One afternoon in the late 1960s, our English teacher
Mr Mason put on a long-playing record for us to listen to. (He was the best
English teacher we had – was his first name really ‘James’ or did we just call
him that after the well-known actor?) Anyway, the record was of John Betjeman
(poet, broadcaster, writer) reading his poem A subaltern’s love song, a paean of passion for tennis-playing Miss
Joan Hunter Dunn.
For the first time, I was hearing poetry which used
what seemed to me to be contemporary language (although in fact already by the
1960s it was rather dated) and addressing everyday issues. Older poetry might deal
with similar themes, but in their lines experiences were expressed in complex language
which I didn’t yet have the linguistic skills to penetrate. But Betjeman – this
was visceral, powerful, real – I found in these lines an intense relevance
which others of my age probably found in the Beatles’ songs.
Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn
How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won.
And that evening, as speaker and girl sat in the
Hillman outside a Golf Club Ball which they never quite managed to enter, there
was a (to me) satisfactory conclusion:
We sat in the car park till twenty to one
And now I’m engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn
After this introduction to Betjeman I explored his
work, and came across some further lines (from Chapter VIII of the poet’s verse
autobiography Summoned by Bells)
which I was drawn to:
An only child, deliciously apart,
Misunderstood and not like other boys,
Deep, dark and pitiful I saw myself
In my mind’s mirror, every step I took
A fascinating study to the world.
The apartness and self-scrutiny of the only child
described here resonated with me, although I don’t think I would have described
the experience as ‘delicious’. I remember reading these lines to my mother, and
her suspicion (unarticulated) that Betjeman was claiming to be gay. Perhaps as
a teenager I was seeking to characterise myself as different, and somehow
eccentric as a way of coping with, or making a virtue of the difficulties I
found in relationships, and the poet’s words helped to authenticate the
difference I aspired to.
(Incidentally, I distinctly recall seeing in print
another version of the line ‘A fascinating study to the world’ – perhaps it was
from a draft? – which read ‘An object of absorbing interest’ which seems to me
to be more powerful and effective than the final version.)
The poignancy of another of Betjeman’s poems Five o’clock shadow has haunted me ever
since I first read it. It describes terror experienced in the men’s ward. The
doctors are playing a ‘foursome out on the links’ at the end of their shift;
Sister ‘is putting her feet up’; the visiting relatives, having done their bit,
are ‘making for home and a nice big tea and the telly.’ The patients (or at
least one patient) are left to their visceral fear and sense of abandonment.
‘This is the time of day when we feel betrayed’ and (a line of aching sadness) ‘this
is the time of day which is worse than night.’
I remember in the late 1980s staying overnight with
friends in the north of England on a trip down to Wales. It was at a time when
I was depressed and anxious, and overnight, unable to sleep because of heavy traffic
on the road outside, I had decided I simply couldn’t cope with the planned
holiday, and would (without telling my friends) head home in the morning rather
than continuing south. Sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for it to be time
to head downstairs for breakfast, I read the only interesting book in the room,
a copy of John Betjeman’s picture book for children, Archie and the strict Baptists. It’s a fictionalised version of
scenes from the life of Archie is the poet’s teddy to which (together with a
toy elephant) he was attached throughout his life. In the book, Archie appears
as a member of the Strict Baptist denomination – to which the folk I was
staying belonged.
One Christmas in the 1970s, my mother pointed out in
the Christmas issue of a women’s magazine the last three stanzas of Betjeman’s
poem Christmas.
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.
Could this man be a Christian, my mother wondered,
considering the issue from her very polarised perspective on whether one was ‘in’
or ‘out’. Was he saying it was true, or wasn’t he, she mused.
Well, John Betjeman had a long-term commitment to
the Anglican Church. He celebrated faith, but he also struggled with doubt, and
I believe the tension between believing and doubting is reflected in these
lines. Betjeman wrote to his friend
Evelyn Waugh in 1947 ‘I do know for certain that there is nothing else I want
to believe but that Our Lord was the son of God and all He said is true.’
And seven years later he wrote in the Spectator ‘The only practical way to
face the dreaded lonely journey into Eternity seems to me the Christian one. I
therefore try to believe that Christ was God, made Man and gives Eternal Life,
and that I may be confirmed in this belief by clinging to the sacraments and by
prayer.’ *
Betjeman concludes his poem on The Conversion of St Paul with these moving lines which speak to
all of us who ever find ourselves living, somewhere between faith and doubt:
What
is conversion? Not at all
For
me the experience of St Paul,
No
blinding light, a fitful glow
Is
all the light of faith I know
Which
sometimes goes completely out
And
leaves me plunging into doubt
Until
I will myself to go
And
worship in God's house below –
My
parish church -and even there
I
find distractions everywhere.
What is Conversion? Turning round
What is Conversion? Turning round
To
gaze upon a love profound.
For
some of us see Jesus plain
And
never once look back again,
And
some of us have seen and known
And
turned and gone away alone,
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.
*These quotations are from Faith and doubt of John Betjeman: An anthology of Betjeman’s religious
verse, Edited and introduced by Kevin J. Gardner, London, 2005 p xv
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