We’ll forever associate him with Cornish clifftop walks and Aldershot sun, but Sir John Betjeman’s heart lay in another part of the country altogether. Clive Aslet looks at his enduring relationship with Norfolk.
WHEN we think of John Betjeman, we think of Surrey and bombs falling on Slough, but, most of all, Cornwall. Memories of happy boyhood holidays were a lifelong wellspring of inspiration for the Poet Laureate, who returned to Trebetherick (‘I know so well this turfy mile,’ he wrote in Greenaway) time and time again. Indeed, it was where he died, in 1984.
However, Cornwall wasn’t the only place sacred with echoes of a prelapsarian past. Ernest Betjeman, his cabinetmaker father, had also taken the family on a trip to the Norfolk Broads that would shape him profoundly. Here, for Betjeman, was the very best of England, from salt marshes to sand dunes and the gossip of village life and he made up his mind to return whenever he could.
‘I’m still reeling with delight at the soaring majesty of Norfolk and our tour there,’ Betjeman, then in his late sixties, wrote to BBC producer Edward Mirzoeff after a research trip for his television programme A Passion For Churches in 1974. He went on to describe ‘the sound of waves on shingle and bells in church-towers’ and the detour he had made to admire the Art Nouveau architecture of George Skipper in Norwich.He effervesced with the joy of it.
But there was another side to the place,which appealed to him in a different way.His poem Norfolk isn’t an ebullient celebration of the county, but a lament for the vanished past—an expression of mourning for that time before the outbreak of war (and the onset of adulthood), when Betjeman and his parents could tuck themselves securely into a houseboat on Horsey Mere and enjoy a few days of tranquility:
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