First and Last Loves

by John Betjeman

  Ah, the sweet prelude to an English winter! For me it is so much a more beautiful season than any other, which is just as well since it goes on for most of the year. It is a time when there is more colour in the country than there was ever before. Ploughed fields take on a look like a farming scene in the initial letter of a medieval manuscript. Bricks are an intenser red and Cotswold stone is more golden, the limestone and granite of the north is more silver, bare branches are like pressed seaweed against the pale blue sky. Whatever remains green is more deeply, richly green than it was before. This waiting, intense stillness is generally a prelude to a storm. The smallest sound is easily heard. Cocks are continually crowing, ducks quacking as though they were happy, and even across three miles of still, misty fields, it is possible to distinguish all six of the church bells as men practise method ringing in the oil-lit evening tower. But this night there is not one of those gigantic winter sunsets and the house is more than usually full of spiders, huge hairy ones which cast a shadow twice their own size on the drawing-room carpet. And then, in the night the storm begins. Will the trees stand it, this gale which makes them roar and creak and roar again? Will the earth ever be able to soak up these torrents which beat the house, brim the water-butts and swish on grass and gravel? And has anyone remembered to shut the upstairs window?

  Winter is the one time when I feel I can indulge myself in reading what I like instead of what I ought to read. Time stretches out a little more and I stretch myself with it. Slow books come back and I try to forget our jerky modern novels. While the storm shakes the shutters, I re-read Scott, generally starting with The Heart of Midlothian. And as the great rumbling periods, as surely and steadily as a stage-coach, carry me back to Edinburgh, the most beautiful city in these islands, I feel an embarras de richesse. There is too much I want to read, too many memories I wish to experience.

  Every winter I read The Task by William Cowper, and twice or thrice those wonderful books in it where he describes a Winter Evening, a Winter Morning and a Winter Walk at Noon. The frost blades of north Buckinghamshire, the snowed-over woodlands, the dog that gambolled in the snow, the bells and post horns, the cups of tea, melted, dead, silenced, evaporated for nearly two hundred years, come to life again. And if the next morning is nippy and white with frost, then Cowper’s magic power of description gives an eternal look to the cold and sparkling scene so that even this duller landscape in which I live might be the gentle undulations round Cowper’s Olney, Bucks, or it might be something earlier still, a frost-bound Dutch landscape by Breughel.

  Winter is the time for reading poetry and often I discover for myself some minor English poet, a country parson who on just such a night must have sat in his study and blown sand off lines like these, written in ink made of oak-gall:

  Soon as eve closes, the loud-hooting owl

  That loves the turbulent and frosty night

  Perches aloft upon the rocking elm

  And hallooes to the moon.

  And here they are, these lines, widely spaced upon the printed page and hundreds more, by the Reverend James Hurdis, D.D., Incumbent of Bishopstone, Sussex, printed a century and a half ago, some of the most perfect descriptions of an English winter that were ever written in English. And you and I are probably the only people in England who are reading Hurdis. The smell of the old book is like a country church when first you open its door, the look of the pages is spacious like the age in which it was written and the broad margins isolate the poetry as Bishopstone must then have been isolated among windy miles of sheep-nibbled downs.

  There is no need only to escape into the civilised past, which is more easily done in winter than in any other time of the year. Even modern barbarism becomes almost human, especially in places which make their money out of summer visitors. Am I wrong in thinking that the blonde with a handkerchief wound round her head and a cigarette in her mouth is a little politer now when she refuses to sell me the cigarettes I know she has in hundreds under the counter? Do I perceive a mood less casual in the bar-attendant at the Grand Hotel? Is it possible that when I ask for a room at the reception desk, I shall actually be accommodated instead of being sent away with a scornful refusal? Maybe this is all imagination. But of this I am quite certain, when I receive my fee for describing to you these joys of winter, I shall indulge in the greatest winter joy I know. I shall take the train to the coast and spend a night by the sea.

  The train from London will be fairly empty. By the time evening has set in there will be hardly anyone in it at all, for the larger towns on the way to the sea will have taken off most of the passengers. What started as an express will have turned into a local train, stopping at oil-lit stations while the gale whistles in the ventilators of empty carriages. Standing out white on a blue glass ground, will appear the names of wayside stations and, reflected in a puddle, the light of a farmer’s car in the yard will sparkle beyond the platform fence.

  Then we will go on into the windy dark until at last there is a station slightly more important than those we have passed, lit with gas instead of oil, and that is mine. I shall hear the soft local accent, smell the salt in the wet and warmer air and descry through the lines of rain that lace the taxi’s wind-screen, bulks of houses that were full and formidable in summer and now have not a light in any of their windows.

  2

  BOURNEMOUTH

  BOURNEMOUTH is one of the few English towns one can safely call “her.” With her head touching Christchurch and her toes turned towards the Dorset port of Poole she lies, a stately Victorian duchess, stretched along more than five miles of Hampshire coast. Her bed has sand for under-blanket and gravel for mattress and it is as uneven as a rough sea. What though this noble lady has lately disfigured her ample bosom with hideous pseudo-modern jewellery in the shape of glittering hotels in the Tel-Aviv style, her handsome form can stand such trashy adornment, for she is lovely still. Warm breezes caress her. She is heavy with the scent of pinus laricio, pinus insignis, the Scotch fir of orange-golden bark, the pinaster and black Austrian pine. She wears a large and wealthy coat of precious firs. Beneath it we may glimpse the flaming colours of her dress, the winding lengths of crimson rhododendron, the delicate embroidery of the flower beds of her numerous public gardens which change their colours with the seasons. The blue veins of her body are the asphalt paths meandering down her chines, among firs and sandy cliffs, her life-blood is the young and old who frequent them, the young running gaily up in beach shoes, the old wheeled steadily down in invalid chairs. Her voice is the twang of the tennis racket heard behind prunus in many a trim villa garden, the lap and roar of waves upon her sand and shingle, the strains of stringed instruments from the concert hall of her famous pavilion.

  The sea is only one of the things about Bournemouth, and one of the least interesting. Bathing is safe. Sands are firm and sprinkled in places with shingle and in others with children. There are lines of bathing huts, bungalows and tents and deck chairs municipally owned, mostly above that long high water mark which hardly changes at all, for the tide at Bournemouth always seems to be high. Zig-zag paths, bordered by wind-slashed veronica, ascend those unspectacular slopes of sandy rock from Undercliffe to Overcliffe. From Undercliffe the lazy motorist may shout out of her motor-car window to her children on the beach, from Overcliffe she may survey the sweep of bay from Purbeck to the Needles, and, sickened by so much beauty, drink spirits in the sun lounge of one of those big hotels or blocks of flats which rise like polished teeth along the cliff top. The sea to Bournemouth is incidental, like the bathroom leading out of a grand hotel suite: something which is there because it ought to be, and used for hygienic reasons. Deep in a chine with its scent of resin and tap of palm leaves and plash of streamlets and moan of overhanging pine, an occasional whiff of ozone reminds us of the sea. But Bournemouth is mainly a residential town by the sea, not a seaside town full in summer only.

  The inland suburbs of Bournemouth are like any other suburbs, indistinguishable from Wembley or
the Great West Road. And they stretch for miles into Hants and Dorset, leaving here and there a barren patch of pylon-bisected heath. The main shopping streets have the usual ugly lengths of flashy chromium, though a pretty, early-Victorian stucco thoroughfare survives called the Arcade. The public buildings are less blatant and alien looking than the latest blocks of flats and hotels. But the beauty of Bournemouth consists in three things, her layout, her larger villas and her churches. All of these are Victorian.

  Earliest Bournemouth is on the western and Branksome side of the Bourne which runs into the sea by the Pavilion. It consists of a few villas built by Mr. Lewis Tregonwell whose name survives in a terrace and a road and whose house was part of the Exeter Hotel. He started building in 1810. In 1836 a local landlord, Sir George Tapps of Westover and Hinton Admiral, built on the eastern bank of the stream. Adding Gervis to his name, he went on building and called in Benjamin Ferrey, the Gothic church architect and friend of Pugin, to lay out his estate. Thus Gervis Place arose with its stucco Tudor-style villas. Tudor or Italian, the villas were varied, well spaced in their setting, roads were broad and planted with trees, but everything had to wind. Nothing was to be regular. That is why there is no formal promenade in Bournemouth and why there have always been so many footpaths and curving roads in the older and finer parts of the town. The place was carefully planned from its beginnings on the principle that nature abhors a straight line, the picturesque school of Georgian gardening surviving into Victorian times. This sense that Bournemouth is a garden with houses in it survived the century. The name Tapps-Gervis increased to Tapps-Gervis-Meyrick, hence Meyrick Avenue. Meyrick Park, Meyrick Road. And if you are not sure of the owner of the road, you may often guess its date from its name—Adelaide, Alma, Gladstone. They are hidden behind trees and flowering shrubs, down lengths of gravel bordered with rhododendron, these Victorian villas. Some are hotels, some are now government offices. They reflect every phase of leisured Victorian and Edwardian life—here a hint of Madeira, there an Elizabethan cottage, then an Italian villa like the Royal Bath Hotel. All these are in stucco and not later than the ’seventies. Then brick came in and we have “Flemish style” buildings, with gables and white wood balconies and leaded panes, of which J. D. Sedding’s Vicarage at St. Clements and big house at the top of Boscombe Chine, called The Knole, are beautiful, satisfying examples. They look stately and practical. Later, a brilliant local architect, Sidney Tugwell, designed villas in the new art style with tiny windows fluttering cheerful chintz, low-pitched roofs of local stone and broad eaves—wholesome and simple buildings like home-made cakes. He had his imitators. And each of these strongly individual Victorian houses, not content with its garden-like road, Knyveton Road, Manor Road, Alum Chine or further inland round Meyrick Park, has, or once had, a beautiful garden of its own. So that the real Bournemouth is all pines and pines and pines and flowering shrubs, lawns, begonias, azaleas, bird-song, dance tunes, the plung of the racket and creak of the basket chair.

  Lastly the churches have the colour and clearness of the town. I doubt if any place in Britain has finer modern churches than Bournemouth and, what is more, they are all open and all alive. I visited fourteen of them on one week-day and found them all clean and cared for and in most of them people at prayer. Excluding Parkstone with its beautiful St. Peter’s and the lovely Basilica of St. Osmund I thought the finest Bournemouth church was St. Stephen’s in the centre of the town—designed by J. L. Pearson. It is worth travelling 200 miles and being sick in the coach to have seen the inside of this many-vistaed church, all in clean cream-coloured stone, with arch cutting arch, a lofty hall of stone vaulting providing view after view as you walk round it, each lovelier than the next and worthy of a vast cathedral. Away in the suburbs there is much that is beautiful, J. D. Sedding’s famous church of St. Clement, scholarly and West-country looking in stone; Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s little Roman Catholic Church of the Annunciation, a brilliantly original design in brick, his first work after Liverpool Cathedral; St. Francis’ church by J. Harold Gibbons on a new building estate, white, Italianate and vast. As the day drew to an end I entered a red-brick church in a hard red-brick shopping street at the back of Boscombe. St. Mary’s, Boscombe, built about 1920. Here, out of the noise of the street, was a white, cool and spacious interior, friendly, beautiful, with golden screens and gold and blue east windows, gaily painted roofs and wide and high West-country arches. Clean and white and cheerful, the perfect seaside church. That last experience seemed to typify Bournemouth. You arrive tired from a long journey, you first see only the car parks, buses and jazzy blocks of flats and hotels. You turn into a side road and all is colour, light and life.

  3

  CHELTENHAM

  BOOK ILLUSTRATION can colour a whole town or county. Who can look at a Cotswold manor, the distinct stones, the hollyhock spire, the clipped box, without running his gaze down the flagstones to the bottom right-hand corner where he will expect to find, written on a scroll among the snapdragon, F. L. GRIGGS? Who does not see in Merrion Square or Henrietta Street the Guinness-brown brick, the green, etched-in ironwork, the silver-grey stone of a Malton aquatint? Nor can I help associating the uneven silhouette of the Old Town at Edinburgh with a steel engraving of the ’thirties, while the diminishing terraces of its New Town remind me of more engravings in Thos. H. Shepherd’s Modern Athens. The tumbled cottage by the sandy road, the flaming sunset behind the dumpy spire, the tree-surrounded ponds of southern Surrey can still recall Birket Foster’s wood engravings. The red Dutch cliffs of Willet-land look well in pen and wash, vignetted for the ’nineties and the earliest halftone illustrations. The cover of the Strand Magazine once made the Strand look beautiful, while its pages heightened the romance of Norwood, Brixton and Harrow Weald with its illustrations to Sherlock Holmes. Cheltenham comes from Ackermann’s Repository of the Arts and continues into those lithographed architectural books of the ’forties and ’fifties.

  Here is the relative increase of Cheltenham from when the Spa first became popular.

  Census when taken Number of inhabitants Number of houses

  1801 3,076 710

  1811 8,325 1,556

  1821 13,388 2,411

  1831 22,942 5,000

  1841 31,379 5,653

  1851 35,062 7,365

  We may put down the popularity of Cheltenham not merely to the fact that George III tasted the water—George III tasted almost as many Spa waters as has the author himself—nor merely to the visit of the Duke of Wellington, which seems to have been a success. We may put it down to liver trouble contracted in the East, for which the Cheltenham waters were long recommended as a cure. The properties of the water naturally attracted the military, so that a glance at the statistics printed above will also serve as an indication of the increase of Empire during the nineteenth century. Cheltenham now covers eight square, tree-shaded miles.

  From many quiet houses in the midst of carefully tended gardens, blue eyes look out across the silver birches and see the Himalaya mountains above the stucco chimneys, or, looking at the lily-pond, dream again of Cashmere, until the temple gong in the hall calls the time for dressing and the single bell of a Low Church reminds us that there is a weekday evening prayer meeting somewhere. And bells and shouts from Cheltenham College bring back our youth, for Cheltenham is a military school, and from it Adam Lindsay Gordon went out to Australia never to return, except between the boards of one of the Oxford Poets. But many a distinguished Colonel and many a General has come back to the town of his old school, and so the links of Empire have held fast, and a man may sip his glass of Lansdowne (or sodium sulphate saline) within hearing of the smack of King Willow against the leather on the playing field of his old school.

  The beauty of Cheltenham has been preserved almost entirely by the military1; and there is an absence of municipal swagger such as is to be found in a stock-broking, commercial town like Brighton. Lace curtains are only now disappearing from the windows, since the Colonel’s daughte
r has been to the Slade; old-fashioned shops still exist. Bootmakers have discreet window displays. Chemists are still pharmaceutical and their shops have still those large bottles in the windows and a multitude of lettered coffers round the walls: there is a shop in Cheltenham which especially deals in ladies’ hats of a size large enough to contain a mountain of coiled white hair.

  The earliest Cheltenham architecture just comes into the copper engravings of the late eighteenth-century antiquity book. It is the Parish Church, to which most guide books desperately draw attention, beginning in ardent detail on every medieval feature, however much it has been scraped and renewed. But the Parish Church, though its origin may have been in the twelfth century, shows so much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth, that all its texture, delicacy, original arrangement and proportion have disappeared. It is a wood engraving from Brandon.

  The first great period of Cheltenham is of the Ackermann’s Repository date. It is possible in Cheltenham, on a sunny spring day, to see Greek revival architecture exactly as it looks in a coloured aquatint. There are the chestnut, the copper beech, the silver birch, the single Scotch fir embosoming the bright stucco house, be it Greek or Perpendicular, Soane or Salvin. The roof is purple-blue and with a low pitch, running to broad eaves under which sharp, engraved shadows fall deep down the bright yellow wall. Probably the house has little external decoration beyond a singularly delicate ironwork veranda painted green. Be the house Gothic or Moorish, Cheltenham ironwork is almost always Greek in design and painted green. In front of the house a sweep of golden gravel among green lawns furnishes a foreground to the aquatint.