Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

  Paul had for some years been feeling the burden of his childhood resentments and unhappinesses. They had grown, rather than diminished, during his exile. Whereas Candida had been able to put behind her the storms of adolescence and become a grown-up friend of both her parents, Paul, by being alone in the United States, had possessed no means to purge his demons. A letter, setting out the trouble, seemed the best way of doing so.

  Thirty years after this painful episode, I asked Paul whether he had felt unappreciated; whether he was angry with John and Penelope for being bad parents. His face contorted as he recalled it all. ‘Calling me It. That … I minded so much about that. I could not even articulate it to myself for years. It was not a question of them not appreciating me. It wasn’t a question … he wanted to keep me down.’ He forced his palm against the arm of his chair so forcefully that he might have broken it. ‘Down. That is where he wanted me. Either Elizabeth or a secretary would not let him see my letter. Eventually I got through to him on the telephone. It wasn’t easy – eventually … I was angry with my father but I was chiefly angry with them for not letting him see what I wrote.’

  As Elizabeth had feared, Betjeman was indeed deeply upset by what Paul wrote when she decided to show him his son’s letter. Of course, it was she who had tried to protect Betjeman by initially concealing it. After a faltering conversation on the telephone between father and son, a deep silence descended. In 1974, Penelope went over to New York to give a lecture and reported, ‘I spent most of the day with the P. yesterday and it was much nicer. I went to lunch in its flat – a GREAT improvement on the basement one it lived in in 1969 when I was last here. NO SNAKES…’ By now Paul Betjeman was teaching at the prestigious Riverdale School, and would go on to become the head of the Music Department, and to teach philosophy there. Betjeman when he remembered it at all, referred to the school as Riverside. Penelope had at least made the effort to see ‘the Powlie’, and wrote that tomorrow she would be ‘spending the day with it (Riverdale is in recess for spring vacation) & we are going to the Natural History Museum’. Later that year, she wrote from her Hay-on-Wye fastness, ‘IT IS WONDERFUL NOT BEING ON THE TELEPHONE. NOT A WORD from the P. whom we must now call PAUL. Wibz said she was going to write and invite him over for Christmas.’ He did not come. On 26 November that year, Penelope wrote to Betjeman from Vijayanagar, India, dating her letter ‘Powlie’s birthday’.

  In 1977, however, Paul brought to England his American girlfriend Linda Shelton, a young woman with a passionate interest in Anglican church music. She got on well with Betjeman, and to Candida at least it appeared that a reconciliation had taken place. (Paul denies this, and says he has never really been reconciled to his father.) A few letters were at least exchanged, and a truce of a kind had been established. In May 1979, Penelope and Betjeman received a telegram: ‘Linda and I are getting married on Saturday May 19th at the Advent Lutheran Church on 93rd Street and Broadway, New York. Please be there in spirit although we do not expect you there in body. Paul and Linda.’ The word ‘love’ is surely very conspicuously absent from this telegram, and Candida does not tell us whether this telegram was really sent to both parents, or merely to Penelope. Paul and Linda are the parents of three children, Thomas, Timothy and Lily. Linda is the director of the choir, and the organist, at St Peter’s Episcopal Church, Pearsekill, in a suburb outside New York. Whether Paul and his father have been reconciled is a matter for them, not us, to decide, but a long journey had been traversed since Paul left England and joined the Mormons. In the Anglican worship which has been so large a part of his family life, there has surely been an element of homecoming.

  When I met Lily Betjeman in 2003, she described to me how she and her parents, both musicians, passed their time. She said that on Sundays, they all bundled into a Morris Traveller, and drove into New York. (They live some thirty miles out of town.) They then sang the service in one church after another, starting at the bottom of Manhattan and working their way northwards. I told her that in Oxford, in her grandfather’s day, there had been a clergyman who was almost in the position of a medieval Mass-priest. Having a good voice, he was employed to sing the Prayer Book office of Morning Prayer in two of the colleges before bicycling off to do so in one of the parish churches in the town. His nickname was the Matins Machine. Lily, a golden-haired beauty of a sort which would inspire anyone to want to write a poem, replied, ‘I guess you could say I’m a Matins Machine.’ Paul smilingly said to me, a couple of years later, that Lily had been exaggerating.

  In 1963, Betjeman had written to T.S. Eliot,

  I have been staying at St Michael’s College, Tenbury Worc[estershire]. I can’t recommend it too highly for a visit. There it is founded in 1853 by Sir Frederick Gore-Ouseley in Gothic buildings, also 1853 by H[enry] Woodyer under the Clee Hills and a daily matins and Evensong and anthem from a large choir of resident boys and men – an amazing and unknown C of E outpost.

  Not now. St Michael’s is still a school, but under different management, and the choir is no more. That tradition was carried on by Lily Betjeman and her parents in Manhattan.

  There in the nimbus and Comper tracery

  Gold Myfanwy blesses us all.

  As Betjeman faded, his life was focused on places to which the chair could be wheeled. The Grosvenor Chapel, as was stated in the first chapter, was given up in favour of Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, the Arts and Crafts (J.D. Sedding) church which had inspired one of his earliest poems. In times of liturgical innovation, this church still used the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer which was liked by Betjeman, Elizabeth and by Princess Margaret who often accompanied them.

  Penelope now felt excluded. Guilt made it impossible for Elizabeth to see her. She told James Lees-Milne that ‘once, when Penelope had been to John’s house, she, Feeble, from an upstairs window watched her walk away, looking so sad and weary that her heart bled’.

  Penelope complained, ‘Plymmie would like to be friends with her so that the feeling of your life being divided into two completely separate compartments would disappear. I would obviously never try to take you away from her which would be impossible anyway.’

  So it was that the burden of nursing Betjeman in his latter years fell upon Elizabeth. She had experience with nursing, and engaging professional help, since while Betjeman declined, her long-lived mother Moucher had also entered a phase of painful dementia which required round-the-clock attention. When they went to Moor View or to Chatsworth, Phyllis Foran, a nurse from Mexborough in Yorkshire, was engaged to be on hand. ‘I had great affection for Sir John, he was always so kind and grateful whatever you did, however small his request. We had many a laugh as we talked to Archie.’ In April 1981, he suffered a stroke while staying in Moor View, and was taken to the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield. While he was here, Candida had the delicate task of organising the visits of Elizabeth and Penelope so that they did not coincide.

  I knew he was worried about Elizabeth and I promised that I would always see she was all right and love her. I asked him why he hadn’t married her. I never got an answer. I knew that my mother, with great magnanimity had offered him a divorce soon after my marriage to Rupert. I knew also that he was desperate to avoid hurting my mother, because he loved her so much. He told me that he loved Elizabeth too. I remember thinking angrily at that point, that he was an archetypical ostrich, and that he should be married to Elizabeth. But despite my anger I understood that for him, with his particular penchant for guilt, the situation was as insoluble as it had always been.

  ‘People kept expecting him to do the right thing, but maybe he did do the right thing – and maybe the right thing was not to make a decision’, said Deborah Devonshire, Elizabeth’s sister-in-law.

  The year 1983 was spent largely sitting, often staring with his large, moist, despondent eyes into the middle distance. The letters, which were a curse to him even in his active days, continued to shower upon the mat of 29 Radnor Walk, and his secretary Elizabeth Moore attended m
ost mornings to take his dictation of the ever-shorter replies to television-viewers, aspirant poets, conservation groups, clergymen. In September 1983 he had a heart attack and on 16 October another stroke from which he never really recovered.

  All his life he had worried about money and believed himself to be poor, while being unable to contemplate doing anything so prosaic as a job. By the standards of today’s best-selling authors, he was not rich. There is surely a sort of parable lurking in the fact that he left about the same sum of money in his will as Philip Larkin who was obsessed by what he called ‘the toad work’ and the need for poets to provide security for themselves by doing paid jobs – he as the very highly esteemed librarian of the Bryn Mawr Library in Hull. Larkin, who died a year after Betjeman in 1985, left £286,360. Betjeman was to leave £200,775, the equivalent in 2002, using the average earnings index, of £557,850.74.

  In May 1984, he made the last journey to Trebetherick. Penelope wrote to him:

  I wish you wouldn’t worry about me … I am very happy and have had a very full and happy life and am now indulging myself by going to India again and am very relieved to know that you will be well looked after by Elizabeth … Please relax in Cornwall and don’t fuss about anything and don’t drink any WHISKY.

  Candida went down to Treen and read him the whole of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. It had been arranged that an ambulance would drive him back to London on 18 May. ‘He must have heard it being arranged’, Candida wrote. ‘I know that at that point he decided he wanted to die at Treen.’

  ‘His fear of death seemed to go’, Elizabeth told their friend Father Gaskell. ‘I had always dreaded that most for him for so many of his poems are so full of fear of it. But he was completely serene and at peace.’ To Betjeman’s old friend Billa Harrod, she wrote:

  I truly think that those last months he was more serene & at peace than I have ever known him. No one will ever know how wonderful the 2 nurses Carole and Vicky were to him & it was so lucky that they were both down in Cornwall & he died on the most beautiful sunny morning with the sun streaming into the room & the french windows open & the lovely smell of the garden everywhere & Carole was holding one of his hands & me the other & he had old Archy & Jumbo in each arm & Stanley the cat asleep on his tummy & he was conscious right up to the last moment. We none of us moved for nearly an hour afterwards & the sense of total peace was something I shall never forget. Then the nice Vicar came & said some beautiful prayers & wouldn’t even let me move Stanley the cat & for him, John, I have no doubt that his time had come to leave this world.

  Carole read him all his Cornish poems on the previous afternoon which was too much for me but I read him all his favourite bits of Tennyson & Hardy & Matthew Arnold etc for at least an hour and a half in the evening – & he went to sleep quite content & then I went down in the night because his breathing was so bad & the doctor came & gave him an injection & he slept intermittently & finally died about 8 in the morning.

  Betjeman wrestled all his life with melancholia, and self-doubt and fear. But he was also an incredibly lucky person, who with the manipulative skills of the only child, usually ended up getting precisely what he wanted in any given situation. There was a perfection in his dying where he had spent so many childhood hours of happiness.

  The funeral took place at St Enodoc’s, a short stroll across the golf course from Treen, on 22 May 1984, a day of driving wind and rain. Betjeman’s two children, Candida and Paul, with their mother, followed the coffin and the drenched mourners into the dark little church which was not particularly full, the congregation being limited to family and close friends. It was so dark that the lady verger held up a torch, rather in the manner of an usherette at a cinema, to help them read from their hymn books. In 1975 he had written to Roy Plomley that he would like Isaac Watts’s hymn, ‘There is a Land of Pure Delight’, not only on the Desert Island, but ‘to be sung at my funeral’. In the event, they sang ‘The Church’s One Foundation’ and ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind / Forgive Our Foolish Ways’. The coffin was buried just to the east of the lych gate. Elizabeth and her sister, Anne Tree, entertained one lot of mourners at Treen, where a fire was burning in the grate and toasted sandwiches and whisky were offered. The others went to a neighbouring house for luncheon with Penelope. James Lees-Milne remarked on ‘the poignancy of sitting on John’s little deathbed with Archie, teddy-bear, and Jumbo propped against the pillow. Anyway I have paid my respects to the best man who ever lived and the most lovable.’

  Andrew Devonshire used to remark that Betjeman never talked about himself. There is a certain paradox here, since few men have had such success in projecting their personality into public consciousness. But it is a true observation of his behaviour in private, and it brings to life some of the mystery of a poet’s life which will never be winkled out by biographers. Those who knew him remembered, as Deborah Devonshire did, ‘the blinding charm. The blinding charm. The melancholy was there but he always hid it in company. You only saw it when he was walking away. The slouched shoulders. The crumpled old hat. The mac.’

  * * *

  Penelope Betjeman also had a death which seemed as if it had been scripted by a screenwriter who knew her character very well indeed. In 1985, after a return from one of her Indian trips, she decided to sell her house above Hay-on-Wye and give the money to Paul. She would go and live in a convent at Llandrindod Wells which had guest rooms. There was also a gabled Victorian hotel in the town for guests who did not want to enjoy the possibly austere hospitality of her new dwelling.

  In fact, the house was difficult to sell and it was still unsold when she set off to the Himalayas in April 1986 in quest of temples. On her way to London, she met a friend in the train and remarked, ‘I think I might never come back from this trip. The funny thing is, if I died on the mountains, I know that everyone will say what a wonderful death I have had. They’ll say, what a wonderful way to go, it is just as she would have liked! But I don’t want to die now at all, I’ve so much to do.’

  She and a tour party, whom she was to lead round the temples of the Himalayas, assembled at Simla. There were fourteen of them in all, who set out the next day in a rackety old bus up the Hindustan/Tibet road to Narkanda. They camped in the mountains and Penelope gave them all a talk on the Hindu religion and the meaning of Hindu temples. For four days, they trekked on ponies higher and higher, eating simple, largely vegetarian food, sleeping in scorpion-infested rest-houses, washing in cold water. On 11 April, Penelope rose even earlier than usual when one of the tourists, Ronnie Watson, came upon her at 5.30 a.m.

  ‘You’re up terribly early’, he said.

  Somewhat distracted apparently, Penelope replied, ‘I know, I feel as though I might be on my way to Heaven.’

  The party began to climb after breakfast, their aim being to reach the remote village of Mutisher, 9,500 feet up. Penelope rode on ahead, and the others were to join her when they reached the village and be shown the temple. The temple pujari rushed out to meet her and bless her. He performed the service of puja in her honour and rang the temple bells. Penelope dismounted from her pony and climbed three high steps towards the temple. She sat down, closed her eyes with her head against the stone wall, and died.

  There was wailing, and panic. The doctor in the party tried, without success to resuscitate her. Storm damage had destroyed all wires, and communication with the outside world at that juncture was impossible. They carried the body to the mountain village of Khang. There the group came to the decision to cremate her. Using Penelope’s Bible, they improvised a Christian form of service within a Hindu cremation ceremony. They sang the psalm which begins ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills’, and Paddy Singh, who had been educated by Jesuits, remembered the words of the Hail Mary: Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

  The trekkers made their way back down the hillside to their rest-house before the fire had burned itself out. It was for the villagers, Hindus and Buddhists, to sit in vigil aro
und the flames and to gather her ashes which, some days later, were mingled with flower-petals and scattered into the raging Beas River at the bottom of the Kulu Valley.

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  INDEX

  Notes

  CHAPTER ONE

  BEGINNINGS

  Radnor Walk, a small street … Princess Margaret to author, 1980

  I hang on to faith … Betjeman Papers (hereafter BP), now in the Tom Brown Museum, Uffington, JB to a Mr Bramall, 26 October 1970

  I did not like all the probing and prying … Candida Lycett Green (ed.), John Betjeman, Letters, Volume One: 1926 to 1951 and Letters, Volume Two: 1951–1984 published by Methuen in 1994 and 1995 respectively (hereafter CLG I and CLG II), CLG II, p. 441

  Excellent thing, excellent thing … Jonathan Cecil to author, 2005

  He once threatened a younger journalist … Auberon Waugh

  He’s a lovely man, isn’t he … Victor Stock, Taking Stock: Confessions of a City Priest, HarperCollins, 2001, p. 140

  Unmitigated England … All quotations from the verse are taken, unless otherwise stated, from John Betjeman, Collected Poems, John Murray, reprinted 2001

  A journalist called John Ezard … CLG II, p. 582

  Elizabeth Cavendish … Conversation with author, 27 October 2005

  You’ve always had guilt … BP, Wilhelmine Harrod to JB, 2 March 1982

  I have just re-read Goldsmith’s … CLG II, p. 541

  Where wealth accumulates … Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village

  In every age, there are people … Arthur Machen, The Secret Glory, p. vi

  The Betjemanns were cabinet-makers … Unless otherwise stated, all biographical details are taken from CLG I and CLG II.