Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

  Ingrams got Betjeman to write the ‘Piloti’ column in Private Eye, exposing some of the more monstrous acts of architectural vandalism and the chicaneries of planners and civil servants. Betjeman soon handed this column on to his young friend and admirer Gavin Stamp, a fine architectural historian.

  To this last decade of Betjeman’s life, however, belong some of his best television work, and, even more remarkably, the setting of his poems to music by Jim Parker.

  When asked at the beginning of 1975 to take part in a television programme with David Dimbleby called Face Your Image, Betjeman declined, saying, ‘This is the sort of publicity I would rather avoid as I suffer from persecution mania. That is because my character is weak, pleasure-loving and grovelling and that would come out only too plainly in the course of an interview.’ At about the same time, in that exceptionally cold, dank, misty early spring of 1975, Betjeman’s old mentor, and first confessor, Freddy Hood began to sink towards death. Betjeman came to Hood’s flat in Dolphin Square to make an emotional farewell. Hood, though at death’s door, asked him to stay to luncheon. While Hood slumped in a chair and gazed weakly at the Thames through his window, Betjeman was accompanied down to the restaurant in Dolphin Square by one of Freddy Hood’s closest friends, Canon John Lucas, vicar of St Thomas’s, Becket Street, Oxford. As they entered the modernistic restaurant, the Poet Laureate said, ‘Oh dear, is this what Purgatory is going to be like?’ Saying goodbye to Freddy awoke in Betjeman the sense that he had not fulfilled the promise of what he might have been. His conversation returned to Pusey House in the 1920s and the very high standards, moral, aesthetic and professional, which Freddy had himself, and which he held up to his friends. ‘And now, Canon,’ said Betjeman sadly, looking into the middle distance with an expression of despondency, ‘I’m just a Pop poet.’

  Betjeman explained that he was in the middle of recording with Jim Parker. If he felt at that moment that he was ‘just’ a Pop poet, his self-reproach (partly affected?) could not have been more misplaced. For these records, made between 1974 and 1981, are among the very best things he ever did. If my harsh judgement is correct, and many of Betjeman’s poems on the page need, to use tailor’s jargon, a few more fittings, then Parker is the master tailor or Magger Tagger. Born in Hartlepool in 1934, Parker left school at sixteen, and after a spell in an accountant’s office, joined the army and played in the band of the Dragoon Guards. Later he got a grant to study at the Guildhall School of Music, and joined the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra as an oboist. When he settled in London, he joined up with the Barrow poets, a group who read poems aloud, sometimes Betjeman’s, and played background music to them. It is what the Germans call Sprechgesang, or spoken song. It was Parker’s genius to get Betjeman himself to record his own poems, to richly varied background settings of Parker’s composition.

  The recordings were made in a studio in Willesden. In the Middle Ages, there was a shrine of Our Lady at Willesden to which pilgrimages were made. The modern Roman Catholic church at the end of Willesden High Road contains a shrine of sorts, but naturally Betjeman was not interested in that. Betjeman wanted to ask the vicar of Willesden to tell Parker about the appearance in the Middle Ages of the Black Madonna. Parker remembered Betjeman’s indifference to the pouring rain as he ‘ploughed on through the graveyard’. The rhythms of Betjeman’s voice perfectly match the music of Parker, and vice versa. Many of the poems which are either too weird to be much appreciated in a silent reading – such as ‘A Shropshire Lad’, the one about the ghost of Captain Webb swimming along the old canal which carried the bricks to Lawley – or too slight – ‘The Flight from Bootle’ – come to life in a miraculous way when read aloud by Betjeman to Parker’s accompaniment. The great poems, such as ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde’, the ‘Death of King George V’, ‘Youth and Age on Beaulieu River, Hants’ and the ‘Subaltern’s Love-song’ are likewise enhanced to a positively sublime degree. No one confronted by medieval English lyrics, or the songs of Burns, can really appreciate them by simply sitting silently with the book open on the knee. They need to realise that these poems are songs. Parker has done much more than create a musical diversion around some spoken songs. He has brought out the inherent quality of lyrics which are, so many of them, the missing link between the songs of the music hall and Hymns Ancient and Modern. No one who has heard Parker’s records can ever forget them. For ever afterwards, when you read Betjeman’s lyrics on the page, the music starts.

  The first few years at Radnor Walk were also the period when Betjeman made some of his finest television programmes. The most archetypical, and therefore the most celebrated, was Metroland, first screened on 23 February 1973 and directed by Edward Mirzeoff. Betjeman followed the line from Baker Street up to Amersham. If it is true that in death all the scenes of a past life flash before you, then this television-poem by Betjeman – it is too good to be described as simply a ‘programme’ – took him back through the suburban outskirts of London he had known and loved and love-hated since boyhood. He passes through St John’s Wood, ‘Sweet secret suburb on the City’s rim’, referring to its Victorian kept women, but no doubt also remembering the Woads. Out through Wembley, then to Harrow, where he had been at school in all but fact, and so on to Pinner, and Rickmansworth and beyond. ‘The Croxley Green revels – a tradition that stretches back to 1952’, a line which when first spoken, only twenty-one years after the tradition began, reduced Betjeman and the film crew to hysterics.

  But though Metroland is perhaps his television masterpiece it is by no means the only great telly-poem he made during this last phase before his powers faded. A Passion for Churches was filmed largely in Norfolk. This enabled him to stay with his old friend Billa Harrod.

  As a friend of both Betjemans, and as his ex-fiancée, Billa felt able, while he was staying, to speak out on the subject of Penelope. She felt Penelope was getting a raw deal, and that Betjeman was neglecting her in favour of Elizabeth. Billa was not a stranger herself to the complexities of the emotional life. For much of her marriage to Roy Harrod, she had been in love with another Oxford don, but as she said, ‘You have affairs, and that is one thing. But you keep your marriage TOGETHER. You don’t divorce or separate.’

  Betjeman replied to her,

  Your kindest action to me in our long and loving friendship was to speak to me so kindly and clearly of Penelope. I love her. But I cannot live with her for long without quarrelling. I sensed her anguish when we went to the cinema last night with Emily [Villiers-Stuart]. I cannot bear to hurt her. She kissed me on the cheek when she got out of the taxi last night and I went back to Radnor Walk.

  You said being loved is a great burden. I have lived so long apart from Penelope, that Elizabeth now loves me more than anyone else in the world. I cannot hurt her either, any more than I can Penelope. I depend on Elizabeth for food for my body and mind. She is v much part of me too.

  Both P and E feel threatened. Fear steps in and with it hatred and anger. It is difficult. I think Penelope would be wounded if we separated, though she says it is what she wants to do. I don’t want to, but may have to if she precipitates it in rage at E and all the Cavendishes. I can understand her rage and misery. She won’t believe how much I love her. I think she needs to be given her rights and dignity. She is okay at Kulu-on-Wye and insecure in London within the enemy’s camp. I must buy, if it ruins me, a camp for her in London where she can entertain her friends with me.

  In this awful storm of misery, the one thing I cling to is my love for Penelope and for Elizabeth who has given up marriage and a family life with her own children, out of love for me.

  I think, but am not sure, that P is more defenceless than E, and must therefore be propped up by a London base as well as Kulu-on-Wye. Radnor Walk would never do. It is too near the enemy, though P has tried to be friendly with E.

  So still the problem raged on against the background of all his friendships, all his television appearances, all his communions and confessions, all his long pe
riods of gloom. The fans who saw A Passion for Churches saw only their hero, approaching his seventieth birthday, and on the top of his form, not only as a performer, but as a man who was able to use television as a medium in which to tell the truth. There must be many for whom, as it was for me, A Passion for Churches was a formative experience.

  The film, transmitted on 7 December 1974, is tremendously powerful. One of the best scenes is when Betjeman’s voice-over says:

  Every Anglican priest promises to say

  Morning and Evening Prayer daily.

  The Vicar of Flordon

  Has rung the bell for Matins

  Each day for the past eleven years.

  The camera then comes back so that we can see the vicar reading the office to a completely empty church.

  It doesn’t matter that there’s no one here

  It doesn’t matter when they do not come

  The villagers know the parson is praying for them in their church.

  The programme ends with a montage of people going to church on Easter Day and ends –

  And though for church we may not seem to care

  It’s deeply part of us. Thank God it’s there.

  Betjeman understood, far more deeply than most of the bishops and synods and focus groups of the modern Church, what the C. of E. was, and why it was still central to the people of England. This programme was a reminder of the fact that Betjeman was much more than a poseur and a performer. ‘Weak, pleasure-loving and grovelling’ as he might in his worst ‘persecution mania’ have seen himself, he was also the best apologist for Anglicanism of his generation, far more persuasive, because far more modest, far less bossy, than his old tutor C.S. Lewis. If those two are the most finished and brilliant of all his TV programmes, I would not want to forget, either, the one, produced by Patrick Garland in 1976, about Parson Kilvert, in which Betjeman did very little except visit the Victorian curate’s parish of Clyro, near Hay-on-Wye, and read from his diaries. In his love of children, in his fondness for rural life, in his delight in human eccentricities and in his susceptibility to form the most painful crushes on girls in the parish, Kilvert was an obviously sympathetic figure for Betjeman. He stayed with the film crew at the Three Cocks, the excellent local pub. The proximity of Penelope at Cusop meant that Tewpie could see Little Plymmie and avoid both the excruciating discomfort of his wife’s domestic arrangements, and the jealousy of his mistress. That year, Plymmie said, ‘For moi birthday oi would VERY mooch loike the COMPLETE EDITION OF KILVERT. BOOT oi believe it naow costs £20??? So if it does perhaps you could share the cost with Candida???’ ‘P.S. Oi read er poem of yewrs nearly hevery noight.’

  15

  LOVE IS EVERYTHING

  The last years were ones of illness and pathos. The melancholia got worse, so did the persecution mania, as Parkinson’s disease made its inexorable and debilitating progress. He had spent the Christmas of 1972, after becoming Poet Laureate, at the Wiltshire farmhouse of Tory and John Oaksey with Penelope, Rupert, Candida and the grandchildren. Through all the hilarity, it was obvious that he was much sicker than he had ever been, and Penelope wrote to Elizabeth Cavendish, suggesting that they should share the task of looking after him.

  I am writing to you to see if we cannot work something out for John whereby we take it in turns to look after him? He was in a really bad state at Christmas, worse than I have ever known him and really pathetic with his loss of balance, etc … I spoke to Jackie [his secretary] who for the first time opened her heart to me. I have naturally avoided discussing John’s condition before and she said she had to give in her notice as she could not take it any longer … I expect you are having an equally trying time? I never thought it would really help his condition to become the Poet Laureate: twenty years ago, yes, had Masefield died sooner, but now he has reached the age of retirement it means that he can NEVER retire and relax completely, but must always have this yoke around his neck. And the correspondence it has involved him in has been enough to finish off anybody. I fear it is going to take at least a year to get the new wing built on to this tiny cottage. I am having a sound-proof bedroom built for him with a writing table in it so that he won’t rave about the occasional cars which go by! But until that is ready I do not suppose he will come down much, as with his loss of balance trouble he finds the stairs very difficult to negotiate. But I can always come up to London now he has got the ground floor of number 43 and look after him there …

  In fact, he was about to move into Radnor Walk, to become Elizabeth’s neighbour and dependant. Unable to see much of Penelope, he now loved her more and more, and he thought of his days of early married life with her in Uffington, the times, he said, when he had known most happiness. ‘Oi often wish oi was back in those days when Gerald [Berners] was alive. Oi miss yew and those days. Achievement is nothing. Love is everything. Oi daownt give yew enough boot oi dew often think about yew with deep love.’ Since he spent more and more time in Elizabeth’s house, he offered the keys of Number 29 to three trusted friends, Harry Williams and Philip Larkin with his girlfriend Monica Jones, so that they had somewhere to stay in London whenever they wished.

  As Penelope recognised, Elizabeth’s life was not easy. ‘John was very difficult to live with because of his guilt over Penelope about which he would never stop talking.’

  Sex talk, too, formed a larger part of the repertoire as his powers failed. It was even more difficult than it had been in the days of Betjeman’s vigour to know whether he meant, or ‘meant’, any of his professions of lust, whether hetero- or homosexual. Immobility made him a sitting target for any who wanted to call at Radnor Walk, and many of these were homosexuals. Had they been of a different persuasion, it is just as likely that the performance would have been adapted. When Richard Ingrams called on him to discuss John Piper about whom he was writing a book, the telephone rang. It was Betjeman’s (female) agent. ‘What are you wearing?’ the Poet Laureate asked breathily into the telephone. ‘Does it fit tightly?’ ‘Why did he say this?’ Ingrams later asked. ‘To show he was one of the lads? I felt rather embarrassed.’

  Life was now punctuated by hospital visits. ‘I have been in King’s College Hospital, not at all nice. Go anywhere but there. The night staff is a mixture of IRA and emissaries of General Amin’, he told John Sparrow. Some months later, in March 1978, he had a heart attack and was treated at the Brompton Hospital in Fulham Road. Candida, holding his soft hands, realised he had never done a day’s manual work in his life.

  In 1981 and 1982, Betjeman consented to make a series of no less than seven television programmes with the Old Harrovian producer Jonathan Stedall. By now, Betjeman was wheelchair bound, slightly impaired in speech and very much the worse for wear. Old friends and family gallantly came forward to be filmed with him. The Pipers wheeled him into the church at Harefield to see the magnificent tomb of the Countess of Derby, whose ‘flaming ropes of hair’ falling over her shoulders foreshadow the girl in the Licorice Fields at Pontefract. Kingsley Amis and Barry Humphries tiptoed into the sitting-room of Radnor Walk, which was slightly too small to be filmed comfortably. And Stedall took him back to some of his favourite haunts, including Oxford and Cornwall, keeping up a seemingly unstoppable flow of questions.

  Stedall: Do you have any regrets, John?

  Betj: Yes I haven’t had enough sex.

  At the very end of it all, down at Trebetherick, Betjeman is asked to talk of his faith, and says, ‘I hope “The Management” is benign and in charge of us. I do very much hope that.’

  Stedall: Hope rather than believe?

  Betj: Yes, certainly hope. Hope’s my chief virtue.

  Then he stares out across the garden, and murmurs, ‘Lovely, here.’

  Stedall: Finished?

  Betjeman: Yes.

  Jonathan Stedall has now said that he regrets not having made this film a couple of years earlier when Betjeman was less pathetically weak. Certainly, for some viewers, there was something very uncomfortable about watchin
g a consummate performer paraded when he was not – as he so triumphantly is in the best films – in full control. But, of course, the reason that the television programme organisers wanted to devote so much airtime to this in many ways sad series was the simple one of Betjeman’s huge popularity. The programmes will at least have prepared the fans for the knowledge that he had entered the valley of the shadow. His repeated theme, while he could still speak, and when he talked to priests, or old intimates, was guilt – guilt about Penelope and guilt about his son. Shortly after he moved into Radnor Walk, a letter arrived from Paul in America. At this stage of Betjeman’s life, the correspondence had become overwhelming, and the letters were dealt with by Elizabeth Cavendish and a secretary. When Elizabeth opened this letter from Paul, she felt it was too distressing for Betjeman to read, and she put it on one side.