Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

  Stop, oh many bells, stop

  pouring on roses and creeper

  Your unremembering peal

  this hollow, unhallowed V.E. Day, –

  I am deaf to your notes and dead

  by a soldier’s body in Burma.

  The clumsiness of bells ‘pouring’ on roses does not mean anything and lacks any of the pinpoint accuracy of

  Evening light will bring the water,

  Day-long sun will burst the bud,

  Clemency, the General’s daughter,

  Will return upon the flood …

  Imagine what Housman, or Yeats, would have done with the premature death of a young Irish aristocrat.

  Betjeman had a natural gift for consoling the bereaved, and it was to him, outside the family, more than any other friend, that Ava’s widow Maureen turned. He went to Hove, former residence of his old friend Bosie who had also died in the war, and where Maureen was staying in a hotel, to comfort her. Later they exchanged long letters of memories. It was to Betjeman that she turned to get the wording right on Ava’s memorial tablet. ‘You know the heavenly Campo Santo at Clandeboye, don’t you? Where Ava’s father and grandfather and grandmother are buried? Well I thought I’d have a similar one put – just as if he was buried there – but with an inscription on it saying “This in memory of etc. etc.”.’

  Johnson, in Boswell’s pages, is often called upon to think of epitaphs for his friends. Betjeman got Ninian Comper to design the memorial at Clandeboye which commemorated ‘a man of brilliance and of many friends’ who had been killed in action at the age of thirty-five, ‘recapturing Burma the country which his grandfather annexed to the British Crown’.

  Those friends who lived on to remember Ava, such as Bowra and Sparrow and Kolkhorst, now seemed even dearer. Regular visits to the Pahpers at Fawley Bum could be resumed, as could the familiar routines of marital rows, and earning a living. Betjeman worked for the British Council in Oxford, continuing work he had begun at the end of the war. This required a car, and a brand-new Vauxhall 14 hp saloon (grey) was bought from J. Coxeter & Co. of Park End Street, Oxford. Betjeman’s children remembered that he used to drive it ‘like the clappers’.

  But Uffington life was over, and this was the first huge change which peacetime brought to the Betjeman ménage.

  John Wheeler, their landlord in Uffington, said that he wanted Garrard’s Farm for his son Peter to live in. House-hunting began. It was Robert Heber-Percy, Lord Berners’s boyfriend, who found them the beautiful Old Rectory at Farnborough, the highest village in Berkshire. It was for sale at £3,500. ‘1730ish. Red brick seven hundred feet up on the downs. No water, no light, no heat’, Betjeman wrote to Evelyn Waugh.

  Having already settled £5,000 upon Penelope on her wedding (she tied it up in trust for any children who might be born to her), Field Marshal, now Lord, Chetwode (the barony was created for him in 1945) not only did buy her the house, but also settled a further £14,000 on her, with the promise of a further £38,000 (subject to death duties) upon his own death, which happened in 1950. As was observed when assessing the value of her marriage settlement, there are many different ways of judging the equivalent values or purchasing-powers of sums of money at different periods of British history. It has to be borne in mind, for example, that far fewer British people, proportionately, owned their homes and that property was therefore, in inflationary terms, much, much cheaper. The cost of the rectory, £3,500, judged by the standards of the retail price index, would be £92,325, or by the standards of average national earnings, £359,302 39p in 2002 – in either case, this would seem prodigiously cheap by modern standards. Penelope’s capital of £14,000 in 1945 would have been worth the equivalent of £1,128,516 19p in 2002 when measured by the standard of average earnings. This reflects a common pattern among the capital-owning or rentier class until the 1970s, namely that their capital far exceeded the value of their house, whereas nowadays, with a much larger property-owning class, property tends to be a middle-class family’s largest asset.

  The heavy taxes imposed by the post-war Labour Government on capital, and on inheritance, did not endear it to the Betjemans. Established in their big, cold rectory, they took a view of Major Attlee’s socialist policies which was not unlike Evelyn Waugh’s. Waugh, on giving a copy of Betjeman’s poems to Deborah Cavendish (later Duchess of Devonshire), slipped a typed Betjeman poem between its leaves. This samizdat document was evidently considered too hostile to the great British worker to be publishable in Attlee’s Britain.

  When father went out on his basic [petrol ration]

  With Muriel, Shirley and me

  We drove up to somebody’s mansion

  And asked them to give us some tea.

  ‘Get out of there, we’re the workers;

  This mansion is ours, so to speak;

  For Dad turns a handle at Sidcup

  For twenty-five guineas a week.

  I’m paid by the buffet at Didcot

  For insultin’ the passengers there.

  The way they keeps rattlin’ the doorknob

  Disturbs me in doin’ my hair.

  And Shirley does crosswords at Dolcis.

  She’s ever so clever at clues,

  Plus twelve quid a week and her dinner

  For refusing the customers shoes.

  And Muriel slaved at the laundry

  From ten forty five until four;

  But the overtime rates was enormous

  So she don’t have to work any more.

  So get the ’ell out of that mansion

  We workers have got all the tin,

  And Dad has been promised a peerage

  When the Communist party gets in.

  However we judge the matter, though, the Betjemans were the reverse of poor. They usually felt poor, partly because neither of them was good at handling money, and partly because they sometimes enjoyed the company of those who were much richer than themselves. But they were in fact very much more comfortably placed than most people in that bleak, post-war austerity England.

  The fact that they did not install electricity or running water was not because they were unable to afford these luxuries. Penelope at least enjoyed the discomfort and Betjeman probably enjoyed the thought of the house itself not being aesthetically spoilt by mod cons. The villagers in Farnborough were very amused that the first ‘improvement’ which the Betjemans made to the property was to remove a bathroom. The field marshal spent a week with them over their first Christmas and according to Penelope found it

  like living in the dark ages. He cannot see by lamp light and the lav. plugs don’t pull and the bath water keeps running out. He is also very cross because he says that I have carved the ham wrong, he started it straight down then I sliced it across thus exposing a large surface to the atmosphere to dry. However as we all eat several slices three times a day it won’t get the chance to dry right off.

  The Betjemans fetched their water every day from a communal village pump. Every night Betjeman filled paraffin lamps, trimmed wicks and lit fires. In the winter, the whole family huddled round a coke stove in the huge inner hall which had been a village schoolroom. In the summer months, however, the large airy rectory was filled with light, and though surrounded by beech trees, it commanded marvellous views across Watership Down.

  For the growing children, who made friends with the children in the village and adopted their accents (‘grossly proletarian’ noted Evelyn Waugh, whose own mother – his wife once alleged – spoke with a Bristol accent), Farnborough was a paradise. Betjeman’s story Archie and the Strict Baptists reflects the bear’s sense of distraction when he is uprooted from his favourite chapel in the Vale, to live in Farnborough. Though only a few miles from Uffington as the crow flies, Farnborough itself was a place which added to the strains on the Betjemans’ marriage. For a start, the village itself was smaller and much less friendly than Uffington. Betjeman always enjoyed pub life, and at Uffington he derived real pleasure from going to bell-ringing
and getting drunk afterwards in the pub. At Farnborough, there was no pub. It had been removed decades since by a puritanical squire. Church life was also the reverse of consoling. ‘My experience’, Betjeman wrote to Gerard Irvine, ‘is that there is no faith in English villages at all, only convention.’ The flinty little church of All Saints’, ashlar-faced, and with a Norman nave, is perched on the hill on the very edge of the downs, with a spectacular prospect. Inside it is small; its box pews are damp-feeling, and the vicar, Father Steele, not especially high, was unlikely to appeal to someone used to the glories of High Mass, and sanctuaries designed by Comper. It is surely of some significance that Farnborough does not receive a mention in the Collins Guide to English Parish Churches (ed. John Betjeman) and that anyone wishing to find out architectural details about Farnborough must turn to the despised Herr Doktor Pevsner. ‘C of E village religion is no pleasure’, Betjeman told Evelyn Waugh. ‘In this village which has no Nonconformist Chapel, the only bulwark against complete paganism is the church and its chief supporters are Propeller and me.’ This was almost literally the case, and their daughter Candida remembers how very churchy both parents were together when they first came to Farnborough. There was shock, for example, when they called on a local farmer one Friday and found him eating meat for his lunch.

  ‘If we were to desert it’, Betjeman told Waugh,

  there would be no one to whip up people to attend the services, to run the church organisations, to keep the dilatory and woolly-minded incumbent (who lives in another village) to the celebration of Communion services any Sunday. It is just because it is so disheartening and so difficult and so easy to betray that we must keep this Christian witness going.

  He wrote this letter while in the midst of the worst crisis of his marriage. The rift between the Betjemans after this crisis would become, according to their wise priest-friend Gerard Irvine, fundamentally unbridgeable – namely Penelope’s decision to become a Roman Catholic.

  When two strong-minded people come together and then drift apart, it is far too simple to attribute it all to one cause, and it should never be forgotten that part of the villain in this story was not the Pope (or Evelyn Waugh), it was Farnborough itself. Betjeman, from his schooldays onwards, was an architecturally obsessed solitary, and he would always be that until the cruelties of Parkinson’s disease in old age stopped him from wandering about England looking at buildings. Whether he was doing so with a bicycle and a sketch-book aged fifteen, or as an old man with a television crew, he was always on the move, looking for new architectural delights, noticing details which the untrained eye would take for granted or fail altogether to spot. In addition, he was compulsively sociable and he never stopped being a Londoner, who thought of London as the natural and normal place in which to make money. Uffington allowed for this peripatetic and confusing existence. In spite of the marital rows and, on Betjeman’s side, the deep and ever-worsening depressions, it was all manageable at Uffington, because he could catch the train at Challow or Deedcoate – as he and the Propeller liked to pronounce Didcot in imitation of a genteel railway announcer they’d once heard – and usually be home by evening. Farnborough was too far from the nearest station for this – hence his purchase of the Ford. But although he could ‘drive like the clappers’ into Wantage or Oxford, he was never keen on long drives, and for his visits to far-flung friends and his journeys into London, overnight stops were now essential. The result was that Penelope became more and more isolated with the children, more and more resentful of his absences, and more and more the companion of her own religious thoughts and broodings.

  As long ago as November 1933, Penelope had warned Betjeman of her fascination with the Church of Rome. At that time, he was a Quaker, and she was more in the nature of a seeker, who would go through a Zen Buddhist phase. But in the intervening years the Church of England had become a great shared bond. This was the Church of Father Folky, the Church of Uffington life, the Church which had tightened their bond with the Pipers. As well as a religious conviction, the Anglicanism of the Betjemans was something they did together, a form of marital glue.

  It is clear from the very beginning of the marriage between these two very strong and eccentric characters, that both needed to assert their independence as well as their shared life and love. There were constant rows, and in spite of confessing them to Father Folky, neither of them seemed able to hold back from the fuming egotism which fuels such life-poisoning self-indulgence, this giving in to wrath. Some bad-tempered people justify their irascibility by claiming that rows clear the air. The self-inflicted suffering of the Betjemans who could not stop themselves rowing was a casebook example of how false is this idea. Betjeman, as his cult status developed through poems, and through the ever-increasing circle of admirers, was defined as an Anglican. His faith was central to his life, and it was not merely Christian, it was decidedly that of the Church of England. ‘His Kingdom stretch from See to See’, as he once wrote on a postcard to his fellow Anglican Sir Brian Batsford, ‘Till all the world is C of E.’ When, in 1963, an Anglican priest expressed his doubts about reunion with the Methodists, Betjeman wrote to him, ‘I absolutely agree with you about fucking about with Methodists … – another waste of time. No, the C of E is The Catholic Church, tempting though it is to think it isn’t – and English Romanism is sectarian.’ There was an inevitability, perhaps, that his wife, in trying to maintain and assert her own independence while married to such an overwhelmingly developed ‘character’, should have chosen to cut the tie which bound them closest. Her quest for God was different from his. He knew how to live with doubt, she didn’t. She wanted certainties, and there was one Church, particularly in those days, which offered them. On a visit to Assisi, she had experienced, as must many visitors to that electrically charged spiritual powerhouse, something like a vision of the heavenly host. In Ireland she had missed the ‘Catholic privileges’ (as they are called by High Church devotees) on offer to Anglo-Catholics in England – meaning, frequent Mass, priests who are used to hearing confessions. So it was, in the post-war years, as the quarrels between the two of them got worse, and as her spiritual hungers became more aching, she turned to the spiritual path which he was least likely to follow.

  Some time in 1947, she made the decision, not merely to dabble with Roman Catholicism, but to receive formal instruction in that faith. She went to the Dominicans (Order of Preachers) in Oxford, intellectual, and in some cases Bohemian figures who suited her inquiring spirit. Some of the Blackfriars, as Dominicans are called, after the black hoods and scapulars which they used to wear, were a match for Penelope’s own eccentricities. Her best friends were Archbishop Mathew and his brother, Gervase Mathew, OP, who walked round Oxford hand in hand. The archbishop was usually dressed in a frock coat covered in spilt food; his brother was a gentle, clever expert on Byzantine art and on the court art of Richard II in England about which he wrote a delightful book. To discover a whole house, at Blackfriars, full of eccentric intellectual celibate priests was for Penelope like Hansel and Gretel’s discovery of a house made of candies. (‘This pensione’, she once wrote from Florence, ‘is simply lovely for me: there is no less than 8 priests stayin at it & oi’ve troied by various means tew get into conversation with oone oroother of Them.’)

  The man who instructed her was called Father Conrad Pepler. Betjeman was devastated by the turn which she had taken. It was not simply that she was doubting the Church of England which he loved. At one point she airily wondered whether their marriage itself was ‘valid’ in the eyes of the Roman Church. Heedless to the tactlessness of discussing such a matter with a clergyman whom she scarcely knew, and who had never met her husband, Penelope wrote to Betjeman.

  I went to see Rev Pepler yesterday morning at 10 a.m. About RC Marriage Law. He said that before 1918 the R.C. Church claimed to exercise jurisdiction over all marriages both Roman and non-Roman but in that year the law was changed & from then on they only claimed jurisdiction over Roman marriages & ins
isted on the ceremony being performed before a priest. But they do recognize non-Roman marriages as absolutely valid & with regard to the Pauline privilege he has only known that used once in all his experience & that was in the case of a woman married to a jew [sic] who started to persecute her after she became a Roman. He says the R.C. Church never regards a marriage as being rendered invalid if one of the parties turn Roman & that the P.P. can only be used if you can prove continual persecution which might endanger the faith of the convert: as when the non-Roman party (and you would also have to PROVE him unbaptized which Rev Pepler says is extremely difficult if he is middle-aged or more) physically prevents his wife (or vice versa) from going to mass.

  So you see the Roman Church including His Holiness regards our marriage as indissoluble just as the Anglican Church does …