Summoned by Bells
1960
MY FATHER WENT UP TO Magdalen College, Oxford, in October 1927. Immediately and brazenly, he ignored the university and college rules and regulations and was sent down in his second term. That was time enough to begin a lasting friendship with John Betjeman, then in his third year in the same college. They had a lot in common. Literature was a good thing in itself but they also saw that it was the way to get themselves talked about and invited by people whose invitations they wanted to have. Being amusing was much the same as being shocking for up-and-coming Vile Bodies, to borrow the title of the novel in which Evelyn Waugh sketched the bright young things of that generation. A particularly skittish passage in Summoned by Bells depicts Alan arriving for a drink on a Sunday wearing just a bathing costume and sitting at a harmonium to play a hymn whose verses have been re-written as lampoon, including the line, “and the pansies all sing flat.”
Betch (as I choose to render Betj, the usual spelling) inhabited a private land of his own, and the nicknames of his friends were a kind of passport for entry into that land. For obvious reasons Alan was Big Nose, which soon became a single word and then due to a typing mistake Bognose, or variously Bog and Boggins, and finally Captain Bog on the grounds that war-time rank was bound to be comic. A letter on February 18, 1933 headed “Darling Bog” congratulated him on becoming engaged to Joan Eyres-Monsell, but had advice: “You must explain that you were once inverted. She won’t mind at all.” Moving to Vienna ostensibly to write, Alan forsook Joan when he fell in love with Poppy Fould-Springer. Twenty years old, she had lived an extraordinarily sheltered life. On October 6, 1934 Betch wrote that he had been “staggered” to read in the Times the announcement of Alan and Poppy’s engagement. “Oh Bog, Bog, how I miss you and how I envy your success. Don’t marry without a long period of probation.… My God, Bog, have a care.”
In 1937, just over a year after I’d been born, Betch was describing me as a baby with “rabbit’s ears on his dress” and hoping that I’d grow up fit to sing treble in some surpliced choir. I have a photograph of him sitting at a table, pen in hand and notebook open. “Ici je suis dans Auxerre,” he wrote along the lower margin, and to one side, “Truly yours Jean Paul Sartre Betjhomme.” Sartre’s novel La Nausée was published in 1938, a clue to this photograph’s date.
Anglicanism in all its manifestations, liturgical and architectural, was sanctified in Betch’s private land, and he made no secret of it. The conversion to Catholicism of Penelope, his wife, lovingly nicknamed Filth or Philth, kept them apart for the rest of their lives. Betch precipitated a similar crisis in Alan’s marriage when he telephoned Poppy to tell her that earlier in the day he had entered Westminster Cathedral and caught sight of Alan face down on the floor with arms extended in the form of a cross, all in the ritual of conversion to the Catholic faith. Poppy had known nothing about this, and took it that changing his spiritual persona without telling her compromised their mutual trust. Forced to choose between her and Catholicism, he chose her.
In February 1953, Poppy died of cancer in Paris. She was 37. Three weeks previously, we had been together in Seefeld, then an undeveloped village in Tyrol, and one morning she had put on skis. Everyone in the family had thought it better not to tell me that she was seriously ill. My housemaster at Eton gave me the news and drove me to Heathrow so that I could be at the funeral in the Père Lachaise cemetery. To this day, I have no idea if Alan had listened to Betch and told her that he was an invert, and if not, then whether she had discovered it for herself. What I do know is that Alan took me back to school, and we found Betch waiting for us at the door of the house; he had spent the afternoon there. Years later, he told me, “I knew the Captain would be sad so I wanted to meet him on his return.”
Paul, his own son, was a year or two younger than me, but happened to be in the same house. After Poppy’s death, or in the next term, the two fathers took their boys out to tea a couple of times in The Cockpit, an ancient and picturesque restaurant in Eton High Street. I was old enough to understand that my nickname of Baby Bog signified admission to his private land. Betch spoke of and to Paul as The Powlie, or more simply It. None of us quite knew what to do for the best or where to put ourselves when he would say things like, I can’t be too sure but I think It is about to speak. As if he hadn’t heard, Paul remained self-contained and silent.
Poppy had not long been dead when Alan took me to Ireland. He did not disclose that the purpose of the trip was for me to meet Elizabeth Cavendish, then staying at Lismore Castle with her brother, the Duke of Devonshire. One morning when we were alone visiting the garden of another show-place, Alan sprang the surprise that he proposed to marry Elizabeth. I felt he was betraying Poppy and said so, my emotions running away with me. The consequence was that Alan spent the rest of his life in the United States, sometimes settled, sometimes unsettled. My stepmother manqué, Elizabeth was to complete a triangle by devoting herself to looking after Betch to the end of his life.
Betch didn’t seem to notice that he had become a national treasure. Pathos was his medium. We went on one or two expeditions in London in search of friends or sights, and he was embarrassed to be recognized in the street. Every Thursday morning, he was in the habit of entertaining the children in one of the wards in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. I took my daughters to meet him and he told them that even if they peeled their grandfather Alan as they might peel an onion, they still wouldn’t know him. Now and then, postcards would arrive addressed to Baby Bog.
The title page of my copy of Summoned by Bells reads, “Inscribed for David P-J by John Betjeman ARTISTE & CALLIGRAPHER,” the two descriptive but imaginary nouns in capitals.
