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them in unknown country where they have to ask for directions. Most of the poets in the thirties did that, but not Betjeman. He’s always accessible. And, of course, it’s a bit of a shock to find that he
is
a thirties poet, just a few months older than Auden, who to his credit was always one of Betjeman’s champions. Not that he needed much championing, at any rate in the second part of his life. His verse has an immediate appeal, and as a result he’s probably the best-known and the most successful English poet this last century.
    It could be said that this was because of television, on which Betjeman was a frequent and indeed an eager performer – but not entirely. Larkin had no truck with television, and when he died the regret and affection for him matched that for Betjeman. Both of them were, of course, very English and wrote straightforward poetry that didn’t need much exposition. But it’s also the case that poetry, though we don’t learn it by heart nowadays and though there is no poetic equivalent of the Booker Prize, still has magic, and seems magical. If their verse chimes in with common experience, poets can still capture the nation’s imagination – as, quite apart from his showmanship, Betjeman did.
    Much of his verse is backward-looking. As Auden and his friends turned to the proletariat and the future, Betjeman looked back to Victorian and Edwardian models (as, in adifferent way, did Evelyn Waugh). But why not? Poets don’t have to be prophets. The following poem is one of Betjeman’s earliest, written in 1930.

Death in Leamington
    She died in the upstairs bedroom
    By the light of the ev’ning star
    That shone through the plate glass window
    From over Leamington Spa.
    Beside her the lonely crochet
    Lay patiently and unstirred,
    But the fingers that would have work’d it
    Were dead as the spoken word.
    And Nurse came in with the tea-things
    Breast high ’mid stands and chairs –
    But Nurse was alone with her own little soul,
    And the things were alone with theirs.
    She bolted the big round window,
    She let the blinds unroll,
    She set a match to the mantle,
    She covered the fire with coal.
    And ‘Tea!’ she said in a tiny voice
    â€˜Wake up! It’s nearly
five
.’
    Oh! Chintzy, chintzy cheeriness,
    Half dead and half alive!
    Do you know that the stucco is peeling?
    Do you know that the heart will stop?
    From those yellow Italianate arches
    Do you hear the plaster drop?
    Nurse looked at the silent bedstead,
    At the grey, decaying face,
    As the calm of the Leamington ev’ning
    Drifted into the place.
    She moved the table of bottles
    Away from the bed to the wall;
    And tiptoeing gently over the stairs
    Turned down the gas in the hall.

    Betjeman was born in London at the foot of one of the hills that leads up to Highgate. The charm of this area (which nowadays can be elusive) stayed with him all his life, and his poetry owes as much to childhood as does Wordsworth’s. London as it was; England as it was. Anyone fond of architecture in this century has had to watch so much of it destroyed that they condemn themselves to a life of distress and regret, and it is this behind most of Betjeman’s poems that gives them a persistent melancholy and sense of loss.
    The following poem is about Lissenden Mansions, a block of Edwardian flats opposite Parliament Hill Mansions where Betjeman was born.

N.W.5 and N.6
    Red cliffs arise. And up them service lifts
    Soar with the groceries to silver heights.
    Lissenden Mansions. And my memory sifts
    Lilies from lily-like electric lights
    And Irish stew smells from the smell of prams
    And roar of seas from roar of London trams.
    Out of it all my memory carves the quiet
    Of that dark privet hedge where pleasures breed,
    There first, intent upon its leafy diet,
    I watched the looping caterpillar feed
    And saw it hanging in a gummy froth
    Till, weeks on, from the chrysallis burst the moth.
    I