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.