Original subtitles

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.