For all John Betjeman's reputation for jolly versifying – a mid-century Benny Hill rhymer laureate – "Norfolk" has little of that all-too-well-known Betjeman about it. This is more sombre reminiscence, in which a question about the Devil hems in the memory of a childhood (Eve-free) Eden: a holiday on the Norfolk Broads. Revisiting this old haunt, the champion of Victorian church architecture sounds almost regretful that "lost innocence" and "rapturous ignorance" have given way to – as well as the "dreadful daylight" – the knowledge that the nineteenth-century architect James Fowler went to work on a building that "is" just the same as it always was. The metre runs on as steadily as the Bure itself. Finally, the apostrophe to Time perhaps has a resonance beyond the merely personal: if the poem's present day is 1953, when the TLS published it, then "forty years ago" dates the fondly remembered holiday to just before the First World War.

Norfolk

How did the devil come? When first attack?
These Norfolk lanes recall lost innocence,
The years fall off and find me walking back
Dragging a stick along the wooden fence
Down this same path, where, forty years ago,
My father strolled behind me, calm and slow.

I used to fill my hand with sorrel seeds
And shower him with them from the tops of stiles,
I used to butt my head into his tweeds
To make him hurry down those languorous miles
Of ash and alder-shaded lanes, till here
Our moorings and the masthead would appear.

Then there was supper lit by lantern light
And in the cabin I could lie secure
And hear against the polished sides at night
The lap lap lapping of the weedy Bure,
Dear whispering and watery Norfolk sound
Which told of all the moonlit reeds around.

How did the devil come? When first attack?
The church is just the same, though now I know
Fowler of Louth restored it. Time, bring back
The rapturous ignorance of long ago,
The peace, before the dreadful daylight starts
Of unkept promises and broken hearts.

JOHN BETJEMAN (1953)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "General Recall" by Charles Causley, click here.

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