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'!
Murray Posh and Lupin Pooter are characters in "The Diary Of A Nobody" which in 1888-9 was a weekly serial in the satirical magazine 'Punch'. It was later later published as a book, with seven extra chapters. (Still in print - Amazon £1.49)
The diary portrays the everyday life of Charles Pooter, a conventional, priggish, strait-laced, lower middle class white collar worker living in a rented semi-detached house (with lace curtains and gnomes in the garden) in the newly developed but unfashionable suburb of Holloway.
"The Laurels", Brickfield Terrace, backs on to the railway where the vibration of the trains has cracked the garden wall.
The story relates his mishaps, his jokes, the rudeness of his friends, his daily domesticity, and also takes pot-shots at some of the fads of the day — bicycling, spiritualism, the Aesthetic movement, child rearing, and even the fashion for publishing diaries.
Pooter and his wife, Carrie, have a son called Lupin. He is twenty. (This is important because the age of majority was then twenty-one; Lupin, therefore, is a minor and still the legal responsibility of his father.) But Lupin is also wilful, wayward, reckless, money-grubbing, unscrupulous, and out of control.
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://www.neilemacview.blog.ca/main
16/10/07 @ 13:27