Martin Jarvis performs John Betjeman's radio poems

Between 1954 and 1957, John Betjeman wrote a series of poems that he read on the radio in a weekly religious programme called The Faith in the West, broadcast on the BBC's West of England Home Service. They were billed under the title Poems in the Porch and had supposedly been pinned up for parishioners to read in the porch of the fictional church of Stoke St Petroc.

The first and most famous of them was his Diary of a Church Mouse, who lived among “long-discarded cassocks” and “half-split-open hassocks” and ate well only at the Harvest Festival - and who had some satirical things to say about the worshippers he observed. That poem, and five others, appear in his Collected Poems, and some were published in magazines, but there remain seven poems that have never been published, which The Times is now printing.

The whole series is coming out in a volume also called Poems in the Porch, edited by Kevin Gardner.

Times Archive, 1983: The Times Profile: Sir John Betjeman

'John B has became a bore rather' wrote Evelyn Waugh in his 1930 diary

BACKGROUND

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BACKGROUND

• Poem: The Bishop by John Betjeman

• Poem: Three Crosses by John Betjeman

• Poem: The Lenten Season by John Betjeman

They are all, naturally, religious poems in some degree. In fact, however, Betjeman's religious life was having a hard time in these years. He was married with two children, but was living mainly on his own and also having an intense love affair with a much younger woman, Elizabeth Cavendish. His friend, the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, observed admiringly that “you are married, have a mistress, and are living the life of a bachelor all at once”. Betjeman was obviously enjoying the situation, but he was also full of moral anguish about it as a believing Christian.

There was also the recurrent question in his mind: was he in fact a believing Christian? “And is it true? And is it true?” he asks agonisingly about the Nativity in Christmas, another of these poems that has since become famous. Perhaps it was a relief to him to write some of these broadcast poems that expressed a simpler faith, both in the spirit and the style of many Victorian hymns:

Cling to the Sacraments and pray

And God be with you every day.

He did not take care over all these lines, sometimes bumping up the length with phrases such as a redundant “near and far”, or saying (in Sunday Morning) that the church bells went - most unrealistically - “tinkle tinkle”, for the sake of the rhythm.

Poems intended to be read aloud could, of course, take these slack moments more easily than poems intended for silent reading. But I think that the reason why Betjeman failed to publish some of them was simply because he knew that he had not taken quite enough trouble.

In fact his spirit shows most clearly in the gently satirical passages about some parishioners - and the clergy. Here the lines often have a real swing and thrust. The Bishop is a very good example, with all the members of the Mothers' Union baking away because the bishop is visiting the parish:

The bishop will be given part

Of Mrs Gurney's cherry tart.

The bishop will, without a question,

Leave with violent indigestion.

Perhaps the best of the unpublished poems is The Lenten Season.

It catches delicately the mood of Lent, and its purpose as a preparation for the Resurrection, but at the same time there is an easy good humour in its tone, and there is a fine metaphor for the Resurrection in its description of the sun coming through the mist in some Irish hills. The most powerfully religious of the poems is Three Crosses, in which he prays at the end to become like the “penitent thief” on the cross alongside Jesus,

And turn to Christ with trusting eyes

And hear Him promise Paradise.

Nevertheless, in the 30 years he lived after writing these poems, it must be said that Betjeman did not change much. He went on seeking fun and laughter, he went on suffering doubt and guilt, and he stayed with both wife and mistress (and they stayed with him) to the end.

Poems in the Porch: The Radio Poems of John Betjeman edited by Kevin Gardener
Continuum, £14.99 Buy the book

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