First and Last Loves

by John Betjeman

  I do not know whether St. Petroc’s day, the 4th of June, is still kept in Padstow church; it is in Bodmin parish church and in most of the other thirty or forty churches in Wales, Devon and Cornwall which are dedicated to him. His cult has survived too in Brittany and at Loperec (Locus Petroci) they have a statue of him, a more lively one than the little stone one in Padstow church. It shows a benign, bearded man in a spangled cloak, in one hand he holds the gospels and with the other he strokes a thin, nobbly little deer which has jumped up to him and put its forepaws on his breast. Blessed St. Petroc! He was the chief of all Cornish saints, a man of pervading gentleness.

  St. Petroc may be neglected in Padstow today. But the Hobby-horse is not. Whether it came in with the Danes who sacked the town in 981 and drove St. Petroc’s monks to Bodmin or whether it was a pagan rite which St. Petroc himself may have witnessed with displeasure, I leave to antiquarians to dispute. The Padstow Hobby-horse is a folk revival which is almost certainly of pagan origin. Moreover, it is as genuine and unselfconscious as the Morris Dancing at Bampton-in-the-Bush, Oxfordshire, and not even broadcasting it or an influx of tourists will take the strange and secret character from the ceremonies connected with it. For this is what happens. On the day before May Day, green boughs are put up against the houses. And that night every man and woman in Padstow is awake with excitement. I knew someone who was next to a Padstow man in the trenches in the 1914 war. On the night before May Day, the Padstow man became so excited he couldn’t keep still. The old ’obby ’oss was mounting in his blood and his mates had to hold him back from jumping over the top and dancing about in No-man’s-land.

  Now imagine a still night, the last of April, the first of May. Starlight above the chimney pots. Moon on the harbour. Moonlight shadows of houses on opposite slate walls. At about two in the morning the song begins. Here are the words.

  With a merry ring and with the joyful spring,

  For summer is a-come unto day

  How happy are those little birds which so merrily do sing

  In the merry morning of May.

  Then the men go round to the big houses of the town singing below the windows a variety of verses—

  “Arise up Mr. Brabyn I know you well afine

  You have a shilling in your purse and I wish it were in mine.”

  And then on to a house where a young girl lives—

  “Arise up Miss Lobb all in your smock of silk

  And all your body under as white as any milk.”

  Morning light shines on the water and the green-grey houses. Out on the quay comes the Hobby-horse—it used to be taken for a drink to a pool a mile away from the town. It is a man in a weird mask, painted red and black and white, and he wears a huge hooped skirt made of black tarpaulin which he is meant to lift up, rushing at the ladies to put it over one of their heads. The skirt used to have soot in it. A man dances with the Hobby-horse carrying a club. Suddenly, at about 11.30 in the morning, there is a pause. The Hobby-horse bows down to the ground. The attendant lays his club on its head and the day song begins, a dirge-like strain.

  “Oh where is St. George? Oh where is he, O?

  He’s down in his long boat. All on the salt sea, O.”

  Then up jumps the Hobby-horse, loud shriek the girls, louder sings the crowd and wilder grows the dance—

  With a merry ring and with a joyful spring

  For summer is a-come unto day

  How happy are those little birds which so merrily do sing

  In the merry morning of May.

  Ilfracombe

  Ilfracombe is the end of everything. The express train had only three carriages left which had wound so long and crowded out of Waterloo. Parts of it had been dropped off at Exeter and Barnstaple. Here at Ilfracombe staion, the end of the line, we seemed to hang in air on a cliff top, with the town two hundred feet below us and silvery slate cliffs, sea and the far-seen coast of Wales beyond.

  It was hard to believe there was going to be a town after all those miles of bleak North Devon fields with their high stone hedges, black thorns, foxgloves and hardly a house in sight. There might perhaps be a village, quite a big village, but not a town. Ilfracombe seems enormous. It has several churches, lines of Welsh-looking lodging houses, hills and valleys filled with houses, shops, cinemas and loud speakers giving off crooning. It is the Blackpool of the West, the Douglas of North Devon, the noise and the glitter dazzled me at first so that I could not sort out Ilfracombe nor discover why it had ever been built and if it had to be in North Devon, why not at some more spectacular place like Heddon’s Mouth or Lynton where Exmoor rises to nearly a thousand feet and cascades in rocks and bracken to the Bristol Channel? Why is Ilfracombe here where there is no sand and these great hills, grass on the land-ward side, slate on the seaward, hide much of the town from the sea?

  I went up Torrs Walks and from 450 feet looked back on the town. My son and I set off in a speed boat swirling past the caves and cliffs to glimpse between the gaps in spray and rock the terraces of the town. Leaving him to take more trips on the speed boat, I climbed to airy suburbs where boarding houses flew bathing dresses from upstairs windows. I visited the Museum, quite the nicest and most old-fashioned provincial museum I have ever seen, crowded with all sorts of objects; old tickets, stuffed crocodiles, heathen gods, local photographs and prints and playbills, butterflies, moths and birds, seaweed arranged to look like flowers and feathers arranged to look like fruit. Indeed, this Museum must be almost the last unspoiled one left in England. It has no horn-rimmed experts in it cataloguing and killing things with their erudition and asking you not to touch.

  From walks and drives and cruises, and chiefly from this Museum, I began to piece together the growth of Ilfracombe. It is an epitome of seaside history, and this must be the kind of way it grew. Until a hundred and fifty years ago nobody cared about living by the sea, unless they were fishermen or sailors. Then, Ilfracombe consisted of a harbour naturally guarded by Lantern Hill, on the top of which is an old chapel of St. Nicholas, possibly Celtic in origin. Nearly a mile further up the brook which poured into the harbour were an old village and parish church. In that large and graceful church today you can feel the old West Country Ilfracombe about you, for it is a singularly countrified church for so large a town. It has carved barrel roofs of wood; it has wall tablets and low West-Country style columns. And not far off are old houses with slate-hung sides, yellow stucco fronts and Georgian windows. In a place called Cuddeford’s Passage, off the High Street, I found Clovelly-like cottages built of slate and whitewashed. This is all genuine Devon.

  In Georgian days the harbour was extended. Ilfracombe grew as a fishing port. Then in about 1830 someone saw its possibilities as a watering place. Mild, warm, almost as sunny as Nice, it was a fuchsia-shaded ilex-waving paradise. Indeed, the poet Charles Abraham Elton of Clevedon thus described it in 1835—

  Thy craggy coves, O Ilfracombe!

  The outline of thy ridgy hills,

  The ash-tree dell’s sun quivering gloom,

  And pebbled dash of viewless rills.

  Many attractive Georgian houses were built above the harbour and set snugly down in the grassy valley between harbour and church. Still later, this mild climate and these mildly beetling rocks, not too rugged and wild, these well-spoken Devon sailors round the little harbour—all were just the thing for Mid-Victorian merchants and their families. So next came stupendous hotels erected in the turfy hollow, St. Pancras Station in white brick, the Louvre in red and white bricks. These hotels are the most impressive buildings in the place and the most prominent is the Ilfracombe Hotel built in 1867 in the French Gothic style in coloured bricks.

  Since those Mid-Victorian days, Ilfracombe has changed in character. Rich West Country and London merchants ceased to come. The Welsh arrived by steamer from Barry, Swansea and Cardiff; the railway opened in 1874 and made the journey less adventurous and the place less what used to be called “exclusive”. So the combe filled up not with nobl
e isolated villas proclaiming the riches of their occupants, but with large hotels and rows upon rows of boarding houses designed to cram bedrooms into the smallest possible space. Ilfracombe became what it still is, the people’s playground.

  My last picture of Ilfracombe is not of sea, nor of Devon but of that peculiar and exotic thing known as “seaside”. I stand on a steep hill on the way to the station. Warm salty air is round me and I can smell the Atlantic but cannot see it. There rises in front of me a row of late Victorian boarding houses in shiny yellow brick, relieved with shiny red, a style very popular in Ilfracombe. The roofs are of blue slate and red tiles pick out the ridges. The cast-iron railings are painted silver and the garden behind them is bright with lobelias, geraniums and hydrangeas. A palm tree rises as high as the first floor window. The piers of the front gate are topped with pieces of white quartz. Ilfracombe, with your chapels, evangelical churches, chars-à-bancs and variegated terraces, long may you lie embedded in your gorgeous cliffs and hills! Nature made you lovely. Man has not improved you. But on a sunny summer evening you are lovely still.

  Clevedon

  Clevedon has the most character, the widest diversity of scenery, the fewest really hideous buildings of all the “seaside” places I have lately visited. It is quiet, mild, medium-sized. Its churches are full, its shops are polite, the same families come to it year after year, the same type of people who like peace and who mistrust so-called “progress” walk along its ilex-shaded roads. Upon that slender cast-iron pier, built in 1869, strode T. E. Brown, the Clifton schoolmaster and poet. Here he composed a poem about the salmon rushing up the Severn from the sea. To Clevedon, the body of Arthur Hallam was brought in 1833—

  The Danube to the Severn gave

  The darken’d heart that beat no more;

  They laid him by the pleasant shore,

  And in the hearing of the wave.

  There twice a day the Severn fills,

  The salt sea-water passes by,

  And hushes half the babbling Wye

  And makes a silence in the hills.

  Not thirty years earlier Coleridge had brought his young bride to Clevedon to a small cottage which still survives:

  Low was our pretty cot: our tallest rose

  Peeped at the chamber window. We could hear

  At silent noon, and eve and early morn

  The sea’s faint murmur.

  Now he would hear only bus engines, for a big garage is opposite to the cottage where he lived.

  Great writers have come to Clevedon ever since the Elton family bought Clevedon Court in Queen Anne’s reign. Successive Eltons who seem always to have been men of taste and vision, improved the town throughout the last century, Clevedon Court where the Eltons still live is said to be the oldest inhabited house in England. Most of what one sees from the Bristol road looks Tudor, Jacobean and later, but parts of it go back to Edward II. Terraced gardens rise to oak and ilex, beech and ash woods. These form a dark and satisfying background to the house which is of honey-coloured and silvery limestone, battlemented and irregular.

  Much of Clevedon looks as though it were a continuation of the private park of the Court, thanks to skilful planting and planning in Victorian times. Roads wind among trees, there is plenty of open space. Skylines are often left undisturbed by building. Elton Road and Hallam Road leave little doubt about who the original owners were. Albert, Victoria and Alexandra roads give one a good idea of the dates of others. The earliest development is to be found in simple late Georgian houses of stucco washed cream or white and set down below the crest of Dial Hill, where they peep from myrtle bushes and ilex trees. What a comment on our civilisation it is that these modest houses actually beautify the hillside, while a few yards above them, a row of pre-war villas, commanding fine views no doubt, ruin the skyline for miles with their shapelessness and alien red brick among all this silvery stone. Such vandalism would never have been allowed under the benevolent liberalism of Elton control. The prevalent style of house in the older, mid-Victorian parts of Clevedon is Gothic or Italianate, built of local greyish-blue stone, sometimes flecked with pink or honey-yellow. Bargeboards adorn gables, roofs are slated, trees surround lawns and hang over garden walls. It is all as though many comfortable vicarages had been set down here among trees within sound of the sea. Well-designed Victorian lamp posts, instead of boa constrictors in concrete, adorn the streets. Walks and shelters and flowering shrubs and parks decorate the sea front. Only the sea itself is a bit of a failure. It is often muddy with that chocolate mud one sees at Weston and which seems to clog the waves and dye their thin tops a pinky-brown. This mud lies upon the rocks. Bathing in the marine lake at Clevedon I accidentally touched some with my toe—it had the feeling of a dead body.

  But stand on Castle Hill three hundred feet above the town, in the octagonal ruin of Stuart times called Walton Castle, and view the landscape round. The gables of Clevedon rise from the spur of hills below us. Clifton is only twelve miles away behind us. Backbones of hill leading home to Bristol are dark with waving woods. Beyond the town towards Weston run flat and pale green moors till they meet the blue outline of true Mendips like the background of a Flemish stained-glass window. The Bristol Channel is a bronze shield streaked with sunlight. Flat Holm and Steep Holm are outlined to the west, and to the north the coast of South Wales stretches out of sight. What was a tidal river has become a huge dividing sea. This wonderful view from Castle Hill is all Georgian enjoyment of the picturesque, especially when seen through an ivy-mantled arch.

  But at the other end of the town, where the old parish church stands sheltered between two grassy hills at the sea’s edge, the atmosphere is older and even Celtic. The cruciform church built of dark grey slate, with storm-resisting central tower, the windy churchyard, the low bushes blown landward, the brown grass, cliff plants and nearby thud and thunder of water, all make me think I am in Cornwall.

  Clevedon is saved by being on the way to nowhere. The dear old light railway which connected it with Portishead has been ripped up by modern progress, which here means buses. But buses don’t go with Clevedon, any more than do modernistic arcades of shops and the new Post Office at the cross roads in the town. Now only a Great Western branch from Yatton serves the town. Let the chars-à-bancs and megaphones and multitudes roar down distant main roads to Weston and to Cheddar Gorge. Clevedon will then still be left as it is, a civilised and decorative seaside town, shunned, thank heaven, by modern barbarism, a refuge in time of trouble, a beautiful haven of quiet.

  Highworth

  I have never seen Highworth given due praise in guide books for what it is—one of the most charming and unassuming country towns in the West of England. It is unspoiled by the vulgar fascias of chain stores, concrete lamp posts don’t lean above its houses like seasick giants spewing orange light at night that turns us all to corpses, the roaring hideousness of main roads has left Highworth undisturbed. The only ugly things about it are some fussy red modern villas on the outskirts and too many electric light and telegraph wires zig-zagging across its High Street.

  Highworth is extraordinary because it has more beautiful buildings than it has ugly ones. It is mostly a Cotswold-coloured place of pale grey stone gathered round its church high on a hill, with a High Street and Market Place, a street at right angles, a Georgian doctor’s house in red brick with a fine white wooden porch and doorway, and one more grand brick house—and these Georgian brick houses look as beautiful and ripe as autumn apples among all this silver stone of the streets.

  Then Highworth is full of old inns with bay windows and swinging signs and arches for coaches to go under into cobbled yards; there is a pleasant late Georgian Congregational church; wistaria and vines trail over some of the houses; high garden walls show glimpses of fruit trees rising above them. It would not surprise me to see periwigged men in knee breeches and ladies in silks and countrymen in smocks walking about in Sheep Street and in High Street or down Vicarage Lane, Highworth. They would not
look out of place.

  Even the Matting Factory is tucked away out of sight. So is the church. You can see its tower everywhere but you have to look through an arch under a house in the High Street to glimpse the porch and lime-shaded churchyard. The church has a fine painted Royal Arms, a huge parish chest with three padlocks, some Norman work and much later work and much too much late-Victorian work.

  Highworth is on the border of the West Country and the Midlands, and to me it is the centre of some of the loveliest country round its feet—Coleshill House in Berkshire, that four-square masterpiece of stone built in Charles II’s reign with its lantern and moulded chimneys rising mightily from surrounding elms; Great Coxwell barn, the oldest and grandest tithe barn in Britain, beating, in my opinion, those at Abbotsbury in Dorset and Harmondsworth in Middlesex; Inglesham church down by the Thames, the church which William Morris saved from so-called restoration—there it is, clear glass, box pews, old screens and wall paintings, a stoney, lichen-crusted country church among the whispering grasses. These are some of the sights of the country round Highworth. Countless unknown lanes lead up the hill to Highworth.

  When I am abroad and want to recall a typically English town, I think of Highworth. It is the sort of town read about in novels from Cranford to Miss MacNaughten. Ah, Highworth as a whole! Churches and chapels, doctors’ houses, Vicarage, walled gardens with pears and plums, railway station, inns and distant cemetery, old shops and winding streets. We walked down one of those narrow lanes, between garden walls, that lead under archways into the High Street. (The only way to see a town is to go down every alley and see the backs of the houses.) Ivy-leaved toadflax with its little purple flowers hung over the stone, an uneven line of stone-tiled roofs and slate roofs, stone and brick chimney stacks, leaded windows under eaves, all these formed a base for the church tower. There was a sound of tea being cleared away in a cottage just near us. And suddenly with a burst the bells of Highworth church rang out for Evening Service. As though called by the bells, the late sun burst out and bathed the varied roofs with gold and scooped itself into the uneven panes of old windows. Sun and stone and old brick and garden flowers and church bells. That was Sunday evening in Highworth. That was England.