Footnotes by Vybarr Cregan-Reid

Author:Vybarr Cregan-Reid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

SUSTAINABLE RUNNING IN ALDEBURGH

To get to Aldeburgh I drive A-roads, B-roads, and roads without any status, finding myself in the heart of the seaside village with barely any suburban prologue. For years, I have been reading about its associations with Benjamin Britten, E.M. Forster, Ronald Blythe, the Tennyson family, George Ewart Evans and George Crabbe. There’s a pageantry to it, managing to look old and new all at once.

It’s the end of the winter, February. It’s shudder-cold and breezy. I pull up on the north edge of town. It’s just after lunchtime, and having worked all morning it’s now too late for me to eat if I’m to do a longish run. Knowing this, I’ve plundered my collection of pillow mints from my room in the B & B up the coast – they will suffice for the sugar-hit I will need in a few miles’ time.

The sky’s a little heavy, but it is carrying its weight high. I have dressed appropriately (a rare thing), and if the clouds stay at altitude the weather may be kind. The sea is the colour of pewter. It’s empty; the fishing boats all landed to the south. Looking north, down the coast, the pebble beach stretches for miles. Aldeburgh looks like the end of the world.

On the map, the coastline is sharp, with clean lines, but here there seems to be hundreds of yards of scumbled shading where the flats of the grassland blend seamlessly with the pebbles and sands of the beach. The flitting strings and rippling woodwinds of Benjamin Britten’s first Sea Interlude from Peter Grimes pop into my head and for the remainder of the run I can’t get them out. (Not really surprising as I later discover that this is the path that he walked every day between fits of composition.)

The opera was adapted from a poem in an unsentimental collection of poetry about Suffolk life called The Borough (1810) by George Crabbe. He was a surgeon’s apprentice, clergyman, coleopterist, carer and novel-arsonist (three of his own unpublished manuscripts), and he is still underrated as a poet, valued more for the doors he showed others the way to than those he opened. Before Wordsworth and Coleridge, he was writing the poetry of the common man and of the struggle therein to become an uncommon one.

It was on reading an article by E.M. Forster on Crabbe, while Britten was in exile in California in 1941, that he was first alerted to The Borough. Forster did the thing that he does in his essays, which is to knit together the art, the artist and the area. ‘So remember Aldeburgh when you read this rather odd poet, for he belongs to the grim little place, and through it to England.’4 It would take an emigrant with a heart of stone to read the essay and not long to feel the shingle of the foreshore at one’s feet.

The land is laid flat. And, out of season, it is sparsely peopled: a couple of couples and some dogs.

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