CHAPTER 1 BRITTEN MINOR 191330 1 The Suffolk coastal resort of Lowestoft, where Benjamin Britten was born in 1913, was described in the mid-nineteenth century as 'a handsome and improving market town , bathing-place , and sea port ' which, 'when viewed from the sea, has the most picturesque and beautiful appearance of any town on the eastern coast'.1 This was just before the arrival of the railway in 1847 and the massive development of South Lowestoft, between Lake Lothing and the previously separate villages of Kirkley and Pakefield, by Sir Morton Peto of Somerleyton Hall. Thirty years later, Anthony Trollope would choose Lowestoft as the setting for a pivotal chapter in his novel The Way We Live Now , transporting three characters Paul Montague, Winifred Hurtle and Roger Carbury to the town: Paul rashly meets Mrs Hurtle there and bumps into Roger, who has been his rival for the hand of another woman. At that time, South Lowestoft's principal building was the Royal Hotel of 1849: though unnamed by Trollope, it is evidently the scene of Paul Montague and Winifred Hurtle's meeting. In one filmed version of The Way We Live Now , part of the episode takes place on a hotel balcony, from which the former lovers watch the sun set over the sea; but this is something they couldn't have done in Lowestoft, since it is the most easterly point on the English coastline, although on a clear morning you might see the sun rise. What is just as likely to greet you, if you look out from the Victorian houses of Kirkley Cliff Road, across the slender green space of the bowls club towards the beach and sea, is an easterly onshore breeze and sleet in the wind. During the early years of the last century, one of these houses, 21 Kirkley Cliff Road, was occupied by a dentist, Robert Victor Britten, his wife Edith Rhoda (née Hockey) and their family. A semi-detached villa with its entrance lobby to the left-hand side, it was to contain a dental practice for most of the twentieth century and is now a small hotel called Britten House; opposite, next to the bowling green, there's a car park adorned with aluminium seats and cycle racks, flying-saucer lamp posts and a few municipal saplings in little gravelled squares.

Robert Britten, whose father ended up running a dairy business in Maidenhead, where he died in 1881, had originally hoped to be a farmer, but this ambition was thwarted by his lack of the necessary capital. Instead, he trained at Charing Cross Hospital before working as an assistant dentist in Ipswich and, in 1905, setting up his own practice at 46 Marine Parade, Lowestoft; three years later, his growing family and increasing prosperity prompted him to move the mile further south to Kirkley Cliff Road. There, every day at eleven o'clock, he would habitually leave his ground-floor surgery for a fortifying mid-morning whisky, ascending to the first-floor sitting room which he called 'Heaven'; downstairs, he seems to have implied, was the other place. There's a hint in this habit of that continuous rumbling dissatisfaction, not unlike toothache, with which Graham Greene so memorably burdened his dentist, Mr Tench, in The Power and the Glory . Yet, probably because he didn't relish his profession, Robert Britten's patients found him sympathetic and friendly; he was able to share and respond to their feelings to a greater extent than a more enthusiastic practitioner of his craft might have done. Robert had met his future wife while studying dentistry at Charing Cross, but there was already a connection between their two families: Edith and her sisters had attended the same school as Robert's sisters Miss Hinton's School for Girls, Maidenhead where Florence Britten and Sarah Hockey were exact contemporaries. Edith's father, William Henry Hockey, was a Queen's Messenger at the Home Office: the family's staff flat had a misleadingly grand address in Whitehall, and it was from there in September 1901 that the eldest daughter married Robert Britten at St John's, Smith Square. Edith was a strikingly attractive and talented young woman who might have expected something better than marriage at the age of twenty-eight to a dentist four years her junior, had it not been for her socially compromised background: her father was illegitimate and her mother sufficiently unstable to have spent much of her life in homes.

But Robert was young, handsome and something of a challenge, for drink and recklessness had already ruined both of his brothers. Determined to save her husband and children from a similar fate, Edith's prescription was moderation and music, and it seems to have worked. By 1913, Robert was thirty-six and Edith forty years old: they had three children Barbara (born in Ipswich on 11 June 1902), Robert or Bobby (born in Lowestoft on 28 January 1907) and Elizabeth, known as Beth (born in Lowestoft on 10 June 1909) and they thought their family complete. So their fourth child was what parents are sometimes apt to describe, with a knowing and self-congratulatory smile, as a 'mistake'. He was born at 21 Kirkley Cliff Road on 22 November, which is the feast day of St Cecilia, the patron saint of music. As if that were not omen enough, he was given the first name not only of his father's younger brother but, as Edith at least would have been very well aware, of England's most eminent living composer, Edward Elgar, who in the preceding five years had produced a flurry of major works including the two completed symphonies (1908, 1911), the violin concerto (1910) and The Music Makers (1912). But the Brittens' youngest son would always be called by his middle name Benjamin or 'Beni', 'Benjy' and finally 'Ben' and, as we shall see, he would grow up to have mixed feelings about Elgar. His father had no interest in music: he was, said Britten, 'almost anti-musical, I'm afraid'.

2 The musical ability and ambition was all on his mother's side: of the seven Hockey children, at least three pursued musical careers, most notably Edith's brother Willie, who was organist at St Mary-le-Tower in Ipswich, conductor of the Ipswich Choral Society and a professional singing teacher. He gave his nephew, for his ninth birthday, a copy of Stainer and Barrett's A Dictionary of Musical Terms (1889), which in ordinary circumstances might have seemed an overambitious or over-optimistic present. By this time, Benjamin would sometimes stay with his Uncle Willie and Auntie Jane at their home in Berners Street, Ipswich, from where his earliest surviving letter home was written on 25 April 1923: in this, he is more excited by a visit to the railway station and the sight of a new L&NER engine, 'green with a gold rim round its chimmeny', than by anything specifically musical. Nevertheless, Marian Walker, a family friend, remembered that when she asked Britten 'Where did your music come from?' he replied: 'I had rather a reprobate old uncle, but he was intensely musical, and I think it was he who originally told me that he preferred to read a score rather than hear anything played.'3 So where did his music come from? Uncle Willie, supplying the crucial distinction between the practitioner's pleasure in the score and the listener's in the performance, is clearly part of the answer. But little Benjamin showed conspicuous ability, or so his doting mother supposed, from the moment his infant hand touched the piano in the upstairs drawing room: 'Dear pay pano,' he would demand at the age of two, liking to think 'Dear' was his name because that's what people called him.4 Edith was particularly keen that he should be a musical genius, since her two daughters were as unmusical as their father while Bobby, her elder son, preferred to play ragtime; she convinced herself that her younger son would one day be ranked as the 'fourth B', alongside Bach, Beethoven and Brahms although, as things turned out, a more relevant trinity of Bs would be Bridge, Berg and Berkeley. There is a peculiar photograph, taken when he was about seven years old, of the small boy seated at the piano, upon which half a dozen open scores have been ingeniously displayed: whether they are parts to be played simultaneously or pieces to be performed in rapid succession isn't clear; but the photograph is evidently intended as a joke, since another taken at about the same time shows him tackling a single piece in the ordinary way while, seated on the sofa, his mother listens politely and an unmusical sister reads a book.

The point of the first photograph, of course, is that this is a child of prodigious virtuosity; yet virtuosity isn't the same as creativity. 'Where did his musical skills come from?' isn't the same question as 'Where did his music come from?' The latter may prove the more difficult and interesting of the two. Benjamin received his first semi-formal musical instruction from his mother at the age of five or six; two years later, he began piano lessons with Miss Ethel Astle ARCM, the younger of two sisters who ran the nearby pre-preparatory school called Southolme, at 52 Kirkley Cliff Road. Although he would later praise Miss Astle's 'impeccable' teaching, adding that those with whom he subsequently studied at the Royal College of Music 'commented on the really first-rate ground-work that I had received',5 there is no reason to suppose that she was anything much more than a perfectly decent and unexceptiona.