The late John Betjeman, who was appointed Poet Laureate in 1972,
and remained in the role until his death in 1984, leaves behind a wealth of
evocative verse and prose, describing the places he knew and visited around
Britain so vividly that he transports the reader back to an earlier time
redolent with nostalgia. One of his best
known works is the autobiographical 'Summoned by Bells', which recalls his
childhood, his school days and his time at University. Chapter VII of the collection covers his time
at Marlborough College, a boarding and day school in the attractive small
Wiltshire town of the same name which he attended in the early 1920s.
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| Entrance to Marlborough College on the Bath Road - geograph.org.uk - 1509846. Photo by Steph, via Wikimedia Commons. |
Betjeman was allegedly quite miserable at Marlborough College,
where he spent five years (“Thank God I’ll never have to go through them
again”) and he does not miss an opportunity to have a dig at it in his poetry,
referring to it as “my prison house”. Winters
were a particular endurance test, described as “Black as our college suits, as
cold and thin”. Mealtimes did not bring
any solace, with cakes “harder than the rocks”, tea which is “made from stewed
up socks”, and a Dining Hall smelling of Irish Stew. The teas at the College were described as a
joke – “you only ate them when quite stony broke”.
Sports formed a large part of life in the College, and
Betjeman bemoaned the fact that for five years he and his fellow pupils
“shivered in exiguous shorts”. While at
the College he founded a satirical magazine called ‘The Heretick’, which made
fun of this obsession with sport. Other
negative memories recalled in the poem include the “casual beatings”, the stone
flag passages and the iron bars. In the
early 1960s Betjeman made a documentary film about Marlborough, part of a
series which became lost, but subsequently rediscovered. The director of the piece on Marlborough
recalls that it took some persuading to get him to go through the gates of the
school for the filming on his first visit there for 40 years, such were his
feelings about it.
It wasn’t all bad though, because he liked the town and adored
the surrounding countryside. He used to
walk along the River Kennet, which he recalls in the poem with the line “The
smell of trodden leaves beside the Kennet, On Sunday walks with Swinburne in my
brain” (a reference to a fellow English poet).
He also cycled to Silbury, “by burnt-up hawthorn edged again with white
from chalk dust whirled by Fords and Lancias” (Marlborough is in the middle of
a predominantly chalk terrain) and to “sepulchral Avebury “.
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| Avebury Ring - geograph.org.uk - 443147. Photo by Simon Barnes, via Wikimedia Commons. |
Marlborough used to be an important pit-stop on the old road
from London to Bath, and the quaint old inns lining its main street are a
reminder of that time. Its most notable
feature is its generous High Street, the second widest in the country, with a
pleasant mix of pubs, cafes, restaurants and shops. In fact, for a town of its size it has a
surprisingly decent selection of shops, probably because the continued presence
of Betjeman’s hated College lends the town an upmarket air. The chalklands around Marlborough are full of
fascinating ancient sites. Silbury,
mentioned above, is home to Silbury Hill, an artificial prehistoric chalk
mound, and Avebury is famous for its Avebury Ring, a henge monument containing three stone circles. These two Neolithic monuments, along with the
West Kennet Long Barrow, are part of the Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated
Sites UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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| High Street, Marlborough, from St Peter's Church roof - geograph.org.uk - 460662. Photo by Brian Robert Marshall, via Wikimedia Commons. |
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