Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

  Her son, Antony Armstrong-Jones, was beginning to make a name for himself as a photographer, and by the late 1950s he led a raffish, Bohemian life, much of it centring around pubs and bars in the East End – most notably, the Waterman’s Arms on the Isle of Dogs – run by his fellow photographer, Daniel Farson, who liked mixing artists, aristocrats, rough trade and sailors. Antony Armstrong-Jones fixed up for Betjeman to stay in a room in Rotherhithe Street, overlooking the River Thames. The friend, a journalist called William Glenton, was delighted by the ‘beaming, well fed, almost Pickwickian figure of John Betjeman who … looked in no way like the conventional idea of the threadbare starving poet’. When Betjeman saw the room, and the river-view from it, he was as excited as a schoolboy and exclaimed, ‘Oh, how jolly! This is going to be fun! I shan’t want to go back to my own place!’

  About two weeks after he had gone back to Cloth Fair, Betjeman made a reappearance at Rotherhithe, but this time he was not alone. He was accompanied by Tony Armstrong-Jones and by Elizabeth Cavendish. From this moment on, ‘Tony’s Room’ changed its function in Glenton’s house. Hitherto, it was a room which the young photographer had used to entertain a whole gang of Chelsea friends. Now it was to become a secret place known only to a few. There was a fishnet hammock in the corner of the room, into which Armstrong-Jones jumped lithely. Then Betjeman had a go, heaving his way in and out of the swinging bed, and then to Glenton’s surprise – partly because he was in awe of her title, partly because she was so tall, and partly because her bearing was so dignified and old for her years – Lady Elizabeth too leapt into the hammock, but went right over the top and crashed to the floor on the other side. The second time, she succeeded in getting in, ‘and she lay sprawled its full length like a highly bred saluki dog’.

  There was a reason for the trio making their visit. They had been casing the joint and making it ready for the use of Armstrong-Jones’s latest love. Some weeks later when Glenton came into the house, he met Elizabeth coming downstairs, who said she had just come in to ‘tidy Tony’s room’. Glenton noticed that some lilac-coloured lavatory paper had been put in the loo. The large car waiting outside belonged to Princess Margaret.

  Betjeman and Elizabeth his girlfriend had seen the princess through the upset of her decision not to marry Group Captain Townsend in 1955. It was even said at the time by those ‘in the know’ that Elizabeth had helped the princess draft her famous public statement, of 31 October 1955, that she was renouncing the group captain, ‘mindful of the Church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble’ and conscious of her duty to the Commonwealth. If it is true that Elizabeth, or even Betjeman, had anything to do with the wording of that statement then it was indeed what some call an irony, given their own situation. Now, a few years on from the Townsend affair, Betjeman and Cavendish were once again at the heart of Princess Margaret’s emotional life. On 26 February the Queen Mother announced the engagement of her ‘beloved daughter’ to Anthony Armstrong-Jones, who later became the Earl of Snowdon. (Evidently they either had forgotten or did not agree with King George V’s diktat that royal personages do not become engaged, they are betrothed.) The wedding of the Joneses, as John and Penelope Betjeman called them, took place on 6 May 1960.

  * * *

  The first five or six years in 43 Cloth Fair represented a peak in Betjeman’s popularity as a poet which few of his loyal friends, who had purchased the privately printed Mount Zion in 1931, would have been able to predict. John Betjeman’s Collected Poems were published in 1958, with a preface by his old friend Freddie Birkenhead. Though he had known Betjeman since Oxford days, there was something a little surprising about this choice, rather than, say, Tom Driberg, Evelyn Waugh, John Piper, Osbert Lancaster, Maurice Bowra or John Sparrow, all far more distinguished than Birkenhead, and all closer friends of Betjeman. But Birkenhead was the brother of the man who had introduced Betjeman to his new love. And he was a friend of Elizabeth’s. Collected Poems sold at a rate of 1,000 per day in the month before Christmas 1958, and altogether, world-wide, it was destined to sell two million copies. A prize set up in memory of Duff Cooper by his widow Lady Diana, which had previously been given to Winston Churchill, was given in that year to Betjeman. The judges were all friends of Betjeman – Harold Nicolson, Maurice Bowra and Lord David Cecil, Elizabeth’s uncle, and the prize was presented by Princess Margaret, so the whole occasion was what some would describe as a bit incestuous.

  ‘Don’t buy my collected verse’, he urged R.S. Thomas. ‘I’ll send it you. It’s nothing like as good as your poetry.’ He meant that.

  ‘How nice of you’, Betjeman wrote to his old friend Bryan Guinness, ‘to write to me about my temporary success at poetry. I set no store by it. The slump in me will start in a month or two. But I can say, in the depths of it, that I have at least had my day. And your boom will Arrive.’ He wrote from the Mead adding that ‘we are all well’. But this was only ever true, from now on, up to a point.

  There is no doubt that Betjeman felt, in retrospect, that he had been a neglectful father, especially to his son. Both Penelope and Betjeman himself derived pleasure from embarrassing the boy when he was at Eton by turning up on grand occasions such as the Fourth of June, wearing ragged clothes, old macs and battered hats. Eventually, he actually asked them not to visit him at school and embarrass him in front of his friends. After National Service, Paul got into Trinity College, Oxford to read Geography and increasingly began to go his own way. Betjeman was continually hard on him, as if genetically compelled to replicate the destructive rows he himself had had with Ernie. ‘You’re half my age and a twentieth my intelligence’, he once raged at the Powlie, words which the son unconvincingly claims ‘weren’t offensive, because it was truthful’.

  Candida, who would be allowed to leave school (St Mary’s, Wantage) at fifteen, was a worry to her mother. Her printed memories of both her parents are loyal, while not being untruthful. She remembers a father who always took them to the Crazy Gang at Christmas time, who made jokes, who accompanied her to church in Wantage every Sunday while her mother went to RC Mass, who stuck up for her schoolfriends when they might otherwise have been expelled by the nuns, and who was in every respect an ideal Dad. Obviously she had a much closer relationship with her father than Paul did, but even so his frequent absences placed a great burden on Penelope, who, like most mothers, bore the brunt of the difficulties during Candida’s moody adolescence. ‘I go to London for telly on Sunday’, he wrote to ‘Darling Wibz’, ‘on the Great Western Plymouth to Paddington.’ ‘No peace when the Devil drives. I sometimes think I am sold to the Devil … No peace is left and you feel you are wasting the joy of being alive’ – a better definition of television work was never written. But while he was rattling on trains with such thoughts, Penelope was at home, having the usual mother-daughter difficulties, only not usual because she had them at Penelope levels of high volume and overstatement.

  LENTEN THOUGHT I hate my daughter

  I hate her friends

  Therefore I will give her MONEY to lead her own life and keep out of the way as much as possible.

  IS THIS RIGHT???? WE have to answer to GOD ON THE JUDGEMENT DAY FOR OUR CHILDREN AND AS YOUR PRESENT ATTITUDE STANDS YOU WILL BE GUILTY OF GROSS NEGLECT.

  So she wrote to Betjeman.

  All your hospital visiting and holy talks and inspiring people with religious sentiments through your poetry and other good works are worthless compared with what you owe your children and don’t give them. Candida so often says, ‘Daddy never comes home now. I am frightened of him when he goes on about hating my friends.’ MY GOD HALF OF THEM DRIVE ME POTTY TOO but it is one’s plain DUTY to provide a home background where she can bring them and entertain them. I know I like being here and enjoy having them until they drive me silly as last Sunday. But you MUST be here sometimes and HELP and SUPPORT me …

  There were some levels on which Tewpie and Plymmie would always be at one, always sharing their distinctive enjoyment of re
maining distinct from the rest of the world. This was particularly true when, astoundingly, they agreed to a proposal, which came via Stephen Spender, that he should spend a month being Poet in Residence at the University of Cincinnati and she go with him. This was precisely the way Spender loved passing his time, but one almost feels that the Betjemans, with their screams of horror about everything in America, especially the central heating, had gone to ‘Cinci’ simply in order to have another ‘hilarious’ incident to relate to their friends. ‘I long to see you and Wantage again – my goodness I do’, Betjeman wrote to Wibz. ‘Don’t forget Mummy and me. We think of you a lot and envy you even at school’ – and to his secretary Anita Dent: ‘This place’ – Cincinnati – ‘is HELL, an unrelieved hell, worse than Penelope and I thought it was going to be.’ While he was away he wrote to ‘Feebleness’ every day.

  Now, everything the Betjemans did, whether together or apart, reminded them of the difficulties of the triangle. Sometimes it was Feeble’s turn to say she had had enough, and to break things off with Betjeman. He would write mournful poems about it – such as ‘The Cockey Amorist’ – and then it would be

  Ausgang we were out of love

  Und eingang we are in.

  That one, ‘In the Public Gardens’, was written after a tour of Germany with Elizabeth, and her sister and brother-in-law, Anne and Michael Tree.

  But the divided life was not without its cost. When Penelope, for example, had undertaken to have some French children, the Lurots, to stay, and Betjeman let fall that if they were in the house, he would not want to come home to Wantage for Christmas, it provoked one of Penelope’s most alarming tirades, typed at furious speed on 20 December 1956 at the Mead, Wantage, Berks. One of the most frightening things about it is that it is in English rather than in Plymmie-ese, and the spellings are more or less orthodox, a token of how deadly serious she was.

  Darling Tewps, If you won’t come down for Christmas with the Lurot kiddies then DON’T. I am FED UP WITH YOUR BULLYING FOR NEARLY THIRTY YEARS AND AM AT LAST GOING TO TAKE A STRONG LINE. I have NEVER been able to have my friends to stay at Uffington, Farnborough or Wantage without a row. Dr Betty about once at Uff and after that always when you were away. I take all your new friends to my bosom, eg, the Demants, the Penning-Rowsells etc. etc. and get to like them then YOU get bored with them and play hell if I go on asking them to meals. I have had all your friends like Philip [Harding] Hanbury [Sparrow], Maurice [Bowra] to stay and/or meals whenever you have wanted them and mine and the kiddies mostly when you are away.

  YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY MAD. Some silly sec rang up to-day and said, ‘This is just to confirm that Mr Betjeman is going to the opera at Covent Garden tomorrow with Lord Drogheda’. You HATE opera. You have simply got yourself into a rich smart set with which you have little in common bar literary sympathies with the Cavendishes. Your LIFE IS NOT YOUR OWN AND IF YOU DO NOT CALL A HALT VERY SOON YOU WILL GO OFF YOUR ROCKER. You DARE to suggest that you cannot afford to feed two Frog kiddies when you must have spent about £15 on Christmas cards which are a SIN when they are such a waste of money; and had you had Maurice or Patrick or Philip to stay would have spent £20 on drink. As it is I am just getting a case of Coke in for Antoine, and P[owlie] will not be here so it will be QUITE unnecessary to offer A anything to drink except on C. Day when you always open a bottle for the Miss Butlers. We are not getting any more or less invitations because of the frog kiddies. The Barings have decided to give up their evening party on Chr Day as Dezzie is trying to economize on drinks VERY sensibly. They are just having a few intimate chums into drinks before Ch Day luncheon and will be delighted if you and Wibz and Antoine (Anne likes him very much) and Marian go while I am cooking. Nic to my great surprise says she would like to have A and Marian to cold supper on Chr night as the P. and Maurice won’t be with us so she will have room for us five. The Stockings have invited us up on Boxing Night with Mr and Mrs King to sing Aussie songs. I KNEW you would like that, otherwise no outings thank God. Our daily cannot come for THREE DAYS AT CHRISTMAS as her husband will be home and does not want her to go out and she is much richer than us so does not need the money. Therefore I shall be VERY grateful for the help of the frogs as little Marian is very domesticated and Antoine is going to take the ENTIRE CHARGE OF MY HORSE which will be a GODSEND.

  As always in their marriage, it was Penelope who made all the arrangements, and kept the show on the road. But this outpouring, with all its capital letters and all its anguish, goes much further than one of her usual outbursts. It screams with the painfulness of Betjeman and Elizabeth now being regarded as a couple by Princess Margaret and her friends. For all its anger with an errant husband, and heartbreak for a lost love, it also grieves for a Betjeman who is spoiling himself, wasting his time and his talents, frittering life away.

  Re money it is idiotic to go and worry yourself sick over it. I shall give you SIX MONTHS IN WHICH TO GET OUT OF YOUR CAVENDISH ENTANGLEMENTS and fulfil your various commitments in London after which you must chuck up the flat and Sec and live BETWEEN HERE AND CORNWALL. STOP all this TV and stuff which you repeatedly tell me does not pay: make it your WHOLE OBJECT IN LIFE TO GET OUT OF THE PUBLIC EYE. Not until you are FORGOTTEN for a bit will you write anything worth while again. You are not living: you are EXISTING. Cut down the money you give me and I will sell some shares until such time as I can make some money writing myself which I feel confident I can.

  I WILL TAKE NO HALF MEASURES. I AM FED UP WITH YOUR DIVIDED LIFE AND COMPLETELY FALSE SET OF VALUES. Have the GUTS to tell your smart friends that you are tired of the rush and worry of London and that you are clearing out AND WISH TO BE LEFT ALONE.

  DON’T PANIC ABOUT MONEY IT IS NOT WORTH IT. We cannot sell the Caff until the credit squeeze is over which I am told will last six months. After that if we DO sell it we will invest some of the capital in cutting this house in half and letting the front half as planned. I feel it is a better investment than any stocks and shares which go up and down. If we leave this to the kiddies with THREE little places to let furnished: two parts of this house and eventually G’s cottage, it could bring in an income of £1000 p/a at least.

  If you INSIST in going on with the London racket and Elizabeth and the Jones’ then I shall ask for a legal separation and once Wibz is married I shall go and live in Spain on £300 p/a. But I don’t WANT to do that. I would far rather we lived here WITHOUT a Tel. But WITH a Spanish maid to give ME time to write: and WITH an efficient woman sec daily to deal with your correspondence. Then I could go and ride round Spain for Sept and Oct each year and write about it and you could go to lots of places you want to see for British Council and/or to Cornwall where you have plenty of friends all round you.

  But I’M DAMNED if I am going on with you in this perpetual dichotomy with insomnia, hysterical nerves, fear of losing your reputation etc., etc. We have both got only another 20 years to live if all goes well with our health and we are not run over by a bus or killed in a motor accident, and it is simply not worth being as MISERABLE AS YOU ARE OWING TO PHOBIAS LISTED ABOVE. Take it or leave it.

  ELIZABETH OR ME.

  Yewrs very truly Plymstoine

  But he could not take it or leave it, and that for a reason which could only put terrible strain on all three of them, when things went badly, though of course it redeemed the whole situation when things went well, that is, when Betjeman’s mood was happy, and in the company of one or the other he could enjoy ‘laughter and the love of friends’. And that reason, that complicating factor, was the unbudgeable love he felt for Penelope. This was not a marriage which came unstuck because he fell in love with another woman, and which therefore ended in separation and estrangement. It was a marriage in which he never fell out of love with his wife, but in which he also loved another woman. While loving Penelope, he had fewer and fewer interests in common with her, whereas in Elizabeth’s company he could not only see people he liked, he could worship with the woman he loved in the church they both loved toget
her, and indulge in such harmless pleasures as golf. ‘Dear, feeble Elizabeth and I did eighteen holes on a Municipal Putting course in Fulham Palace Gardens before she went away with her Little Friend.’ One of his closest confidants, a priest called Harry Jarvis who came to work as his secretary after Tory Dennistoun got married, was quite clear about it. ‘Elizabeth tried to encourage him to leave her, but he wouldn’t.’ What existed between him and Penelope was ‘a very deep deep love … I don’t think at any stage he wanted to leave Elizabeth – he never wanted to leave either of them in fact. I think he enjoyed dealing with the guilt to some extent.’ Betjeman told Jarvis that his wife was not interested in sex any more, and that Elizabeth wanted a baby – blamed Betjeman as the years went by for not giving her this. But the situation was going to be one with which all three had to live for the rest of his life, and he would never resolve it.