The Wry Romance of the Literary Rectory by Deborah Alun-Jones

Author:Deborah Alun-Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2013-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

John, Candida, Paul and Penelope Betjeman with the Dalmatian, Peter Pudding, in the garden at Farnborough in 1948, taken by Bassano. (Photo National Portrait Gallery, London)

The previous incumbent, the Revd H. L. Puxley and his family, had had full domestic backup despite his modest living (he ‘never earned more than £350 a year,’ according to his daughter). This comparatively modest income notwithstanding, morning prayers in the rectory counted the four family members, Beulah North the cook, Abbot the gardener/chauffeur who lived in the lodge, a nanny and a parlour maid. Abbot remained a much-valued part of the household in the Betjemans’ time and together with two sisters from the village, Florrie and Pearl, made up the somewhat diminished staff. An added bonus for Betjeman, who by his own admission was susceptible to the ‘very direct stuff’ of physical attraction, was the younger sister’s obvious charms: ‘Keep me from Thelma’s sister Pearl!/She puts my senses in a whirl,’ he wrote in the poem ‘Agricultural Caress’ (1966), changing just one of the names.

Penelope took charge of the cooking and even the fastidious Evelyn Waugh conceded the food was ‘delicious’. The kitchen was, and still is, to the far right of the entrance hall. It was originally the village schoolroom and had a window looking onto the rectory lawn, a good vantage point from which to espy approaching visitors. All the family’s meals were taken in here, never the dining room, where the table was usually covered in a mass of Betjeman’s papers. Patrick Cullinan, the poet, stayed with the family when he was 17 and remembered ‘a dark but friendly kitchen where we had our meals and … John opening and decanting the most delicious bottles of claret.’ In the Puxley era, the annual choir supper had taken place in the kitchen, cooked on the capacious range by Beulah North. After this the choir (men and boys only), who were also the bell-ringers, would stagger over to the church to ring in the New Year.

The Puxley family seemed to have been living the rural parish dream during the 1930s when Betjeman and Piper were beginning to fix it poetically and pictorially. These were the days when the rector still rode out to see his parishioners in the fields; when the church was the centre of village life; when the surpliced choir still processed up and down the aisle making a joyful noise unto the Lord; when candlelit Evensong was, according to the Revd Mr Puxley’s daughter, Rosemary, ‘thrilling’.

The war had intruded rudely on this idyll. The rector’s daughter, who had danced on the lawn with a local farmer’s son, left to join the Auxillary Territorial Service and never lived in the rectory again. The pale Doric columns by the entrance were painted dark brown in the belief that this would prevent them attracting enemy aircraft. Two years into the war the rector himself retired, lamenting in Betjeman-like terms the arrival of ‘the weekender who spent his Sundays unsuitably dressed, washing his car and taking no interest in the village’.

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