Joyce Grenfell's Lost Song by Janie Hampton

Benjamin Britten, Joyce Grenfell, Peter Pears at The Red House, June 1967

In 1947 the British composer Benjamin Britten and his partner, the singer Peter Pears, fulfilled their dream when they started the Aldeburgh Music Festival, in Suffolk. Aldeburgh is a pretty fishing town on the East coast of England, unchanged since its hey-day in the early 19th century. At first concerts and lectures were performed in local churches and village halls. The British writer and entertainer Joyce Grenfell (1910-79) and her devoted husband Reggie went every June for the music, the people and the bird watching. Joyce liked all types of music, as long as it was good: Bach, Beethoven, Britten, Gershwin and Rogers. ‘I would rather go to a concert than the theatre, cinema or an exhibition,’ she wrote. In 1966 she wrote to her friend the writer Virginia Graham: ‘All the usuals here, such as Lady Dashwood, in modern clothes and assisted brunette hair-do. June is a magic month in Suffolk & the drive over to Orford in a faint summer haze with long blue shadows was breathtaking. Ditches full of Queen Anne’s lace, wild roses, elder flower in full cream, and a nightingale sang in the church yard, as we were going in! Such production!
‘Lovely day ended with an accolade from Ben: “Will I do a concert here next year for the new concert hall and the 20th festival?” “Yes of course Ben,” I say. At once, sitting in the parish church hearing but I fear not listening to, lovely early Byrd, I started panicking about new material for the event.’
‘My Dear Ben,’ she wrote shortly after, ‘I feel truly honoured to be asked to be part of the best festival in the world. It is the compliment I am more proud of than anything that has ever happened to me. I mean this. Your music past and present - and future – makes me feel as if I had been taken into space. I always feel music, such as Beethoven’s late quartets, is already there from the beginning. With love Joyce. P.S. Please thank Peter, too, for his singing in Curlew River - oh and in the Schumann!’

Joyce Grenfell, circa 1945.

Joyce Grenfell was an unusual choice for this rather intellectual concert series. But Britten must have known that her comedy show would subsidise the more esoteric offerings. Also in that year's programme were the Vienna Boys’ choir, The Castaway by Lennox Berkeley, a new production of Britten’s The Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Plomer reading poetry, a talk on Anglo-Saxon Ship-Burials, and ended with Purcell’s The Fairy Queen. Three events each day gave everyone time to enjoy each performance and the place, without having to rush. Joyce wrote two new monologues: about an intense American music student called Marty Winderhauer, and a new Shirley’s Girlfriend with her whistling from behind a pulpit. She and her pianist and composer William Blezard also wrote a song in praise of Britten. ‘I have never toiled, polished, worked on anything as I have on this ditty,’ she wrote. ‘I was praying that he would like it.’
In case Britten didn’t like it, Joyce and Blezard performed the song for Britten on the morning of the concert at The Red House where Britten lived with Peter Pears, just outside Aldeburgh. The song is one of Joyce Grenfell's most sophisticated - a recitative of puns set to Blezard's  lively jazz accompaniment.
'How benevolent is the setting
Suffolk winds benignly blow
Benefitting all who came here
And to concerts go oh-oh-oh
Seats benumb on Parish church benches
But the benefited ear recognises benediction
In the wonders it can hear
Bene, bene molto bene.'
Joyce was amazed by Britten’s reaction. ‘I was quite flummoxed,’ she wrote to Virginia Graham. ‘Ben ran to me and embraced me, weeping! He was very touched and moved. It was very dear and entirely unexpected.’
So fifty years ago, at the concert that night on 5 June 1967, in the Jubilee Hall, the song was rapturously received and the audience called out for an encore. But Joyce thought it was a ‘one occasion song’ and did not sing an encore, nor ever performed it again.
The next day Britten wrote to Joyce: ‘It was a joy to have you here, & we are grateful to you for the incomparably funny and wise evening you gave us - we were the honoured ones! Come back again, both of you, & do another such evening for us - ‘as near the bone’ as you like to make it. Love Ben.’ Joyce replied: ‘Dear Ben, Thank you for letting me be a small part of this 20th festival. There is something about the Aldeburgh Festival that makes one want to do far better than one has ever done before, anywhere else in the world. It is a challenge to keep up to the standard you & Peter give, that goes far beyond the line of duty!’
Back in London, Joyce and Blezard made a gramophone record and sent it to The Red House. Three years later, in 1970, Britten wrote: ‘I do hope this letter reaches you in a forgiving mood! Peter & I were hunting for an ancient record in a seldom used cupboard, & to our great surprise, then delight, & then horror, we found a record you’d sent us, away back in 1967, which neither of us had seen before. I can only imagine your handsome & delightful Tribute was ‘tidied away’. I somehow think you will forgive, for you are so grand a person.’
Joyce replied, ‘Of course I understand & of course I forgive! What’s more I can imagine the wave of horror you felt when you discovered the record and you have my deepest sympathy.’ And the record and the song were forgotten again.

Postcard from Joyce to Donald Swann, 1951

While I was researching the biography of Joyce Grenfell 15 years ago, I found Britten’s and Grenfell’s letters in separate archives. After I’d put copies of them together in chronological order, I started to look for the song Bene . But by then William Blezard had lost the manuscript; the Aldeburgh festival manager had just died; and the Britten-Pears archivist had never heard of it. Ten years later I tried again, and after some further searching at The Red House, the single gramophone record of the Bene song was found, mislabelled but still in perfect condition.
Not heard for nearly 40 years, it was broadcast for the first time on Joyce Grenfell at Aldeburgh Festival on BBC Radio 3 in 2005.
Joyce visited Aldeburgh Music Festival every year from 1962, until a few weeks before her death in 1979. Listening to a performance of an "advanced" piano piece, Grenfell composed her own obituary: 'She died from opening her mind too far'.

Click on this to hear the Bene song.
  

www.janiehampton.co.uk

THE WITCHFINDER'S SISTER by Beth Underdown. An interview with the author by Adèle Geras

Some time ago, I downloaded this book to my Kindle because I'd read a favourable review of it in the Times. Full disclosure: I love books to do with witchcraft and I've written on this blog about just such a one by my friend Livi Michael. That was about the Pendle Witches and this novel speaks in the voice of a sister of the infamous Witchfinder, Matthew Hopkins. At the back of the book there's a piece by Underdown in which we discover that Hopkins had siblings but that little is known about them. This gap in the history gives the writer the space to create Alice, elder stepsister of the man who spread terror and destruction in the Tendring Hundreds of Essex and Suffolk during the 1640s. Many women were hanged and before that, subjected to terrible tests to discover whether or not they were witches.

Alice is a wonderful fictional creation who writes with a voice that is clear, unsensational and intelligent and which seems to reach us through the centuries with the power of someone speaking directly to us. It's a voice that carries weight. It is full of emotional understanding. It describes everything in a way that is plain but deep; full of emotion but also unhysterical. The real events that unfold are known to anyone interested in the period, but Alice, speaking about her brother, provides a context and a background that is most persuasive. Why does a man become a Witchfinder? What impels him? Are there psychological reasons for his dreadful fixation for rooting out women with supposed supernatural powers? And what of Alice? Why is she returning to Manningtree after the death of her husband in London?

Others play a part in the disclosures that follow: Alice's mother-in-law, Bridget, whose life has been entwined with that of Matthew's late mother; Rebecca, one of the accused women; men of varying degrees of stupidity and greed; many others in the community.

The witches Hopkins brought to their horrific ends are seen to be everything we suspected they might have been: slightly deranged, or eccentric, or strange looking, or gifted in the matter of using herbs and natural remedies for this or that, but with no more supernatural powers than a chicken. Still (and this is one of the best things about this novel) there is also the unexplained. There is such a thing as ill-wishing: people do sometimes want bad things to happen to their neighbours and their enemies. Above all, there is childbirth and the changes that it can wreak on even the most balanced of minds. Now we call such behaviour 'hormonal' and we know about post-natal depression but that's a very modern concept. It wasn't even properly talked about and understood as late as the 1970s.


Beth Underdown has woven a story of grief, anxiety, depression, longing, and the love of a sister for her brother together with an account of a febrile time of religious wars and desperately wild and frightening superstition.


The tone of the telling is compelling throughout. You are entirely in Alice's head, apart from several quotations from historical accounts. I am not going to spoil anyone's pleasure by leaking the surprise in the narrative, but there is one. Read this book and find out what it is...you won't regret it.


I asked Beth some questions via email and I reproduce her answers below. The photographs are also Beth's, taken in the Manningtree area.

1) The Witchfinder's Sister is a very accomplished début and I wonder whether it really is your first attempt at novel or whether there are any other novels in your bottom drawer. Had you been writing for a long time before you were published?


It really is my first novel! I was interested in the seventeenth century
before I came across the story of Matthew Hopkins, and at the point
that I found the subject of The Witchfinder’s Sister I’d completed a
chapter or so of a novel based on the life of the herbalist Nicholas
Culpepper. But it didn’t really feel vital (I think due to a lack of
villain!)


And as soon as I started to research the Hopkins witch hunts, I
changed tack straight away. Before starting work on The Witchfinder’s
Sister I’d been writing bits and bobs of short fiction for years. But I’d
never sent anything off, or finished or indeed been happy with much
of what I’d written. I think I was waiting for the right topic – the right mould
to pour my jelly into!
2) Can you outline where you interest in history comes from? Were you a bookish child?

I was an extremely bookish child – most of my free time was spent
reading, until I left home for university. And I always liked history,
too, and studied it up to A-level – but I never got brilliant marks.
I have quite a bad memory, so being examined on dates wasn’t
perhaps my strong suit.


I think the interest in history was always there – but maybe it came
in the first place from family holidays – my parents liked hiking, and
we holidayed a lot in the UK, places like Scotland and Cornwall.
Castles, standing stones and things like that were used as treats to
convince my brother and me that long hikes were a good idea!


3) What was it about this story that appealed to you?

I think initially it was the shock of it – the scale of what had happened,
the number of deaths. From that came an outrage that propelled me
through some of the research – but I think what sustained me as I
developed the story was a growing interest not just in telling people
about the witch hunts, but also in figuring out why and how they
could have come to pass.


4) Did you have any private rules about mixing fiction with fact?

For this book, my rule was that everything to do with the women
who were persecuted in the witch hunts – their names, their stories –
should be kept as accurate as possible. Likewise, Hopkins’s movements,
and what is known about his life – where he was on a certain date,
for instance – all that should be accurate. But everything about his
emotional life is invented, or speculated – and Alice, Joseph and
Bridget are completely fictional. I think my private rules for this book
came from balancing a sense of an ethical responsibility to Hopkins’s
victims against the necessity of inventing full emotional lives for my
characters – and of telling an engaging story.


5) You are very sparing with the physical description but the places you wrtie about are very clear and present to the reader. Can you put your finger on how you evoked the Essex of the 1640s?

This is a very hard question to answer. I did a lot of wandering
around the Tendring Hundred (the area around Manningtree,
where the witch hunts began) with the oldest map I could find
– which was one from 1810, but still useful because it subtracted
railways and A-roads from the landscape. I looked into how the
agriculture, shipping and fishing would have changed. I also did a
fair amount of research into seventeenth century domesticity – 
what people ate, what different things cost. Beyond that, I think it 
was an effort of imagination – and I’m really glad you feel it works!

6) Are there any other pieces of fiction that influenced you in the writing of this book?

There are many writers I admire, but I think the works that influenced
this book most consciously were Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies.
I love how ordinary and vital the dialogue in those works is – how
well and how naturally they avoid the ‘thees and thous’ that are so
hard to pull off (but also hard to avoid) in historical fiction. I feel that
Hilary Mantel’s approach to the early modern period in fiction is
incredibly fresh and frank, and I’ve tried to replicate some of that approach in 
The Witchfinder’s Sister.
7) You teach Creative Writing at Manchester. How do you integrate the writing of fiction into your day job?

I’m on a 0.5 FTE contract at Manchester, and my colleagues have
been very good to me this year in allowing me to have half the year
teaching and half the year not. So I was teaching a full load between September and Christmas – and didn’t do a scrap of writing, but enjoyed it immensely! Then this semester I’m not teaching, and am
able to make some headway with Book Two and also do events and nice things like that for TWS.

8) How did WS come to be published? Do you have a follow up to WS? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

The Witchfinder’s Sister had a long road to publication. It started
with my agent, Nelle Andrew, who spotted me in the anthology put out
by the Creative Writing MA course that I took at Manchester (where
I now teach!). Nelle got in touch with me, and we met a few
times – the book was in the very early stages, but she seemed to
love and understand what I wanted to do with it, so I signed up
with her. Then some years went by while I worked on the book, but
also did a bit of living (a succession of different jobs, a marriage and
then a divorce, a painful illness followed by an operation that mostly
fixed it). At last I quit my day job to give the book one last proper
push, and Nelle found it a home with Katy Loftus at Viking, who was absolutely 
the best editor I could have hoped to meet.


There will be a sequel to TWS one day – and if you read the book
(Do not cheat and skip to end!AG) you might guess what and where
it will be. But next I’m writing something a little different – still
a bit Gothic, but later in history – 1899/1900. It’s about death,
but also love and friendship – and that’s probably as much as I can say 
at the moment!

 

Going to Church, Going to School - by Imogen Robertson

Clare Parish Church

My New Year’s resolution is to spend more time in church. To be more precise, it is to spend more time in churches. I haven’t become religious, though I sometimes think every writer’s career involves a great deal of praying for divine favour, but for anyone who is fascinated by English history churches are temples not just of God, but of time. 

St Agatha's Church -Richmond

I am a big museum fan. Love ‘em. Show me a museum from the Ashmolean to those tiny local museums that consist of three display boards and an axe head and I’m there, but there is something different about being in a church. In museums you are being presented with the past as past. There are things in glass cases carefully labelled and, separated from human hands and minds, I fear they often become dead objects. In churches objects are still being used for the same thing they’ve been used for for several centuries. The font is the font first, an example of 15th century carving second. The pews maybe remarkable for their poppy-head carving or the humour of their 14th century grotesques, but they are primarily there for people to sit in, just as they always have been. I think the continual use of a place or an object for a certain purpose over many years gives it an atmosphere or energy which lets us get as near to time travel as it is possible to get. When I see medieval wall paintings showing the cycle of the seasons, a man sewing seed for example, I don’t see a historical artefact, I see another human being getting through his year, just like me. 

The Ancient House

I’ve felt like that about churches for a while, the resolution to learn how to read churches was inspired by spending a week in the Suffolk village of Clare. We were staying in The Ancient House which is rented out to holiday makers like ourselves by the Landmark Trust. The bookcase was full of treasure, but the book I spent most of my time with was the Popular Guide to Suffolk Churches by D. P. Mortlock. It had a long entry on the church opposite the Ancient House - dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul - but even better it had at the back a glossary of terms which I wish I could have memorised wholesale. I contented myself with writing half of it down in my notebook. Now I want to spend more time in churches so I can learn to use some of these terms frequently and confidently, really savour them with the pleasure that comes from understanding: trefoil, crocketting, clerestory and squint; hatchment, reredos and pier. With understanding I expect a deepening of that feeling of connection with the people who built, rebuilt, altered and decorated these buildings. Learning to read a church, I believe, gives you a chance to see something of their stories unfurl in the air around you. 

Clare Parish Church

Take Clare Parish Church as an example. On the porch is not only a green man, but a green woman carved in the 14th century, then partially obscured in the 15th. Think of the people that have passed under her eyes on their way into church for baptisms, weddings and funerals as well as their weekly encounters with the saints and angels inside. I love churches with a touch of the pagan. It reminds you of the times when older beliefs were folded into Christianity. Or the lectern. I’ve walked past a fair few brass lecterns in my time, but I never for a moment realised that some of them were hundreds of years old. I’m afraid I’ve always thought brass equalled Victorian, but the one in Clare Parish Church dates from somewhere round the end of the 15th century. Knowing that I couldn’t help thinking of how many generations of parishioners had been keeping it so beautifully polished. It would have been there when William Dowsing, Parliamentary visitor for demolishing superstitious ornaments, came smashing through in 1643, tearing down the apostles from the roof and smashing the stained glass. Some of the later survives in the East window, a sun and a moon, enduring that and whatever else time could throw at them. The church has a range of leaflets about the church and some of the particular items within it. They are excellent. I’ll be looking out for those more and more and working my way through the beautiful new edition of Betjeman’s Best British Churches murmuring parvise, ballflower, cartouche - my own form of prayer, but a sincere one. 

Clare Parish Church