by A. N. Wilson
For a twenty-three-year-old, addressing an emotional chaotic of just less than twenty-eight, this manifesto seems remarkably clearheaded. On the sixth page of the epistle, she turns to another aspect of Betjeman which perhaps neither she, nor any of his friends, nor his biographer, could ever quite determine – the extent to which the superficiality and the jokes go all the way through like the name of a seaside resort through a stick of rock. It is this, the possibility that he was deeply superficial, which disturbs her about the various ‘engagements’ and infidelities of the year 1933.
I know you were annoyed when I first wrote & suggested marrying in a few years, but when it comes to being engaged 5 times (actually it’s only once besides me, isn’t it? And then only for 2 days to Billa) and saying that you take everything as a joke and have no depth of feeling it makes my blood boil.
This obviously refers to the judgement expressed by her mother who has weighed in and offered her advice to Penelope, since she goes on,
I wrote to her and said, as a matter of fact, John is capable of far deeper and finer feelings than you have ever dreamed of or can hope to conceive – and surely I should know. If your friends, or rather semi-friends, your real pals like Cracky and Etchells would never do it, are really going about saying that you treat life entirely as a joke and never take anything seriously, then Nancy Mitford’s novel Christmas Pudding was indeed prophetic – when you appear as a character who longs to be taken seriously but whose every action and production is taken as a joke and thought to be intended as such.
In the event, it was Nancy Mitford herself who urged Betjeman, if he was serious about Penelope, to go to the South of France and win her back.
A month after she wrote her long manifesto, Penelope Chetwode was married to John Betjeman, at the Edmonton Register Office. The venue was chosen because of its proximity to Heddon Court, the prep school where the groom had taught before he got his job on the Archie Rev. Present at the ceremony were Betjeman’s parents, Hubert de Cronin Hastings and Isabel Hope, the headmaster’s wife. After they were married, they went into London for a celebratory luncheon of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding at the Great Eastern Hotel, Liverpool Street, and the honeymoon was a few days at the Green Man, the village pub at Braxted, Essex. ‘Ooooh, I did enjoy Essex’, Penelope wrote to her husband, when she had returned to her parents’ house to face the difficult business of telling them what she had done. Her father’s reaction is very touching, as expressed in a letter to her that autumn, from Marseilles, en route to Inja –
I just hated saying goodbye to you my own darling. It would have been just the same whoever you had married. It is such a break when the young birds one has watched growing leave the nest.
I am happier now about you. I can never say I like your choice – but I feel that you are so quite sure you are right, & have mapped out your life so thoroughly, that it will be the worst luck if it is not a success … Remember always if you are unhappy or in trouble there are always your old daddy’s arms to fly to, always open & always ready as long as I live.
It was a matter of course that the field-marshal and his wife should be subsumed into the Betjeman jokey mythos, becoming figures such as ‘Colonel’ Kolkhorst, or ‘Father’ Arber of Holy Trinity, Gas Street whose previous existence, pre-Betjeman, had probably been real enough to themselves, but who now found themselves re-invented as one of his private jokes. Betjeman, who had partly yearned to marry into the upper class, and partly through self-protection, partly through masochism, partly through a desire to subvert, had really longed to be known as the common little man Penelope Chetwode married, built up the Chetwodes, when describing them to his friends, as creatures of pure farce. Bowra was soon telling everyone that when the Chetwodes’ butler had said, ‘Yes, Miss Penelope’, the field marshal had sharply stated, ‘She’s not Miss Penelope, she’s Mrs Bargeman.’ Searching around for how the young man should address him, Sir Philip had allegedly said, ‘You can’t call me Philip, that wouldn’t do. You can’t call me father – I’m not your father. You’d better call me Field Marshal.’ Betjeman repeated this statement not only to old friends like Bowra but also to strangers he had barely met. In 1933, for example, he regaled a lunch-table of young clergy at St Alban’s, Holborn, with the story.
On 20 November 1931, the field marshal wrote to his daughter:
Penelope, darling, Your John must be a very stupid man. We have had quite a lot of letters from people who are cross with him because he mimics and mocks me & mother – & imitates interviews with us. People all think it is in such bad taste. We have smothered our feelings & done all we can for both of you & it is so common & rude to mock at any older people let alone those who have done all they can for you. Several people have said they won’t have you again because of it … Even Roger [her brother] has heard of it in America. It is not only rude & common it is surely very foolish if nothing else, & leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, my dear, & makes us think we were right in our objection to the marriage. Try and stop him doing it.
Betjeman wrote to the Chetwodes indignantly denying it, though his mother-in-law said, ‘I believe it and always shall.’ What Sir Philip Chetwode would probably never realise was that, as with his attitude to religious and aesthetic objects of devotion, laughter and mockery signalled in Betjeman a mixture of emotions which included admiration. ‘All the things I love – and hate –’: a comment by Alan Bennett at a military funeral comes to mind. Three years after Betjeman married, King George V died, and it inspired one of the best public poems of the twentieth century. Who can doubt that, in the final stanza, Betjeman is thinking of those ramrod-straight, decent figures who shored up the British Empire in its last phases, men, in short, like Sir Philip Chetwode? In twelve lines, he captures the dullness of the late king – his shooting, his stamps, his obsession with correct dress; and the momentous nature of the change, the final putting to sleep of the Victorian age as, at Croydon airport, the anarchic and ‘unsuitable’ figure of Edward VIII, with his flash clothes, divorced mistress and alleged fascistic leanings, arrives. None of these things is spelt out, they are all implied in the essential simplicity of the lyric form –
Spirits of well-shot woodcock, partridge, snipe
Flutter and bear him up the Norfolk sky:
In that red house in a red mahogany book-case
The stamp collection waits with mounts long dry.
The big blue eyes are shut which saw wrong clothing
And favourite fields and coverts from a horse;
Old men in country houses hear clocks ticking
Over thick carpets with a deadened force;
Old men who never cheated, never doubted,
Communicated monthly, sit and stare
At the new suburb stretched beyond the run-way
Where a young man lands hatless from the air.
For the first few months they were married, they lived apart. They had lodged in a succession of nasty one-room flats in London, and Penelope wanted to study Sanskrit. With this end in view, she went to Germany, to perfect her German at the same time, since much of the Indian scholarship which she needed to pursue for her work was written in the German language. Interestingly, in the light of what was to come, she wrote from Germany that she was toying with the idea of a conversion to Roman Catholicism. According to Waugh family gossip, it was either just before or just after her marriage that she either had an affair (Waugh’s version) or resisted one (her version) with the novelist, who was himself a recent (1930) convert. ‘There is no possible chance of my going over for 2 yrs at the very least’, she assured the Quaker husband on 8 November 1933. In Germany, she later admitted, she had fallen for one or two other people, but not gone beyond flirtations. She had gone to the opera which inspired Hitler to become both a Wagnerian and a populist political leader – Rienzi – and wondered whether the Architectural Review would like a review of the big exhibition on the history of photography –
There is a large room with larger th
an life size snaps of Nazi Demonstrations at Nuremberg etc. There are snaps of the youth movement, German trades, Architecture (mostly old world, all ultra-modern Corbusier etc styles are Communist) peasant types (terrifying faces) villages etc etc. One notices particularly the absence of surrealist snaps because the Cubist and Surrealist movements are of course communist. It is useless to write a review of the Ex. for the A.R. without reproducing some of the snaps and I don’t know if it’s possible to get hold of the prints, especially the early ones. P’raps you have already got someone on to it? If not, I’ll do something for you if you like.
Meanwhile, in Penelope’s absence, Betjeman looked for somewhere to set up the marital home when she returned. The editor of Architectural Review was a man called Christian Barman, known by Betjeman inevitably as Barmy. He lived in the Vale of the White Horse in the unwrecked and beautiful village of Uffington below the Berkshire Downs. Barmy found the Betjemans a house, Garrard’s Farm, which they took at a rent of £36 per annum. It was to be their home for twelve years. The house needed to be got ready before it was habitable – and it was always a place of austere comfort, lit by oil lamps. A pretty, dark-haired young woman called Molly Higgins was found who would help Betjeman, in Penelope’s absence, to prepare his marital home for habitation. ‘An affair was inevitable’, wrote Betjeman’s daughter. It did not last more than a few months. Penelope, to whom Betjeman confessed at once, seems to have felt just as guilty, in her letters, that she has neglected him, as he did about his infidelity – if anything, slightly more guilty.
Darling, I’m so relieved you say I can come back. I think you will find it will work alright, anyhow on my side now … I hope you’ll be happy with me but if you aren’t you can always go off with M.H.… It will be lovely if we can go down ter Bryan the first weekend as then we’ll be able to motor over to Garrards straightaway.
He had jokingly feared that she would come back from Germany a Nazi. In fact, it was their intelligent, mercurial friend Diana Guinness who was fatefully to accompany her sister Unity Valkyrie to Germany that same summer. Diana would leave her liberal-minded poet husband, and their bohemian circle at Biddesden, for the aspirant fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, whom they had invited, with Winston Churchill, Augustus John, and crowds of others to Diana’s twenty-second birthday ball. These dramas lay (just) ahead. At this distance in time, one is overwhelmed by how young they all were, and how fixed their destinies, by decisions taken often quite randomly.
In the case of the Betjemans, there was a third in the marriage from the start, of whom Betjeman himself had perhaps not been sufficiently aware during all the melodramas of courtship. On their last visit to India together, Penelope’s father had bought her a wiry little grey, 14.2 hands high, imported from Mosul to race in Bombay. A ‘grey’ is what horsey people call a snow-white horse. She called him Moti which means Pearl in Hindi. She hunted with him for two seasons with the Delhi foxhounds, as well as putting him in for endless hunter trials. This was during the period of her affair with Sir John Marshall, when she was learning all about Indian art and archaeology and her father Sir Philip, Commander-in-Chief of the Indian army, was undertaking the important task of ‘indianising’ the army. (Until 1932, all the officers in the Indian Army were British, and it was Chetwode’s task to train up Indian officers to lead their own men.)
Moti came back from India at the first opportunity and was taken to live in Uffington with the newly-weds. Penelope knew nothing of stable management and she engaged a boy in the village, Jackie Goodenough, a school-leaver aged fourteen, for 10 shillings a week to groom the horse. She dressed Jackie in black breeches and gaiters, the traditional groom’s uniform. She began slowly to teach herself how to groom and feed a horse, getting the information from a book. For the housekeeping, she brought with her a German cook-general, Paula Steinbrecher, who spoke no English and who for the first year believed that Betjeman’s name was ‘Shut up’, since Penelope said this to him so often.
Her passion for horses did not confine itself to the stable. In all the houses of which she was the mistress, tack was brought indoors. Kitchens, corridors and staircases smelt of leather, mingled with the fruity aroma of Cochaline, a red oily polish which softens leather. Strewn over kitchen chairs, hanging from lamps and banisters, were bridles, girths, martingales, nosebands, breastplates and reins. She requisitioned one of the ground-floor rooms as a harness room.
Betjeman claimed to hate horses, and from the start he and Penelope quarrelled about almost everything. She claimed he was a bully who would not allow her friends to come and stay without making a row, or going away when they came to see her. ‘I take all your new friends to my bosom … and get to like them then YOU get bored with them and play hell if I go on asking them to meals.’ Nevertheless, they had an enormous acquaintance, with many friends, old and new, coming to Sunday luncheon or staying for the night. Though the leathery Cochaline smell shocked the more urban visitors, and though the house was very cold in the winter, it is clear from surviving letters that Penelope kept house to quite high standards. Wystan Auden came to stay shortly after they had moved in, and they took him to a meet of the local hunt. ‘I hope no one killed themselves at that meet’, he wrote, ‘also that you haven’t discovered how much mud I brought into the sitting room. I tried to brush it but there were ominous stains still on the carpet.’
One neighbour and friend who took a less tolerant view of hunting was Samuel Gurney who lived in the nearby village of Compton Regis. His family were Norwich Quakers, Betjeman’s new religion, but Gurney himself was an advanced Anglo-Catholic. He was very rich, drove a Rolls-Royce, and paid to have the lovely little medieval church of Compton Beauchamp, perched on the edge of the Downs near the Ridgeway and Wayland’s Smithy, turned into a luminous Baroque shrine. With the refurbishments to altar and lamps by Martin Travers, this whitewashed English medieval church takes on something of the feeling of a Spanish hermitage, and you feel as you step inside that perhaps Philip II’s Armada had after all been successful and the English village churches had been adapted to the religion of El Greco and St John of the Cross.
Gurney was a serious churchman, who worried about the coarsening of the spirit which would result in pursuing the fox.
The thing itself outrages conscience. Theologically, of course, every evil produces good results, and every pang and pain swells the treasury of the Passion; but nevertheless it is ‘woe to that man by whom the offence cometh’. Its indefinite continuance is unthinkable. It won’t really square with the faith. Put it another way. Picture the bright young thing, leaving the altar in the morning, her lips rosy with the Blood of Jesus: returning home at night, her finger dripping with the blood of vixen. Or Jesus, Mary and Joseph, all in at the death and blooded. Have I put it too strongly?
Another Anglo-Catholic who lived nearby and had his influence on Betjeman was Adrian Bishop, an Etonian friend of Bowra’s, a brilliant linguist and talker, acerbic, homosexual, loud baritone-voiced. Having mocked and hated religion in the early years when Bowra knew him, he suddenly converted, and in the years before making up his mind to become an (Anglican) Benedictine monk of Nashdom Abbey, he went to live in Uffington.
‘Penelope is practising mysticism’, he wrote to Bowra, ‘but the Kingdom of Heaven is not taken by storm.’
For all the disruptions to his ego which marriage caused, and for all the tempestuousness of his relations with Penelope from the very beginning, Betjeman early in his marriage began a serious return to the Church, from which he never turned back. The fact that they had smart friends never prevented either Betjeman from forming bonds with their near neighbours, in any of the places they lived. They were friends with the Misses Molly and Edmee Butler, the bootfaced local squiresses. They made friends with the locals in the pub, the Craven Arms, where Betjeman fooled around playing darts underarm, to the amusement of other customers whom he would then stand drinks. And they naturally gravitated towards the big, damp, cruciform church, known as ‘the
Cathedral of the Vale’. The vicar, the Rev. George Bridle, accepted the new young couple who were eager to take an active role. Betjeman eventually became the people’s warden and together with Penelope started the Uffington Parochial Youth Fellowship. The village youngsters felt that the Betjemans ‘got things going’, with entertainments, talks, tennis tournaments, concerts, fêtes.
Osbert Lancaster did a sublime drawing of the Betjemans and friends performing ‘Summer is icumen in’ for an audience in the village hall. Osbert Lancaster is playing the flute. Penelope is strumming a guitar. Karen Lancaster and Adrian Bishop are trilling in the back row, while in the foreground stand Betjeman and Bowra belting out the words, Bowra looking as if he is barking orders on a parade-ground and Betj, eyes aloft and wonky teeth bared, looking more as if he is warbling a sentimental love song from the Edwardian music hall. At the piano sits a bald, saturnine figure, with a bow tie and an eye-glass, and his fingers poised over the keys with the expertise of a serious concert performer.