Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

  His two obsessive crushes at this time were Margaret Wintringham, whom he had met at a poetry reading in Swindon, and a young South African poet, Patrick Cullinan. Margaret was married to a wine expert called Edmund Penning-Rowsell and because she and her husband were communists, she became the Party Member, or the Stakhanovite. She was put through the usual Betjeman routine of worship, but unlike many of the boys and girls whom he adored, she assumed that this would lead to some reciprocal lovemaking. When he visited her, for what she supposed would be adultery, however,

  with priggishness and self-righteousness, with fear and love, I insisted on doing nothing. She – oh God I can’t put it down in ink or pencil or charcoal or anything – she [put up with] my priggishness. And now what have I? Remorse, internal writhings, detestation of everything here [Farnborough], inability to concentrate, fear of her revenge on me and the prospect of several more deliciously wonderful visits each with its sad ending.

  She got her revenge with a bad poem –

  For J.B.

  Remember when in your philosophy

  Human relationships take second place

  Your chastity is founded on my charity

  And through my grief you reach your State of Grace.

  ‘Of course she’s quite right’, he told Anne Barnes, but the reader fifty years on wonders if he understood what she was saying.

  Patrick Cullinan was an easier idol to adore. A South African boy at Charterhouse, with a blond lock of hair falling constantly over his bright blue eyes, he became a pen-pal of Betjeman’s in the late 1940s and was asked to stay at Farnborough in 1950. ‘John seems very fond of that South African boy, Penelope’, said the field marshal to Betjeman’s delight. He quoted the remark in a letter to Piper, and added,

  He attracted Robert H-P so much that he called with 4 other queers to take a 2nd look and Gavin and his little American friend laid themselves out to be nice & would not let go when we called at Buscot … I fell in love so much that I felt no physical sensations at all beyond being drained of all power of limbs … Of course I am imagining things – a mere David Horner I am or Oliver Messel – but I think – that he looks at me with all his eyes and loves me or at any rate is very fond of me … I believe that my chief function is like the Colonel’s – drawing out the young.

  Unhappy, or rather luxuriating masochistically in unhappy love, as a distraction from real unhappiness in his marriage – Betjeman during these years in Farnborough has been made to seem a wretched person in the last few pages. That was only part of the picture. He continued to go into Oxford to work at the Oxford Preservation Trust. For his children, and their village friends, there were endless jokes, and larks. And Penelope continued to be a generous hostess and a good cook, entertaining every weekend.

  The Mosleys, Sir Oswald and his wife Diana, were now living at Crowood, near Ramsbury, and often came over for Sunday luncheon. Betjeman had loved Diana since Biddesden days when she was married to Bryan Guinness, and the two had a deep bond of humour. Since she and her husband had been imprisoned during the war under the 18B regulation, which suspended habeas corpus, and entitled the Government to lock up citizens without trial, both Mosleys had become social pariahs in many circles. It was supposed that they had been to prison for treason, or that they had wanted Hitler to win the war. Neither thing was true, but the fact that Sir Oswald had been the leader of the British Union of Fascists led to very understandable confusions, not least because he hoped in these post-war years to re-form some kind of populist party from the remnant of the old Blackshirt movement. Betjeman felt a natural sympathy with those who were in disgrace, whether it was Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar, or clergymen who had in Freddy Hood’s phrase ‘stepped aside’. The Mosleys came into this category. Betjeman tried hard to get Alexander and Max Mosley, the two sons of Oswald and Diana, into English schools, though their parents eventually decided to educate them abroad. ‘You really are an angel to have found a school which might accept Alexander and Max as pupils – or perhaps I should say a genius’, wrote Diana in May 1946, ‘Mr Tootill sounds as blissful as his name … I was beginning to despair as I had had so many furious refusals. Isn’t it odd in a way; if I had a school I should welcome reds, in the hope of converting them.’

  Mosley himself turned to Betjeman for help with the layout of his political newsletter, ‘Action’. ‘The public seem very willing to buy it when given an opportunity’, he added optimistically. Betjeman gave advice about typography, but the times were not auspicious. A book printed by ‘Mosley Publications Limited’ was of ‘vile appearance’ because it ‘was set up, in secret, at night, by one small printer, and was then completed when another broke down completely under the stress’.

  A lost cause with which Betjeman was to have more success was in persuading the Prime Minister to put forward the name of the great Ninian Comper for a knighthood for his ‘Wark’. T.S. Eliot, John Piper, Lord Shaftesbury, the Bishop of Chichester, the Reverend Mother of the Wantage Convent and many others were written to by Betjeman and asked to write individually to the PM. It was doubly challenging since as Charles Peers pointed out, ‘old Comper has certainly not gone out of his way to make friends of his professional brethren during a long and distinguished career’. In the New Year’s Honours of 1950, however, Betjeman’s dream came true. P. Morton Shand was ‘lost in admiration at your getting a knighthood for Comper. Obviously it is entirely your own work and was also intended as one straight between the eyes for the RIBA.’ Not only was this the case. Even more satisfyingly – like the confusion caused at Magdalen by Betjeman’s insistence upon studying medieval Welsh – it actually threw the anti-Comper architects into administrative confusion. John Summerson went into the RIBA canteen and enjoyed the unhappy faces there.

  Spragg said, I suppose you know. Comper’s not an architect. Not an architect I said. No, he’s not an architect. HE’S NOT ON THE REGISTER … J.N.C. is not on the register [of the Royal Institute of British Architects] and does not pay a pound a year. If he styles himself ‘architect’ he is liable to prosecution and a heavy fine. BUT THE KING HAS KNIGHTED HIM AS AN ARCHITECT. Well, make of this what you like. Some will say it is a great blow for freedom.

  And so it was.

  The king held Garden Parties that summer as usual, and Lord Chetwode took his daughter along to one of them. It was to be the last summer of the field marshal’s life. When he died, Betjeman said,

  very sad it will be for Penelope. Losing one parent is bad enough. When you lose both, you suddenly know you have stepped out into loneliness, there’s no one to back you up or even to quarrel with, except other lonely people like yourself. I suppose husband and children are some consolation. But not much and they can’t lessen the change.

  Some people believe that once you have children yourself, you cease to be a child and become primarily a parent. This frank letter shows that psychologically Betjeman had never made that leap. A parent, or better still, a nanny, would alone comfort him in his loneliness. Probably Penelope was very different. It was nice for her, however, that she went to a Buckingham Palace garden party with her aged father in the last weeks of his life. And after that experience, she wrote a letter to her husband which, in the light of Betjeman’s subsequent career, seems prophetic:

  Woad was very please [sic] oi went ter the garden party with im boot it was very cold so we only stayed an hour. We saw the Roogby’s [i.e. the former Sir John Maffey and wife, now Lord and Lady Rugby] and ee says as ow ee is troin ter get yew made poet laureate when Masefield kciks [sic] the boocket but that ow as yew moost wroite a poem about Prince Charles first.

  She adds that she now has ‘dia[rrhoea] … boot thqt [sic] was from eating too many of the King’s cakes’.

  10

  DEFECTIONS

  ‘I have the most beautiful secretary in the world & yet remain a faithful husband. Praise God for strength received’, Betjeman wrote to his old schoolmaster T.S. Eliot on 14 May 1951. The manias for Patrick Cullinan, and for
the Stakhanovite, Margaret Wintringham, faded in the bright rays of a new passion. Jill Menzies ‘is very pure and blue-eyed and freckled and covered with gold fur and has a degree (2nd) in French at Oxford and she has a quietly dominating personality’, he told another friend. To yet another, he rhapsodised, ‘She is a very clever girl and looks like a ruined choirboy, with turned-up nose, wide apart grey eyes, freckles and golden down on her arms and legs. SHE IS VERY BEAUTIFUL AND GOOD AND CALM AND FUNNY.’ Such passions punctuated his emotional life: they always had and always would. They fed his poetry. After an evening at one of his London clubs, at which he had entertained ‘Freckly Jill’, he wrote one of his worst gush-poems: ‘I could not speak for amazement at your beauty’. Jill Menzies was twenty-two when she came to work for him. He interviewed her in his office at Time and Tide and for his part it was love at first sight. From May 1951, she moved in with the Betjemans and lived en famille, helping with correspondence and typing until May 1953, when, as she said, ‘I think I was getting too fond of him. I thought it would upset Penelope if I stayed.’

  Penelope, the mother of two children aged eleven and nine, had probably never in her Anglican days practised birth control. As a fervent convert to Roman Catholicism, she certainly did not do so and made no secret of the fact that she saw sex ‘only as a means of procreation, not interested at all as an amusement’.

  In his thanksgiving for ‘strength received’ which enabled him to be a faithful husband Betjeman might have been speaking slightly too soon. Between his claim to Eliot in May 1951 that he was still a faithful husband, and his rapturous description of Freckly Jill in the second of the two letters quoted above, to Anne Barnes, a momentous meeting had occurred, one which would change Betjeman’s marriage, and indeed redirect the course of his life. On 15 May 1951, Betjeman accepted an invitation to dinner with Lady Pamela Berry, the wife of the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph. She was a connection by marriage of Penelope’s and Betjeman had known her for over twenty years, having been at Oxford with her brother, Freddy Birkenhead. The daughter of F.E. Smith, the first Lord Birkenhead, and (from 1953 for over a decade) the mistress of Malcolm Muggeridge, this lively flirtatious socialite was the embodiment of everything Penelope detested about London. The little dinner which Lady Pamela had arranged had a missing guest. Guy Burgess, who had been exposed as a Soviet agent, had left the country that night and gone to live in Moscow. No one at the time read anything of significance in the face of one of the guests who did turn up at Lady Pamela’s table, Betjeman’s old Marlborough contemporary, Anthony Blunt, himself a Soviet agent who must have known as his hostess fussed and looked at the clock, and as they sat down late, with an empty place at the table, that his comrade was already on the way to Moscow.

  Betjeman took less notice of Blunt than he did of another guest, a conspicuously tall, shy young woman named Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, who sat in almost total silence throughout the meal. Next day, the irrepressible Pamela telephoned everyone to tell them the sensational news that her missing dinner guest had been unmasked as a spy for the Russians. It would be amusing to read a typescript of her conversation with Blunt, assuming, as would be quite likely by this stage, that his telephone had been bugged by the KGB, if not by British Intelligence. When she rang Betjeman, she asked him if he would be prepared to come on a cruise to Copenhagen in her husband’s yacht. Rather surprisingly for someone who hated abroad, he said that he would do so only on condition that she also invited Elizabeth.

  When Pamela rang Elizabeth, she invited her, adding the devastatingly tempting information that Betjeman was unhappy and that his marriage was going wrong.

  Both Betjeman and Elizabeth Cavendish felt that they had fallen in love at that dinner, and they accepted the invitation to go on the cruise knowing what this might entail. Freckly Jill remembered, ‘JB was very flattered. Elizabeth was mad about him and he was mad about her. Penelope didn’t mind about Elizabeth any more than she minded about anyone else. After all, John was always falling in love.’

  Some of his friends, especially his gay friends, felt that the constant succession of ‘loves’ was becoming tiresome. Colonel Kolkhorst asked him, ‘Is it not time you gave your heart a rest, for a little while anyway? You have been at it non stop now for I don’t know how many donkey’s years, it isn’t good for you.’

  The Cavendish affair was to be very different from what had gone before. Previous loves had either been airy and Platonic, turning into poems and then into laughing friendships, as in the case of Gold Myfanwy; or, as with the ‘ordinary little woman’ in the Bath teashop, they were short flings, during which a full sexual relationship happened, only to be hastily and guiltily put behind him, with confession to a priest putting an end to the matter. Betjeman’s lyrics about sex beg God to make him indifferent to the objects of his desire. He prays to see the ‘wholly to my liking girl, / To see and not to care’, which is not especially flattering to the girl.

  Elizabeth Cavendish was a determined young woman who was not prepared to be treated in this way. She fell very much in love with Betjeman, and probably, for his part, his feelings were more closely engaged than they had been with some of the others, though quite how one judges these matters it is difficult to say. One of his fellow guests on the cruise to Copenhagen was Bog, his old Oxford friend Alan Pryce-Jones, and his wife Poppy, who was to die of cancer not long afterwards. By the time Cavendish came back from the cruise, she had acquired a nickname – Feeble – always a sign that you had entered the inner circle of Betjeman’s imagination. She was also his lover.

  The fact that she was the daughter of the tenth and sister of the eleventh dukes of Devonshire would not have diminished her attractions for the ever-aspirant Betjeman. When a friend, who always took Penelope’s side in the matter, unkindly dismissed Elizabeth as ‘just an upper-class nanny’ she had, of course, managed to define in one short phrase Betjeman’s ideal woman. From boyhood onwards, he had been attracted to nanny-figures. His poem about Myfanwy pictures her leaning over a kinderbank with himself as the kiddie inside. ‘You will protect me, my silken Myfanwy, / Ringleader, tom-boy and chum to the weak.’

  Elizabeth, still grieving for her father, who had died the previous year, would grow into being Betjeman’s protectress, but when they first met, the boot was on the other foot. Betjeman felt her vulnerability (hence the nickname he gave her – Feeble). She was everything Penelope was not. She seemed emotionally needy and dependent upon him. She was quiet and gentle. Her humour was subtle. She was a committed and serious communicant of the Church of England.

  What Elizabeth found in him was equally transparent to all who saw them together. They had a shared sense of humour. From the first, there was laughter between them, and laughter defined their relationship. They also had the Church, with all the complications which that devotion brought with it. Elizabeth to a large extent had reacted against the irreligion of her delightful brother the eleventh Duke who, in spite of a nominal allegiance to the Church of England, was no churchgoer. He was charming to women, and he followed what was in effect the code of his class when it came to adultery – as did his wife’s brother-in-law Sir Oswald Mosley.

  The world from which Elizabeth came took adultery for granted, though it followed certain codes and it tried not to divorce. She did not want an existence which was limited to hunting, country sports, entertaining or the Season. Belonging as she did to one of the most eminent of aristocratic lineages, her father one of the grandest dukes in the kingdom, her mother a Cecil, sister of Lord David the writer, and daughter of the fourth Marquess of Salisbury, Elizabeth came from two notably intelligent families. But she had no wish to lead the conventional upper-class life, and was naturally drawn to a Bohemian life in London, combined with what Penelope Betjeman would have called something ‘worth whoile’. She was to become a magistrate and to work especially with young offenders. Like her uncle David Cecil and unlike her brother Andrew, she was naturally pious, and the complicated situation into which she f
ell when she found that she loved John Betjeman was not one which she would ideally have chosen. She wanted a ‘normal’ life, marriage and children, of whom she was especially fond. It did, however, suit her on several levels to fall in love with Betjeman since, while not being an aristocrat, he loved mixing with those who were, and understood her world.

  The dinner table where they first met seems, as we think of it from this perspective in time, to have something of the quality of the Le Carré thrillers, those marvellous Cold War stories in which Smiley the agent unskeins the delicate strands of betrayal not only in the political but also in the marital life, his own wife’s compulsive need to betray him in his bed being matched by his colleague Bill Haydon’s compulsion to betray his country. By falling in love with one another, Betjeman and Cavendish, precisely because they had so much in common, put at risk all they cared for most, especially family life and the Church.

  One of the things which Feeble and John Betjeman had in common, and one of the things which now separated him from his wife, was that they were both serious Anglicans. (Feeble’s family nickname, coined by her sister-in-law Deborah Devonshire, is Deacon.) Alan Pryce-Jones, the witness to their burgeoning love on the cruise, was also a devout man. A year after the cruise, Pryce-Jones, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, followed Penelope’s path. ‘He made a brief plunge to Rome … but didn’t like what he found and swam out quickly’, wrote his fellow Anglican Rose Macaulay in triumph.

  Betjeman too rejoiced in Bog’s return from Rome, and the two men loved going to High churches in London together, such as the Grosvenor Chapel (sanctuary adorned by Comper) in South Audley Street, or St Cyprian’s, Clarence Gate, the marvellous Comper masterpiece near Baker Street Station where the white interior is divided by a blaze of gold rood-screen, adorned with angels.