I have a new ambition: to read from a pulpit. In November’s gales, with ominously late swallows still sweeping out to sea, I found myself in the Baptist Chapel at Aldeburgh. ‘I’m Richard Mabey’, I had told startled friends at the launch of Aldeburgh’s twenty-seventh Poetry Festival.
My transformation went as follows. Sunday evening: arrive home via the Oxford bus to a phone message. Richard Mabey, sadly, was unwell. Could I give a talk on a poem by John Clare? Monday: breathe deeply. Read Clare. Write talk. Thursday: sit in Liverpool Street Station muttering Clare. Friday: tramp Aldeburgh’s shingle, one eye on a cormorant, still muttering Clare…
So, on Saturday, instead of self-indulgent coffee and intent listening at Snape Maltings, I looked across at the huge preacher’s clock in Aldeburgh’s Baptist Chapel. Below the hands which helped parishioners home on time to Sunday beef, I saw a large attentive audience. They had not, bless them, decamped to the nearest tea shop when they discovered I was not Richard Mabey.
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| Carcanet, 2006 |
I could not bring them Clare’s, and Mabey’s deep knowledge of birds. (The cormorant was otherwise engaged.) But I did have something fresh to offer: the final lines of ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’, the book-length poem I believe to be Clare’s masterpiece. For almost two hundred years, it was a lost masterpiece. Clare and his publisher, both ill, and desperate to re-establish Clare’s sales, cut and changed it severely. The version of the ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’ which was published in 1827 was, in many ways, as devastated as the bare land around Clare’s village, after what Clare called the ‘mildew’ of enclosure.
But the lost can return. In 2006, Carcanet published a new edition of ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’, whose details can be found here.
As well as the bare 1827 text, it includes the tumbling richness of a manuscript version of the poem, marvellously re-assembled by Tim Chilcott. This ‘Shepherd’s Calendar’, almost unpunctuated, is a revelation. Here is the working year of Clare’s village, with its dialect, its washing, its fruit-eating hedgehogs, and its sudden insights (later cut) into the deeper workings of Clare’s world. The manuscript poem highlights, for example, a growing gulf between the rich and the poor.
I spoke about the manuscript’s final lines: its description of Christmas. This is not Paradise. Its children, Clare remarks, are ‘greedy’. ‘In the dark the lovers steal / To kiss & toy behind the screen’: the screen which, ominously, has a picture of Adam and Eve, about to ‘rob life’s fatal apple tree’. I spoke of the connections to my country family. My grandfather was a renowned East Anglian shepherd. His widowed mother was granted too little poor relief by ‘the Parish’. Worn out by her scramble through paid scrubbing and washing, she died young.
Clare knew anxious poverty. Yet
The yule cake dotted thick wi plumbs
Is on each supper table found
& cats look up for falling crumbs
Which greedy childern litter round
& hus wifes sage stuffd seasond chine
Long hung in chimney nook to drye
& boiling eldern berry wine
To drink the christmass eves “good bye”
The Christmas ending of ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’ celebrates the visits of friends, and the dishes and drink skilfully prepared by the women of the household from home-reared, local food: ‘sage stuffd seasond chine’ and ‘boiling eldern berry wine’. My father’s mother, a noted cook, could make these – and left her own ‘Calendar’ of beautifully copied recipes.
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| A recipe for 6 Christmas puddings, found in Alison Brackenbury's grandmother's notebook |
My praise of the frugality and neighbourliness of this generation seemed to strike a chord with the audience who had braved the gales to sit beneath the preacher’s clock. I did not ascend to the preacher’s wooden pulpit, hanging above my head. Instead, the January issue of that fine magazine The North will include my talk, with Clare’s lines, ‘dotted thick wi plumbs’.
But now I must turn from richness to loss. In the best and worst tradition of blogging, this is an unpolished, dashed-off piece, written in December’s dark, in the hungry gap before breakfast. I am writing it, urgently, to lament another gap: The future of the long-running Aldeburgh poetry festival is now in doubt.
I will not risk inaccurate précis. But I will stress, with sadness, that the Guardian article says: ‘All members of staff will have left by the end of the year’. I would like to wish them well, and to thank them - and all those involved in the thankless work of organising this memorable festival. Aldeburgh has run, amazingly for twenty-seven years. I have only been there for four of these. I wish that my regular gifts of money had been bigger. But I will try to say, briefly, why I value this festival so much, and why I hope it will weather the gales of these difficult times.
First, I can speak of Aldeburgh as a poet who has read there. One of Aldeburgh’s best features was that (I believe) it did not invite poets back for ten years. So I can speak out without suspicion of courting future favours. I don’t know whether I will be able to climb on to a stage, let alone a pulpit, at seventy! But when I read at Aldeburgh, at sixty, in 2013, it was a turning point. I had published work steadily for over thirty years. But for decades I was 50% of the workforce in a small family metal finishing business, supporting our daughter and my husband’s parents. I could not take time off to do readings.
When I retired, and, suddenly, could do readings again, I suspect that many festivals would not immediately have given me a place in a main reading. But Aldeburgh did. I read to an audience of hundreds, including many younger writers. Listeners from Suffolk and much further afield then bought my books and talked to me about my work. It was the beginning of a new season in my own poetry calendar, as I know Aldeburgh has been for other poets, of very varied ages and backgrounds.
Secondly, I would like to praise Aldeburgh for its gifts to me as a writer. I have now been part of the Aldeburgh audience for many readings. I have heard poets I would never have heard or read. Last year I heard Vera Pavlova, a Russian poet who knows all of her sharp, profound pieces by heart. (My husband, who rarely reads poetry, pored over Vera’s book when I brought it home.)
This year, I was deeply impressed by the wayward, generous work of a poet from the US, Tony Hoagland. I sat in the draughts of Victoria Coach Station racing through his books, eager as Clare’s cats who ‘look up for falling crumbs’. I always write better when I have been to Aldeburgh. I could even point to particular poems amongst my readers’ favourites, which began to blow into my mind on that windy coast.
For Aldeburgh is outstanding – perhaps unique – in inviting, and funding, visits by poets from outside the UK, who are not often heard here. This is expensive. But I hope that funding organisations will consider how important it is for British audiences to hear the best of our wide world’s poetry, and consider, urgently, how this can be carried on in the future.
Lastly, and most importantly, I would like to stress that, through the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival , the richest ‘plumbs’ of poetry can reach a far wider audience than normal. My excellent B&B landlord and landlady at Aldeburgh are bright, lively, but very busy people. Many people now are. I can’t think of a period in my lifetime when working households have been so short of time. But local events can attract audiences who do not normally listen to poetry. This includes my landlord, landlady and their friends, who go each year to Aldeburgh’s Sunday events, because the Festival is local, and they have discovered that they enjoy it.
They relish the variety of what Aldeburgh offers. Last year my landlady told me how much she laughed at a young, outrageous performance poet. This year she said how marvellous it was to hear poetry read, by the poet, in their own language. She enjoyed Pedro Serrano’s reading in Spanish (a language, which, like me, she does not speak). She was entranced by the French of Valérie Rouzeau, whose face, she said, became ‘lit’ and ‘beautiful’ during her reading.
I have no pulpit. But I would politely ask the Arts Council, and all other loyal funders of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, to consider one thing. What might seem most extravagant, most difficult, most unlikely to attract a new audience – a poet reading their own poems in their own language – was the ingredient of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival which left my Suffolk landlady’s face radiant over the ‘falling crumbs’ of breakfast. It is why she will return next year. If there is a next year…
Live performance is fragile. Like the remembered stories of John Clare’s childhood, at its best it creates magic. It is a strong magic. It can trouble, stir, move deeply. If it is a poem, it can sing. But no live poetry sang in my East Anglian childhood. I did not hear a poetry reading until I was eighteen, and won a scholarship to Oxford. I would ask arts administrators, also weathering the gales of difficult times, to think urgently about the arts in areas which are outside cities, whose people are scattered, where transport is expensive, where arts events can seem the ‘falling crumbs’ from a distant table.
Though Aldeburgh’s events were often packed, events in rural counties may not always attract the size of audiences that a big metropolitan event would draw. It is wonderful to have an audience of thousands for the T.S.Eliot prize readings. But I have also been in an audience of fifty, listening to a poet at the Wordsworth Trust in Cumbria (a county now in very difficult times indeed).
That audience had travelled a long way to hear a fine poet who was in the early stages of Alzheimers, whose wife had written his introductions, but whose voice still remembered the cadences, and the compassion, of his own work. He had been a Cumbrian parish priest. I am a lapsed Anglican. I was more moved by his reading than by anything I have heard from a pulpit. Since then, the Wordsworth Trust has lost its grant. It no longer offers poetry readings.
‘We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table.’ The Cumbrian priest would have known, far better than I do, those words from the poetry of Thomas Cranmer’s Communion Service. What are these crumbs? As I grow older, I often think about the place of food in our lives. My grandparents, who worked all their lives to rear, grow and cook food, came, at times, close to malnutrition. In a tiny photograph from the 1920s, jacket and waistcoat hang loosely on my tall, gaunt, shepherd grandfather. Clare’s Christmas feast, ‘thick wi plumbs’, celebrates a rare richness. ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’ could include near-starvation.
But, as Cranmer knew, there are many kinds of starvation, of the spirit and of the mind. I think that Clare, with his fitful education, and his few childhood books, suffered from this. When I grew up in the country, the old songs which Clare loved, and which my mother’s father still sang, were almost lost to my parents’ generation. First came the Sunday musical jingles of Radio Luxembourg, ‘We are the Ovaltineys’, then Abba. There are richer crumbs.
I hope that the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival will return to my, and my landlady’s calendar. That coast, which the swallows cross, has always been open to the world. In 2013, the Canadian poet Karen Solie spoke of Canadian farmers, who now drew their income from fracking – but who could no longer drink their local water. This year John Burnside and Helen Macdonald spoke of their deep anxieties about our future.Beneath the pulpit of Aldeburgh’s Baptist Chapel, I spoke of the erosion of East Anglia’s rich soil, of factory farming, of our sleep walk into climate change disaster. A week before, I had found a November Sunday in Oxford hotter than summer. No place in that calendar for Clare’s ‘boiling eldern berry wine’! The preacher’s clock is ticking. We need to do many things, including drastic changes to our own lives. But I hope we can keep, in our calendar, time for protest, pulpits, ‘plumbs’ – and poems.
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