Betjeman and spirit of place

A lifetime during which my favourite poet has been and will be John Betjeman; the poet of suburbia and social insecurity, transience of life, nostalgia, and yes, spirit of place.

My introduction to the works of Betjeman came in September 1972; I had just started the fourth year at grammar school, and English literature classes kicked off in the autumn term with an anthology of poetry entitled Poets of our Time (edited by F.E.S. Finn). The first poem by the first of the ten poets was Betjeman's Upper Lambourn, and it immediately resonated with me in the way that no poet before had ever done (and by then, we'd covered Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Tennyson etc).

Here was something tangible, familiar, a sense of being there, having not been there... from the first very lines I'd read;  "Up the ash tree climbs the ivy/Up the ivy climbs the sun..." I liked all the Betjeman poems in the book and only a handful of the rest (by Charles Causley, Ted Hughes, Laurie Lee).

A month later, in October 1972, Sir John Betjeman was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, and was considered at the time the nation's favourite poet. Certainly by then, mine too.

And on 26 February 1973, the BBC showed Sir John Betjeman's Metro-land, a televisual poem. This took Betjeman up to another level for me. Metro-land, his exploration of the Metropolitan Railway, from Baker Street all the way out to remote villages in deepest Buckinghamshire, was a revelation. It prompted a long series of journeys - by family car, by train, by bicycle, later in my own car, to seek out the spirit, the mood, the atmosphere of place that Betjeman had captured.

As I wrote yesterday, the qualia, those moments of subjective experience of consciousness, are of vital interest to me in terms of who we are, our place on earth, associations of where we are from.

Betjeman could conjure up those feelings with a run of a few words, like a great painter bringing to mind the experience of being there with a few brush strokes, or a great musician painting a picture with a short series of notes. Betjeman was more about place than people; and so am I (in contrast to my daughter, an avid student of people's stories, soap-opera construction and the human condition. My son, like me, is acutely conscious of spirit of place). Like Betjeman (as you will see in the Summoned by Bells TV programme linked below), I am perfectly happy in the solitude of my own company, moving around the landscape, observing, sensing spirit of place.

And set those words to moving pictures, and as I watched Metro-land for the first time, I wanted to head out there and feel it myself, an atavistic yearning for Edwardian England, the 1910s, an era I could feel in the stones and bricks of the Hanwell and Ealing in which I grew up. Below: Cleveland Park, a view I remember from childhood, long before we moved here (though the bench was different - green-painted wrought-iron frame, darker wood planking). And I remember the aluminium-tubed bus shelter, from where the 65A would set off on its long journey to Chessington Zoo, Copt Gilders Estate or Leatherhead. Which Sir John would have no doubt pronounced with a stress on the head.

Does Poland have a Betjeman? Well, we have our literary reportagistes - Jacek Hugo-Bader, Filip Springer, heirs of the great Ryszard Kapuściński - but poets that revel in the everyday, with a hankering for the near-bygone? Poland's 'near-bygone' is the communist era, and among those who lived through it there's little positive sentiment. True, today's hipster designers draw on the visual styling cues of 1950s and '60s Poland, but a belief that a golden age has just slipped by and that Poland should draw on the values and culture of the immediate past belongs to a rather odd fringe.

But will Poland have a Betjeman? Betjeman was an Edwardian who looked back at the Victorian era with nostalgia, and then, in later life, looked back at the 1930s as a golden age. He saved St Pancras Station, but did not live to see it reemerge in glory. A Polish Betjeman may emerge in 20 or 30 years' time, fascinated by the chaotic jumble that was the 1990s and the great leap forward that followed Poland's EU accession. Spirit of place - yes, it's there to be found, documented, captured in poetry, music and the visual arts.

What would Sir John have made of Brexit? What poems would have poured from his pen? We don't know - his voice today would be irrelevant in this age of social media and instant gratification; we can of course readily knock out some parodies in his style - but that's all they would be, for he is a poet of his age, his time, and his place. "Largely, it was a longing for the past/With a slight sense of something unfulfilled" [Summoned by Bells, 1976].

Watch it, and enjoy being taken back to Edwardian England.

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