King’s Cross and E M Forster

Among the many books I once owned, but do no longer, I would like to be able to open Sad Ires (1975), a slim volume of poems by D.J. Enright. Who now remembers Enright? In his own lifetime he was condescendingly written off as a poet in the following terms:

"Enright’s is a distinctive minor talent exercised by a humane intelligence that makes verse jottings on what life throws up here and there about the world to stimulate wry, rueful or deprecatory reflection."

(Harry Blamires, A Guide to Twentieth Century Literature in English, 1983)

Enright was better than that. Sad Ires contained a sequence of poems called ‘The Stations of King’s Cross’ that I admired and about which I thought last week when I found myself unexpectedly standing in the newly opened concourse of King’s Cross.

King’s Cross is not the first London terminus I ever visited. I must have arrived at Euston from Birmingham with my father when I was about four, and he took me to see the Changing of the Guard. I also have a dim memory of being shown the Golden Arrow boat train at Victoria. But King’s Cross is the station about which I have the most vivid memories. I first travelled from there to Peterborough, and thence to Tydd – a journey from the sublime to the miniscule - on 31^st August 1956. A few years afterwards I saw my grandmother for the last time when she waved goodbye to us on Platform 6. Later, I used to catch the 11 o’clock to Durham at the start of each university term; and once I arrived back at King’s Cross in the very early hours of a Saturday morning, 13^th  June 1970. I sat on a hard bench on Platform 8 for two hours until I could sit no longer, so set out on foot across London to Waterloo and caught a slow train to Leatherhead for the funeral of my best friend.

It’s all change at Platform 8 now. The old station gives way to the new. Long gone the hard bench, the beery old Bar and the Stygian gents’ loos. The new entrance fills the space between the Great Northern Hotel and the western flank of the station, curving round under a spectacular new honeycomb roof towards St Pancras– as if determined not to be outdone by its international next-door neighbour.

There’s an intriguing passage in Howards End, where E M Forster describes the feelings of his heroine, Margaret Schlegel, towards the two stations, as she conducts her aunt, Mrs Munt, to King’s Cross for her ill-fated mission to rescue Helen Schlegel from her precipitate engagement to Paul Wilcox:

To Margaret – I hope that it will not set the reader against her – the station of King’s Cross had always suggested infinity. Its very situation – withdrawn a little behind the facile splendours of St Pancras – implied a comment on the materialism of life. Those great arches, colourless, indifferent, shouldering between them an unlovely clock, were fit portals for some eternal adventure, whose issue might be prosperous, but would certainly not be expressed in the ordinary language of prosperity. If you think this ridiculous, remember that it is not Margaret who is telling you about it; and let me hasten to add that they were in plenty of time for the train; that Mrs Munt secured a comfortable seat, facing the engine, but not too near it; and that Margaret, on her return to Wickham Place, was confronted with the following telegram:

All over. Wish I had never written. Tell no one. - Helen

But Aunt Juley was gone – gone irrevocably, and no power on earth could stop her. (Ch. II)

This is a masterly piece of indirection: under the guise first of telling us what Margaret thinks about the two stations (“But don’t tell her I told you she thinks this,” gossips the narrator, tugging gently at the reader’s sleeve) and then of  explaining how Mrs Munt gets herself safely settled for her journey, Forster withholds the key information, until it is too late for Mrs Munt and too late for us, that the journey will be not only needless but disastrous. In a move that is typical of Forster, the disaster has happened before we have been allowed to notice it. The consequences of an act, rather than the act itself, always matter more in Forster’s fiction.

And yet, in terms of the novel as a whole, Margaret is quite right about King’s Cross: it is the gateway to Howards End, and thus to the infinite and as yet unimaginable possibilities that Howards End will offer her and her sister. It will be, for them both, an ‘eternal adventure’. It’s characteristic of Forster, too, to have preferred the ‘colourless, indifferent’ arches of King’s Cross to the ‘facile splendours’ of Gilbert Scott’s St. Pancras.

How do the two stations compare today, emerging from their recent make-overs? Both have been transformed - St Pancras more, of course, than its neighbour. I like the imaginative creation of space in both places. I enjoy the upper and lower levels of St Pancras, and the cafés with their seats outside help to make the atmosphere feel relaxed: not everyone is rushing all the time, and if you are waiting for your Eurostar train to be called there is space and to spare. At King’s Cross, the new concourse under its great glass lattice ceiling (echoing the Norman Foster roof of the British Museum’s Great Court), feels - at least for the moment - wonderfully spacious. Each station, it now seems, adds a sense of occasion to arrival or departure.

But there is one big difference. At King’s Cross I have the feeling of being in a space enclosed, almost submerged: this is partly because a large section of the glass roof is actually darkened. By contrast, St Pancras is a space opened up: the new concourse is located in the old cellars below the original platforms, but with the roof removed: you look up and up, to and through the great glass span of the train shed’s magnificent roof – in its day, the widest single-span vault ever built. And everywhere the cast iron pillars and the great girders of the roof are painted in their original light-sky hue, named now, I’m proud to say, after the eminent Victorian engineer responsible for the roof, English Heritage Barlow Blue.

Adrian Barlow

[photo: King’s Cross station, new concourse

My new book, Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning, has now been published by Lutterworth Press. For details and first reviews, click here.

Short measures (i): William Blake and Eternity’s Sunrise

                 In small proportions we just beauties see

                 And in short measures, Life may perfect be.

                                                                            Ben Jonson

‘Short measures’ – here, short poems. I’m going to start an occasional series in which I discuss very short poems. No more than eight lines, often fewer. Perhaps ten but certainly shorter than a sonnet, sometimes much shorter. Translations allowed, and suggestions welcomed.

What is there to say about a poem so short it may be no more than a couple of lines? What can such a poem add to the conversation between poems, poets and readers of poetry – a conversation that goes backwards and forwards across time and cultures? I’m starting with a poem by William Blake: ‘Eternity’ in four lines.

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the wingéd life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

This quatrain, with its two pairs of rhyming lines, works by contrasts. It balances negatives against positives: the life-denying destructiveness of a selfish act set against the reward of a selfless gesture. What is ‘a joy’, however? To King Lear dividing his kingdom among his daughters, his favourite child Cordelia is ‘our joy’, the person who most gladdens his heart. And when Bassanio selects the lead casket in The Merchant of Venice, hoping to win Portia, he says, ‘Here choose I, joy be the consequence.’

Poets a generation later than Blake tended to see joy not necessarily embodied in a person: to Keats, ‘a thing of beauty is a joy forever’; when Wordsworth found himself ‘Surprised by joy’ he was ‘impatient as the wind … to share the transport’. Importantly, he does not wish to keep the joy to himself: ‘I turned to thee’. Nor did Byron in Childe Harold: on the Eve of Waterloo, the cry goes up, ‘On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined!’

Byron is here using ‘joy’ in the same way as Macbeth at his banquet, proposing a toast ‘to the general joy of the whole table’. Blake’s joy, though, even though it is not specified, is a specific thing (‘a joy … the joy’) with a life of its own.  Any attempt to imprison the ‘wingéd life’, to keep it for oneself, deserves to be condemned. We remember the lines from ‘Auguries of Innocence’:

A robin redbreast in a cage

Puts all Heaven in a rage.

Joy, Blake suggests, is fleeting: the wingéd life is always in flight, and the trick is not to capture, but kiss it – to share it and help it on its way. Nearer to our own time, at the end of the 1930s, Louis MacNeice makes this point in ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’: ‘You cannot cage the minute / Within its nets of gold’. And here is Auden:

Moments of happiness do not come often,

Opportunity’s easy to miss.

O let us seize them, of all their joys squeeze them,

For tomorrow will come when none may kiss.

Here, however, such carpe diem anxiety comes dangerously close to what Blake condemns: squeezing all the joy out of a rare moment of happiness is as bad as binding it to oneself. And in Auden’s lines (which come originally from his 1936 play The Ascent of F6) anxiety is heightened by the fear of tomorrow – specifically, the fear of looming war; existentially, the fear of death. This empty tomorrow recalls the ‘deserts of vast eternity’ in Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’, but this is a very different eternity from Blake’s. In his climactic phrase ‘eternity’s sunrise’, Blake juxtaposes against empty endlessness – what Thomas Hardy called ‘wan wistlessness’ – the promise of hopefulness. Living in Eternity’s sunrise is not a definition of joy (though it could be), it’s the reward for acknowledging, but not appropriating, joy.

For Wordsworth, just after Blake, sunrise is a mystical and transformative experience: ‘Ne’er saw I, never felt a calm so deep,’ he recalls after watching from Westminster Bridge the sun rising over London. Blake’s sunrise, too, is not just a spectacle, it is all-involving. To ‘live in’ eternity’s sunrise is to become, the poet implies, a part of the activity of continuous creation: to cite Wordsworth again, it is to have a

                                                 sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused ….

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. (from ‘Tintern Abbey’)

Wordsworth is here the great interpreter, with his stately piling up in blank verse of phrases, clauses and repetitions - four ‘all’s in two lines. Blake by contrast condenses ‘Eternity’ (the title of his poem) into a single verse, using a metrical form that at first seems almost like a nursery rhyme. The obvious way to scan the poem would go like this:

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the wingéd life destroy,

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

Four ploddingly predictable stresses per line dull the sense of the poem. It is no small part of Blake’s artistry that this short piece invites the reader to think, and re-think, what might be a better way to let the lines speak. I don’t expect you to agree, but here is my suggestion:

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the wingéd life destroy

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sun-rise.

The adjacent stressing of flies / lives, emphasized by the running on from one line to the next, creates a momentum that carries the poem towards its climax. By a nice metrical irony, Blake allows us no time to linger over eternity:  it’s on the final word of the poem he wants us to dwell, sun-rise - a word of two stresses and infinite promise.

Adrian Barlow

[illustration: William Blake, from an engraving of a portrait by Thomas Phillips (1802)

[photo by Faye Steer. See Truly a Well-wrought Urn

My new book, Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning, has now been published by Lutterworth Press. For details and first reviews, click here.

Truly, a well-wrought urn

High summer in early Spring: on a day that will set records for March, we drive across the Cotswolds in search of Whichford Pottery. We have come to inspect an urn that has been commissioned to stand in a corner of the gardens at Madingley Hall, where I used to work. The new urn will replace one that had stood in this same corner ever since the Topiary Garden, at the western end of the north terrace, was laid out around the time of the First World War. The old urn had succumbed to frost and was in danger of collapsing. 

Whichford Pottery is a joy, and so is the new urn. Standing side by side with the old, it has the same dimensions and form but is not simply a copy. Its height (nearly a metre) and girth match the urn it will replace; but whereas the new urn was thrown on a wheel, the old urn was formed by the ancient coil method.  It was made in the pottery of Montelupo near Florence: the name is stamped on that side of the urn which for a century has been hidden by the enveloping hedge.

Adam Keeling, who has made the new urn, tells us how a coil pot was made. Walking backwards (he explains) the potter will have coiled a long rope of clay upwards from the base of the pot, each new loop slightly wider than the one beneath to create the gentle swell of the urn up first to the shoulder and then in towards its neck and throat. Not until the approximate shape was established would the surface of the clay have been smoothed and wrought into its final elegant form. Next the old urn would have stood in the Tuscan sun and only when, finally, the clay was dry would it have gone into the kiln.

Now, under the Cotswold sun and with two pairs of great buzzards coiling overhead, the new urn glows. It turns heads: visitors to the Pottery pause and admire its rich terracotta (‘cooked earth’, of course). They are struck by how beautifully it has been made and how well it compares with its predecessor. ‘Stunning’ is the word used by Paula, who has shown us round and introduced us to the potters, and she is right.  Indeed, it more than deserves that celebrated phrase of John Donne’s: truly, it is ‘a well-wrought urn’.

But wait. Is this pot, destined for Madingley Hall, strictly speaking an urn at all?

When Donne wrote ‘The Canonization’ he had a particular kind of urn in mind. The poem starts with the poet telling someone to shut up: ‘For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love’:

Wee can dye by it, if not live by love,

   And if unfit for tombes and hearse

   Our legend bee, it will be fit for verse;

And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove,

      We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;

       As well a well wrought urne becomes

The greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes,

   And by these hymnes, all shall approve

   Us canoniz’d for Love ….

It’s a cinerary urn of which Donne speaks, praising the craftsmanship of the anonymous potter who fashioned (‘wrought’) it on the wheel. This is the same kind of urn that prompted Sir Thomas Browne’s meditation on death and memory in Urn Burial (1658):

In a field of Old Walsingham, not many months past, were digged up between forty and fifty urns, deposited in a dry and sandy soil, not a yard deep, nor far from one another — not all strictly of one figure, but most answering these described; some containing two pounds of bones, and teeth, with fresh impressions of their combustion; …. The present urns were not of one capacity, the largest containing above a gallon, some not much above half that measure. (Ch.II)

The Madingley urns are far larger than these. The old one, made by a potter whose half-decipherable name stamped into the clay may have been Vincente, was presumably intended for storage, perhaps of oil: the inner surface retains traces of a shiny black glaze. But it’s not an amphora: it does not have the characteristic pointed base, elongated neck or prominent handles. Indeed, the handles of these storage jars are little more than arched flanges below the shoulders of the pot. They would be useless for lifting one of these when full of grain or wine: the pots are heavy enough when empty. The nearest Latin names for pots of this size and shape would probably have been orca or dollum, but in the end I think it’s best to disregard historical or geographical accuracy and simply call them Ali Baba jars.

Such a label lacks seriousness, I admit. So it’s a relief to find that by the end of the eighteenth century ‘urn’ was being used to describe pots with functions other than to hold ashes:

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
  

Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
  

And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
  

Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,
  

That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
  

So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

Thus William Cowper in The Task of 1785, extolling the virtues of the samovar. And a little later, Keats’s Grecian Urn (1819) is simply a decorated pot. It’s probably not long after this that the Madingley urns – four in total, and let’s continue to call them urns; after all, whatever their original functional their standing in the Topiary Garden is decorative and ceremonious rather than practical – were first made in Montelupo. When and how they found their way to Madingley, I have no idea. But I’m pleased to think the Whichford urn will now take its place alongside the other three, especially since Jim Keeling, who founded the Pottery over thirty years ago, incised the urn fittingly with a verse by William Blake. The last word of this poem is ‘sunrise’, and the new urn will stand in the only corner of the Topiary Garden to catch the sun – but only in midsummer, and very early in the morning, as I have seen it do.

[photo; the old and new Madingley urns at Whichford Pottery, 27 March 2012

                                                *          *          *

My new book, Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning, has now been published by Lutterworth Press. For details and first reviews, click here.

For an American account of the launch of Extramural at the UALL Conference at Clare College, Cambridge, last week, click here. This account is written by Dr James Shaeffer, President of UPCEA, who gave the keynote speech at the Conference.

George Herbert’s ‘brittle crazie glasse’

The other day I went to Beverley, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, to give a lecture on the stained glass of Charles Eamer Kempe. The lecture was entitled ‘Espying Heaven’ and the title derives from George Herbert’s poem, ‘The Elixir’:

A man that looks on glass,

On it may stay his eye,

Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,

And then the heav'n espy.

It was a happy chance that just outside Beverley, in the village church of Bishop Burton, I came across an intriguing stained glass window by Kempe depicting George Herbert (1593-1633). It’s a good portrait, owing something to the only known  engraving of him. The poet stands holding a book which carries the neatly inscribed text, ‘Lord I have loved the habitation of thine house’, and it is as if Herbert himself has just written these words with the quill pen held in his right hand. In fact they come from Psalm 26 but they are absolutely appropriate to Herbert, whose chief book was his collection of poems published posthumously as The Temple.

The quotation, though, is puzzling: ‘the habitation of thy [it is ‘thy’ not ‘thine’ in both the King James Bible and the Prayer Book] house’ sounds tautologous, unless either ‘house’ here means family (as in ‘House of David’) or ‘habitation’ means the act of inhabiting a house rather than the house itself. This is actually the first meaning of ‘habitation’ given in the OED, and you could well imagine Herbert agreeing, ‘I have loved inhabiting the house of the Lord’. However, though in his own poetry he frequently uses ‘habitation’ he always means a place to live in:

My God, I heard this day

That none doth build a stately habitation

         But he that means to dwell therein. (‘Man’)

In the Bishop Burton window Herbert is portrayed alongside Archbishop Laud, and perhaps Kempe (or the patron who paid for the window) wanted to suggest that Herbert shared Laud’s views on liturgy and doctrine. Which he may have done – though only so far, as Archbishop Rowan Williams has pointed out. Herbert’s own notion of church ceremonial gave greater emphasis to preaching than Laud’s ever did: his church at Leighton Bromswold in Huntingdonshire was re-ordered during his time as rector in absentia with not one but two pulpits. It is not for nothing that the nearest we have to a contemporary portrait of Herbert shows him wearing a Geneva gown of the kind usually worn by post-reformation preachers. For conducting services he may have worn a surplice and stole, as in this window, but he certainly would not have worn a purple cassock underneath, as he does here: look at his left sleeve peeping out. In other windows where Kempe* has depicted Herbert (there are at least five) he is always shown begowned. At All Saints, Jesus Lane, Cambridge, he stands, an austere black-gowned figure, in front of the Great Court of Trinity, his old college. The inscription for this window is also taken from Herbert’s poem ‘Man’:

Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath

                Another to attend him.

Sad to say, someone in the East Riding has taken a pot shot at Herbert, the airgun pellet narrowly missing his shoulder but leaving a nasty crack across his face. It reminds us just how fragile stained glass is – as Herbert knew only too well. In his poem ‘The Windows’ he speaks of ‘brittle crazie glasse’, which puts it perfectly. He weaves a powerful conceit around stained glass:

LORD, how can man preach thy eternall word ?

        He is a brittle crazie glasse :

Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford

        This glorious and transcendent place,

        To be a window, through thy grace.

But when thou dost anneal in glasse thy storie,

        Making thy life to shine within

The holy Preachers, then the light and glorie

        More rev'rend grows, and more doth win ;

        Which else shows watrish, bleak, and thin.

Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one

        When they combine and mingle, bring

A strong regard and aw :  but speech alone

        Doth vanish like a flaring thing,

        And in the eare, not conscience ring.

A preacher, says Herbert (and he is, as always, talking to and about himself), has the great privilege of being a window through which his congregation may ‘the Heav’n espy’.  But this will be possible only if the Christian story is ‘anneal’d’ - that is, sealed inside the preacher so that he speaks with genuine conviction just as the sacred images and stories are captured in a stained glass window through the glazier’s skill in firing the glass. But if that job is not done properly, the colour fades, the detail disappears and the window does indeed look ‘watrish, bleak and thin’.

It’s a telling conceit, metaphysical in both philosophical and literary senses. And the final stanza, with its appositional phrasing, completes the conceit perfectly: as stained glass needs light to animate the images in the window, so doctrine is lifeless unless the preacher of that doctrine lives – practises – what he preaches. If not, if it’s just ‘speech alone’, then it is merely ‘a flaring thing’ and not the ‘colour and light’ which Herbert so admires in a beautiful window.

It’s therefore fitting that in the earliest and, as I think, the finest of Kempe’s George Herbert windows (West Kirby in Cheshire), the inscription beneath the portrait of the poet should be the first verse of the best poem ever written about stained glass, ‘The Windows’.

* ‘Kempe’ here indicates the work of the Kempe Studios, up to the time of Charles Kempe’s death in 1907; thereafter the work of C.E. Kempe and Co. until the eventual closure of the firm in 1934.

[illustrations:   (i)  George Herbert in a window at Bishop Burton

                       (ii) George Herbert in a window at West Kirby  (photo by Philip Collins)

For information about the Kempe Society, click here.

My new book, Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning, has now been published by the Lutterworth Press. I am now working on a book about the stained glass of Charles Eamer Kempe, to be entitled Espying Heaven.

Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb

Names, particularly names listed aloud, can produce a powerful litany. Poets make good use of such lists: 

   William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough,

            Robert’s kin, and John’s, and Ned’s,

   And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock churchyard  now!

Thus Thomas Hardy recalling ‘Friends Beyond’, but he was by no means the first. The 16^th century Scots poet William Dunbar, in his ‘Lament for the Makaris’, lists the famous poets of the past whom Death has claimed:

   He has done petously devour

   The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour   [makaris: poets

   The Monk of Bury, and Gower, all three -

      Timor Mortis conturbat me.

There are few more poignant passages in Shakespeare’s History plays than the roll call of the dead on both sides after the Battle of Agincourt:

Charles Delabreth, High Constable of France,

Jacques of Chatillon, Admiral of France,

The Master of the cross-bows, Lord Rambures,

Great Master of France, the brave Sir Guichard Dolphin.

John Duke of Alanson, Anthony Duke of Brabant,

The brother to the Duke of Burgundy,

And Edward Duke of Bar: of lusty Earls,

Grandpré and Roussi, Falconbridge and Foix,

Beaumont and Marle, Vaudemont and Lestrale.

“Here was a royal fellowship of death,” says Henry, as he hands back the list to the French Herald, and this royal roll-call is made to sound all the more shocking when contrasted with the names of the English dead whom Henry calls next:

Edward the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk,

Sir Richard Ketley, Davy Gam, Esquire;

None else of name …. (Henry V, IV.viii.92-105)

Roll calls can be created from place names too. In Dylan Thomas’s radio play, Under Milk Wood, the Rev. Eli Jenkins compares his little local River Dewi with the great rivers of Wales:

By Sawdde, Senny, Dovey, Dee,

Edw, Eden, Aled, all,

Taff and Towey broad and free,

Llyfnant with its waterfall,

Claerwen, Cleddau, Dulais, Daw,

Ely, Gwili, Ogwr, Nedd,

Small is our River Dewi, Lord,

A baby on a rushy bed.

And well before Thomas, A.E. Housman had gathered together the names of these Shropshire villages:

Clunton and Clunbury,

            Clungunford and Clun

Are the quietest places

            Under the sun.

One of U.A. Fanthorpe’s best-known poems, ‘Rising Damp’, is about the ‘little fervent underground’ rivers of London. She lists them:

Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy,

Wandle, Walbrook, Tyburn, Fleet

And these names return to haunt the poem as the rivers themselves haunt the city, until the last stanza where Fanthorpe warns:

It is the other rivers that lie

Lower, that touch us only in dreams

That never surface. We feel their tug

As a dowser’s rod bends to the source below

Phlegethon, Acheron, Lethe, Styx.

Names ‘tug’ at us too. We could all call own private roll of significant places and significant people. Sometimes it is their very absence from us, and ours from them, that tugs. One of the most moving scenes in the recent TV adaptation of Birdsong was the calling of the battalion roll at the end of the first day of the Somme, when there was almost no one there to answer to their name. In the novel itself this moment prompts an extraordinary elegiac passage, which begins:

Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegram would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors ….

These reflections on names have been prompted by a short story I read this week consisting only of place names, specifically the names of villages and towns in Lincolnshire, Cambridge and Norfolk encircling the Wash. It’s the final story in Jon McGregor’s new collection, This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You. All the stories are set in this part of East Anglia, which is one reason I bought the book: I lived as a child in this fenland area, and though it’s now nearly fifty years since I left, the village of Tydd St. Mary and the fields, dykes and drains between Tydd and the sea are still – to borrow a phrase from D.H. Lawrence – ‘the country of my heart’.

McGregor’s stories are experiments in the limits and fissures of language: their force often lies in the resonance of what is not said, of what slips into the silence either side of speech. So a story like Memorial Stone consisting of nothing but names arranged by sound and type (Tathwell to Maidenwell, Bag Enderby and Aby, Dogsthorpe, Hogsthorpe, Dogdyke and Quadring Eaudike – hundreds of names over five pages) is in effect a prose poem. Read aloud, it creates the same kind of mesmeric effect of repetition and variation achieved in music by Philip Glass, but with this difference: that each name, each village, carries its own history and its own stories, created from the memories of and about everyone who ever lived there: parish records, war memorials, roads, schools, houses – all names .

But there is one name missing from Memorial Stone: Tydd. The villages that lie around it are there: Sutton St. James, Leverington, Newton, Holbeach (the coldest place in England last week: -16°C). But no Tydd St. Mary (or St Giles, or Fen or Gote). As I searched for Tydd I felt disappointed, even offended. Somehow an injustice had been done. Absurd perhaps, yet this has preyed on my mind all week. But now I think I have found a way to put things right: I have come up with my own roll call of Tydd – roads, fields, people, pubs. Here it is:

Tydd

Teed, Earth, Flint

Roman Bank, Minerva Farm, Sea Wall

Foul Anchor, Five Bells,

Raspberry Cottage, Strawberry Hall

Tydd St. Mary

Banks, Burrell, Balls, Bills, Hicks

Jack Buck, Catling, Cush Knott, Spinks

Tydd Gote

Pedley, Pearson, Paddy, Pat

Cross Gate, Low Gate, Common Pit

Tydd Fen

Greendyke, Harold’s Bridge, Woad Farm

Salt Field, Oldfield,

World’s End.

[illustrations: (i) Map of the Fens around the Wash

                       (ii) Tydd St. Mary’s Church photo: the author
                        (iii) Tydd Church in a stained glass window by Tom Denny (private collection)

                       

John Betjeman and Windlesham

Writing letters to the newspapers, it’s been said, is an entertaining but essentially solitary pastime. Perhaps, but I was touched by how many friends contacted me to say they’d seen my recent (very brief) letter in the Times. It was about a poem by John Betjeman, and I wrote it in answer to an enquiry from the founder of the Betjeman Society as to the identity of Pam, the mountainous tennis player in ‘Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden’. Did she exist? It’s well known that Miss Joan Hunter Dunn was based on a real person, though certainly not on anyone to whom Betjeman ever got engaged, as happens to the nervous young officer at the end of ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’. That’s the poem in which Miss J Hunter Dunn appears, ‘furnished and burnished by Aldershot sun’. In ‘Pot Pourri …’, however, the poet goes one further, and ends by describing confidently the scene and the setting for his eventual marriage to Pam -whoever she may have been.  Pamela Mitford? Possible but unlikely: she never lived anywhere near Windlesham.  

This was my letter as published:

Sir, I suspect that John Betjeman’s Pam is as much a figment of his fevered imagination as the wedding he conjures at the end of ‘Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden’. He imagines “Windlesham bells” ringing out, but the parish church of St. John the Baptist, Windlesham, has only one bell. When my father was rector there in the 1960s, I was sometimes allowed to ring it.

The first Betjeman poem I ever encountered was ‘Hunter Trials’  (probably in O’Malley and Thompson’s Rhyme and Reason) but ‘Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden’ was the second, and I approved of Betjeman because he had written a poem about the place where I lived. I remember, though, being puzzled that he was wrong not only about the bells but about the architecture. In the last stanza he imagines himself and Pam processing up the ‘Butterfield aisle, rich with Gothic enlacement’, but Windlesham Church was neither built nor restored by Butterfield: it was enlarged, in 1874, by Ewan Christian in a notably plain and unadorned style. At the age of fifteen, I had already been to All Saints, Margaret Street in London (rather to my father’s alarm) so I knew what a Butterfield church looked like, and it certainly did not look like Windlesham.

The village of Windlesham is described in Pevsner’s Surrey thus:

On the Berkshire border, half heath and half meadows. Big C19 houses and a busy nest of Victorian brick boxes on the former; sleek old farms on the latter, which is almost the first true countryside on this bearing coming out of London.

It still has the feel, in parts, of an old Surrey village. Its roads have names like Pound Lane, Updown Hill and Snow’s Ride. This commemorates the infamous highwayman, Captain Snow, who used the local Pelican Inn as his base. (The Pelican is now Woodcote House School, where I began - for two terms between school and university - my teaching career.)

Did Betjeman have any particular connection with Windlesham? Not that I know. I suspect in fact that he chose the village both because its name conveniently rhymed with ‘Pam’ and, more significantly, because of its dactylic sound: dum-diddy. This is the key rhythmic feature of the poem. From ‘pram in the …’ onwards, phrases like ‘whizzing them …’ ‘size of her …’ and words like ‘slippery’, ‘bountiful’, ‘mountainous’ and ‘arrogant’ are all dactyls. They give the poem its momentum.

A friend who contacted me after reading my letter in the paper recalled how easy it was to parody Betjeman. That’s true, of course, and while I was still at school I memorized a splendid parody published in the then infant Private Eye.

Lovely lady in the pew

Goodness, what a scorcher, phew!

What I wouldn’t give to do

Unmentionable things to you!

If old God is still up there

I’m sure He wouldn’t really care,

I’m sure he’d say a little lech

Never really harmed old Betje.

I have never accepted the argument that good poets are literally inimitable: in a way, their very distinctiveness makes them easier to parody. Put this to the test: listen to Dylan Thomas reciting ‘Chard Whitlow’, Henry Reed’s definitive parody of Four Quartets. Betjeman, too, was a good parodist and perhaps it’s one of his strengths that he can easily wrongfoot his readers, leaving us unsure whether or not we are missing a joke.

‘Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden’ is itself a good example of what I mean. It’s perhaps a more serious poem than appears at first, paying an oblique homage to T.S. Eliot (who, remarkably, had taught Betjeman at Highgate Junior School). The gauche narrator who hopes to catch a glimpse of the Amazonian Pam is an adolescent Prufrock, washing his face in a bird bath before deciding which path he dare take. Prufrock, indeed, seems a kind of ghostly presence stalking Betjeman’s writing at this time: after all, both title and opening line of ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’ – “Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn” gesture towards ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.

Betjeman insists we pay attention to the title of his poem too.  ‘Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden’ derives from a once-popular book of the same name. That book survives now, as its subtitle ‘The Classic Diary of a Victorian Lady’ suggests, as a record of an earlier, gentler age. Betjeman’s poem does something similar. Published in 1940 at the start of the War, it accumulates remembered details of youthful summers from a suddenly vanished world: the ambiguous ‘miles of pram in the wind’, the unsettling horses’ hooves, the cheap Players’ Weights cigarette packet trodden into the sandy gorse track. Is it good to rake up these memories at such a time? Potpourri itself reminds one of Eliot’s ambivalence about memory at the start of Burnt Norton:

But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

Still, scents and shrubs overwhelm Betjeman’s trespasser. The ‘coco-nut smell of the broom’ draws him towards the ‘remarkable wrought-iron gates’ and ‘over the boundary’. He steals into the exclusive world of stockbroker-belt Surrey:  it’s a world hidden behind gorse, conifers, above all behind rhododendrons.  ‘Lucky the rhododendrons!’ sighs the love-lorn poet when Pam, ‘full of a pent-up strength’, swipes at them with her tennis racquet. He knows he’s no match for her, but he can still dream:

Over the redolent pinewoods, in at the bathroom casement,


One fine Saturday, Windlesham bells shall call,


Up the Butterfield aisle, rich with Gothic enlacement,


Licensed now for embracement,


Pam and I, as the organ


Thunders over you all.

‘Redolent’ not only echoes the dactylic sound of ‘petulant’ in the previous line, it recalls the scents and memories evoked in the opening lines of the poem and in its title. But the rest of this last stanza offers an unexpected rebuff to all those who have despised the speaker for his hopeless and inappropriate passion for Pam. They (we) will have to sit and watch as he, the seven-stone weakling, walks triumphantly up the aisle with his Charles-Atlas like bride. Betjeman doesn’t expect his readers to take any of this seriously, of course. Though it is a poem mixing memory and desire, it is also a fantasy enjoying its element of self-parody: no serious poet would write a serious poem with such tortured rhymes  as rhododendrons / Hendren’s or enlacement / embracement.

Betjeman’s whole persona showed him to be a master of self-parody. He loved a joke against himself. Since, indeed, he contributed to Private Eye from its very earliest days (he was the original Piloti, writing the architecture column ‘Nooks and Corners’), it would not surprise me to discover he had been author of ‘Lovely lady in the pew’, the spoof that caught my eye while I was still a schoolboy, living in Windlesham.

[illustration: Windlesham Church, c.1970. Artist: Doreen Barlow

My new book, Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning, is due to be published by Lutterworth Press later this month.