Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

  Inevitably, being a famous person, a television personality, and a best-selling writer, as well as the lover of a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, led Betjeman to have a very public profile, and the late 1960s were perhaps the height of his fame. It is remarkable that he had any time to be anything except the public ‘persona’ of John Betjeman, given the demands on his time. He became friends with the wife of the Prime Minister, Mary Wilson, who herself wrote verse.

  John Wells and Richard Ingrams, who wrote a spoof Mary Wilson’s Diary in Private Eye magazine naturally made merry with her attempts – ‘If I could write before I die / One line of purest poetry’, etc., etc. Betjeman defended her robustly against the mocking young men. He claimed to think highly of her poem: ‘How like a man to choose a crowded train / To say that we could never meet again.’ It was a genuine friendship between the two of them. Betjeman responded to the rather lonely, shy woman who had been swept up into the public realm because of the ambitions of her husband. Her love of poetry was quite genuine, and her fondness for the Scilly Isles, where she had a bungalow, matched his for Cornwall. It was not mere snootiness on the part of Betjeman’s old friends, however, who felt that he was watering the mixture a little with his effusion to Mary Wilson on the occasion of making a train journey with her to Diss, in Norfolk –

  Dear Mary,

  Yes, it will be bliss

  To go with you by train to Diss.

  As for his poem on the Investiture of the Prince of Wales, it reads more like a job application (for Poet Laureate) than something worthy of the poet who had written a great poem like the ‘Death of King George V’. It begins after a dinner in the Rev. Harry Williams’s rooms in Cambridge.

  The moon was in the Cambridge sky

  And bathed Great Court in silver light

  When Hastings-Bass and Woods and I

  And quiet Elizabeth, tall and white,

  With that sure clarity of mind

  Which comes to those who’ve truly dined,

  Reluctant rose to say good-night;

  And all of us were bathed the while

  In the large moon of Harry’s smile.

  Then, sir, you said what shook me through

  So that my courage almost fails:

  ‘I want a poem out of you

  On my Investiture in Wales’…

  And so on for three pages. R.S. Thomas, a fervent Welsh Nationalist who felt that the nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, did not go far enough in its opposition to England, had come to believe in the fire-bombing of holiday cottages to keep the English out of his beloved land. He might well have viewed with some scepticism Betjeman’s enthusiasm for the prince, and his commendation of the young man to Thomas as Charles prepared for his Investiture as Prince of Wales in a ceremony at Caernarfon devised by David Lloyd George for the future Edward VIII. Of Prince Charles, Betjeman wrote,

  I have met him twice, dining with Harry Williams, Dean of Trinity, Camb. who is his moral tutor. Harry becomes a Mirfield monk next year. With C[harles] were two stalwart young undergraduate friends of his. I must tell you that whether he comes through his Wales affair safely or not [this was the Investiture which had excited some threats of demonstration by the Welsh nationalists] he is a winner of a person. Not handsome (like you & your glorious son) but humorous, sensitive to one’s feelings, and obviously good. By ‘good’ I mean steadfast & unself-conscious & strong. I feel he has already mastered what it is like to be alone. Harry tells me he often serves at weekday celebrations in Trinity. Very curious it was to meet him twice at small private dinners. I think he looks forward to Wales. He clearly likes poetry. I copied out your ‘One night of tempest’ &c for Harry to give him, to whet his anticipation of Caernarfon. I often wonder why you did not include that shining lyric in your later volume.

  The knighthood which Betjeman received in the same year as the Investiture, 1969, was more than deserved. ‘It is of great help in restaurants and theatre ticket offices and airports. Better almost than a Lord.’ If anyone in England deserved a knighthood, not only for his poetry, but also for his tireless campaigning, and for the enlightenment he brought to millions, it was Betjeman. But he did not need to write doggerel such as the poem on the Investiture. If one is to have a royal family at all, they need friends and courtiers. Betjeman, with his willingness to flatter, was a natural courtier, and that was something, especially with Princess Margaret, that he could do with Elizabeth. But the poetry had begun to dry.

  To Harry Jarvis he explained, on 29 January 1970,

  I got a rather delightful thing called melancholia. I lost all confidence, couldn’t bring myself to telephone or write a letter, dragged my feet as though I were eighty, and couldn’t balance properly. It is being cured by pills which keep me asleep all day, and it will take a month to get all right. I am going to Iceland tomorrow, where I shall have to get pills to keep me awake, and then with Mervyn to Spain where I shall be able to sleep, but I don’t think it wise to come up to you on the 4th or 5th. I am not really fit company for anyone. Apparently, I shall be quite all right in a month, the doctor is certain he can cure it. Feeble is very weak and it was at her instigation a doctor was called in. I was rapidly becoming even more intolerable than usual.

  It was hardly a condition in which he should have taken on a major new undertaking: film making in Australia. But, without understanding the true nature of his condition, combined with his old melancholic self, and greatly exacerbated by alcohol, he set forth on what began as a whoopee and was to end as a sort of Calvary.

  The previous visit to Australia, ten years before, had been a round of lectures, talks, television appearances, and poetry readings, and it had been exhausting for a man of fifty-five. At sixty-five, Betjeman was beginning to suffer from Parkinson’s disease, though this was not yet known. He was also undertaking the much more tiring work of making television films. The producer in charge was Margaret McCall. She had not worked with Betjeman much before, and she did not appreciate that he was ill. There were several films to make. It had been written into the contract that Elizabeth should accompany Betjeman with all expenses paid. As well as Margaret McCall and the crew, there was an additional producer, Julian Jebb.

  The grandson of the Catholic poet Hilaire Belloc, Jebb was both overshadowed by his past and in rebellion against it. He had a very carrying voice. The queue of penitents outside one of the confessionals in Westminster Cathedral were once astounded to hear him shouting, ‘Are you telling me that it is a sin to BE a homosexual?’ He stormed out of the church and never returned, being a paid-up agnostic ever afterwards. Slight, blonde, with large brown eyes and an excessively camp manner, Jebb was someone who had a deep knowledge of the literature and music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was an eerily good mimic, and sociable, adoring the company of aristocratic bohemia. He was a regular visitor to Lord David Cecil and his family, to Lady Diana Cooper, to Anthony and Violet Powell, to Vidia Naipaul, who depicted him with cruel accuracy in his novel The Enigma of Arrival. Julian used to say that he could not bear the idea of ageing, and that when he reached his fiftieth birthday, he would commit suicide. This he did, but not before a tortuous life-journey in which he confronted the fact that, clever as he was, he had never found any fulfilling outlet for his talents. The anti-depressant pills which he constantly popped did not seem to do anything for his depressions, and frequent visits to clinics, each more punitive than the last, did nothing to help him cure his ever more extreme alcoholism. He wanted not just friendship, but mother-love. When staying with one of his close friends, Jennifer Ross (briefly married to Robert Heber-Percy), he used to curl up to sleep at the end of her bed.

  He loved Betjeman and Elizabeth and prided himself on being one of their intimates, calling – as he realised later – rather more often than they had wished to spend evenings with them at Elizabeth Cavendish’s house in Radnor Walk.

  At first all went well down under. The friendship with Barry Humphries, then living in Melbourne, w
as resumed. Betjeman’s fondness for him and admiration for his comedic gifts increased. Julian Jebb, likewise, idolised Humphries.

  From Sydney, on 29 September, Betjeman wrote to Candida,

  We are all four very happy because Australian wine is so good. So is Australian architecture right through to Moderne and real contemp. I am ravished by it and you will be. The hotels are awful. The one at Bendigo smelt of cats and my pillow smelt of pipe smoke … Julian is our life and soul. Eliz organises us all and supports me when I lose my balance (physically) and Margaret McCall is highly efficient and kind and calm. We all get on very well and drink a lot.

  Though, or because, the deep potations remained a constant feature of the trip, the good humour did not last. Betjeman, like any good public speaker or television performer, lived on his nerves and found it a tremendous strain doing ‘pieces to camera’. It looked effortless when the viewers saw him in the finished films, but often a speech lasting forty seconds on screen would have taken several repetitive hours to shoot, with different ‘takes’. If the speaker remembers his lines, this does not guarantee that the light will be right at just the moment he speaks the words. If words and light are right, this will not stop a distant motor-bike or aeroplane cutting through the sound. These are the habitual trials of the television film-maker and they require much patience on all sides and, on the part of the presenter, huge reserves of goodwill for (usually) very uncongenial colleagues, and enormous stamina.

  Jebb, a frustrated creative person himself, had an unmistakable streak of sadism in his make-up, coupled with a deep envy of the truly creative people he admired. To be a producer in such a situation gives a man absolute power for the duration of the filming. When they got to Tasmania, Margaret McCall allowed Julian to be the producer of the film covering this part of the trip. By now both Betjeman and Elizabeth had come to find their ‘life and soul’ Jebb a bit too much of a good thing. Not to put too fine a point on it, Betjeman had come to hate Jebb. There was a point when Jebb knocked on Betjeman’s bedroom door in Hobart, and it opened. ‘GO AWAY! GO AWAY! GET OUT OF IT!’ shouted Sir John.

  The mood was in any event darker in Hobart, since they were going to film the place where the convicts were imprisoned in the nineteenth century.

  ‘The latent sadism in the human race’, Betjeman wrote home to Mary Wilson.

  Port Arthur is the Belsen and Buchenwald of the 1830s – the English this time, but most unusually, the Irish doing the floggings and tortures. For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke is a melodramatic classic about the prison life here and on Norfolk Island. Tourism has contributed its little offering – where men were flogged to death, and others turned cannibal, you can buy little model prisons as keyrings. It is horrible. We are filming it, and it’s not for me to turn moralist but I hate the place and Tazzie generally.

  Jebb wanted to film in a particularly cramped prison cell where the convicts awaited torture. Betjeman was made to squat down in this cell while the hot lights shone down on his face, and while the various technicians tried, in very difficult circumstances, to make sure that cameras, lights and microphones were in order. It was a terrible little scene, and in such circumstances, most people, even in perfect health, would have wilted after being made to do two or three ‘takes’. Betjeman was tired and drunk. He kept fluffing his lines. Rather than give the thing up as a bad job, or decide to try again the next day, Jebb went on and on and on making the old poet try again to speak ‘to camera’. They did sixteen takes.

  When it was over, Betjeman staggered out of the cell and was helped back to the hotel. Later, assuming that they would be meeting as usual for dinner, Jebb made his way along a hotel corridor, where, elfin and tiny as he was, he encountered the tall and formidable figure of Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, JP. ‘John and I would like you to know something’, she said with terrifying calm. ‘When we all go back to London, we do not want you to call on us. Please do not try to telephone, please do not visit. We do not want to see you EVER AGAIN.’

  14

  THE MISTRESS

  The year 1972 brought two momentous changes. The Betjemans left Wantage, and in effect separated for the rest of their lives. And, in the autumn, Betjeman became Poet Laureate. For some time now, it had become impracticable to keep up the Mead, especially since Penelope herself was away more and more, travelling in India, making films and collecting material for her books. Betjeman had been coming home less and less. Nevertheless, for as long as the old place remained, at least notionally, ‘home’, and for as long as their shared furniture, his books, her riding tackle and Indian artefacts, were under the same roof, they could be said to have been a couple, living, as many do, a semidetached life, but still in some sense a married life. After Betjeman died, Penelope was officially regarded as the widow. It was in this role that she appeared at the grand memorial service in Westminster Abbey – though the Archbishop of Canterbury escorted Elizabeth from the abbey and gave her luncheon, a gesture which enraged Billa Harrod – ‘most unbecoming in the Archbishop entertaining not the widow but the concubine’. Penelope in her no-nonsense way felt that it had been BOGUS – her capitalisation – to be given the seat of honour. When the Principal of Pusey House in Oxford invited her to a Requiem Mass for Betjeman, to hear the homily by their old friend Gerard Irvine, she accepted with alacrity, but said,

  As I am sure you know JB settled with Elizabeth Cavendish for the last ten or twelve years & although I saw him occasionally & we were on good terms, E did not like us meeting & she looked after him thro’out the Parkinson period. Of course I told JB I would divorce him if he wanted to marry E but he IMPLORED me not to. I have got to be in a front pew in W A as I am John’s official widow but I can’t face it at Pusey House as well.

  This letter spells out as clearly and as mercilessly as it could the state of things after 1972. Penelope turned down several good offers for the Mead, preferring to accept the bid of a Tibetan family, believing that they would care more for it. In fact, they sold it quickly and realised a good profit. By then, Betjeman and his wife had effectively gone their different ways. For about a year, Betjeman stayed on at Cloth Fair, spending more and more time with the Lycett Greens. The nocturnal noise of meat lorries trundling to nearby Smithfield Market had always been one of the disadvantages of living in Cloth Fair, and now he had begun to find it intolerable. Parkinson’s in its early stages incapacitated him. The shuffling walk, which he had affected even in youth, was now for real. In 1954, the first time he was the castaway on Desert Island Discs, he chose a medieval stained glass window as his ‘luxury’. In 1975 when he returned to the show, he chose champagne. Alcohol helped deaden some of the consciousness of what was happening to his body, but it did not dissipate the gloom. When Penelope had bought a cottage in the Welsh borders – New House, Cusop, near Hay-on-Wye – she urged him to come and stay and have a health cure.

  We can ave er ealth food week tergether. Oone feels WOONDERFUL but MOOST stick tew it. No entertaining (other than invoitin other health food maniacs) and no going out and boothoney-sweetened lemonade ter drink. You as lapsed again drinking gin and whiskey. Oi am very sad: oi am NOT er pleasure killer oi simply think spirits are deleterious tew yr ealth and so does yer DOC.

  The truth was that as Little Plymmie’s ways became ever more Spartan and primitive, Tewpie, fat and prematurely old and ill, was ever more dependent on creature comforts – warm rooms, comfortable chairs and beds, hot tea and toast. While her idea of fun would be to rough it for three to six months in India, travelling by coracle or on horseback, and eating lentil dhal, Betjeman’s would be to stay at Chatsworth and be brought champagne by the butler.

  My new position such is

  In halls of social fame

  That many a duke and duchess

  I know by Christian name.

  In her cottage, which Betjeman and she nicknamed Kulu-on-Wye or Little Redoubt, Penelope had a downstairs bedroom and toilet installed but although he came a few times, he was
too ill and it was too uncomfortable to regard it as a place to visit on a weekly or monthly basis, still less to call home.

  Perhaps neither of them – not she, with her hopeful provision of an inadequate spare room, nor he, with his repeated assertions by letter and telephone, that he loved her – could quite bear the reality of what had happened. The clash of their egos had been going on for very nearly forty years by this stage, and neither, surely, had ever envisaged that in the end they would not in some sense be together. ‘I miss Penelope’, he wrote to a friend on 13 August 1972, ‘who I feel has gone for ever.’

  None of the three in the triangle could really tolerate the full reality of the situation, even though Penelope made the most articulate stab at doing so. Elizabeth still refused to meet Betjeman’s wife, even though his illness really suggested that some broad strategy should be worked out for the future – how he would be looked after should his condition deteriorate, as it inevitably did. Moreover, whenever Betjeman tried to visit Little Plymmie, or to speak to her on the telephone, he was somehow made to feel ‘guilty’ by Elizabeth. Even for such occasions as family birthdays or Christmas, Elizabeth made him feel that she could not be left alone.

  It is reediculous that she cannot be left halone as she as many friends living near & is very much a person in er own right being the Duke of D’s sister with presumably a proivate hincome? It would be quoite different were she a Mary Berry (that was yer first girlfriend??) a poor parson’s daughter, a nobody in the eyes of the world, without money or influential pals, whereas E as BOTH the latter in abundance. Boot, yew MOOST BE FIRM …

  Of course, asking Betjeman to be firm in this area would have been like asking Penelope to see two sides of a religious question. The digs in this letter are deadly. (Presumably, Mary Berry is the ‘Molly Higgins’ with whom he had an affair at the very beginning of his marriage shortly after moving into Garrard’s Farm, Uffington?)