by A. N. Wilson
And the sunset made a blood red sky
And I looked at the clowds [sic] that were up on high.
It is an instantly recognisable Betjeman poem. It has church bells. It has the sense of his own wretchedness in the presence of God. It has the mildly kinky need to be punished, in this case in village stocks. No doubt one of the reasons for being in the stocks was so that they could rhyme with rocks. The waves crashing on the rocks of the coast of North Cornwall were part of the inner music of Betjeman all his life.
In a mature poem, ‘Harrow-on-the-Hill’, he is in an electric train going through Wembley on the outer reaches of North London, and glimpsing the lights go on after tea in Harrow-on-the-Hill. Only, in the slightly dream-like state induced by the gathering dark, and the movement of the train, the urban sprawl has turned into Cornish sea and Atlantic rollers
As they gather up for plunging
Into caves.
It is one of the most successful of Betjeman’s poems:
There’s a storm cloud to the westward over Kenton,
There’s a line of harbour lights at Perivale,
Is it rounding rough Pentire in a flood of sunset fire
The little fleet of trawlers under sail?
Can these boats be only roof tops
As they stream along the skyline
In a race for port and Padstow
With the gale?
If North London provided the background for Betjeman’s birth and early experiences of fear and loss, there was always this other place, from the very beginning – Cornwall which, in his daughter’s words, was ‘the healer of all wounds’.
When his mother died, and Betjeman found himself in the unusual position, in 1951, of having a little money, he considered buying a house. ‘I do want to buy a house in Trebetherick’, he told a friend. ‘Nowhere else. Not even Rock or Polzeath.’ These are all small villages, within a few miles of one another on the North Cornish coast.
Bess and Ernie Betjemann had been going down to Trebetherick since before their son was born. South Cornwall is sub-tropical. Palm trees grow in its villa’d gardens and on the esplanade at Penzance. Its sea is good sailing sea, and in such ports as St Mawes and Falmouth, holiday-makers have sailed their dinghies alongside fishing boats for generations.
North Cornwall and its savage coast is completely different. The sea off these dramatic high cliffs is not man’s friend. At the dividing line between Cornwall and Devon, some twenty-five miles from the Betjemanns’ favourite haunt, Parson Hawker of Morwenstowe, a good minor poet, devoted much of his parish ministry in Victorian times to the burial of wrecked sailors. The living pursued by the fishermen of North Cornwall is, to this day, perilous. One of John Betjeman’s most eloquent poems is the prose-description of the deserted fishing village of Port Quin.
Here at the end of the last century, all the men of the village were drowned in the fishing boat owned by the village. So it is now a street of ruined cottages. Weeds choke the stream, fennel, valerian and mallow sprout among the ruined cottage walls and an occasional caravan pollutes a weedy garden. From the inland end of the street may be seen, like a village church tower, the Regency Gothick folly on Doyden Point. Down on the deserted quay the saltings and pilchard stores are empty and the few remaining old cottages are preserved by the National Trust. High hills enclose the sea which seems to be licking its chops and thirsting for more lives, so that one turns inland up the mild valley to the shrine of St Endelienta.
Trebetherick is in a more sheltered stretch of the coast, a few miles westward, just over the Camel estuary and over the water from Padstow. It nestles on a road which slopes steeply down to one of the most spectacular stretches of golden sand – Daymer Bay, which ends with the little headland of Pentire which he saw in his sunset-vision in the Harrow-on-the-Hill poem just quoted. At the top of Daymer Bay, above the dunes, is a golf course, also celebrated in his verse (‘Lark song and sea sounds in the air / And splendour, splendour everywhere’). And in the middle of the golf course is a churchyard. The wobbly old spire of St Enodoc’s Church was all that showed of this medieval granite fane in the eighteenth century. It had been completely buried in the drifting light sand. In order to collect his stipend, the parson had to read the service in St Enodoc’s once a year. They used to dig a hole in the sand and lower him in through the roof. In 1863 the church was excavated, and, inevitably, restored. The golf course followed a few decades later.
At first, when the Betjemanns came to Trebetherick, the other holiday-makers, Harley Street doctors, Indian civil servants and headmasters (a little later in its history it was known as ‘Beak’s Bay’), might have shown their awareness that the Londoners were ‘in trade’. Little by little, as business prospered, Ernie bought more and more land in the village and along the coast, while continuing to stay in the Haven Guest House, or rented a house called, aptly, ‘Linkside’.
One of Betjeman’s childhood playmates remembered how Ernie stipulated that all the houses built on his land should be white. The Arts and Crafts architect C.F.A. Voysey built the finest house in Trebetherick. When in the 1920s Ernie Betjemann decided to build himself a holiday retreat, he commissioned his golfing friend Robert Atkinson, architect of the first Odeon cinemas, to design ‘Undertown’, itself a magnificent piece of Arts and Crafts, with its swooping roof and overhanging eaves, its mullioned windows and its whitewashed granite.
‘The cosy fuschia-ed and tamarisk-ed [sic] gardens of Trebetherick with their sunken slate terraces set out for tea in the shade of macrocarpas’ remained for Betjeman the landscape of his inner peace, his paradise. It was not a paradise lost; as a natural melancholic he was too canny to take risks by throwing away things which made him happy. Trebetherick was his secret ‘other place’, his soul-refreshment. It was the holiday place of his parents, even when they were quarrelling with one another and when he, as an adolescent, was finding them exasperating. It was the place where he took his own children on holiday, and to which he returned whenever he could in adult life; it was where he died, in 1984, and in St Enodoc’s churchyard he lies buried.
Cornwall appealed to the mystic in Betjeman,
And all the time the waves, the waves, the waves
Chase, intersect and flatten on the sand
As they have done for centuries, as they will
For centuries to come, when not a soul
Is left to picnic on the blazing rocks,
When England is not England, when mankind
Has blown himself to pieces. Still the sea,
Consolingly disastrous, will return
While the strange starfish, hugely magnified,
Waits in the jewelled basin of a pool.
He continued, throughout life, to see the seashore with the amazed eye of the child. Cornwall was also a place where he had jolly friends. Among the first friends they made, at the Haven Guest House, were the Larkworthies. Joan, a year older than John Betjeman, remembered Bess, bustling into the guest house, followed by her four-year-old son who ‘used to walk exactly like her, rather fast … I can see him now – coming in in a white suit, little anxious face, big eyes.’
Joan was one of the first female playmates who fell for his charm. He enjoyed emphasising, what was a genuine and ineradicable part of his nature, his timorousness. She remembered him being dragooned into a cricket match with the other children, and walking on the pitch ‘in a very stiff painful way’. When she asked him if anything was the matter, the reply was, ‘I’m covered in newspapers. I am afraid of being hurt.’ He had completely padded himself, round arms and legs, with newspapers, giving himself the appearance of the Michelin man.
In London, cooped up in his private dream-world at 31 West Hill, the rough and tumble of other children could appear threatening. He had the statutory crush on a neighbour’s little daughter, Peggy Purey-Cust – an admiral’s daughter who lived at the considerably grander Number 82, West Hill. He was also bullied by two of the boys who attended the same kindergarten,
Byron House. To his horror, when he moved on to Highgate Junior School, he found that the pair, Jack Shakespeare and Willie Buchanan, had arrived before him. He was a pupil there from September 1915 to March 1917. In Summoned by Bells he remembered them
now red-capped and jacketed like me:
‘Betjeman’s a German – spy –
Shoot him down and let him die:
Betjeman’s a German spy,
A German spy, a German spy.’
Britain, which had been so fervently pro-German in the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign, developed an insane anti-Hun mania from almost the moment war broke out in 1914. Much-loved German bakers’ shops were torched. It became unpatriotic to like Beethoven. Little children, still taught German as a matter of course in many schools, seized the opportunity to torment their German teachers. The language itself was a joke, an excuse to find ‘rude words’ which might be permissibly yelled at the teacher (‘Zucker damn it’). In such an atmosphere, it was bad luck to be called Betjeman, and to have the timorous clowning, cowering nature which appealed to the protective instincts in females and the bully in males.
Ernie Betjemann could not fail to have found it disturbing that his son was mocked because of his name, lured by Shakespeare and Buchanan to Swain’s Lane, at the bottom of West Hill, where they ripped off his shorts and threw him in a holly bush.
I learned a lot from that tough London boys’ school. I learned how to get round people, how to lie, how to show off just enough to attract attention but not so much as to attract unwelcome attention, how to bribe bullies with sweets (four ounces a penny in those days) – and I learned my first lessons in mistrusting my fellow beings.
The affectation of disliking England’s greatest poet which he retained to the end of his days – ‘I couldn’t see why Shakespeare was admired’ – makes more sense when one remembers Jack Shakespeare’s taunts.
His flowering poetic taste was in the direction of narrative verse, such as might be found in ‘Reciters’ – volumes of verse designed, in schoolrooms or parlours, to be recited – ‘Casabianca’, ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’, ‘Soldier’s Dream’. These, and the rhythms and cadences of the hymnal, were to be the formal inspiration of Betjeman the poet. And once again he is remarkable for the extent to which he did not need to move on, once he had discovered a formula to suit him. He tells us: ‘I knew as soon as I could read and write / That I must be a poet’.
By the time Betjeman was a boy, English poetry, like the British Empire, had reached a division of the ways. It was not a division which was apparent for everyone. Versifiers like Masefield, who was destined to become Poet Laureate, could continue writing their anthology pieces. But in even the best of the so-called Georgian poets (named after George V) there was a feeling of the machine running down. It is a mistake to think of Betjeman writing in their wake or following in their footsteps, though he makes occasional echoes of the best of them – Housman, for example. In rather a similar way, it would be a mistake to try to find inspiration for Blake’s poetry in the literary traditions of his contemporaries. Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience grew out of ballad sheets, and the hymns of Nonconformist chapels. Betjeman’s poetry grew out of music-hall songs, hymns and the Reciter. Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, to outshadow the etiolated offerings of the ‘Georgians’, was a poet of an altogether different order, an American called Thomas Stearns Eliot. It is one of the most extraordinary coincidences in literary history that Eliot at this time was a master at Highgate Junior School. The child Betjeman had his verses bound up into a book, and presented them to ‘The American master, Mr Eliot’… ‘At the time / A boy called Jelly said, “He thinks they’re bad”.’ In later life, Eliot apparently kept his counsel about his assessment of Betjeman’s poetry. As a publisher, however, at Faber & Gwyer, later Faber & Faber, in 1936, he tried to publish Betjeman as a poet – before he was taken up by the firm which published most of his work, John Murray. Faber did, however, publish, for a while, another of Betjeman’s great achievements, the Shell Guides. Different as the two men were in temperament, they met at a number of important levels. Both laughed at many of the same things. Both loved the English music hall – see Eliot’s classic appreciation of Marie Lloyd. Both loved ‘old London’, the City, City churches, gentlemen’s clubs. When Eliot taught Betjeman, he was still a young man, spiritually homesick and adrift, and locked into a disastrously unhappy marriage. He was to find his Rock in just such Anglican shrines as delighted Betjeman –
where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
On a level of faith, and loyalty to their church, the two men found a profound bond.
* * *
If in London the young Betjeman nurtured the introspection of the only child, in Cornwall, with more congenial companions, he could develop that other, very usual quality in onlies, compulsive sociability.
It was in sociable Trebetherick that a solution was found to Betjeman’s education, an escape route not only from the bullies of Highgate Junior, but also from the awkwardness of class. One of the ideas of Victorian boarding schools was to cement the class system. But those who attended them, all treated alike, all fed and clothed in the same austere manner, had mysteriously managed, whether or not their fathers were gentlemen, to make themselves a cut above.
Ernie and Bess Betjeman befriended A.E. ‘Hum’ Lynam and his wife May who had a house at Trebetherick called Cliff Bank. Hum’s brother Charles Cotterill – ‘Skipper’ – Lynam was the headmaster of a school for dons’ sons and daughters in North Oxford, called the Dragon. Skipper’s children, Joe and Audrey, became Betjeman’s friends at Trebetherick and remained his friends for life, as did the rest of the Trebetherick ‘gang’ – Joan and Roland Oakley, Vasey, Ralph and Alastair Adams, John and Biddy Walsham, the Larkworthies already mentioned (Joan and Tom), Phoebe and Alan Stokes … The difficulty of making a coherent chronicle of a gregarious man is comparable to trying to catch his attention at a crowded party, where everyone clusters around. It is important to remember the two sides, always – the need for solitude, and the fact that he wanted, so much of the time, to be in a crowd.
What are now called preparatory schools – preparing children for public school – were more often in those days called private schools. In most such places, the boys would still be dressed in stiff Eton collars, and varieties of Victorian school uniform: miniature bowler hats or top hats; blazers or tail coats. The Dragon was different from this. It was a disciplined, organised school, but written into its organisation was a studied bohemianism. The children wore ‘sensible’ clothes – corduroy shorts, aertex shirts. The lives of the pupils, in which cleverness was expected of them, but not too much care was given to outward appearances, matched the lives of their parents, mostly dons who lived with their wives in the rented, lumpy neo-Gothic redbrick villas of the surrounding North Oxford roads.
This too, like North London, and North Cornwall, became part of the Betjeman inner landscape and recurs frequently in his verse. The portly figure of the don’s wife, dying in 1940 at an Oxford bus stop, breathes her last within yards of the Dragon School –
This dress has grown such a heavier load
Since Jack was only a Junior Proctor,
And rents were lower in Rawlinson Road.
In a May-Day Song, to be sung to the tune of ‘Annie Laurie’, the blossom is out in Belbroughton Road, the gardens are bright with prunus and forsythia
And a constant sound of flushing runneth from windows where
The toothbrush too is airing in this new North Oxford air
From Summerfields to Lynam’s, the thirsty tarmac dries,
And a Cherwell mist dissolveth on elm-discovering skies.
The Cherwell is the river running past the playing fields at the edge of the Dragon. Summer Fields is another small private school, a little further north. It chiefly sends boys (such as the Prime Minister Harold Macmill
an) to Eton. At the beginning of the war, its school magazine noted, ‘Wavell mi has done well in North Africa’. Lynam’s was another name for the Dragon School.
* * *
When Betjeman first went to the school, in May 1917, Skipper Lynam was still the headmaster, and he remembered ‘the dramatic moment at a prize-giving when Skipper threw off his gown and Hum assumed it…’
Hum was like a father to me. One always knew one could go to him if up the spout, although one never did. There was the feeling that he was there as a protection against injustice. He taught me how to speak in public and how to recite, ‘Hands behind your back. Eyes on the clock. Stand at the front of the stage. Now speak up.’ Hum’s preoccupation with religion and the school services, I realise now, greatly affected me. Here was this great, but never remote and always kind man, interested in religion. There must be something in it. Preoccupation with it since, for which I am especially grateful, must be due to Hum and always, of course, one was part of his family in holidays in Cornwall, Joe and Audrey, the Adams family and the Walshams, all of whom were at school.
To this extent, being at the Dragon was an extension of the Cornish experience. Betjeman was happy at the Dragon, in spite of the fact that, like all such establishments until the 1970s, it practised corporal punishment. Summoned by Bells recalls one of the masters, Gerard Haynes (‘From his lower lip / Invariably hung a cigarette’), thwacking Betjeman with a slipper for talking after lights out in the dormitory.
‘I liked the way you took that beating, John.
Reckon yourself henceforth a gentleman.’
He was not reckoned a gentleman by all his friends and coevals.
Hugh Gaitskell, a future leader of the Labour Party, got on well with Betjeman, but his parents warned him against the friendship. Betjeman was said to have relations who lived in Polstead Road (the road where Lawrence of Arabia spent his childhood), too far north, too recently built, too far from the centre of Oxford to be quite the thing. When young Hugh Gaitskell still failed to pick up the hint, and met Betjeman during the holidays in London, his parents had to spell it out. They did not like him mixing with a child whose father was in trade.