Six Poets (10 page)

1906–1984

John Betjeman was born in North London, the only child of affluent parents. He was educated at Marlborough and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where his friends included Auden and MacNeice. He left without taking a degree. At twenty-five, he began writing for the
Architectural Review
and, throughout his life, held passionate views about architecture. Other freelance work included the Shell Guides on Cornwall and Devon and film criticism for the London
Evening Standard
(he later described himself in
Who's Who
as ‘a poet and a hack'). His first collection of verse,
Mount Zion
, appeared in 1931, followed by collections including
New Bats in Old Belfries, A Few Late Chrysanthemums, A Nip in the Air, High and Low
and his blank-verse autobiography
Summoned by Bells
. His
Collected Poems
were published in 1958, the first edition selling over 100,000 copies. He was knighted in 1969 and appointed Poet Laureate in 1972. He died in Cornwall in 1984.

It's awf'lly bad luck on Diana,

Her ponies have swallowed their bits;

She fished down their throats with a spanner

And frightened them all into fits.

So now she's attempting to borrow.

Do
lend her some bits, Mummy,
do
;

I'll lend her my own for to-morrow,

But to-day
I
'll be wanting them too.

Just look at Prunella on Guzzle,

The wizardest pony on earth;

Why doesn't she slacken his muzzle

And tighten the breech in his girth?

I say, Mummy, there's Mrs Geyser

And doesn't she look pretty sick?

I bet it's because Mona Lisa

Was hit on the hock with a brick.

Miss Blewitt says Monica threw it,

But Monica says it was Joan,

And Joan's very thick with Miss Blewitt,

So Monica's sulking alone.

And Margaret failed in her paces,

Her withers got tied in a noose,

So her coronets caught in the traces

And now all her fetlocks are loose.

Oh, it's me now. I'm terribly nervous.

I wonder if Smudges will shy.

She's practically certain to swerve as

Her Pelham is over one eye.

Oh wasn't it naughty of Smudges?

Oh, Mummy, I'm sick with disgust.

She threw me in front of the Judges,

And my silly old collarbone's bust.

Writers like to elude their public, lead them a bit of a dance. They take them down untrodden paths, land them in unknown country where they have to ask for directions. Most of the poets in the thirties did that, but not Betjeman. He's always accessible. And, of course, it's a bit of a shock to find that he
is
a thirties poet, just a few months older than Auden, who to his credit was always one of Betjeman's champions. Not that he needed much championing, at any rate in the second part of his life. His verse has an immediate appeal, and as a result he's probably the best-known and the most successful English poet this last century.

It could be said that this was because of television, on which Betjeman was a frequent and indeed an eager performer – but not entirely. Larkin had no truck with television, and when he died the regret and affection for him matched that for Betjeman. Both of them were, of course, very English and wrote straightforward poetry that didn't need much exposition. But it's also the case that poetry, though we don't learn it by heart nowadays and though there is no poetic equivalent of the Booker Prize, still has magic, and seems magical. If their verse chimes in with common experience, poets can still capture the nation's imagination – as, quite apart from his showmanship, Betjeman did.

Much of his verse is backward-looking. As Auden and his friends turned to the proletariat and the future, Betjeman looked back to Victorian and Edwardian models (as, in a
different way, did Evelyn Waugh). But why not? Poets don't have to be prophets. The following poem is one of Betjeman's earliest, written in 1930.

She died in the upstairs bedroom

By the light of the ev'ning star

That shone through the plate glass window

From over Leamington Spa.

Beside her the lonely crochet

Lay patiently and unstirred,

But the fingers that would have work'd it

Were dead as the spoken word.

And Nurse came in with the tea-things

Breast high 'mid stands and chairs –

But Nurse was alone with her own little soul,

And the things were alone with theirs.

She bolted the big round window,

She let the blinds unroll,

She set a match to the mantle,

She covered the fire with coal.

And ‘Tea!' she said in a tiny voice

‘Wake up! It's nearly
five
.'

Oh! Chintzy, chintzy cheeriness,

Half dead and half alive!

Do you know that the stucco is peeling?

Do you know that the heart will stop?

From those yellow Italianate arches

Do you hear the plaster drop?

Nurse looked at the silent bedstead,

At the grey, decaying face,

As the calm of the Leamington ev'ning

Drifted into the place.

She moved the table of bottles

Away from the bed to the wall;

And tiptoeing gently over the stairs

Turned down the gas in the hall.

Betjeman was born in London at the foot of one of the hills that leads up to Highgate. The charm of this area (which nowadays can be elusive) stayed with him all his life, and his poetry owes as much to childhood as does Wordsworth's. London as it was; England as it was. Anyone fond of architecture in this century has had to watch so much of it destroyed that they condemn themselves to a life of distress and regret, and it is this behind most of Betjeman's poems that gives them a persistent melancholy and sense of loss.

The following poem is about Lissenden Mansions, a block of Edwardian flats opposite Parliament Hill Mansions where Betjeman was born.

Red cliffs arise. And up them service lifts

Soar with the groceries to silver heights.

Lissenden Mansions. And my memory sifts

Lilies from lily-like electric lights

And Irish stew smells from the smell of prams

And roar of seas from roar of London trams.

Out of it all my memory carves the quiet

Of that dark privet hedge where pleasures breed,

There first, intent upon its leafy diet,

I watched the looping caterpillar feed

And saw it hanging in a gummy froth

Till, weeks on, from the chrysallis burst the moth.

I see black oak twigs outlined on the sky,

Red squirrels on the Burdett-Coutts estate.

I ask my nurse the question ‘Will I die?'

As bells from sad St Anne's ring out so late,

‘And if I do die, will I go to Heaven?'

Highgate at eventide. Nineteen-eleven.

‘You will. I won't.' From that cheap nursery-maid,

Sadist and puritan as now I see,

I first learned what it was to be afraid,