In the footsteps of Benjamin Britten and MR James: a walk round Aldeburgh and a visit to the Red House, the home Britten shared with his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, for the last twenty years of his life. It is a town saturated with the strangeness, mystery and elemental danger of the sea; it was all too easy to imagine the frantic flight of the foolhardy archaeologist Paxton along the shingle from the Bear Inn (the White Lion, now a hotel) to the Martello tower where he met his gruesome and lonely end in one of James's greatest stories, A Warning to the Curious (memorably filmed in 1972 by Lawrence Gordon Clark, but filmed, strangely, in Norfolk). Britten's Red House felt, by contrast, a place of safety, a peaceful art and book-lined sanctuary (the likes of Arthur Machen, Denton Welch and Walter de la Mare occupy the shelves), a light-filled house still tinged with the warmth and cheer of Britten's many friends and visitors (there was sadness too: the upstairs bedroom in which he died was especially moving). I liked the shelves of knick-knacks and postcards, art that ran the gamut from from the kitsch to the darkly sublime, and the carefully preserved traces of domesticity as well as musical inspiration. At the end of our trip I couldn't resist: we went back down to the beach and I stood, with Maggi Hambling's Scallop at my back, facing out to the North Sea, into the teeth of the wind, and listened to Britten's Sea Interludes (visions of Dunwich and church bells submerged beneath the waves, the weightless skimming of a gull along the surface of the waters, defying the buffeting winds and the fierce current that drags men and boats under, the sun fighting to break through the blanket of grey cloud, shades of Paxton, Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, Gustav von Aschenbach...) It was some moment. #mrjames #montaguerhodesjames #awarningtothecurious #aldeburgh #seaburgh #martellotower #aldeburghbeach #ghoststories #buriedcrown #threecrownsofeastanglia #benjaminbritten #theredhouse #peterpears #johnpiper #maggihambling #scallop #aldeburghbookshop #seainterludes #petergrimes #dunwich #sunkenchurches #drownedbells #theseathesea #thalattathalatta https://www.instagram.com/p/B1W7qfegIyh/?igshid=yhgcbi9h9jph
