Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

  I think he should be very good … The couple have a big reputation here, both rather eccentric and intellectual; he has written poetry and books on architecture and was also film critic on the Standard. He should be the sort of whimsical person the Irish will like and he likes them. I think he’s a good choice.

  Garrard’s Farm was shut up. The Misses Butler took the keys and undertook to look after it for the Betjemans in their absence, which they wrongly imagined would not last more than three months. ‘I wish I cared more about the war, then I would care more about my job’, he told the Pipers. They did not come home again until the autumn of 1943.

  While they were away, England, and especially London, would be subject to repeated air raids, with many of Betjeman’s favourite old buildings being destroyed. In May 1941, John Summerson wrote to him,

  As you probably know, the last big raid was a knock-out as regards church architecture. St George’s-in-the-East (well-photographed by us the day before), St Alban, Holborn, St John, Kennington, St Agnes, Kennington, St John, Red Lion Square, St George’s Cathedral, Southwark, and I fear many others – Chelsea, St Olave, Hart Street, St Mildred, Bread Street, O, Lor’, what a massacre!

  Away from the bombs and horrors of London at war, the Betjemans were living first as paying guests at Dunsinea House, Castleknock, near Dublin. Later they (John, Penelope and their infant Paul) moved to a house called Collinstown near Clondalkin. Moti the horse came over, and in that land of horses, Penelope had plenty of opportunity to ride him. When Laurence Olivier came over to Ireland to film Henry V, Moti was nearly used as the king’s charger at Agincourt, but in the event it was decided that ‘it wasn’t correct as Arabs hadn’t been imported to England at that date’.

  Sean O’Betjeman, as he inevitably became in his letters home to English friends, was highly successful at his work, which chiefly consisted in dining out and going to parties and being out and about among the Irish, with the aim of lessening anti-English prejudice. ‘They are all very fearful of British propaganda here. I don’t blame them.’

  I have to see pro-Germans, pro-Italians, pro-British, and most of all, anti-British people. The German Legation here is pretty dim and repulsive. I have to see journalists, writers, artists, poets. I have to go round stating, ‘Britain will win in the end’ and I have to be charming to everyone, and I am getting eaten up with hate of my fellow-beings as a result,

  he confessed to Oliver Stonor.

  So worried were the IRA by the Betjeman charm offensive that they considered assassinating him. In 1967, Betjeman received a letter from Diarmuid Brennan, of Stevenage, Hertfordshire, who said that he was responsible for civilian intelligence for the Army Council of the IRA. ‘Oddly … you became a source of much anxiety to the Army Council of the IRA. I got communications describing you as “dangerous” and a person of menace to all of us. In short, you were depicted in the blackest of colours.’ Brennan was told to tail Betjeman and give daily reports on his movements. Brennan claimed in his letter that gangsters in the Second Battalion of the Dublin Brigade wanted to shoot a British diplomat in order to take the spotlight off the IRA’s internal difficulties. These gunmen asked for photographs of Betjeman, but, claimed Brennan, having read some of Betjeman’s poetry, he decided he ‘couldn’t be much of a secret agent’. He also claims that he gave the gunmen photographs of a different person, a cousin of his who was a Special Branch officer, and told them that they were under police surveillance and had no chance of being able to carry out an assassination unobserved.

  It is impossible to know at this distance of time how much of this letter reflects the truth. Betjeman on a number of occasions described his function as that of a ‘spy’ in Dublin, and he probably was involved with collecting secret information. Eamon de Valera, closer to Archie the teddy bear than to Churchill in his political allegiances, was the first man to sign the book of condolence in the German Embassy when Hitler shot himself. He was seen by Churchill as a very dangerous figure. He had taken part in the Easter Rising, he was fervently anti-British, and he had it in his power to make the Irish ports available for German ships and U-boats. It was a measure of his very great political nous that he did not do so, and kept the British and the Germans guessing until the end of the war. (Churchill offered him a United Ireland, with the six counties of the North simply given to the Republic, if he would come into the war on the side of the British.) Betjeman knew Dev. This passionately Catholic and Celtic Twilight lover of the past would have been impressed by Betjeman’s having taken the trouble to learn Gaelic, and he would have responded to the things which both Betjemans liked about Ireland, ‘where everyone – Roman, Anglican, Nonconformist – believes in another world and where everyone goes to church’. He would also probably have responded kindly to Penelope’s plea to him, when they met for the last time, not to tarmac the Irish roads. ‘I spent a lot of time defending Dev here for his consistency, if not his tact’, Betjeman wrote to his friend Geoffrey Taylor when they had come back to England.

  Taylor’s was the friendship which meant most to him in Dublin. Geoffrey Taylor was a quiet, gentle poet who shared Betjeman’s passionate love of creepy-crawlies. Betjeman loved lice, wasps, daddy-long-legs, and would spend hours staring at them. Taylor was an expert on beetles and on plant life. He was a conscientious objector, which Betjeman also found appealing. The outbreak of war had caused him to leave England and return to his native Ireland, renting his brother’s house, Airton House, Tallaght, a few miles from Collinstown. Penelope and John would come over in a horse-drawn cart and Taylor and Betjeman spent hours together reading and reciting poetry. From their shared enthusiasm sprang the edited anthology English, Scottish and Welsh Landscape which the two chose together, and which John Piper illustrated, an undervalued book.

  Their friends in England missed them too. The Lancasters stayed for long periods with the Pipers. ‘We’ve had a happy time with them with no rancours or squabbles’, Myfanwy reported. ‘They are funny. But in the end they are a bit of a spiritual burden. Osbert so sophisticatedly helpless & Karen so enervated. But they are the nicest possible evacuees if you must have them except quarrelsome old geniuses like you.’

  Both Pipers wrote to Betjeman often, to ‘my dearest Exile’, ‘Dearest Plymouth Brother’, ‘Dear Sean’, keeping the jokes and the friendship alive across the estranging Irish Sea. ‘Oh how I miss you’, Myfanwy wrote. ‘It’s really awfull [sic], I do hope to goodness you don’t get to like Ireland and stay there.’

  Betjeman replied to her that ‘I think a good deal about your hair & eyes & about your figure. These Colleens here have too big heads and too thin legs & are too twilit.’ He complained, ‘I cannot believe that such an expense of spirit as this job is will not bring a reward of some kind. No time to myself at all … no peace at the office and Politics day and night.’ While Betjeman wrote to Mr Pahper, sending ‘my fondest love to luscious bubble-breasted, golden-haired, blue-eyed, strapping, milky Goldilox’, Penelope characteristically enquired after the Pipers’ religious life.

  ‘Did you go to Confession at the Folkies before Easter?’ she asked.

  We find ourselves spiritually quite dead. St John’s … the only really Catholic Church [she means, of course, Church of Ireland, i.e. Anglican Church with the sort of ethos to which the High Church Betjemans were accustomed in England] is 7 miles away so it is impossible to get there for early Mass except by car and the petrol is so short. Father Colquoun, the Vicar, is an excellent confessor, but we hate not having any proper Parish life. One must undoubtedly be Roman over here if one really wants to enter into the life of the country, but as we want to return to England as soon as possible we cannot ‘go over’ just for a few months, tho’ it would be very convenient if we could.

  In the light of Penelope’s subsequent conversion to Rome, and its calamitous consequence for her marriage, this letter sounds an unconscious but solemn chord.

  When friends came over, it served as an almost painful reminder of how much
they missed the carefree, pre-war days of church-crawling, conversation and shared jokes. ‘What a week!’ Osbert Lancaster wrote in 1942:

  I think I can safely say that I have not enjoyed myself so intensely and so uninterruptedly since the war started. You, I know, are sick to death of the whole atmosphere but to me it was all wonderful. I am prepared to take your word for it that the charm soon palls but I cannot recollect ever having been so immediately impressed with a place at first sight before. The architecture was a revelation, the Whites [Terence de Vere White and his wife] I found charming and my bowels worked with wonderful smoothness. I now discover Bedford Square to be drab in colour and appallingly inadequate in size; the Ministry a sordid burden and the water as hard as tintacks …

  ‘Much love – don’t quarrel with Propeller’, had been Myfanwy Piper’s sign-off to a letter when the Betjemans set out for Ireland. The quarrels were part of the inevitable texture of the Betjemans’ married life, as was Betjeman’s constant falling in love with other women. In Ireland, this tendency remained on the level of crushes, and, as with Miss J. Hunter Dunn at the Ministry of Information in London, it provided some memorable verse. In Tulira in County Galway, Betjeman met Lord Hemphill and his beautiful American wife Emily. She had met her husband while riding in the Borghese Gardens in Rome in 1926. Though a brilliant horsewoman, she had taken a fall. Lord Hemphill, riding by, had instantly leapt from his horse and run to her assistance. A year later they married in New York and moved into Tulira, the Victorian house built by Edward Martyn and immortalised in George Moore’s Hail and Farewell.

  Emily was in love with a man not her husband when she met Betjeman – and she subsequently married him – Ion Villiers-Stuart. Betjeman was obliged to worship from afar, but on one afternoon he went for a bicycle ride with her through the strange primeval-looking landscape of the Burren in County Clare. It produced one of the best evocations of Irish landscape, and of the ‘feel’ of rural Ireland ever written – ‘Ireland with Emily’.

  … Stony seaboard, far and foreign,

  Stony hills poured over space,

  Stony outcrop of the Burren,

  Stones in every fertile place,

  Little fields with boulders dotted,

  Grey-stone shoulders saffron-spotted,

  Stone-walled cabins thatched with reeds,

  Where a Stone Age people breeds

  The last of Europe’s stone age race.

  Has it held, the warm June weather?

  Draining shallow sea-pools dry,

  When we bicycled together

  Down the bohreens fuchsia-high.

  Till there rose, abrupt and lonely,

  A ruined abbey, chancel only,

  Lichen-crusted, time-befriended,

  Soared the arches, splayed and splendid,

  Romanesque against the sky …

  When the Betjemans left Ireland, Betj continued to write to Emily, saying he would cross the water for her, but this was a dream, and in England he found other, more available female company.

  In his farewell speech, Frank Gallagher, UK Representative at Dublin Castle, said,

  Sure the Betjemans will, across the water, carry on their work of levelling out the peaks and valleys in the estimation of us into one sweet and pleasant plain. We shall remember them. One thing they will carry with them as proof of Irish hospitality is that they came three and went four … To the four of them we wish the Irish blessing, Dia go deo libh, God be with you.

  Candida Rose Betjeman had been born at the Rotunda Hospital, Dublin, in September 1942.

  The ceaseless activity expected of Betjeman, the endless round of parties with people the Betjemans did not know, had exhausted both of them, and they were glad to return to England. By the end of 1943, Betjeman had been posted to the ‘P’ branch of the Admiralty in Bath, arriving in March 1944. The department was stationed in the Empire Hotel, and Betjeman – whose immediate superior was Richard Hughes, author of High Wind in Jamaica – was supposedly in charge of producing two publications, The Green ’Un, which supplied current bulletins about the best places to find supplies of labour, steel, wood, etc., and The Pink ’Un, which was top secret and gave bulletins about recent damage from bombardment. Those who shared the office with Betjeman, who included the future Lord Weinstock, remembered him chain-smoking and writing book-reviews for the Daily Herald in office time. As he told Nancy Mitford in a letter, life was ‘wonderfully boring’.

  He was away from his wife, who had returned to Garrard’s Farm and was preoccupied with her young children. Some love affairs were presumably inevitable and this time he found women who were willing, unlike Emily in Ireland, to go the whole way.

  Alice Jennings was working for the BBC in Bristol when she met Betjeman. She was married, but her husband was away. Betjeman came to make a programme with Geoffrey Grigson.

  I came to the Listening Room in order to put him on the air, being the Programme Engineer, now called Studio Manageress, and John said, ‘Who’s that girl?’ And Griggers from a great height said, ‘That’s your PE’. At that time everybody in the BBC and probably elsewhere too was bristling with initials, and coming upon this latest one, John burst into a great chortle of enchantment, so infectious that I joined in too, and that’s how our friendship started up, and how henceforth I was called PE.

  They kept their affair a secret, and it was not long-lasting, even though they wrote to one another annually until he died. The affair provoked a poem which annoyed Alice, ‘the shortest I ever wrote’, according to Betj. She wrote to him, ‘You may be a thumping crook, but I’m not an ordinary little woman’. But it is one of his best.

  In a Bath Tea-shop

  ‘Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another –

  Let us hold hands and look.’

  She, such a very ordinary little woman;

  He, such a thumping crook;

  But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels

  In the teashop’s ingle-nook.

  An affair which did not inspire any poetry was with a colleague at the Admiralty, the writer Honor Tracy, a boozy Catholic convert who, in spite of English origins, made her name as an Irish writer, with such amusing tales of Irish life as The Straight and Narrow Path and Mind You, I’ve Said Nothing. (Incidentally, she could be seen as the missing link between Iris Murdoch and John Betjeman, having slept with them both.)

  Betjeman lodged while in Bath with a widow called Mrs Helen Holmes, of 16 Macaulay Buildings, Widcombe Hill. (She also, like so many friends and acquaintances, remained a correspondent until death.) The affair with Honor Tracy took the form of alcohol-fuelled lunches followed by an afternoon in his rented room.

  He wrote on 27 May 1944:

  Darling Honor,

  I loved yesterday. All day, I’ve thought of nothing else. No other love I’ve had means so much. Was it just an aberration on your part, or will you meet me at Mrs Holmes’s again – say on Saturday. I won’t be able to sleep until I have your answer.

  Love has given me a miss for so long, and now this miracle has happened. Sex is a part of it, of course, but I have a Romaunt of the Rose feeling about it too. On Saturday we could have lunch at Fortt’s, then go back to Mrs H’s. Never mind if you can’t make it then. I am free on Sunday too or Sunday week. Signal me tomorrow as to whether and when you can come.

  Anthony Powell has written to me, and mentions you admiringly. Some of his comments about the Army are v funny. He’s somebody I’d like to know better when the war is over. I find his letters funnier than his books. Tinkerty-tonk, my darling. I pray I’ll hear from you tomorrow. If I don’t I’ll visit your office in a fake beard.

  All love, JB

  He did see a certain amount more of Anthony Powell when the war was over, sometimes staying with his children at Powell’s country house, the Chantry, Frome, Somerset. Powell for his part thought Betjeman’s poems ‘make Auden & Co look very poor performers’. The affair with Honor, which had felt, at the time, as intense as
that with Alice, immortalised in the Bath teashop, faded into the past.

  9

  THE PATH TO ROME

  Many people found it difficult to readjust to peacetime life. Soldiers returned from years away to find children who barely knew them. Humdrum civilian jobs which had felt tolerable, in 1939, now, after six years in armed combat, seemed very different. ‘Oh, I have been happy here!’ Queen Mary said as she left Badminton House, her wartime billet. ‘Here I’ve been anybody to everybody, and back in London I shall have to begin being Queen Mary all over again.’

  Betjeman, as so often, was an unusual case. His war, after the initial semi-farcical attempts to get into the RAF, had been, especially in Ireland, a continuation of peacetime incarnations. He had been hired, whether as a broadcaster, or as a propagandist-cum-diplomat, to go on being Betjeman. But he was approaching his fortieth birthday, and the decisions he made now, about the division of his time, would determine the remainder of his creative life. Some old friendships, too, could never be resumed. Basil Dufferin (known to his family as Ava) had been killed in Burma. Only once, some ten years after ‘Little Bloody’s’ death, did Betjeman meet the daughter, Lady Caroline Blackwood. He felt so overpowered that he resolved never to meet her again. Though the eyes were a different colour, Little Bloody’s large and brown, Caroline’s a searching steel blue, he felt again the magic of that person with whom he had ‘been more in love … than with any human being he had ever met in the world’ and from whom he had ‘never received so much as the touch of a hand on the shoulder’. His poetic tribute to Ava – ‘Friend of my youth, you are dead!’ – reads like an amateur attempt at threnody, and not particularly competent at that. Whereas he could soar to heights of prosodic ingenuity, inspired by a bicycle ride with a pretty American woman he barely knew, or the glimpse of a general’s daughter rowing her sharpie, he was seldom capable of writing poetry when his feelings were most deeply engaged. In the poem about Little Bloody, he wanders about the quads of Oxford and remembers the Hooray Henrys of the late 1920s roaring back from Thame in their borrowed Bugattis. As the victory bells peal out over the city, he cries,