Six Poets (12 page)

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

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.

‘
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.

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.

‘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.