by A. N. Wilson
Another friend, destined to become a Roman Catholic priest, was Ronald Hughes Wright with whom he enjoyed exploring the churches in the town. This incipient fascination with architecture was nurtured by Mr Haynes, who took favoured boys for jaunts on his motor-bike in search of Early English Gothic architecture.
At the Dragon, Betjeman enjoyed acting – his first appearance on the boards was as Ruth in the Pirates of Penzance – ‘a pleasing buxom wench’ said the school magazine – and, in spite of his distaste for Shakespeare, he was also successful in Henry V, as Charles VI of France and the Earl of Cambridge. ‘The cleverest actor of all was John Betjemann’, said the Oxford Times, ‘he played the mad old king of France in such a way that, instead of being completely minor it became one of the most impressive parts in the whole play.’
Offstage, too, he was a noted eccentric.
‘Betjeman first achieved notice when his father sent him an unusually sophisticated stationary steam engine which inspired me’, remembered a contemporary, Per Mallalieu – like Gaitskell another future Labour politician – ‘to some pyrotechnical mis-spellings.
“Betgiman’s engin was going tonight”, I wrote to my mother, “and it has a lovely pump that pumps in water whill the thing is going”. The “engin” drove a variety of tools including a miniature circular saw on which H. K. Hardy tried to cut his finger nails, spending a week in bandages after…’
Betjeman too got himself in bandages. He had been intoning some chant to himself in one of the classrooms and marking the beat by pulling and releasing the rope which opened and shut a glass skylight. They spent about a week in the school Sick Room picking bits of glass out of his head. ‘This was a serious matter for the rest of us because no one was allowed to play with his “engin” until he returned, which, eventually, he did, looking like a Sikh.’ ‘Thereafter’, Mallalieu added, ‘Wright and Betjeman specialised in eccentricity.’
Laughter redeems boarding-school life, and for some reason the jokes are funnier when the children are between seven and thirteen than later on. At the Dragon, Betjeman was in his element. He had developed his incipient love of buildings. He had fallen, especially, in love with Oxford, and begun to see it through the eyes of an old illustrated book, purchased at the long-vanished shop of Cahaunday’s, and illustrated with Victorian watercolours of wisteria-draped colleges, where gowned Doctors of Divinity entered the ancient porch of a college. ‘All that was crumbling picturesque and quaint / Informed my taste.’ He had also developed his histrionic gifts. The Betjeman phenomenon was beginning to be formed.
* * *
When he came home for the holidays, he found that his parents had left 31 West Hill, and abandoned North London in favour of Chelsea. The new house, 53 Church Street, was ‘poky, dark and cramped’ but fashionable. Bess now had friends ‘whose friends had friends who knew Augustus John’. The advantage of the house, as far as Betjeman was concerned, was its proximity to his friend Ronald Wright, so he could continue trawling round churches and second-hand bookstalls even in the holidays. Though Bess groaned as ‘more books’ were carried into the tiny house, Ernest Betjeman encouraged his son. ‘If you must buy books, then buy the best.’ He inscribed George Goodwin’s The Churches of London with the words, ‘To my dear boy in the hope that his appreciation of all that is beautiful will never fade’. The hope was fulfilled.
One of the most successful passages in Summoned by Bells is the conclusion to chapter VI, when he describes seeking out City churches, following the sound of a single bell, tinkling down those still unbombed intersecting lanes of the City until he found ‘St Botolph this, St Mary that’, and heard the words of Evensong from the Book of Common Prayer read out as they had been for three hundred years.
Thus were my London Sundays incomplete
If unaccompanied by Evening Prayer.
Ronnie Wright and he were to go different ways. As early as twelve years old, Wright became a Roman Catholic. This was never to be Betjeman’s way. The great city churches of Wren, with their gilded Commandment Boards and sword-rests; the varied styles, from medieval to Victorian neo-Norman of the Oxford churches, the sand-lashed mysteries of Cornish shrines, all held something for him, which could not, quite, be found anywhere else. At the same time, he felt it to be largely a longing for the past, certainly not a conscious search for God. But the longing continued until it grew into the search, even during the next phase of life, his inevitably miserable adolescence.
3
THE SECRET GLORY
‘When I announce that I was at Harrow I always add “in all but fact”, as I like the turn of phrase,’ he told a friend in grown-up life. He loved the songs of Harrow School such as ‘Five Hundred Faces and All So Strange’ or ‘Forty Years On’. He believed that Harrovians wrote the best prose, giving as proof the names of Winston Churchill, Wyndham Ketton-Cramer and Sir Bernard Docker. Surprisingly, given the splashy colours of Churchill’s Macaulayesque rhetoric, Betjeman spoke of ‘cool Harrovian prose’. ‘I like things that are overshadowed – like Harrow’, he once said in a speech.
But, in fact, Betjeman was not sent to the Alma Mater of Sir Winston Churchill, Lord Byron and the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury. He never attended that school which, from the train in the gloaming, resembled a rocky Cornish island, that outpost in North London of the Elizabethan age, which received its charter in 1572, but which had links with a much older foundation, that Harrow which, next to Eton, ranks as a school for the upper classes. He went instead to Marlborough College, an architecturally undistinguished boarding school in Wiltshire, founded by a Rugby master in 1843, in the first instance for the sons of the clergy. Betjeman arrived slightly older than the usual thirteen – just after his fourteenth birthday in September 1920.
Had he gone to Harrow, he would almost certainly have been bullied for snobbish reasons, as Anthony Trollope was in the previous century. Public schools were, and for all we know still are, brutal institutions. At the top, rather like an eighteenth-century Deist’s conception of the Almighty, was the headmaster, who preached sermons in the school chapel – the one good building at Marlborough, by G.F. Bodley; who probably taught classics to the sixth form but had very little to do with the actual running of his kingdom. The school was/is divided into houses of fifty or so boys. Housemasters profoundly resented any attempt by the headmaster to interfere in their fiefdoms. In Betjeman’s day, a housemaster at Marlborough received the boarding fees directly from the parents and was expected, upon his retirement, to make a handsome profit. It paid the housemaster to be parsimonious. Food and bedding for the boys would therefore be on the verge of inadequate. The hunger, cold and discomfort suffered by the pupils was deemed to be good for the character, as was the frequent use of corporal punishment and bullying as a means of subduing independent spirits. In the house, while teachers could, and sometimes did, beat the boys, the overall running of the place was left in the hands of the older boys, who were allowed to beat younger boys with canes, to make them work as minor servants (‘fags’), cleaning shoes, making toast, running errands. Moreover, these adolescent gauleiters could, and usually did, rule not merely by formal discipline but by terror and bullying.
Anyone who has been educated in such an institution will recognise the atmosphere of the Marlborough chapter in Summoned by Bells – ‘Doom! Shivering doom’… ‘The dread of beatings, dread of being late! / And greatest dread of all, the dread of games’.
Betjeman’s adolescence was as stormy as most. At home, his parents were more than ever quarrelsome with one another, and with him. There were slammed doors and ‘black waves of hate’. Ernest Betjeman, who had been the friend of his only son, was now perceived as a monster. The habits of bad temper which the two parents and their boy permitted themselves no doubt sharpened, in John Betjeman’s mind, a sense of his father’s imperfections. To the Dragon boy, Ernest had been the charming patron, who read aloud from Oliver Goldsmith and persuaded his son to buy old books and write poetry. He was the weekend p
ainter who enjoyed the landscape of rural Hertfordshire and the Cornish coastline. Now, as knowing adolescence advanced in John, Ernie was seen as a tyrant, forcing him to shoot with his Hertfordshire friends and to play golf in Cornwall when he would prefer to be looking at old churches. The hatred between the two male Betjemans was perhaps quickened by the pathos of Bess, with her toothache and her psychosomatic illnesses. Was the adolescent Betjeman becoming aware that all was not well in his parents’ marriage? When did he begin to discover, as he certainly knew in his undergraduate days, that Ernest had a mistress, possibly several?
Whatever the reasons for the estrangement between father and son it was a powerful ingredient in Betjeman’s make-up. Perhaps it was genetically programmed that the younger should fight the elder. Betjeman himself did not learn from his experiences of psychological warfare with his father in teenaged years to be sensitive to his own son during adolescence. He was programmed to copy the same pattern of turning into a tyrant with his own son, at about the period of life, early teens, that he himself had come to hate Ernie.
Marlborough, with its hearty, gamesy ethos, appeared to be at war with everything the budding aesthete stood for. Moreover, it was relentlessly male in atmosphere, and Betjeman, in spite of enjoying and even loving the company of his own sex, was at his happiest in the company of females. The awful discomfort of a boys’ boarding house derives not only from the rows of lavatories without cubicle-doors; not just from the icy dormitories, and the smell of sweaty clothes and boots; nor even from the total failure in any inch of such institutions to consider the look of the place. It was also, in those days, the complete absence of the tenderness which could be found in the company of girls.
Here were no Joan Larkworthies, still less Peggy Purey-Custs. Some of his contemporaries were boys destined for very great distinction in their fields. Louis MacNeice, a little older than Betjeman, grew to be a very different sort of poet. Anthony Blunt, art historian, keeper of the Queen’s Pictures and Soviet agent, was another contemporary, as was Frederick Copleston, later a Jesuit priest whose many-volumed History of Philosophy is unsurpassed.
Schools such as Marlborough like to advertise such famous names as typical products of the system. In fact, however, poets, and priests and aesthetes and philosophers, emerge in spite of, rather than as a consequence of the public-school system. The only achievement of the men listed above which could certainly be credited to Marlborough is Blunt’s ability for so long to fool, and undermine, the system as a communist agent. Resourceful children learn deceit as the first lesson in such places, as a way of surviving. They also learn, which must have quickened Betjeman’s awareness that his father had ‘shop man’s’ manners, the deadly and indelible lessons of snobbery.
Betjeman triumphantly survived it, using tricks he had already mastered at Highgate Junior, evasiveness, buffoonery and charm. He was also helped by his temperament, since, as well as being timorous, he had a tremendous capacity to derive enjoyment from life. There is a great deal of laughter in these schools, as he remembered when thinking of the deaf invigilator in the Memorial Reading Room at Marlborough –
‘Do you tickle your arse with a feather, Mr Purdick?’
‘What?’
‘Particularly nasty weather, Mr Purdick.’
Although the bullying and the discomfort were memories, Betjeman also developed a deep love of Marlborough, and its surrounding country, as a place. The art master, Christopher Hughes, was a friend for life, teaching him, as ‘Tortoise’ Haynes had done at the Dragon, to take an interest in his surroundings, and to capture them in line and wash. When he had children of his own, Betjeman taught them to sketch, and ‘as Hughes had taught him, how to effect a cloudy sky by blotting the still wet blue wash with a rolled-up handkerchief’.
Marlborough and all such schools were specifically designed to instil conformity.
Everybody thought that he had absolutely fallen into line; that he was absorbing the ethos of the place in the most admirable fashion, subduing his own individuality, his opinions, his habits, to the general tone of the community around him – putting off, as it were, the profane dust of his own spirit and putting on the mental frock of the brotherhood. This of course is one of the aims – rather the great aim – of the system …
‘There is no system known to human wit that approaches in thoroughness and minuteness the supervision under which every single boy is kept all through his life at an English Public School.’
These words come from The Secret Glory by Arthur Machen, the book which was lent to Betjeman by a clergyman, met while cycling round to look at Cornish churches. The priest, the Reverend Wilfrid Johnson, was a tall, bearded figure, rector of St Ervan from 1915 to 1955.
The village upon which Betjeman had alighted was a long ride from Trebetherick. Dr Pevsner, his mind not attuned to the glories Betjeman was to discover there, found the village ‘a picture of squalor and neglect’. The austere church, however, was a place where something rather more engaged was taking place than had been reflected in Betjeman’s aimless pursuits of Evensong in almost empty City fanes, or among the comforting school hymns of Bodley’s chapel at Marlborough. As Ambrose Meyrick, hero of The Secret Glory, discovers, Christianity ‘was not a moral code, with some sort of metaphorical Heaven held out as a reward for its due observance, but a great mystical adventure into the unknown sanctity’.
The book contrasts the world of ‘reasonable’ Anglicanism and public school morality on the one hand, and the spiritual powerhouse which is hidden, but contained, in the old Celtic Church. Among the Welsh hills, the Holy Grail itself is hidden.
Boswell quotes Johnson as saying, ‘When at Oxford I took up Law’s Serious Call to a Holy Life, expecting to find it a dull book (as such books generally are), and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me: and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion, after I became capable of rational inquiry.’ ‘From this time forward’, adds Boswell, ‘religion was the predominant object of his thoughts; though, with the just sentiments of a conscientious Christian, he lamented that his practice of his duties fell far short of what it ought to be.’
Arthur Machen’s The Secret Glory occupies a comparable place in the inner history of John Betjeman. It is in some ways a badly written and bizarre book, lurching from one melodrama to the next. The hero, as well as glimpsing the Holy Grail, elopes from the public school with a parlourmaid and ends up being crucified by the Kurds. But the overwhelming things about it which spoke to the schoolboy Betjeman were its dismissal of public-school and middle-stump Church of England conformity, and its embrace of Mystery as the fundamental reality of life, the Mystery of all Mysteries being the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist.
When we read The Secret Glory, we find Betjemanic echoes all the way through. The appalling sarcasm of Mr Horbury, upbraiding Meyrick for his interest in Gothic architecture against the finer points of Greek grammar, seems exactly like the hated A.R. Gidney, who taught Greek to the Lower Sixth at Marlborough.
Still droned the voice of Mr Gidney on:
That ‘τι’? Can we take its meaning here
Wholly as interrogative?
There is the vision of Welsh loveliness, in which love of God and love of a woman are blended –
I saw golden Myfanwy, as she bathed in the brook Tarogi …
I gazed into her blue eyes as it were into twin heavens.
All the parts of her body were adornments and miracles.
O gift of the everlasting!
O wonderful and hidden mystery!
This moment in Machen finds its echo in many of Betjeman’s poems, including the late one (‘Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican’) where he glimpses in the Mistress ‘A hint of the Unknown God’: but most obviously in the fantasy poems he wrote about an actual Myfanwy, Myfanwy Evans. The vision of loveliness on a bicycle becomes blended with the experience of Eucharistic worship –
Tubular bells of tall St Barnabas,<
br />
Single clatter above St Paul,
Chasuble, acolyte, incense-offering,
Spectacled faces held in thrall.
There in the nimbus and Comper tracery
Gold Myfanwy blesses us all.
More than any specific echoes and influences, however, we find in The Secret Glory one of the most distinctive features of Betjeman’s whole attitude to life, namely that life is funny; but that humour itself derives from a fundamentally religious viewpoint. ‘No real mirth is possible without the apprehension of the mysteries as its antecedent.’
Although published in 1922, Machen’s book gives off, like the almost stupefying reek of incense-smoke, the scent of three decades earlier, the atmosphere of the 1890s.
As far as the history of English literature was concerned, it was the decade of turning point. In their different ways, two of the three giants on the poetic scene when Betjeman was growing up – Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats – both looked back to the 1890s as the time when everything changed. Modernism found its roots in the symbolist poets of the 1890s. Neither was to make any appeal to Betjeman: the symbolism which attracted the other giant, the early T.S. Eliot, or the full-scale modernism of Pound and Eliot’s later manner.
The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.
As Pound and Yeats both acknowledged – Pound in his tribute to the Nineties in the Hugh Selwyn Mauberley poems, and Yeats in his autobiographies – it was in the personalities and lives of the Nineties poets, as much as in what they wrote that the novelty and shockingness of the Decadence was heralded forth.
Almost the central event in this mythology was the arrest, trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. It was an event which had shaken England. Obviously, the sexual nature of Wilde’s offences was what made them so excitingly shocking to those newspaper-readers who had previously flocked in such hordes to laugh at his comedies in the theatre. His trials, during which his witty exchanges with prosecuting lawyers had blurred the distinction between his dramas and his life, now made the bourgeoisie uneasy, as they laughed about young men having secret lives, concealed from Lady Bracknell or Canon Chasuble, as they invented friends called Bunberry and made rather improbable declarations of love to sexless young women, as the Ideal Husband turned out to be one who ‘is as domestic as if he was a bachelor’.