POEMS AND PROSE

THE WORD

A pen appeared, and the god said:
'Write what it is to be
man.' And my hand hovered
long over the bare page.

until there, like footprints
of the lost traveller, letters
took shape on the page's
blankness, and I spelled out
the word 'lonely'.

And my hand moved
to erase it; but the voices
of all those waiting at life's
window cried out loud: 'It is true.'

R.S. Thomas

He is not rich, nor learned nor young. He is poor. He has no learning. He is old. He is lean. He never owns any a machine like a tractor, which would break the silence on the Welsh hills.

A PEASANT

Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed,
Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills,
Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud.
Docking mangels, chipping the green skin
From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin
Of satisfaction, or churning the crude earth
To a stiff sea of clods that glint in the wind—
So are his days spent, his spittled mirth
Rarer than the sun that cracks the cheeks
Of the gaunt sky perhaps once in a week.
And then at night see him fixed in his chair
Motionless, except when he leans to gob in the fire.
There is something frightening in the vacancy of his mind.
His clothes, sour with years of sweat
And animal contact, shock the refined,
But affected, sense with their stark naturalness.
Yet this is your prototype, who, season by season
Against siege of rain and the wind's attrition,
Preserves his stock, an impregnable fortress
Not to be stormed, even in death's confusion.
Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars,
Enduring like a tree under the curious stars.

R.S. Thomas

The name, "Iago Prytherch," is a common Welsh name in the mid Wales and Thomas chose it for his character so that non-Welsh readers could pronounce it.

DEATH OF A POET

Laid now on his smooth bed
For the last time, watching dully
Through heavy eyelids the day's colour
Widow the sky, what can he say
Worthy of record, the books all open,
Pens ready, the faces, sad,
Waiting gravely for the tired lips
To move once -- what can he say?

His tongue wrestles to force one word
Past the thick phlegm; no speech, no phrases
For the day's news, just the one word ‘sorry';
Sorry for the lies, for the long failure
In the poet's war; that he preferred
The easier rhythms of the heart
To the mind's scansion; that now he dies
Intestate, having nothing to leave
But a few songs, cold as stones
In the thin hands that asked for bread.

R.S. Thomas

R.S. Thomas was very close to nature in his beloved Welsh countryside.

Here he comments on the rich, but loaded, song of the blackbird.

A BLACKBIRD SINGING

It seems wrong that out of this bird,
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should come
Such rich music, as though the notes'
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill.

You have heard it often, alone at your desk
In a green April, your mind drawn
Away from its work by sweet disturbance
Of the mild evening outside your room.

A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With history's overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears.

R.S. Thomas

Thomas was not the only person to comment on the song of the blackbird.

ALBUM

My father is dead.
I who am look at him
who is not, as once he
went looking for me
in the woman who was.

There are pictures
of the two of them, no
need of a third, hand
in hand, hearts willing
to be one but not three.

What does it mean
life? I am here I am
there. Look! Suddenly
the young tool in their hands
for hurting one another.

And the camera says:
Smile; there is no wound
time gives that is not bandaged
by time. And so they do the
three of them at me who weep.

R.S. Thomas

NO POEM TODAY

This is one of my favourite Christmas poems.

MISTLETOE

Sitting under the mistletoe
(Pale-green, fairy mistletoe),
One last candle burning low,
All the sleepy dancers gone,
Just one candle burning on,
Shadows lurking everywhere:
Some one came, and kissed me there.

Tired I was; my head would go
Nodding under the mistletoe
(Pale-green, fairy mistletoe),
No footsteps came, no voice, but only,
Just as I sat there, sleepy, lonely,
Stooped in the still and shadowy air
Lips unseen - and kissed me there.

Walter de la Mare

POETRY FOR SUPPER

'Listen, now, verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.'

'Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem's making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life's iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build
Your verse a ladder.'
'You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.'

'Sunlight's a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don't happen.'
So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.

R.S. Thomas

Today's poem reminds me of Larkin's "This Be The Verse', which begins:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

However, Thomas does not blame his parents for what he has become; or, if he does, he forgives them.

SORRY

Dear parents,
I forgive you my life,
Begotten in a drab town,
The intention was good;
Passing the street now,
I see still the remains of sunlight.

It was not the bone buckled;
You gave me enough food
To renew myself.
It was the mind's weight
Kept me bent, as I grew tall.

It was not your fault.
What should have gone on,
Arrow aimed from a tried bow
At a tried target, has turned back,
Wounding itself
With questions you had not asked.

R.S. Thomas

Yesterday R.S. Thomas was searching for God - in a church.

In today's poem he suggests a different approach.

VIA NEGATIVA

Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes
We follow, the footprints he has just
Left. We put our hands in
His side hoping to find
It warm. We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them, too; but miss the reflection.

R.S. Thomas

Thomas frequently writes of God in terms of paradox… He is present in absence, knowable only in hiddenness… a God you hear in silence. He is an echo, a shadow, a hazy reflection for whom we wait and ache and search and hope. He is the God of mystery, a God about whom there are far more questions than answers.

In my series of poems by John Betjeman, we often discovered him poking around old churches - admiring the pews, the lectern and the stained glass windows.

In vain!

IN CHURCH

Often I try
To analyse the quality
Of its silences. Is this where God hides
From my searching? I have stopped to listen,
After the people have gone,
To the air recomposing itself
For vigil. It has waited like this
Since the stones grouped themselves about it.
These are the hard ribs
Of a body that our prayers have failed
To animate. Shadows advance
From their corners to take possession
Of places the light held
For an hour. The bats resume
Their business. The uneasiness of the pews
Ceases. There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

R.S. Thomas

More about him: He was widely regarded as the best religious poet of his time, although his verse covered a wide range of themes.

P.S. Thomas was looking for God in an empty church. In my experience he is often not there. You are more likely to find him through his creation - in the beauty of the countryside, or through a loving relationship.

If people sends us poems, music or other work they have themselves composed and ask our opinion, should we always be honest - or tell Thomas's 'dark lie', fearing that we may upset them if we tell the truth?

UNPOSTED

Dear friend unknown,
why send me your poems?
We are brothers, I admit;
but they are no good.
I see why you wrote them,
but why send them? why not
bury them? as a cat its faeces?
You confuse charity and art.
They have not equal claims,
though the absence of either
will smell more or less the same.

I use my imagination:
I see a cramped hand gripping
a bent pen, or, worse, perhaps
it was with foot you wrote.
You wait in an iron bed
for my reply. My letter
could be the purse of gold
you pay your way with past
the giant, Despair.
I lower my standards
and let truth hit me squarely
between the eyes. "These are great
poems", I write, and see heaven's
slums with their rags flying,
cripples brandishing their crutches,
and the one, innocent of scansion,
who knows charity is short
and the poem for ever, suffering
my dark lie with all the blandness
with which the round moon suffers an eclipse.

R.S. Thomas

Ronald Stuart Thomas was born in Cardiff in 1913, the son of a sea captain.

More tomorrow.

I am moving on from Robert Louis Stevenson as several of my readers have commented that he is a lightweight. However, others have enjoyed his poems, particularly those for children. I may return to him on some future occasion.

This is the very last poem of more than 350 and it sensitively describes the passing of a life-long partner.

R.S. Thomas

A MARRIAGE

We met
under a shower
of bird-notes.

Fifty years passed,
love's moment
in a world in
servitude to time.

She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed - and opened
them on her wrinkles.

`Come,' said death,
choosing her as his
partner for
the last dance,

And she,
who in life
had done everything
with a bird's grace,
opened her bill now
for the shedding
of one sigh - no
heavier than a feather.

R.S. Thomas

Following yesterday's poem about 'Foreign Lands', here are the little boy's comments about children overseas.

FOREIGN CHILDREN

(From Child's Garden of Verses)

Little Indian, Sioux, or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
Oh! don't you wish that you were me?

You have seen the scarlet trees
And the lions over seas;
You have eaten ostrich eggs,
And turned the turtle off their legs.

Such a life is very fine,
But it's not so nice as mine:
You must often as you trod,
Have wearied NOT to be abroad.

You have curious things to eat,
I am fed on proper meat;
You must dwell upon the foam,
But I am safe and live at home.

Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
Oh! don't you wish that you were me?

Robert Louis Stevenson

We are back in the realm of imagination, as a little boy climbs a tree and looks out on the world.

Tomorrow he considers the children in those "Foreign Lands' and concludes that it is probably better to stay at home.

FOREIGN LANDS

Up into the cherry tree
Who should climb but little me?
I held the trunk with both my hands
And looked abroad in foreign lands.

I saw the next door garden lie,
Adorned with flowers, before my eye,
And many pleasant places more
That I had never seen before.

I saw the dimpling river pass
And be the sky's blue looking-glass;
The dusty roads go up and down
With people tramping in to town.

If I could find a higher tree
Farther and farther I should see,
To where the grown-up river slips
Into the sea among the ships,

To where the road on either hand
Lead onward into fairy land,
Where all the children dine at five,
And all the playthings come alive.

Robert Louis Stevenson
(From 'Child's Garden of Verses)

The 'lady' in this poem is the city of Marseilles - not one of the 'incomparable women" who "pace the shadows of the alley".

LONG TIME I LAY

Long time I lay in little ease
Where, placed by the Turanian, (1)
Marseilles, the many-masted, sees
The blue Mediterranean.

Now songful in the hour of sport,
Now riotous for wages,
She camps around her ancient port,
As ancient of the ages.

Algerian airs through all the place
Unconquerably sally;
Incomparable women pace
The shadows of the alley.

And high o'er dark and graving yard
And where the sky is paler,
The golden virgin of the guard (2)
Shines, beckoning the sailor.

She hears the city roar on high,
Thief, prostitute, and banker;
She sees the masted vessels lie
Immovably at anchor.

She sees the snowy islets dot
The sea's immortal azure,
And If, that castellated spot,
Tower, turret, and embrasure.

Robert Louis Stevenson

(1) The Turanians are the indigenous inhabitants of vast territories in Eurasia and have a rich and ancient cultural heritage. Tūrān (Persian: توران) is the ancient Iranian name for Central Asia, literally meaning "the land of the Tur".

(2) The "golden virgin of the guard" who shines and beckons the sailor is, of course, the lighthouse.

I first came across this poem as a song, set to music by the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Perhaps it was only "arranged" by Vaughan Williams. I am sure one of the more musically knowledgeable amongst you will let me know.

THE VAGABOND

(To an air to Shubert)

Give to me the life I love,
Let the lave go by me,
Give the jolly heaven above
And the byway night me.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river --
There's the life for a man like me,
There's the life for ever.

Let the blow fall soon or late,
Let what will be o'er me;
Give the face of earth around
And the road before me.
Wealth I seek not, hope nor love,
Nor a friend to know me;
All I seek, the heaven above
And the road below me.

Or let autumn fall on me
Where afield I linger,
Silencing the bird on tree,
Biting the blue finger;
White as meal the frosty field --
Warm the fireside haven --
Not to autumn will I yield,
Not to winter even!

Let the blow fall soon or late,
Let what will be o'er me;
Give the face of earth around,
And the road before me.
Wealth I ask not, hope, nor love,
Nor a friend to know me.
All I ask, the heaven above
And the road below me.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Note: I believe 'lave' means: 'the rest', 'the remainder', 'everything else'

If you read any of Stevenson's poems at school, you probably already know of Leerie, the lamplighter.

THE LAMPLIGHTER

My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;
It’s time to take the window to see Leerie going by;
For every night at teatime and before you take your seat,
With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street.

Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea,
And my papa’s a banker and as rich as he can be;
But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I’m to do,
O Leerie, I’ll go round at night and light the lamps with you!

For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,
And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more;
And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light;
O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him to-night!

Robert Louis Stevenson

P.S. When I was a child we didn't have a lamplighter - but the street lamps were gas-lit and someone came round (I believe once a week) and climbed a ladder to wind the clockwork time switch.

We used to call him Leerie.

This is one of the few poems I recall from my days at primary school.

Perhaps you remember it too?

MY SHADOW

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an India-rubber ball,
And he sometimes gets so little that there’s none of him at all.

He hasn’t got a notion of how children ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.
He stays so close beside me, he’s a coward you can see;
I’d think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!

One morning, very early, before the sun was up,
I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;
But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Read this poem aloud and listen to the rhythm of the train.

FROM A RAILWAY CARRIAGE

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.
Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And here is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart runaway in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill, and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone forever!

Robert Louis Stevenson

Today a move away from childhood and into more lyrical territory.

AN ENGLISH BREEZE

Up with the sun, the breeze arose,
Across the talking corn she goes,
And smooth she rustles far and wide
Through all the voiceful countryside.

Through all the land her tale she tells;
She spins, she tosses, she compels
The kites, the clouds, the windmill sails
And all the trees in all the dales.

God calls us, and the day prepares
With nimble, gay and gracious airs:
And from Penzance to Maidenhead
The roads last night He watered.

God calls us from inglorious ease,
Forth and to travel with the breeze
While, swift and singing, smooth and strong
She gallops by the fields along.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Another poem for the very young (and the young in heart).

None of the high-tech toys of today.

A GOOD PLAY

We built a ship upon the stairs
All made of the back-bedroom chairs,
And filled it full of soft pillows
To go a-sailing on the billows.

We took a saw and several nails,
And water in the nursery pails;
And Tom said, "Let us also take
An apple and a slice of cake;"--
Which was enough for Tom and me
To go a-sailing on, till tea.

We sailed along for days and days,
And had the very best of plays;
But Tom fell out and hurt his knee,
So there was no one left but me.

Robert Louis Stevenson

WHERE GO THE BOATS?

Dark brown is the river,
Golden is the sand.
It flows along for ever,
With trees on either hand.

Green leaves a-floating,
Castles of the foam,
Boats of mine a-boating -
Where will all come home?

On goes the river
And out past the mill,
Away down the valley,
Away down the hill.

Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore.

Robert Louis Stevenson

It derives from A.A. Milne's stories of Winnie-the-Pooh

BED IN SUMMER

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

Robert Louis Stevenson

Over the next few days I shall be posting here poems written by Robert Louis Stevenson especially for children

Better still, buy a book of children's poems, like the one below, and read to them from that.

WINTER-TIME

Late lies the wintry sun a-bed,
A frosty, fiery sleepy-head;
Blinks but an hour or two; and then,
A blood-red orange, sets again.

Before the stars have left the skies,
At morning in the dark I rise;
And shivering in my nakedness,
By the cold candle, bathe and dress.

Close by the jolly fire I sit
To warm my frozen bones a bit;
Or with a reindeer-sled, explore
The colder countries round the door.

When to go out, my nurse doth wrap
Me in my comforter and cap;
The cold wind burns my face, and blows
Its frosty pepper up my nose.

Black are my steps on silver sod;
Thick blows my frosty breath abroad;
And tree and house, and hill and lake,
Are frosted like a wedding cake.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson does a Betjeman !

YOU LOOKED SO TEMPTING IN THE PEW

You looked so tempting in the pew,
You looked so sly and calm -
My trembling fingers played with yours
As both looked out the Psalm.

Your heart beat hard against my arm,
My foot to yours was set,
Your loosened ringlet burned my cheek
Whenever they two met.

O little, little we hearkened, dear,
And little, little cared,
Although the parson sermonised,
The congregation stared.

Robert Louis Stevenson

This is the time of year when it is nice to snuggle down in front of a blazing fire - look into the flames and daydream.

But in Stevenson's time there were plenty of open fires and in today's poem he discovers a phantom army.

ARMIES IN THE FIRE

The lamps now glitter down the street;
Faintly sound the falling feet;
And the blue even slowly falls
About the garden trees and walls.

Now in the falling of the gloom
The red fire paints the empty room:
And warmly on the roof it looks,
And flickers on the back of books.

Armies march by tower and spire
Of cities blazing, in the fire;--
Till as I gaze with staring eyes,
The armies fall, the lustre dies.

Then once again the glow returns;
Again the phantom city burns;
And down the red-hot valley, lo!
The phantom armies marching go!

Blinking embers, tell me true
Where are those armies marching to,
And what the burning city is
That crumbles in your furnaces!

Robert Louis Stevenson

Having buried John Betjeman, I have been racking my brains to find another poet to present here.

RLS wrote the following poem in honour of his father.

The Muckle Flugga lighthouse.

TO MY FATHER

Peace and her huge invasion to these shores
Puts daily home; innumerable sails
Dawn on the far horizon and draw near;
Innumerable loves, uncounted hopes
To our wild coasts, not darkling now, approach;
Not now obscure, since thou and thine art there,
And bright on the lone isle, the foundered reef,
The long, resounding foreland, Pharos stands.

These are thy works, O father, these thy crown;
Whether on high the air be pure, they shine
Along the yellowing sunset, and all night
Among the unnumbered stars of God they shine;
Or whether fogs arise and far and wide
The low sea-level drown - each finds a tongue,
And all night long the tolling bell resounds:
So shine, so toll, till night be overpast,
Till the stars vanish, till the sun return,
And in the haven rides the fleet secure.

In the first hour, the seaman in his skiff
Moves through the unmoving bay, to where the town
Its earliest smoke into the air upbreathes
And the rough hazels climb along the beach.
To the tugg'd oar the distant echo speaks.
The ship lights have led her like a child.

This hast thou done, and I - can I be base?
I must arise, O father, and to port
Some lost, complaining seaman pilot home.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Note: The illustration is of one of the more than 30 lighthouses designed by Thomas Stevenson, the Muckle Flugga, built on the most northerly rock in the British Isles.

I leave Betjeman to sign off in his own words.

THE LAST LAUGH

I made hay while the sun shone.
My work sold.
Now, if the harvest is over
And the world cold,
Give me the bonus of laughter
As I lose hold.

John Betjeman

We are nearing the end, and in this poem Betjeman once again tests his faith.

GOOD-BYE

Some days before death
When food's tasting sour on my tongue,
Cigarettes long abandoned,
Disgusting now even champagne;
When I'm sweating a lot
From the strain on a last bit of lung
And lust has gone out
Leaving only the things of the brain;
More worthless than ever
Will seem all the songs I have sung,
More harmless the prods pf the prigs,
Remoter the pain,
More futile the Lord Civil Servant
As, rung upon rung,
He ascends by committees to roofs
Far below on the plain.
but better down there in the battle
Than here on the hill
With Judgement or nothingness waiting me,
Lonely and chill.

John Betjeman

I don't think I can say much about this poem of "lonely terror", except that it is something we have probably all seen in others and one day may ourselves experience.

"Had I faith, there'd be no fight."

FIVE O'CLOCK SHADOW

This is the time of day when we in the Men's ward
Think "one more surge of the pain and I give up the fight."
When he who struggles for breath can struggle less strongly:
This is the time of day which is worse than night.

A haze of thunder hangs on the hospital rose-beds,
A doctors' foursome out of 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."

This is the time of day when the weight of bedclothes
Is harder to bear than a sharp incision of steel.
The endless anonymous croak of a cheap transistor
Intensifies the lonely terror I feel.

John Betjeman

If there is a running theme in Betjeman's religious poetry, it is about the "honest doubt" which followed him all his life.

He was brought up in the Church of England and, apart from teenage atheism at Marlborough which led him to refuse confirmation (he was later confirmed when an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford) and a few years as a Quaker in the 1930s, he never left the Church, despite his wife Penelope converting to Roman Catholicism.

However, although his poems often affirm his faith, they also reveal his fears that it might be false - " Almighty Saviour, had I Faith - There'd be no fight with kindly Death."

Perhaps his views on Christianity were best expressed in his poem "The Conversion of St. Paul":

But most of us turn slow to see
The figure hanging on a tree
And stumble on and blindly grope
Upheld by intermittent hope.
God grant before we die we all
May see the light as did St. Paul.

BEFORE THE ANAESTHETIC,
OR - A REAL FRIGHT

Intolerably sad, profound
St. Giles's bells are ringing round,
They bring the slanting summer rain
To tap the chestnut boughs again
Whose shadowy cave of rainy leaves
The gusty belfry-song receives.
Intolerably sad and true,
Victorian red and jewel blue,
The mellow bells are ringing round
And charge the evening light with sound,
And I look motionless from bed
On heavy trees and purple red
And hear the midland bricks and tiles
Throw back the bells of stone St. Giles,
Bells, ancient now as castle walls,
Now hard and new as pitchpine stalls,
Now full with help from ages past,
Now dull with death and hell at last.
Swing up! and give me hope of life,
Swing down! and plunge the surgeon's knife.
I, breathing for a moment, see
Death wing himself away from me
And think, as on this bed I lie,
Is it extinction when I die?
I move my limbs and use my sight;
Not yet, thank God, not yet the Night.
Oh better far those echoing hells
Half-threaten'd in the pealing bells
Than that this "I" should cease to be -
Come quickly, Lord, come quick to me.
St. Giles's bells are asking now
"And hast thou known the Lord, hast thou?"
St. Giles's bells, they richly ring
"And was that Lord our Christ the King?"
St. Giles's bells they hear me call
I never knew the Lord at all.
Oh not in me your Saviour dwells
You ancient, rich St. Giles's bells.
Illuminated missals-spires-
Wide screens and decorated quires-
All these I loved, and on my knees
I thanked myself for knowing these
And watched the morning sunlight pass
Through richly stained Victorian glass
And in the colour-shafted air
I, kneeling, thought the Lord was there.
Now, lying in the gathering mist
I know that Lord did not exist;
Now, lest this "I"should cease to be,
Come, real Lord, come quick to me.
With every gust the chestnut sighs,
With every breath, a mortal dies;
The man who smiled alone, alone,
And went his journey on his own
With "Will you give my wife this letter,
In case, of course, I don't get better?"
Waits for his coffin lid to close
On waxen head and yellow toes.
Almighty Saviour, had I Faith
There'd be no fight with kindly Death.
Intolerably long and deep
St. Giles's bells swing on in sleep:
"But still you go from here alone"
Say all the bells about the Throne.

John Betjeman

Now don't say I didn't warn you; Over the next few days we are going to hospitals, getting close to illness - and to death.

Following yesterday's reminiscences, Betjeman is visiting another old friend - who is dying.

INEVITABLE

First there was putting hot-water bottles to it,
Then there was seeing what an osteopath could do,
Then trying drugs to coax the thing and woo it,
Then came the time when he knew that he was through.

Now in his hospital bed I see him lying
Limp on the pillows like a cast-off Teddy bear.
Is he too ill to know that he is dying?
And, if he does know, does he really care?

Grey looks the ward with November's overcasting
But his large eyes seem to see beyond the day;
Speech becomes sacred near silence everlasting
Oh if I must speak, have I words to say?

In the past weeks we had talked about Variety,
Vesta Victoria, Lew Lake and Wilkie Bard,
Horse-buses, hansoms, crimes in High Society -
Although we knew his death was near, we fought against it hard.

Now from his remoteness in a stillness unaccountable
He drags himself to earth again to say good-bye to me -
His final generosity when almost insurmountable
The barriers and mountains he has crossed again must be.

John Betjeman

Note: The reference to a teddy bear persuades me that, when writing this poem, Betjeman was probably thinking of his own illness and ultimate death. You may recall that "Archibald", his own teddy bear, accompanied him wherever he went.

Today JB is reflecting on friends who have passed on. Perhaps he is thinking - "Me next?"

OLD FRIENDS

The sky widens to Cornwall. A sense of sea
Hangs in the lichenous branches and still there's light.
The road from its tunnel of blackthorn rises free
To a final height,

And over the west is glowing a mackerel sky
Whose opal fleece has faded to purple pink.
In this hour of the late-lit, listening evening, why
Do my spirits sink?

The tide is high and a sleepy Atlantic sends
Exploring ripple on ripple down Polzeath shore,
And the gathering dark is full of the thought of friends
I shall see no more.

Where is Anne Channel who loved this place the best,
With her tense blue eyes and her shopping-bag falling apart,
And her racy gossip and nineteen-twenty zest,
And warmth of heart?

Where's Roland, easing his most unwieldy car,
With its load of golf-clubs, backwards into the lane?
Where's Kathleen Stokes with her Sealyhams? There's Doom Bar;
Bray Hill shows plain;

For this is the turn, and the well-known trees draw near;
On the road their pattern in moonlight fades and swells:
As the engine stops, from two miles off I hear
St Minver bells.

What a host of stars in a wideness still and deep:
What a host of souls, as a motor-bike whines away
And the silver snake of the estuary curls to sleep
In Daymer Bay.

Are they one with the Celtic saints and the years between?
Can they see the moonlit pools where ribbonweed drifts?
As I reach our hill, I am part of a sea unseen -
And oppression lifts.

John Betjeman

Betjeman, had strong views on planners, as we have seen in earlier poems posted here.

This poem, advocating 'workers' flats' and 'modern factories' is very much tongue-in-cheek.

THE TOWN CLERK'S VIEWS

"Yes, the Town Clerk will see you." In I went.
He was, like all Town Clerks, from north of Trent;
A man with bye-laws busy in his head
Whose Mayor and Council followed where he led.
His most capacious brain will make us cower,
His only weakness is a lust for power -
And that is not a weakness, people think,
When unaccompanied by bribes or drink.
So let us hear this cool careerist tell
His plans to turn our country into hell.
"I cannot say how shock'd I am to see
The variations in our scenery.
Just take for instance, at a casual glance,
Our muddled coastline opposite to France:
Dickensian houses by the Channel tides
With old hipp'd roofs and weather-boarded sides.
I blush to think one corner of our isle
Lacks concrete villas in the modern style.
Straight lines of hops in pale brown earth of Kent,
Yeomen's square houses once, no doubt, content
With willow-bordered horse-pond, oast-house, shed,
Wide orchard, garden walls of browny-red -
All useless now, but what fine sites they'ld be
For workers' flats and some light industry.
Those lumpy church towers, unadorned with spires,
And wavy roofs that burn like smouldering fires
In sharp spring sunlight over ashen flint
Are out of date as some old aquatint.
Then glance below the line of Sussex downs
To stucco terraces of seaside towns
Turn'd into flats and residential clubs
Above the wind-slashed Corporation shrubs.
Such Georgian relics should by now, I feel,
Be all rebuilt in glass and polished steel.
Bournemouth is looking up. I'm glad to say
That modernistic there has come to stay.
I walk the asphalt paths of Branksome Chine
In resin-scented air like strong Greek wine
And dream of cliffs of flats along those heights,
Floodlit at night with green electric lights.
But as for Dorset's flint and Purbeck stone,
Its old thatched farms in dips of down alone -
It should be merged with Hants and made to be
A self-contained and plann'd community.
Like Flint and Rutland, it is much too small
And has no reason to exist at all.
Of Devon one can hardly say the same,
But "South-West Area One " 's a better name
For those red sandstone cliffs that stain the sea
By mid-Victoria's Italy - Torquay.
And "South-West Area Two" could well include
The whole of Cornwall from Land's End to Bude.
Need I retrace my steps through other shires?
Pinnacled Somerset? Northampton's spires?
Burford's broad High Street is descending still
Stone-roofed and golden-walled her elmy hill
To meet the river Windrush. What a shame
Her houses are not brick and all the same
Oxford is growing up to date at last.
Cambridge, I fear, is living in the past.
She needs more factories, not useless things
Like that great chapel which they keep at King's.
As for remote East Anglia, he who searches
Finds only thatch and vast, redundant churches.
But that's the dark side. I can safely say
A beauteous England's really on the way.
Already our hotels are pretty good
For those who're fond of very simple food -
Cod and two veg., free pepper, salt and mustard,
Followed by nice hard plums and lumpy custard,
A pint of bitter beer for one-and-four,
Then coffee in the lounge a shilling more.
In a few years this country will be looking
As uniform and tasty as its cooking.
Hamlets which fail to pass the planners' test
Will be demolished. We'll rebuild the rest
To look like Welwyn mixed with Middle West.
All fields we'll turn to sports grounds, lit at night
From concrete standards by fluorescent light:
And over all the land, instead of trees,
Clean poles and wire will whisper in the breeze.
We'll keep one ancient village just to show
What England once was when the times were slow -
Broadway for me. But here I know I must
Ask the opinion of our National Trust.
And ev'ry old cathedral that you enter
By then will be an Area Culture Centre.
Instead of nonsense about Death and Heaven
Lectures on civic duty will be given;
Eurhythmic classes dancing round the spire,
And economics courses in the choir.
So don't encourage tourists. Stay your hand
Until we've really got the country plann'd.

John Betjeman

My illustration shows the red cliffs of Budleigh Salterton, in Devon.

Betjeman is at it again - immersed in death and grief - this time for a no doubt wealthy Company Director.

VARIATION ON A THEME BY NEWBOLT

The City will see him no more at important meetings
In Renaissance board rooms by Edwin Cooper designed;
In his numerous clubs the politely jocular greetings
Will be rather more solemn to-day with his death in mind.

Half mast from a first floor window, the Company's bunting
Flops over Leadenhall Street in this wintry air
And his fellow directors, baulked of a good day's hunting
Nod gloomily back to the gloomy commissionaire.

His death will be felt through the whole of the organization,
In every branch of its vast managerial tree,
His brother-in-law we suppose will attend the cremation,
A service will later be held in St. Katherine Cree.

But what of his guns? - he was always a generous giver.
(Oh yes, of course, we will each of us send a wreath),
His yacht? and his shoot? and his beautiful reach of river?
And all the clubs in his locker at Walton Heath?

I do not know, for my mind sees one thing only,
A luxurious bedroom looking on miles of fir
From a Surrey height where his widow sits silent and lonely
For the man whose love seemed wholly given to her.

John Betjeman

Note: 'Newbolt', referred to in he title, is Henry Newbolt, an early 20th century English poet, who is probably best remembered for his poem Vitaï Lampada, which refers to how a future soldier learns stoicism in cricket matches in the famous Close at Clifton College:

How many of you remember the Festival of Britain in 1951?

Well, today's Betjeman poem is about that area of London, along the river, and you will note that he mentions the shot tower. However, the period he describes is long before the Skylon and the Dome of Discovery.

BLACKFRIARS

By the shot tower near the chimneys,
Off the road to Waterloo,
Stands the cottage of "The Aged"
As in eighteen-forty-two.
Over brickwork, brownish brickwork,
Lilac hangs in London sun
And by light fantastic clockwork
Moves the drawbridge, sounds the gun.
When the sunset in the side streets
Brought the breezes up the tide,
Floated bits of daily journals,
Stable smells and silverside.
And the gaslight, yellow gaslight,
Flaring in its wiry cage,
Like the Prison Scene in Norval
On the old Olympic stage,
Lit the archway as the thunder,
And the rumble and the roll,
Heralded a little handcart,
And "The Aged" selling coal.

John Betjeman

Not, I feel, one of his best poems - but it gives me an excuse to introduce it with one of my little personal reminiscences.

But that is another story!

You all know now that I was born in Essex.

However, as in yesterday's poem, he is bemoaning urban intrusion - as London spreads outwards, devouring the countryside.

HERTFORDSHIRE

I had forgotten Hertfordshire,
The large unwelcome fields of roots
Where with my knickerbockered sire
I trudged in syndicated shoots;

And that unlucky day when I
Fired by mistake into the ground
Under a Lionel Edwards sky
And felt disapprobation round.

The slow drive home by motor-car,
A heavy Rover Landaulette,
Through Welwyn, Hatfield, Potters Bar,
Tweed and cigar smoke, gloom and wet:

"How many times must I explain
The way a boy should hold a gun?"
I recollect my father's pain
At such a milksop for a son.

And now I see these fields once more
Clothed, thank the Lord, in summer green,
Pale corn waves rippling to a shore
The shadowy cliffs of elm between,

Colour-washed cottages reed-thatched
And weather-boarded water mills,
Flint churches, brick and plaster patched,
On mildly undistinguished hills -

They still are there. But now the shire
Suffers a devastating change,
Its gentle landscape strung with wire,
Old places looking ill and strange.

One can't be sure where London ends,
New towns have filled the fields of root
Where father and his business friends
Drove in the Landaulette to shoot;

Tall concrete standards line the lane,
Brick boxes glitter in the sun:
Far more would these have caused him pain
Than my mishandling of a gun.

John Betjeman

Betjeman is in ironic mood, talking about the Town Planners and rural re-development - although I have never heard the word "Planster" before.

His invention?

THE PLANSTER'S VISION

Cut down that timber! Bells, too many and strong,
Pouring their music through the branches bare,
From moon-white church-towers down the windy air
Have pealed the centuries out with Evensong.

Remove those cottages, a huddled throng!
Too many babies have been born in there,
Too many coffins, bumping down the stair,
Carried the old their garden paths along.

I have a Vision of The Future, chum,
The workers' flats in fields of soya beans
Tower up like silver pencils, score on score:
And Surging Millions hear the Challenge come
From microphones in communal canteens
"No Right! No Wrong! All's perfect, evermore."

John Betjeman

I know it is still some way ahead, but Christmas is rapidly approaching.

Here today is one of Betjeman's best known and well-loved poems on the subject.

CHRISTMAS

The bells of waiting Advent ring,
The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
Has caught the streaks of winter rain
In many a stained-glass window sheen
From Crimson Lake to Hooker's Green.

The holly in the windy hedge
And round the Manor House the yew
Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,
The altar, font and arch and pew,
So that the villagers can say
"The church looks nice" on Christmas Day.

Provincial public houses blaze
And Corporation tramcars clang,
On lighted tenements I gaze
Where paper decorations hang,
And bunting in the red Town Hall
Says "Merry Christmas to you all."

And London shops on Christmas Eve
Are strung with silver bells and flowers
As hurrying clerks the City leave
To pigeon-haunted classic towers,
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky.

And girls in slacks remember Dad,
And oafish louts remember Mum,
And sleepless children's hearts are glad,
And Christmas-morning bells say "Come!"
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.

And is it true? And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,
No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -

That God was Man in Palestine
And lives to-day in Bread and Wine.

John Betjeman

His car speeds down the city street - but so does a tram . . .

EXETER

The doctor's intellectual wife
Sat under the ilex tree
The Cathedral bells pealed over the wall
But never a bell heard she
And the sun played shadowgraphs on her book
Which was writ by A. Huxley.

Once those bells, those Exeter bells
Called her to praise and pray
By pink, acacia-shaded walls
Several times a day
To Wulfric's altar and riddel posts
While the choir sang Stanford in A.

The doctor jumps in his Morris car,
The surgery door goes bang,
Clash and whirr down Colleton Crescent,
Other cars all go hang
My little bus is enough for us -
Till a tram-car bell went clang.

They brought him in by the big front door
And a smiling corpse was he;
On the dining-room table they laid him out
Where the Bystanders used to be
The Tatler, The Sketch and The Bystander
For the canons' wives to see.

Now those bells, those Exeter bells
Call her to praise and pray
By pink, acacia-shaded walls
Several times a day
To Wulfric's altar and riddel posts
And the choir sings Stanford in A.

John Betjeman

Has your attention ever wandered during a church service?

LENTEN THOUGHTS OF A HIGH ANGLICAN

Isn't she lovely, "the Mistress"?
With her wide-apart grey-green eyes,
The droop of her lips and, when she smiles,
Her glance of amused surprise?

How nonchalantly she wears her clothes,
How expensive they are as well!
And the sound of her voice is as soft and deep
As the Christ Church tenor bell.

But why do I call her "the Mistress"
Who know not her way of life?
Because she has more of a cared-for air
Than many a legal wife.

How elegantly she swings along
In the vapoury incense veil;
The angel choir must pause in song
When she kneels at the altar rail.

The parson said that we shouldn't stare
Around when we come to church,
Or the Unknown God we are seeking
May forever elude our search.

But I hope that the preacher will not think
It unorthodox and odd
If I add that I glimpse in "the Mistress"
A hint of the Unknown God.

John Betjeman

(*) "Red hat and no knickers"

In Betjeman's day the idea of an Indian priest in a remote country parish would be 'unusual' - to say the least.

Betjeman seems more interested in the church building.

A LINCOLNSHIRE CHURCH

Greyly tremendous the thunder
Hung over the width of the wold
But here the green marsh was alight
In a huge cloud cavern of gold,
And there, on a gentle eminence,
Topping some ash trees, a tower
Silver and brown in the sunlight,
Worn by sea-wind and shower,
Lincolnshire Middle Pointed.
And around it, turning their backs,
The usual sprinkle of villas;
The usual woman in slacks,
Cigarette in her mouth,
Regretting Americans, stands
As a wireless croons in the kitchen
Manicuring her hands.
Dear old, bloody old England
Of telegraph poles and tin,
Seemingly so indifferent
And with so little soul to win.
What sort of church, I wonder?
The path is a grassy mat,
And grass is drowning the headstones
Sloping this way and that.
"Cathedral Glass" in the windows,
A roof of unsuitable slate -
Restored with a vengeance, for certain,
About eighteen-eighty-eight.
The door swung easily open
(Unlocked, for these parts, is odd)
And there on the South aisle altar
Is the tabernacle of God.
There where the white light flickers
By the white and silver veil,
A wafer dipped in a wine-drop
Is the Presence the angels hail,
Is God who created the Heavens
And the wide green marsh as well
Who sings in the sky with the skylark
Who calls in the evening bell,
Is God who prepared His coming
With fruit of the earth for his food
With stone for building His churches
And trees for making His rood.
There where the white light flickers,
Our Creator is with us yet,
To be worshipped by you and the woman
Of the slacks and the cigarette.
The great door shuts, and lessens
That roar of churchyard trees
And the Presence of God Incarnate
Has brought me to my knees.
"I acknowledge my transgressions"
The well-known phrases rolled
With thunder sailing over
From the heavily clouded wold.
"And my sin is ever before me."
There in the lighted East
He stood in that lowering sunlight,
An Indian Christian priest.
And why he was here in Lincolnshire
I neither asked nor knew,
Nor whether his flock was many
Nor whether his flock was few
I thought of the heaving waters
That bore him from sun glare harsh
Of some Indian Anglican Mission
To this green enormous marsh.
There where the white light flickers,
Here, as the rains descend,
The same mysterious Godhead
Is welcoming His friend.

John Betjeman

It is 1911 and Betjeman is in 'Mansionland' - the fashionable 'red cliff' apartment blocks of North London, inhabited by the middle-class.

He is being forcibly fed by the nursery-maid.

NW5 & N6

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 chrysalis 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.

John Betjeman

Postscript:

Gloria Patri: "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

(Cal Thomas - Washington Post columnist)

JB is in my present home county of Surrey.

It is Autumn and a young lady is being taken home by a dashing Liutenant in his 'rakish car'.

LOVE IN A VALLEY

Take me, Lieutenant, to that Surrey homestead!
Red comes the winter and your rakish car,
Red among the hawthorns, redder than the hawberries
And trails of old man's nuisance, and noisier far.
Far, far below me roll the Coulsdon woodlands,
White down the valley curves the living rail,
Tall, tall, above me, olive spike the pinewoods,
Olive against blue-black, moving in the gale.

Deep down the drive go the cushioned rhododendrons,
Deep down, sand deep, drives the heather root,
Deep the spliced timber barked around the summer-house,
Light lies the tennis-court, plantain underfoot.
What a winter welcome to what a Surrey homestead!
Oh! the metal lantern and white enamelled door!
Oh! the spread of orange from the gas-fire on the carpet!
Oh! the tiny patter, sandalled footsteps on the floor!

Fling wide the curtains! - that's a Surrey sunset
Low down the line sings the Addiscombe train,
Leaded are the windows lozenging the crimson,
Drained dark the pines in resin-scented rain.
Portable Lieutenant! they carry you to China
And me to lonely shopping in a brilliant arcade;
Firm hand, fond hand, switch the giddy engine!
So for us a last time is bright light made.

John Betjeman

Note: I believe that "Old Man's Nuisance" is probably "Old Man's Beard" - an attractive lichen that adorns hedgerows in Autumn.

When I was a youngster I spent many happy holidays with the family sailing on the Norfolk Broads.

On several occasions we moored in Horsey Mere and walked the short distance over the sand-dunes to the beach for a swim in the icy water of the North Sea.

Then back for a warming drink or meal.

It seems that John Betjeman did the same.

Horsey Beach

EAST ANGLIAN BATHE

Oh when the early morning at the seaside
Took us with hurrying steps from Horsey Mere
To see the whistling bent-grass on the leeside
And then the tumbled breaker-line appear,
On high, the clouds with mighty adumbration
Sailed over us to seaward fast and clear
And jellyfish in quivering isolation
Lay silted in the dry sand of the breeze
And we, along the table-land of beach blown
Went gooseflesh from our shoulders to our knees
And ran to catch the football, each to each thrown,
In the soft and swirling music of the seas.

There splashed about our ankles as we waded
Those intersecting wavelets morning-cold,
And sudden dark a patch of sea was shaded,
And sudden light, another patch would hold
The warmth of whirling atoms in a sun-shot
And underwater sandstorm green and gold.
So in we dived and louder than a gunshot
Sea-water broke in fountains down the ear.
How cold the bathe, how chattering cold the drying,
How welcoming the inland reeds appear,
The wood-smoke and the breakfast and the frying,
And your warm freshwater ripples, Horsey Mere.

John Betjeman

1.
adumbration - the act of providing vague advance indications; representing beforehand, foreshadowing, prefiguration.

2.
adumbration - a sketchy or imperfect or faint representation - a creation that is a visual or tangible rendering of someone or something.

Betjeman is in his element at the idyllic English seaside.

The poem opens in the 1930s but, in the final verse we are in 1940 and the lights have gone out in Margate - as they did over most of Europe.

The Queen's Highcliffe Hotel, Margate

MARGATE 1940

From out The Queen's Highcliffe for weeks at a stretch
I watched how the mower evaded the vetch,
So that over the putting-course rashes were seen
Of pink and of yellow among the burnt green.

How restful to putt, when the strains of a band
Announced a thé dansant was on at The Grand,
While over the privet, comminglingly clear,
I heard lesser Co-Optimists down by the pier.

How lightly municipal, meltingly tarr'd,
Were the walks through the lawns by the Queen's Promenade
As soft over Cliftonville languished the light
Down Harold Road, Norfolk Road, into the night.

Oh! then what a pleasure to see the ground floor
With tables for two laid as tables for four,
And bottles of sauce and Kia-Ora and squash
Awaiting their owners who'd gone up to wash -

Who had gone up to wash the ozone from their skins
The sand from their legs and the rock from their chins,
To prepare for an evening of dancing and cards
And forget the sea-breeze on the dry promenades.

From third floor and fourth floor the children looked down
Upon ribbons of light in the salt-scented town;
And drowning the trams roared the sound of the sea
As it washed in the shingle the scraps of their tea.

Beside The Queen's Highcliffe now rank grows the vetch,
Now dark is the terrace, a storm-battered stretch;
And I think, as the fairy-lit sights I recall,
It is those we are fighting for, foremost of all.

John Betjeman

This poem is not yer typical JB !

A dark wet night in north London at pub closing time . . .

CLASH WENT THE BILLIARD BALLS

Clash went the billiard balls in the Clerkenwell Social Saloon.
Shut up the shutters and turn down the gas they'll be calling
the coppers in soon.
Goodnight, Alf!
Goodnight, Bert!
Goodnight, Mrs. Gilligan!
Rain in the archway, no trams in the street.
COP COP
Cop on the cobbleway
Quick little ladylike feet
"'Ard luck, ain't got a gentleman? "
"Not on a night like this, sweet "
"The Red lion, Myddleton, all the 'ole lot of 'em
Shut but a light in The Star
Counting the coppers to see what they've got of 'em
Glistening wet in the bar
32, 34, 36, 38, Gaskin's not back with 'is tart
Left the 'all door open gives 'imself airs 'e does
Thinks 'imself too bloody smart
Gas on in the 'all and it's we've got to pay for it
Damn these old stairs and this bug-ridden panelling
See 'im to-morrow what 'e's got to say for it
Get on the bed there and start."

John Betjeman

Several of my friends know my secret . . .

Here is Betjeman's take on that fabulous county.

Leigh-on-Sea at low tide

ESSEX

"The vagrant visitor erstwhile,"
My colour-plate book says to me,
"Could wend by hedgerow-side and stile,
From Benfleet down to Leigh-on-Sea."

And as I turn the colour-plates
Edwardian Essex opens wide,
Mirrored in ponds and seen through gates,
Sweet uneventful countryside.

Like streams the little by-roads run
Through oats and barley round a hill
To where blue willows catch the sun
By some white weather-boarded mill.

"A Summer Idyll Matching Tye"
"At Havering-atte-Bower, the Stocks"
And cobbled pathways lead the eye
To cottage doors and hollyhocks.

Far Essex, - fifty miles away
The level wastes of sucking mud
Where distant barges high with hay
Come sailing in upon the flood.

Near Essex of the River Lea
And anglers out with hook and worm
And Epping Forest glades where we
Had beanfeasts with my father's firm.

At huge and convoluted pubs
They used to set us down from brakes
In that half-land of football clubs
Which London near the Forest makes.

The deepest Essex few explore
Where steepest thatch is sunk in flowers
And out of elm and sycamore
Rise flinty fifteenth-century towers.

I see the little branch line go
By white farms roofed in red and brown,
The old Great Eastern winding slow
To some forgotten country town.

Now yarrow chokes the railway track,
Brambles obliterate the stile,
No motor coach can take me back
To that Edwardian "erstwhile".

John Betjeman

When I was a young boy we lived near Leigh-on-Sea and I remember my twin brother becoming stuck fast while walking across the "sucking mud". It was some way up his legs and I thought he would disappear. Fortunately, he was rescued by the Harbour Master, who had to put boards down to reach him.

Tomorrow (Friday) I shall be going into hospital for a minor operation

- so I may not be posting my blogs for a few days.

Here is a hint of what it is going to happen to me:

No - not castration!

They are operating on a hernia. (Mine is a double.)

I hope the surgeons will be more professional than this and, unlike this unfortunate patient, I shall not be awake to see what is going on.

Wish me luck!

I am in a rush today, as I shall explain in a later posting to all my blogs, so here is just a very short, sad and sombre Betjeman poem.

He despondently reflects on "the threat growing still greater within me" (Parkinson's Disease), which blighted his final years, and he compares his dwindling existence to the fruit in the apple orchards of Worcestershire.

FRUIT

Now with the threat growing still greater within me,
The Church dead that was hopelessly over-restored,
The fruit picked from these yellowing Worcestershire orchards
What is left to me, Lord?

To wait until next year's bloom at the end of the garden
Foams to the Malvern Hills, like an inland sea,
And to know that its fruit, dropping in autumn stillness,
May have outlived me.

John Betjeman

Note: Harking back to yesterday's poem, I have been asked what happened to Sir John Piers who, for a wager, seduced the young wife of Lord Concurry.

The story inspired a poem by John Betjeman about the seduction which begins with the gentry having a picnic on the shores of Lough Ennel in Co Westmeath."

Lough Ennel

Fête Champêtre

Oh, gay lapped the waves on the shores of Lough Ennel
And sweet smelt the breeze 'mid the garlic and fennel,
But sweeter and gayer than either of these
Were the songs of the birds in Lord Belvedere's trees.

The light skiff is push'd from the weed-waving shore,
The rowlocks creak evenly under the oar,
And a boatload of beauty darts over the tide,
The Baron Cloncurry and also his bride.

Lord Belvedere sits like a priest in the prow,
'Tis the Lady Mount Cashel sits next to him now.
And both the de Blacquieres to balance the boat,
Was so much nobility ever afloat?

The party's arranged on the opposite shore,
Lord Clonmore is present and one or two more,
But why has the Lady Cloncurry such fears?
Oh, one of the guests will be Baronet Piers.

The grotto is reached and the parties alight,
The feast is spread out, and begob! what a sight,
Pagodas of jelly in bowls of champagne,
And a tower of blancmange from the Baron Kilmaine.

In the shell-covered shelter the grotto affords
The meats and the pies are arranged on the boards,
The nobility laugh and are free from all worry
Excepting the bride of the Baron Cloncurry.

But his lordship is gayer than ever before,
He laughs like the ripples that lap the lake shore,
Nor thinks that his bride has the slightest of fears
Lest one of the guests be the Baronet Piers.

A curricle rolling along on the grass,
The servants make way to allow it to pass,
A high-stepping grey and the wheels flashing yellow
And Sir John in the seat, what a capital fellow!

Huzza for Sir John! and huzza for the fete,
For without his assistance no fete is complete;
Oh, gay is the garland the ladies will wreathe
For the handsomest blade in the County Westmeath.

The harness is off with a jingle of steel,
The grey in the grass crops an emerald meal,
Sir John saunters up with a smile and a bow
And the Lady Cloncurry is next to him now.

Her eyes on the landscape, she don't seem to hear
The passing remark he designs for her ear,
For smooth as a phantom and proud as a stork
The Lady Cloncurry continues her walk.

John Betjeman

Note: That is just the introduction to a rather long poem,

Listen to the first verse, set to music and sung by Mike Read, at:

http://www.emusic.com/album/Various-Artists-Karaoke-Words-Music-Sir-John-Betjeman-Mike-Read-MP3-Download/10963694.html

(Track 12 on Disc 2)

John Betjeman was concerned with the preservation of old churches in the United Kingdom - and also their 'sympathetic' restoration.

Here he ironically comments on those 'preservationists' who take away ecclesiastical items - either to sell for personal profit, or to install on their own property.

HYMN

The Church's Restoration
In eighteen-eighty-three
Has left for contemplation
Not what there used to be.
How well the ancient woodwork
Looks round the Rect'ry hall,
Memorial of the good work
Of him who plann'd it all.

He who took down the pew-ends
And sold them anywhere
But kindly spared a few ends
Work'd up into a chair.
O worthy persecution
Of dust! O hue divine!
O cheerful substitution,
Thou varnish‚d pitch-pine!

Church furnishing! Church furnishing!
Sing art and crafty praise!
He gave the brass for burnishing
He gave the thick red baize,
He gave the new addition,
Pull'd down the dull old aisle, -
To pave the sweet transition
He gave th' encaustic tile.

Of marble brown and vein‚d
He did the pulpit make;
He order'd windows stain‚d
Light red and crimson lake.
Sing on, with hymns uproarious,
Ye humble and aloof,
Look up! and oh how glorious
He has restored the roof!

John Betjeman

In this poem he combines his love of both.

DISTANT VIEW OF A PROVINCIAL TOWN

Beside those spires so spick and span
Against an unencumbered sky
The old Great Western Railway ran
When someone different was I.

St. Aidan's with the prickly nobs
And iron spikes and coloured tiles -
Where Auntie Maud devoutly bobs
In those enriched vermilion aisles:

St. George's where the mattins bell
But rarely drowned the trams for prayer -
No Popish sight or sound or smell
Disturbed that gas-invaded air -

St. Mary's where the Rector preached
In such a jolly friendly way
On cricket, football, things that reached
The simple life of every day:

And that United Benefice
With entrance permanently locked, -
How Gothic, grey and sad it is
Since Mr. Grogley was unfrocked!

The old Great Western Railway shakes
The old Great Western Railway spins -
The old Great Western Railway makes
Me very sorry for my sins.

John Betjeman

P.S. I wonder why Mr. Grogley was unfrocked?

Later today I shall be visiting Highbury and Islington in North London.

In "The Sandemanian Meeting House", Betjeman gives us the populace and the trams hurtling down the Holloway Road, always passing that fast-shut grained oak door, but little knowing or caring about the religious fervour within.

Robert Sandeman

THE SANDEMANIAN MEETING-HOUSE IN HIGHBURY QUADRANT

On roaring iron down the Holloway Road
The red trams and the brown trams pour,
And little each yellow-faced jolted load
Knows of the fast-shut grained oak door.

From Canonbury, Dalston and Mildmay Park
The old North London shoots in a train
To the long black platform, gaslit and dark,
Oh Highbury Station once and again.

Steam or electric, little they care,
Yellow brick terrace or terra-cotta hall,
White-wood sweet shop or silent square,
That the LORD OF THE SCRIPTURES IS LORD OF ALL.

Away from the barks and the shouts and the greetings,
Psalm-singing over and love-lunch done,
Listening to the Bible in their room for meetings,
Old Sandemanians are hidden from the sun.

John Betjeman

Note: Sandeman had a distinctive doctrine on the nature of faith, which is thus stated on his tombstone:

"The bare death of Jesus Christ without a thought or deed on the part of man, is sufficient to present the chief of sinners spotless before God."

Here is a very strange poem from John Betjeman about the great English novelist, short story writer, and poet Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928).

Betjeman's poem imagines Hardy's heart flying out of the grave to its Creator, accompanied by some of the characters from his novels; Tess from "Tess Of the Durbevilles", Jude from "Jude The Obscure" (his last two novels) and I believe and "His Worship", which I believe refers to "The Mayor Of Casterbridge".

Stinsford Church

THE HEART OF THOMAS HARDY

The heart of Thomas Hardy flew out of Stinsford churchyard
A little thumping fig, it rocketed over the elm trees.
Lighter than air it flew straight to where its Creator
Waited in golden nimbus, just as in eighteen sixty,
Hardman and son of Brum had depicted Him in the chancel.
Slowly out of the grass, slitting the mounds in the centre
Riving apart the roots, rose the new covered corpses
Tess and Jude and His Worship, various unmarried mothers,
Woodmen, cutters of turf, adulterers, church restorers,
Turning aside the stones thump on the upturned churchyard.
Soaring over the elm trees slower than Thomas Hardy,
Weighted down with a Conscience, now for the first time fleshly
Taking form as a growth hung from the feet like a sponge-bag.
There, in the heart of the nimbus, twittered the heart of Hardy
There, on the edge of the nimbus, slowly revolved the corpses
Radiating around the twittering heart of Hardy,
Slowly started to turn in the light of their own Creator
Died away in the night as frost will blacken a dahlia.

John Betjeman

Note: I have found a report saying that although Thomas Hardy requested that his heart be buried in Stinsford, it is not in fact there as, after it was removed from his body, it was stolen by a cat!

I am not sure that I believe that though.

A few years ago I stayed at Langton House in Dorset, now owned by the Holiday Property Bond, but formerly a boys' school.

It was only a short stroll down the grassy slope to 'Dancing Ledge' where, cut into the rock and filled by the tide, there is a small bathing pool which was used by the school.

This Betjeman poem brings it all back to me.

Dancing Ledge

HEARTS TOGETHER

How emerald the chalky depths
Below the Dancing Ledge!
We pulled the jelly-fishes up
And threw them in the hedge
That with its stones and sea-pink tufts
Ran to the high cliff edge.

And lucky was the jelly-fish
That melted in the sun
And poured its vitals on the turf
In self-effacing fun,
Like us who in each other's arms
Were seed and soul in one.

O rational the happy bathe
An hour before our tea,
When you were swimming breast-stroke, all
Along the rocking sea
And, in between the waves, explain'd
The Universe to me.

The Dorset sun stream'd on our limbs
And scorch'd our hinder parts{:}
We gazed into the pebble beach
And so discussed the arts,
O logical and happy we
Emancipated hearts.

John Betjeman

Dancing Ledge is part of the Jurassic Coast near Langton Matravers in the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, England. The 'Ledge' is a flat area of rock at the base of a small cliff (a little scrambling is required for access). It is signposted on the South West Coast Path a few kilometres west of Swanage. A swimming pool was blasted into the rock for the use of local preparatory schools sometime near the beginning of the twentieth century. The one remaining school (The Old Malthouse in Langton Matravers) for which the pool was originally created recently arranged for debris, including several large rocks, to be removed, making swimming possible once again. The sea is also suitable for swimming, although it is deep right up to shore. This depth was exploited by local quarrymen in transporting Purbeck Limestone away from the area.
Dancing Ledge is so called because the stone cut out of it is the same size as a ballroom dance floor. The stone removed was transported by ship direct from Dancing Ledge, round the south coast to Kent in order to construct Ramsgate harbour.

(Wikipedia))

Betjeman loved Diss in Norfolk above all East Anglian towns, and often said he was more proud of being president of the Diss Society than of being Poet Laureate.

Betjeman wrote this poem to her.

A MIND'S JOURNEY TO DISS

Dear Mary,

Yes, it will be bliss
To go with you by train to Diss,
Your walking shoes upon your feet;
We'll meet, my sweet, at Liverpool Street.
That levellers we may be reckoned
Perhaps we'd better travel second;
Or, lest reporters on us burst,
Perhaps we'd better travel first.
Above the chimney-pots we'll go
Through Stepney, Stratford-atte-Bow
And out to where the Essex marsh
Is filled with houses new and harsh
Till, Witham pass'd, the landscape yields
On left and right to widening fields,
Flint church-towers sparkling in the light,
Black beams and weather-boarding white,
Cricket-bat willows silvery green
And elmy hills with brooks between,
Maltings and saltings, stack and quay
And, somewhere near, the grey North Sea;
Then further gentle undulations
With lonelier and less frequent stations,
Till in the dimmest place of all
The train slows down into a crawl
And stops in silence.... Where is this?
Dear Mary Wilson, this is Diss.

John Betjeman

Note: One of the town's most famous citizens was John Skelton, Rector of Diss from 1504-1529, who was the childhood tutor of Henry V, and became Poet Laureate.

I have been looking for a Halloween poem from Betjeman.

This is the closest I can get.

LORD COZENS HARDY

Oh Lord Cozens Hardy
Your mausoleum is cold,
The dry brown grass is brittle
And frozen hard the mould
And where those Grecian columns rise
So white among the dark
Of yew trees and of hollies in
That corner of the park
By Norfolk oaks surrounded
Whose branches seem to talk,
I know, Lord Cozens Hardy,
I would not like to walk.

And even in the summer,
On a bright East-Anglian day
When round your Doric portico
Your children's children play
There's a something in the stillness
And our waiting eyes are drawn
From the butler and the footman
Bringing tea out on the lawn,
From the little silver spirit lamp
That burns so blue and still,
To the half-seen mausoleum
In the oak trees on the hill.

But when, Lord Cozens Hardy,
November stars are bright,
And the King's Head Inn at Letheringsett
Is shutting for the night,
The villagers have told me
That they do not like to pass
Near your curious mausoleum
Moon-shadowed on the grass
For fear of seeing walking
In the season of All Souls
That first Lord Cozens Hardy,
The Master of the Rolls.

John Betjeman

John Betjeman is in the park with a lady friend.

"Among the loud Americans, Zwei Englender were we."

IN THE PUBLIC GARDENS

In the Public Gardens,
To the airs of Strauss,
Eingang we're in love again
When ausgang we were aus.

The waltz was played, the songs were sung,
The night resolved our fears;
From bunchy boughs the lime trees hung
Their gold electroliers.

Among the loud Americans
Zwei Englender were we,
You so white and frail and pale
And me so deeply me;

I bought for you a dark-red rose,
I saw your grey-green eyes,
As high above the floodlights,
The true moon sailed the skies.

In the Public Gardens,
Ended things begin;
Ausgang we were out of love
Und eingang we are in.

John Betjeman

JB warns against emigrating to Spain.

THE COSTA BLANCA
(Two sonnets)

SHE

The Costa Blanca! Skies without a stain!
Eric and I at almond-blossom time
Came here and fell in love with it. The climb
Under the pine trees, up the dusty lane
To Casa Kenilworth, brought back again
Our honeymoon, when I was in my prime.
Good-bye democracy and smoke and grime{:}
Eric retires next year. We're off to Spain!
We've got the perfect site beside the shore,
Owned by a charming Spaniard, Miguel,
Who says that he is quite prepared to sell
And build our Casa for us and, what's more,
Preposterously cheaply. We have found
Delightful English people living round.

HE (Five years later)

Mind if I see your Mail? We used to share
Our Telegraph with people who've returned -
The lucky sods! I'll tell you what I've learned:
If you come out here put aside the fare
To England. I'd run like a bloody hare
If I'd a chance, and how we both have yearned
To see our Esher lawn. I think we've earned
A bit of what we had once over there.
That Dago caught the wife and me all right!
Here on this tideless, tourist-littered sea
We're stuck. You'd hate it too if you were me:
There's no piped water on the bloody site.
Our savings gone, we climb the stony path
Back to the house with scorpions in the bath.

John Betjeman

Today I offer you Betjeman's shortest poem - only six lines.

But it is a perfect little cameo of an unlikely relationship.

John Betjeman

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.

Note: The "very ordinary little woman" is believed to have been Alice Jennings, a married lady whom Betjeman met at the BBC.

While staying at nearby Birchington in the 1930s, John Betjeman wrote this poem about Westgate-on-Sea, which charmingly evokes the orderly, genteel holiday resort of the day.

WESTGATE-ON-SEA

Hark, I hear the bells of Westgate,
I will tell you what they sigh,
Where those minarets and steeples
Prick the open Thanet sky.

Happy bells of eighteen-ninety,
Bursting from your freestone tower!
Recalling laurel, shrubs and privet,
Red geraniums in flower.

Feet that scamper on the asphalt
Through the Borough Council grass,
Till they hide inside the shelter
Bright with ironwork and glass,

Striving chains of ordered children
Purple by the sea-breeze made,
Striving on to prunes and suet
Past the shops on the Parade.

Some with wire around their glasses,
Some with wire across their teeth,
Writhing frames for running noses
And the drooping lip beneath.

Church of England bells of Westgate!
On this balcony I stand,
White the woodwork wriggles round me,
Clock towers rise on either hand.

For me in my timber arbour
You have one more message yet,
"Plimsolls, plimsolls in the summer,
Oh goloshes in the wet!"

John Betjeman

Westgate-on-Sea is a seaside town in northeast Kent, England, with a population of 6,600.

Its two sandy beaches have remained a popular tourist attraction since the town's development in the 1860s from a small farming community.

CROYDON

In a house like that
Your Uncle Dick was born;
Satchel on back he walked to Whitgift
Every weekday morn.

Boys together in Coulsdon woodlands,
Bramble-berried and steep,
He and his pals would look for spadgers
Hidden deep.

The laurels are speckled in Marchmont Avenue
Just as they were before,
But the steps are dusty that still lead up to
Your Uncle Dick's front door.

Pear and apple in Croydon gardens
Bud and blossom and fall,
But your Uncle Dick has left his Croydon
Once for all.

John Betjeman

Notes:

'Spadger' is an old name for a sparrow - except in Australia, where it means something entirely different. Do your own research!

Betjeman is in "The Valley Of The Racehorse", an area of the Berkshire Downs, near Newbury - renowned for National Hunt racing, with more than 2,000 horses in training and over 50 racing yards.

He also seems obsessed by all things leathery!

UPPER LAMBOURNE

Up the ash-tree climbs the ivy,
Up the ivy climbs the sun,
With a twenty-thousand pattering
Has a valley breeze begun,
Feathery ash, neglected elder,
Shift the shade and make it run -

Shift the shade toward the nettles,
And the nettles set it free
To streak the stained Carrara headstone
Where, in nineteen-twenty-three,
He who trained a hundred winners
Paid the Final Entrance Fee.

Leathery limbs of Upper Lambourne,
Leathery skin from sun and wind,
Leathery breeches, spreading stables,
Shining saddles left behind -
To the down the string of horses
Moving out of sight and mind.

Feathery ash in leathery Lambourne
Waves above the sarsen stone,
And Edwardian plantations
So coniferously moan
As to make the swelling downland,
Far-surrounding, seem their own.

John Betjeman

'Carrara' is a type of marble, originally from Italy, used for headstones and memorials.

I said here yesterday that I was concluding my collection of Betjeman's verse with poems about his pet subjects of growing old, illness and death.

But I have decided that would be too gloomy, so I have selected others - from the bottom of my bag.

They are not my favourites, but some may appeal to you.

Let me know.

"On their way back they found the girls at Easedale, sitting
beside the cottage where they sell ginger beer in August."
('Peer and Heiress', Walter Besant.)

LAKE DISTRICT

I pass the cruet and I see the lake
Running with light, beyond the garden pine,
That lake whose waters make me dream her mine.
Up to the top board mounting for my sake,
For me she breathes, for me each soft intake,
For me the plunge, the lake and limbs combine.
I pledge her in non-alcoholic wine
And give the H. P. Sauce another shake.

Spirit of Grasmere, bells of Ambleside,
Sing you and ring you, water bells, for me;
You water-colour waterfalls may froth.
Long hiking holidays will yet provide
Long stony lanes and back at six to tea
And Heinz's ketchup on the tablecloth.

John Betjeman

The quotation below the picture was included by Betjeman as a header to his poem.

I am afraid I am exhausting my collection of Betjeman poems.

A simple, poignant little vignette of a woman who has survived the minor deprivations of wartime England and has now grown graciously old.

OXFORD: SUDDEN ILLNESS AT THE BUS-STOP

At the time of evening when cars run sweetly,
Syringas blossom by Oxford gates.
In her evening velvet with a rose pinned neatly
By the distant bus-stop a don's wife waits.

From that wide bedroom with its two branched lighting
Over her looking-glass, up or down,
When sugar was short and the world was fighting
She first appeared in that velvet gown.

What forks since then have been slammed in places?
What peas turned out from how many a tin?
From plate-glass windows how many faces
Have watched professors come hobbling in?

Too much, too many! so fetch the doctor,
This dress has grown such a heavier load
Since Jack was only a Junior Proctor,
And rents were lower in Rawlinson Road.

John Betjeman

It is 1925 and JB is at his first year at Magdalen College, Oxford.

I sympathise about the sore feet!

A HIKE ON THE DOWNS

'Yes, rub some soap upon your feet!
We'll hike round Winchester for weeks-
Like ancient Britons - just we two -
Or more perhaps like ancient Greeks.

'You take your pipe - that will impress
Your strength on anyone that passes;
I'll take my Plautus (non purgatus)
And both my pairs of horn-rimmed glasses.

'I've got my first, and now I know
What life is and what life contains -
For, being just a first year man
You don't meet all the first-class brains.

'Objectively, our Common Room
Is like a small Athenian State -
Except for Lewis: he's all right
But do you think he's quite first rate?

'Hampshire mentality is low,
And that is why they stare at us.
Yes, here's the earthwork - but it's dark;
We may as well return by bus.'

John Betjeman

Religion for Betjeman was inextricably tied up with fear—possibly the legacy of a Calvinist nanny.

But surely religion should not be like this. It should be joyful.

John Calvin

CALVINISTIC EVENSONG

The six bells stopped, and in the dark I heard
Cold silence wait the Calvinistic word;
For Calvin now the soft oil lamps are lit
Hands on their hymnals six old women sit.
Black gowned and sinister, he now appears
Curate-in-charge of aged parish fears.
Let, unaccompanied, that psalm begin
Which deals most harshly with the fruits of sin!
Boy! pump the organ! let the anthem flow
With promise for the chosen saints below!
Pregnant with warning the globed elm trees wait
Fresh coffin-wood beside the churchyard gate.
And that mauve hat three cherries decorate
Next week shall topple from its trembling perch
While wet fields reek like some long empty church.

John Betjeman

This poem has been described as Betjeman's most moving elegy.

Dr. Ramsden was a don at Oxford University and, as indicated in the poem, an expert on silk worms.

Pembroke College, Oxford

I. M. WALTER RAMSDEN OB. MARCH 26, 1947 PEMBROKE COLLEGE, OXFORD

Dr. Ramsden cannot read The Times obituary to-day
He's dead.
Let monographs on silk worms by other people be
Thrown away
Unread
For he who best could understand and criticize them, he
Lies clay
In bed.

The body waits in Pembroke College where the ivy taps the panes
All night;
That old head so full of knowledge, that good heart that kept the
brains
All right,
Those old cheeks that faintly flushed as the port suffused the veins,
Drain'd white.

Crocus in the Fellows' Garden, winter jasmine up the wall
Gleam gold.
Shadows of Victorian chimneys on the sunny grassplot fall
Long, cold.
Master, Bursar, Senior Tutor, these, his three survivors, all
Feel old.

They remember, as the coffin to its final obsequations
Leaves the gates,
Buzz of bees in window boxes on their summer ministrations,
Kitchen din,
Cups and plates,
And the getting of bump suppers for the long-dead generations
Coming in,
From Eights.

John Betjeman

Note: "bumps"

We return to "The Diary Of A Nobody" with the Pooters going visiting in North London.

The Pooters are invited to Sunday Dinner (Lunch).

Muswell Hill

THOUGHTS ON "THE DIARY OF A NOBODY"

The Pooters walked to Watney Lodge
One Sunday morning hot and still
Where public footpaths used to dodge
Round elms and oaks to Muswell Hill.

That burning buttercuppy day
The local dogs were curled in sleep,
The writhing trunks of flowery May
Were polished by the sides of sheep.

And only footsteps in a lane
And birdsong broke the silence round
And chuffs of the Great Northern train
For Alexandra Palace bound.

The Watney Lodge I seem to see
Is gabled gothic hard and red,
With here a monkey puzzle tree
And there a round geranium bed.

Each mansion, each new-planted pine,
Each short and ostentatious drive
Meant Morning Prayer and beef and wine
And Queen Victoria alive.

Dear Charles and Carrie, I am sure,
Despite that awkward Sunday dinner,
Your lives were good and more secure
Than ours at cocktail time in Pinner.

John Betjeman

Note: After reading the poem, go to www.kendrive.blog.co.uk where I have posted some extracts from the "Diary" which describe in more detail the visit to Watney Lodge.

It is all pretty mundane stuff, but it portrays a picture of Victorian England.

We are back at Letchworth - the 'First Garden City' Utopia, where I spent an enjoyable childhood.

GROUP LIFE: LETCHWORTH

Tell me Pippididdledum,
Tell me how the children are.
Working each for weal of all
After what you said.
Barry's on the common far
Pedalling the Kiddie Kar.
Ann has had a laxative
And Alured is dead.
Sympathy is stencilling
Her decorative leatherwork,
Wilfred's learned a folk-tune for
The Morris Dancers' band.
I have my ex-Service man and
Mamie's done a lino-cut.
And Charlie's in the kinderbank
A-kicking up the sand.
Wittle-tittle, wittle-tittle
Toodle-oodle ducky birds,
What a lot my dicky chicky
Tiny tots have done.
Wouldn't it be jolly now,
To take our Aertex panters off
And have a jolly tumble in
The jolly, jolly sun?

John Betjeman

Note: 'weal' = "The welfare of the community; the general good." A very laudable attitude in Letchworth at that time.

Of course, the whole poem is ironical satire.

A sad tale of a man with a religious conscience and a fearful load of sins.

SUICIDE ON JUNCTION ROAD STATION
AFTER ABSTENTION FROM EVENING
COMMUNION IN NORTH LONDON

With the roar of the gas my heart gives a shout -
To Jehovah Tsidkenu the praise!
Bracket and bracket go blazon it out
In this Evangelical haze!

Jehovah Jireh! the arches ring,
The Mintons glisten, and grand
Are the surpliced boys as they sweetly sing
On the threshold of glory land.

Jehovah Nisi! from Tufnell Park,
Five minutes to Junction Road,
Through grey brick Gothic and London dark,
And my sins, a fearful load.

Six on the upside! six on the down side!
One gaslight in the Booking Hall
And a thousand sins on this lonely station -
What shall I do with them all?

John Betjeman (1937)

Note: Junction Road railway station (originally Junction Road for Tufnell Park) was opened by the Tottenham & Hampstead Junction Railway on 1 January 1872. It was located at the corner of Junction Road and Station Road in N19, at the northern tip of Islington, London.

Today Betjeman presents us with a sad tale of the innocent friendship of a sensitive little boy growing up in Victorian England.

Shades of Oscar!

NARCISSUS

Yes, it was Bedford Park the vision came from -
De Morgan lustre glowing round the hearth,
And that sweet flower which self-love takes its name from
Nodding among the lilies in the garth,
And Arnold Dolmetsch touching the spinet,
And Mother, Chiswick's earliest suffragette.

I was a delicate boy - my parents' only -
And highly strung. My father was in trade.
And how I loved, when Mother left me lonely,
To watch old Martha spice the marmalade,
Or help with flower arrangements in the lobby
Before I went to find my playmate Bobby.

We'ld go for walks, we bosom boyfriends would
(For Bobby's watching sisters drove us mad),
And when we just did nothing we were good,
But when we touched each other we were bad.
I found this out when Mother said one day
She thought we were unwholesome in our play.

So Bobby and I were parted. Bobby dear,
I didn't want my tea. I heard your sisters
Playing at hide-and-seek with you quite near
As off the garden gate I picked the blisters.
Oh tell me, Mother, what I mustn't do -
Then, Bobby, I can play again with you.

For I know hide-and-seek's most secret places
More than your sisters do. And you and I
Can scramble into them and leave no traces,
Nothing above us but the twigs and sky,
Nothing below us but the leaf-mould chilly
Where we can warm and hug each other silly.

My Mother wouldn't tell me why she hated
The things we did, and why they pained her so.
She said a fate far worse than death awaited
People who did the things we didn't know,
And then she said I was her precious child,
And once there was a man called Oscar Wilde.

"Open your story book and find a tale
Of ladyes fayre and deeds of derring-do,
Or good Sir Gawaine and the Holy Grail,
Mother will read her boy a page or two
Before she goes, this Women's Suffrage Week,
To hear that clever Mrs Pankhurst speak.

Sleep with your hands above your head. That's right -
And let no evil thoughts pollute the dark. "
She rose, and lowered the incandescent light.
I heard her footsteps die down Bedford Park.
Mother where are you? Bobby, Bobby, where?
I clung for safety to my teddy bear.

John Betjeman

NOTES:

Arnold Dolmetsch (1858-1940), was a French-born musician and instrument maker who spent much of his working life in England. He was a leading figure in the twentieth century revival of interest in early music.

Betjeman takes us on a red electric train through the northern suburbs of London.

Watch out for the 'Murray Poshes' and the 'Lupin Pooters'!

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.

John Betjeman

'Murray Poshes' and 'Lupin Pooters'!

Lupin is jilted by his first fiancee, who marries Murray Posh, a rich man who makes three-shilling hats for the masses.

You can read the whole of the book online at:

http://www.cleavebooks.co.uk/grol/grossmith/diary00.htm

You can also listen to the introduction on librivox.org at:

http://ia301108.us.archive.org/2/items/diary_of_nobody_librivox/the_diary_of_a_nobody_00_grossmith_mac_64kb.mp3

Betjeman was passionate about the English countryside and a fierce campaigner against its desecration by urbanisation.

From the beginning it was a 'request' stop and incredibly trains still slow down in case anyone wants to flag them down.

DILTON MARSH HALT

Was it worth keeping the Halt open,
We thought as we looked at the sky
Red through the spread of the cedar-tree,
With the evening train gone by?

Yes, we said, for in summer the anglers use it,
Two and sometimes three
Will bring their catches of rods and poles and perches
To Westbury, home for tea.

There isn't a porter. The platform is made of sleepers.
The guard of the last train puts out the light
And high over lorries and cattle the Halt unwinking
Waits through the Wiltshire night.

O housewife safe in the comprehensive churning
Of the Warminster launderette!
O husband down at the depot with car in car-park!
The Halt is waiting yet.

And when all the horrible roads are finally done for,
And there's no more petrol left in the world to burn,
Here to the Halt from Salisbury and from Bristol
Steam trains will return.

John Betjeman

George Orwell spoke of: 'every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, nature cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England' as living there and in this poem Betjeman jumps on the band-wagon.

HUXLEY HALL

In the Garden City Caf‚ with its murals on the wall
Before a talk on "Sex and Civics" I meditated on the Fall.

Deep depression settled on me under that electric glare
While outside the lightsome poplars flanked the rose-beds in the square.

While outside the carefree children sported in the summer haze
And released their inhibitions in a hundred different ways.

She who eats her greasy crumpets snugly in the inglenook
Of some birch-enshrouded homestead, dropping butter on her book

Can she know the deep depression of this bright, hygienic hell?
And her husband, stout free-thinker, can he share in it as well?

Not the folk-museum's charting of man's Progress out of slime
Can release me from the painful seeming accident of Time.

Barry smashes Shirley's dolly, Shirley's eyes are crossed with hate,
Comrades plot a Comrade's downfall "in the interests of the State".

Not my vegetarian dinner, not my lime-juice minus gin,
Quite can drown a faint conviction that we may be born in Sin.

John Betjeman

Please also refer to my blog today at: www.kendrive.blog.co.uk

Public houses in Irish country towns are very often general merchants as well.

It was in just such a general shop as I have described that I might have found, pinned up among the notices for a local Feis, Gaelic football matches and Government proclamations, the following ballad, printed on emerald paper in a border of shamrocks.

THE SMALL TOWNS OF IRELAND

The small towns of Ireland by bards are neglected,
They stand there, all lonesome, on hilltop and plain.
The Protestant glebe house by beech trees protected
Sits close to the gates of his Lordship's demesne.

But where is his Lordship, who once in a phaeton
Drove out twixt his lodges and into the town?
Oh his tragic misfortunes I will not dilate on;
His mansion's a ruin, his woods are cut down.

His impoverished descendant is dwelling in Ealing,
His daughters must type for their bread and their board,
O'er the graves of his forebears the nettle is stealing
And few will remember the sad Irish Lord.

Yet still stands the Mall where his agent resided,
The doctor, attorney and such class of men.
The elegant fanlights and windows provided
A Dublin-like look for the town's Upper Ten.

'Twas bravely they stood by the Protestant steeple
As over the town rose their roof-trees afar.
Let us slowly descend to the part where the people
Do mingle their ass-carts by Finnegan's bar.

I hear it once more, the soft sound of those voices,
When fair day is filling with farmers the Square,
And the heart in my bosom delights and rejoices
To think of the dealing and drinking done there.

I see thy grey granite, O grim House of Sessions!
I think of the judges who sat there in state
And my mind travels back to our monster processions
To honour the heroes of brave Ninety-Eight.

The barracks are burned where the Redcoats oppressed us,
The gaol is broke open, our people are free.
Though Cromwell once cursed us, Saint Patrick has blessed us -
The merciless English have fled o'er the sea.