Six Poets

by Alan Bennett

  N.W.5 and N.6

  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,

  Forcibly fed when sprawled across her knee

  Lock’d into cupboards, left alone all day,

  ‘World without end.’ What fearsome words to pray.

  ‘World without end.’ It was not what she’d do

  That frightened me so much as did her fear

  And guilt at endlessness. I caught them too,

  Hating to think of sphere succeeding sphere

  Into eternity and God’s dread will.

  I caught her terror then. I have it still.

  Betjeman remembered the cruelties and rebuffs of his childhood all too vividly for the rest of his life: that harsh nursemaid, a cruel master at his prep school, the tortures of his first terms at Marlborough. And there were other unbearable memories. In a Christmas Day broadcast in 1947 he recalled how his nanny Hannah Wallis, a simple and loving soul, had bought him a toy for a present, a toy which he wanted and for which she’d had to save up. In the excitement of unpacking his stocking he trod on the toy and broke it.

  He didn’t let on, hiding the debris in his room and saying nothing to her lest he should hurt her feelings. Later, after Hannah had tidied his room he found the broken pieces in the waste-paper basket. Neither of them ever mentioned it. It’s a good job childhood is at the beginning of our lives. We’d never survive it if it were in the middle.

  Now a poem about the Metropolitan Railway. One of Betjeman’s first poems for his school magazine was about the Metropolitan Railway. It began: ‘When travelling to Timbuctoo / Don’t set out on the Bakerloo.’ After Marlborough, Betjeman went to Oxford, which he left without taking a degree, and eventually landed up on the staff of the Architectural Review – the ‘Archy Rev’ as he called it. Because he was one of the first champions of Victorian architecture (as well as of the railway), Betjeman is affectionately regarded as backward-looking, a fuddy-duddy. In fact, he was a visionary, detecting quality in the architecture of all periods, including that most remote of all periods, the recent past.

  The Metropolitan Railway

  (Baker Street station buffet)

  Early Electric! With what radiant hope

  Men formed this many-branched electrolier,

  Twisted the flex around the iron rope

  And let the dazzling vacuum globes hang clear,

  And then with hearts the rich contrivance fill’d

  Of copper, beaten by the Bromsgrove Guild.

  Early Electric! Sit you down and see,

  ’Mid this fine woodwork and a smell of dinner,

  A stained-glass windmill and a pot of tea,

  And sepia views of leafy lanes in PINNER,

  Then visualize, far down the shining lines,

  Your parents’ homestead set in murmuring pines.

  Smoothly from HARROW, passing PRESTON ROAD,

  They saw the last green fields and misty sky,

  At NEASDEN watched a workmen’s train unload,

  And, with the morning villas sliding by,

  They felt so sure on their electric trip

  That Youth and Progress were in partnership.

  And all that day in murky London Wall

  The thought of RUISLIP kept him warm inside;

  At FARRINGDON that lunch hour at a stall

  He brought a dozen plants of London Pride;

  While she, in arc-lit Oxford Street adrift,

  Soared through the sales by safe hydraulic lift.

  Early Electric! Maybe even here

  They met that evening at six-fifteen

  Beneath the hearts of this electrolier

  And caught the first non-stop to WILLESDEN GREEN,

  Then out and on, through rural RAYNERS LANE

  To autumn-scented Middlesex again.

  Cancer has killed him. Heart is killing her.

  The trees are down. An Odeon flashes fire

  Where stood their villa by the murmuring fir

  When ‘they would for their children’s good conspire.’

  Of all their loves and hopes on hurrying feet

  Thou art the worn memorial, Baker Street.

  In that poem, Betjeman, as always, sees architecture in terms of the people who inhabit it. Churches call up the worshippers, trains the travellers … it’s always a landscape with figures.

  The next poem was written in the fifties, but it ends up with Betjeman remembering, as in so many of his poems, the London he knew as a boy.

  Middlesex

  Gaily into Ruislip Gardens

  Runs the red electric train,

  With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s

  Daintily alights Elaine;

  Hurries down the concrete station

  With a frown of concentration,

  Out into the outskirt’s edges

  Where a few surviving hedges

  Keep alive our lost Elysium – rural Middlesex again.

  Well cut Windsmoor flapping lightly,

  Jacqmar scarf of mauve and green

  Hiding hair which, Friday nightly,

  Delicately drowns in Drene;

  Fair Elaine the bobby-soxer,

  Fresh-complexioned with Innoxa,

  Gains the garden – father’s hobby –

  Hangs her Windsmoor in the lobby,

  Settles down to sandwich supper and the television screen.

  Gentle Brent, I used to know you

  Wandering Wembley-wards at will,

  Now what change your waters show you

  In the meadowlands you fill!

  Recollect the elm-trees misty

  And the footpaths climbing twisty

  Under cedar-shaded palings,

  Low laburnum-leaned-on railings,

  Out of Northolt on and upward to the heights of Harrow hill.

  Parish of enormous hayfields

  Perivale stood all alone,

  And from Greenford scent of mayfields

  Most enticingly was blown

  Over market gardens tidy,

  Taverns for the bona fide,

  Cockney anglers, cockney shooters,

  Murray Poshes, Lupin Pooters

  Long in Kensal Green and Highgate silent under soot and stone.

  Betjeman was quick to cotton on to the power of brand names to evoke a period: ‘Well cut Windsmoor’, ‘Jacqmar scarf’. It’s a technique nowadays used by Barry Humphries, of whom Betjeman was an early fan, and by Victoria Wood, and at its best it’s a poetry of recognition. The Betjeman family fortunes had actually been based on a brand name. His father was a well-to-do cabinet-maker, and the staple of the firm in Edwardian times was the ‘Betjeman Patent Tantalus’, a drinks cabinet that could be locked up to defeat the servants.

  Betjeman didn’t get on with his father, had no intention of following him into the family business, and, quite early, was on the move up the social ladder. This ga
ve him a keen ear for social pretension and the niceties of the language in which it was cloaked, most famously in this poem – a catalogue of snobberies, and apparently a virtual documentary of the expressions used in the Betjeman family home.

  How to Get On in Society

  Phone for the fish-knives, Norman

  As Cook is a little unnerved;

  You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes

  And I must have things daintily served.

  Are the requisites all in the toilet?

  The frills round the cutlets can wait

  Till the girl has replenished the cruets

  And switched on the logs in the grate.

  It’s ever so close in the lounge, dear,

  But the vestibule’s comfy for tea

  And Howard is out riding on horseback

  So do come and take some with me.

  Now here is a fork for your pastries

  And do use the couch for your feet;

  I know what I wanted to ask you –

  Is trifle sufficient for sweet?

  Milk and then just as it comes dear?

  I’m afraid the preserve’s full of stones;

  Beg pardon, I’m soiling the doileys

  With afternoon tea-cakes and scones.

  A social climber himself, Betjeman always had a keen and kindly eye for those on the lower slopes.

  Business Girls

  From the geyser ventilators

  Autumn winds are blowing down

  On a thousand business women

  Having baths in Camden Town.

  Waste pipes chuckle into runnels,

  Steam’s escaping here and there,

  Morning trains through Camden cutting

  Shake the Crescent and the Square.

  Early nip of changeful autumn,

  Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,

  At the back precarious bathrooms

  Jutting out from upper floors;

  And behind their frail partitions

  Business women lie and soak,

  Seeing through the draughty skylight

  Flying clouds and railway smoke.

  Rest you there, poor unbelov’d ones,

  Lap your loneliness in heat.

  All too soon the tiny breakfast,

  Trolley-bus and windy street!

  The operative line in that poem is ‘Rest you there, poor unbelov’d ones’. Betjeman always had an eye for the forlorn and the unloved: unloved buildings, unloved suburbs, aesthetic outcasts as well as emotional ones. Lord David Cecil was once giving a lecture on ‘The Pleasures of Reading’ when, rather to his surprise, he saw Betjeman in the audience. Afterwards he thanked him for coming. ‘Oh no, don’t thank me,’ said Betjeman. ‘I thought it was the pleasures of Reading.’ Reading, I suppose, yet another unloved place.

  This love of the neglected came from thinking himself a bit unloved, which of course he wasn’t, certainly not when he was older. And from this came all the business of carrying his teddy bear about with him, which, I have to say, I find a bit tiresome. Mind you, writers often pretend they suffer more than they do, or blame other people for the suffering they cause themselves. One should never underestimate the extent to which writers steal. They burgle other people’s lives, and one of the things they most commonly purloin is other people’s pain.

  In his long poem Summoned by Bells, Betjeman describes the horrors suffered by new boys at Marlborough, but they don’t seem actually to have happened to him. Indeed, he seems to have played the system very well. Louis MacNeice, who was at the same school, described the boy Betjeman (and the phrase describes his life) as ‘a triumphant misfit’. He got along in life by playing up as ‘Silly Me’ so that people were always rallying round. The Silly Mes of this world often get their own way and can be bullies, and so it was occasionally with Betjeman. None of this matters unless you’re on the receiving end, and as long as the writer keeps coming up with the goods.

  Betjeman, unlike many of his contemporaries, wasn’t homosexual, but he did make a tentative stab at conforming in this regard. Indeed, on one occasion, he said to Hugh Gaitskell, ‘Do you mind if I put my hand on your bottom?’ The future leader of the Labour Party sighed and said, ‘Well, if you must.’

  Betjeman’s ‘type’ seems to have been brisk and masterful like the hearty girls he celebrated in his poems, and he married the daughter of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army in India, Field Marshal Chetwode. His father-in-law was a bit of a tartar, though in no time at all Betjeman had him eating out of his hand, the Field Marshal even tucking rugs over the poet’s knees. Field Marshal Chetwode was not unlike one of the old men ‘who never cheated, never doubted’ mentioned in the next poem.

  Death of King George V

  ‘NEW KING ARRIVES IN HIS CAPITAL BY AIR …’

  Daily Newspaper

  Spirits of well-shot woodcock, partridge, snipe

  Flutter and bear him up the Norfolk sky:

  In that red house in a red mahogany book-case

  The stamp collection waits with mounts long dry.

  The big blue eyes are shut which saw wrong clothing

  And favourite fields and coverts from a horse;

  Old men in country houses have clocks ticking

  Over thick carpets with a deadened force;

  Old men who never cheated, never doubted,

  Communicated monthly, sit and stare

  At the new suburb stretched beyond the run-way

  Where a young man lands hatless from the air.

  In his later years, Betjeman tended to become public property. He was a natural television performer, audiences loving his ‘gosh and golly’ approach. His personality had always been something of a turn, though, and now an act perfected for a small audience was simply transferred to the electronic stage.

  However, his clowning should never make us forget that he had a marvellous ear for language. It’s the limited language of the middle class, or of those aspiring to be so, but he was a master of it.

  Devonshire Street, W.1

  The heavy mahogany door with its wrought-iron screen

  Shuts. And the sound is rich, sympathetic, discreet.

  The sun still shines on this eighteenth-century scene

  With Edwardian faience adornments – Devonshire Street.

  No hope. And the X-ray photographs under his arm

  Confirm the message. His wife stands timidly by.

  The opposite brick-built house looks lofty and calm

  Its chimneys steady against a mackerel sky.

  No hope. And the iron knob of this palisade

  So cold to the touch, is luckier now than he.

  ‘Oh merciless, hurrying Londoners! Why was I made

  For the long and painful deathbed coming to me?’

  She puts her fingers in his as, loving and silly,

  At long-past Kensington dances she used to do

  ‘It’s cheaper to take the tube to Piccadilly

  And then we can catch a nineteen or a twenty-two.’

  It’s almost impertinent to comment on a poem like this, it’s so limpid and clear. But what makes it unbearable is the little snatch of ordinary speech at the finish. Although it’s the man who is going to die, it’s the woman we see most clearly and who is the pathetic figure.

  Even in a little cameo like the next poem, it is Betjeman’s language – and one characteristic word – that brings the scene into focus.

  In a Bath Teashop

  ‘Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another –

  Let us hold hands and look.’

  She, such a very ordinary little woman;

  He, such a thumping crook;

  But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels

  In the teashop’s ingle-nook.

  ‘Thumping’ is what does it. There is so much of Betjeman in the word.

  ‘The proof of a poet’, said Walt Whitman, ‘is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.’ B
etjeman was so English it was almost a joke and, with his popularity as a performer as well as a poet, his country certainly absorbed him. But he survived his celebrity because he was tough, and he was tough because, despite his terrible raincoats and battered pork-pie hats, he was a dandy and dandies are tough. The times have only just caught up with his taste and proved him as much of a prophet as Auden – ‘triumphant misfit’ is right.

  There are absences. An artist can be diminished by his virtues and one of Betjeman’s virtues is clarity. However much the reader welcomes clarity, some of the most memorable moments in poetry occur when it isn’t exactly clear what the poet is talking about. Auden has many such moments, but Betjeman never, because he always is sure, and that’s the penalty of being lucid. He may be pretending it’s light verse when it isn’t, but he knows exactly what he’s about. His is not poetry of ideas or argument, but because it is simple doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to understand.

  And he always hits home.

  from Five O’Clock Shadow

  A haze of thunder hangs on the hospital rose-beds,

  A doctors’ foursome out on the links is played,

  Safe in her sitting-room Sister is putting her feet up:

  This is the time of day when we feel betrayed.

  Below the windows, loads of loving relations

  Rev in the car park, changing gear at the bend,

  Making for home and a nice big tea and the telly:

  ‘Well, we’ve done what we can. It can’t be long till the end.’

  W. H. Auden

  1907–1973

  Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, brought up in Birmingham, where his father was a physician, and educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, and Christ Church, Oxford. His student contemporaries included poets Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender. After graduating in 1929, he spent several months in Berlin, often in the company of Christopher Isherwood, his future collaborator. His first book, Poems, was published in 1930 by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber and he later become associated with Rupert Doone’s Group Theatre, for which he wrote several plays, sometimes in collaboration with Isherwood. In January 1939 the two of them left England for the United States, where Auden became a citizen in 1946. His later works include The Age of Anxiety, Nones, The Shield of Achilles and Homage to Clio, and he also wrote texts for works by Benjamin Britten and (with Chester Kallman) the libretto for Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress. Elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1956, he died in Vienna in 1973.