. There I am thinking where on earth is Debach, pronouncing it in my head as De..bark, but then he reveals that a property owner from the hamlet bought two racehorses and called them Debach Boy and Debach Girl. He recalls a racing commentator calling them De Bark Boy and De Bark Girl ! "Really.....you would think that an educated person would know how to pronounce Debach." No, actually. In fact it's pronounced Debbidge, and anyway the place is no more. The church is now a house, and "all it has on the two and a half inch to the mile map is 'airfield disused'".
One learns little of Blythe himself from this book apart from his developing life as a writer, moving from an impoverished state in which he struggles to pay his bills to a freelance reviewer and writer and then author. One wants to know more about how he fitted into the lives of all these people he got to know - Forster, Britten, Nash and so on. He gives few clues. You're left thinking where's the unauthorised biography of Ronald Blythe? It might be quite revealing.
Rarely have I read a book containing so much name dropping. Barely two pages go by without being introduced to another person. What makes it more infuriating is that Ronald Blythe expects you to have heard of them. He doesn't bother to give you a line of who they are and what they do, but launches into a description of them. He or his publisher knows it's an oversight, because at the back of the book are four pages of "selected personalia."
Here's a test to see if you've heard of some of these real people the author met and fraternised with in Aldeburgh between 1955 and 1958. Cedric Morris and Lett Haines? Edward Clodd perhaps? Edward Fitzgerald ? How about James Turner?
No, neither had I.
Though irritating, it was also fascinating to learn of all these notable people of their time who'd lived or visited the Suffolk coastal town. Ronald Blythe met many of them in the space of the three years he was there or thereabouts helping the composer Benjamin Britten organise the first and later famous Aldeburgh Festivals.
He appears to be one of those few people able to mix socially and make friends with people from all walks of life. One moment he's living the bohemian lifestyle with gay couple artists Cedric and Letts; the next he's taking sherry and biscuits with novelist EM Forster, he's socialising and working with Gustav Holst's daughter Imogen, and eventually settles down with the artist John Nash and his wife Christine. There's a wonderful chapter called How I Came To Wormingford, which is in Essex rather than Suffolk. He lived in the same old farmhouse which is restored from its ramshackle state by the painter and his wife, till the end of his life earlier this year. He inherited the house from Nash and his wife.
I never knew Thomas Hardy had stayed in Aldeburgh and worshipped at its famous parish church. Ronald Blythe reminds us of how the great novelist admired the poor farm labourers who were forced to wait outside church for the hoi polloi to arrive and then given any spare seats at the back. Hardy "knew them as great fiddlers and singers." Hardy had stayed in Aldeburgh as a guest of Edward Clodd who held meetings for rationalists at Stafford House. Blythe lived too late to meet Clodd but relates reminscences of his meeting with Clodd's second wife as he quizzes her for literary memories.
Ronald Blythe brings the 1950's Aldeburgh to life . He arrives in the town shortly after the great flood of 1953 and notes how many of the seafront properties were flooded. I didn't realise Aldeburgh had been affected but it's quite understandable looking at the low gradient the town stands in relation to the sea and how the River Alde creeps round the back of the town from Orfordness.
Of all the people he meets and gets to know, Benjamin Britten comes across as Aldeburgh's No.1 fan. Blythe writes that the sea at Aldeburgh was crucial to Britten's writing. He was ftom Lowestoft originally, growing up there as the town became depressed when the herring industry crashed. What Britten witnessed made him, writes Blythe, a Labour supporter and adds that a similar depression in agriculture made him a Labour man too. Britten, writes Blythe, watched the sea, "all the time." When visitors to the town came to look in on him, he would evade their view and move somewhere else in the house where he couldn't be spotted but still look out to sea.
For Blythe himself, the sea at Aldeburgh is threatening in its vastness and force but he's comforted in that it never reaches him. But, more importantly to him, it's the sound of the sea at Aldeburgh that makes it magical.
The reader is introduced to a place in Suffolk called Debach. An American air force second world war airfield was based there, and Blythe writes of discovering a crashed Spitfire buried in the back garden of a friend there. There I am thinking where on earth is Debach, pronouncing it in my head as De..bark, but then he reveals that a property owner from the hamlet bought two racehorses and called them Debach Boy and Debach Girl. He recalls a racing commentator calling them De Bark Boy and De Bark Girl ! "Really.....you would think that an educated person would know how to pronounce Debach." No, actually. In fact it's pronounced Debbidge, and anyway the place is no more. The church is now a house, and "all it has on the two and a half inch to the mile map is 'airfield disused'".
One learns little of Blythe himself from this book apart from his developing life as a writer, moving from an impoverished state in which he struggles to pay his bills to a freelance reviewer and writer and then author. One wants to know more about how he fitted into the lives of all these people he got to know - Forster, Britten, Nash and so on. He gives few clues. You're left thinking where's the unauthorised biography of Ronald Blythe? It might be quite revealing.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 9, 2020
As a musician I was keen to find out more about the importance of Aldeburgh to Britten at this seminal time (1955-1958), which was my main motivation for reading this memoir. I also enjoy pastoral writing, and I expected poetic descriptions of the Suffolk landscape, especially the sea, which had such significance in Britten's music.
Despite Britten and the sea being constantly in the background, the foreground of this memoir is very much about the personalities of a multitude of artists connected to the region at this time. There are lots of sketches of half-remembered conversations over dinner, over flowers in various gardens and on walks in the countryside. There are interesting characters, many of whom were or have become famous in their fields; but we never really get to know them, and the memoir sometimes starts to feel like an exercise in name-dropping on the part of the author.
I read much of the book on a summer's day under apple trees, and it did awaken in me a bit of envy for a more bohemian, artistic lifestyle. The gift of this book was to take the reader briefly to this time and place in what feels like an authentic way, focussed on Blythe's acute listening ear. In the end my favourite passages were those about the sea (the final chapter) and Britten (Chapter 6), which I suppose betrays my own interests and should not be taken as a critique on the book.
Nevertheless, it has had the effect on me to listen again to Peter Grimes and to seek out another novel, set close to the region (with some similar literary parallels), The Essex Serpent.
Despite Britten and the sea being constantly in the background, the foreground of this memoir is very much about the personalities of a multitude of artists connected to the region at this time. There are lots of sketches of half-remembered conversations over dinner, over flowers in various gardens and on walks in the countryside. There are interesting characters, many of whom were or have become famous in their fields; but we never really get to know them, and the memoir sometimes starts to feel like an exercise in name-dropping on the part of the author.
I read much of the book on a summer's day under apple trees, and it did awaken in me a bit of envy for a more bohemian, artistic lifestyle. The gift of this book was to take the reader briefly to this time and place in what feels like an authentic way, focussed on Blythe's acute listening ear. In the end my favourite passages were those about the sea (the final chapter) and Britten (Chapter 6), which I suppose betrays my own interests and should not be taken as a critique on the book.
Nevertheless, it has had the effect on me to listen again to Peter Grimes and to seek out another novel, set close to the region (with some similar literary parallels), The Essex Serpent.
January 11, 2024
The memory of reading Ronald Blythe's 'Akenfield' stayed warm enough over several decades for me to immediately seize this on finding it in a Woodbridge bookshop. Just as gently meandering, an account of living in Aldeburgh in the 1950s, the friends, the music, the writing and the place itself, further resonating in the knowledge I've Suffolk ancestors back to the 1550s.
April 28, 2023
Well written and I really enjoyed finding out more about the people involved in the arts in this area. It felt a bit like lots of name dropping at times. I would have liked more personal material (but not more showing off) and more about the role of the landscape. Nevertheless it was fascinating.
June 6, 2022
Beautiful and evocative.
September 14, 2022
Charming, if slight, name-dropping from Ronald Blythe.
Living with the arty bohemians in East Anglia.
Living with the arty bohemians in East Anglia.
May 8, 2023
A gentle reminiscence of a a time long past and long gone never to be repeated.
April 7, 2025
Just wonderful, an extraordinary place in time chronicled in the company of an affable, charming, stylish author.
November 14, 2015
A time and place, of civilisation of congregation and of grace. A celebration of a community of like-minded souls; their talents and their friendships. Money not being a subject deemed worthy of conversation, it rightly receives no mention; so very, very unlike those ‘star’-crossed scripts of insecurities rehearsed and voraciously played out in the media of the twenty-first century.
“Mervyn said that he had so hated being in the army that he had created an alternative world – Gormanghast – into which he could flee. … . “M.R. James used to stay with his grandparents just below Aldburgh church and, it was said, experienced his first ghost in the chuch when he was a child, rushing from it during a service, terrified and at the same time observing it.”
Ronald Blythe writes a weekly short column for the “Church Times” (London, publ. weekly); a friable column, which I’ve tended to perplexedly puzzle over. Hoorah then, for “The Time By The Sea”, which lyrically stitches the silk of that puzzle, unfolding and enlarging, as it does, a quietly dignified 1950s social scene much like one (though not so glittering) that I once observed with the naturally perplexed curiosity of a small child. No gratuitous name-dropping; rather the recognition of fascination and joy in what brings us together. John and Christine Nash, Kathleen Hale, Maggie Hambling, Benjemin Brittain, Peter Pears … the perfection of golden days of quiet-moneyed East Coast Suffolk summers long past.
“Coasts provide the ultimate sites for meditation” (p.239). The coasts of Britain formed and shaped, and continue to form and shape our Island race; the bitter East wind tested and toughend, and continues to test and toughen, those who could, those who can, stand the test. An indefinable quality of light gave and gives expression to canvas and paint; storms, sea, and solitude inspired the composer. Storytelling and singing, sowing and threshing, chipping and carrying; the poor then were indeed made of iron. As for now? I’m not so sure.
It takes but four finely crafted succinct sentences for Angus Ross to sum up the grave of Edward FitzGerald, translator of, “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”, a soul stirring and mesmorising epic, once read, never forgotton. Suffolk is epic itself with its surprises. Ronald Blythe watches the excavation of Sutton Hoo; its magnificent Saxon treasures, riches beyond belief, now elegantly and safely displayed in the British Museum, for a world of visitors to snap, wonder, and attempt to describe to their family and friends in lands far-away.
“Mervyn said that he had so hated being in the army that he had created an alternative world – Gormanghast – into which he could flee. … . “M.R. James used to stay with his grandparents just below Aldburgh church and, it was said, experienced his first ghost in the chuch when he was a child, rushing from it during a service, terrified and at the same time observing it.”
Ronald Blythe writes a weekly short column for the “Church Times” (London, publ. weekly); a friable column, which I’ve tended to perplexedly puzzle over. Hoorah then, for “The Time By The Sea”, which lyrically stitches the silk of that puzzle, unfolding and enlarging, as it does, a quietly dignified 1950s social scene much like one (though not so glittering) that I once observed with the naturally perplexed curiosity of a small child. No gratuitous name-dropping; rather the recognition of fascination and joy in what brings us together. John and Christine Nash, Kathleen Hale, Maggie Hambling, Benjemin Brittain, Peter Pears … the perfection of golden days of quiet-moneyed East Coast Suffolk summers long past.
“Coasts provide the ultimate sites for meditation” (p.239). The coasts of Britain formed and shaped, and continue to form and shape our Island race; the bitter East wind tested and toughend, and continues to test and toughen, those who could, those who can, stand the test. An indefinable quality of light gave and gives expression to canvas and paint; storms, sea, and solitude inspired the composer. Storytelling and singing, sowing and threshing, chipping and carrying; the poor then were indeed made of iron. As for now? I’m not so sure.
It takes but four finely crafted succinct sentences for Angus Ross to sum up the grave of Edward FitzGerald, translator of, “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”, a soul stirring and mesmorising epic, once read, never forgotton. Suffolk is epic itself with its surprises. Ronald Blythe watches the excavation of Sutton Hoo; its magnificent Saxon treasures, riches beyond belief, now elegantly and safely displayed in the British Museum, for a world of visitors to snap, wonder, and attempt to describe to their family and friends in lands far-away.
February 25, 2016
I read and enjoyed this book as I have been a lover of Benjamin Britten's music and Peter Pears' voice since I first discovered them as a teenager back in the 1960s. If this were not the case I doubt if I would have read this book at all. The reason I know and love Aldeburgh and the Suffolk coast is because of this long-term association.
May 7, 2016
A friend highly recommended this memoir. It wasn't for me. It was hard to follow at times, and really he is just talking about people he meet in the fifties. Disappointing.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews