Several programmes this week marked the centenary of the birth of Sir John Betjeman. There was one about his contribution to broadcasting, another about the mischievous correspondence he carried on with various BBC staff. But somehow I was dragged into the one that made me seriously dislike him. Radio 4’s Doubts and Demons: The Inner John Betjeman was, to the uninitiated, a shock.
The presenter, the journalist A. N. Wilson, set out his stall at the beginning: “In this programme I want to explore the inner man, with all his demons.”
Why? We spend so much time these days destroying popular gods, why do it with Betjeman, a man who was one of the few modern poets we can read without falling asleep? For God’s sake, A. N., couldn’t you have left us just one pure image to cherish? But no. Before we could tune in to something a bit less hurtful and (granted) a lot less entertaining, we were into the happy memories of married life chez Betjeman: “In our early years we would have physical rows,” Pene- lope Betjeman reminisced cheerily. “We used to kick each other round the house. Once, when we were visiting Cyril and Jean Connolly, they were in the bath together, and we kicked our way in, kicked our way around the bathroom and then out again, heh heh.”
They had special names for each other — sometimes she was Plimmy, sometimes Propeller, sometimes Filth. Later, when Betjeman took unto himself a long-term (20 years) mistress, Elizabeth Cavendish, he called her Feeble. “Like children at play they (John and Penelope) knew each other,” said Wilson. “They knew each other’s vulnerable spots, and they knew how to hurt.”
“I threw Archie out of the living-room window,” said Penelope, “because I knew it would hurt. He very nearly divorced me over that.”
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Archie, full name Archibald Ormsby-Gore, after the diplomatic family, donchaknow, was Betjeman’s teddy bear. “It achieved considerable fame, it had been a part of his life since he was 2, and he said he loved it more than his wife or his children,” fluted Penelope with all the cheery humour of the rejected. “It always slept in our bed.”
Archie was the dark side of Betjeman: “He was a projection of extreme and angry feelings that the gentle poet would not allow himself,” said Wilson. “Betjeman was a doubt-ridden Anglican, Archie a strict Baptist. Betjeman was a wishy-washy Conservative; throughout the war Archie held pro-Hitler views.” Archie was a stuffed cuddly toy. One cannot reiterate this too often.
As a parent, Betjeman was generally remembered affectionately by his daughter, the poet Candida Lycett Green. The other child, Paul, was not heard from. This may or may not have had something to do with his being nicknamed (jocularly as ever) It by his loving parents.
Betjeman’s snobbery, his cruelty, his selfishness — they all came pouring out. It was somehow appropriate, though, that the act that ended whatever adherence he may have felt to his marriage was Penelope’s conversion to Catholicism. With one bound of her faith he was free.
Of all the nastiness we had heard, it was this that made me dislike John Betjeman more than I admire him. Surely that was not Wilson’s intention? This could quite well be the most hateful programme to have enthralled me.