Betjeman: Writing the Public Life

4. Dear Old, Bloody Old England: Sacramental Politics and Anglican Pastoralism

119 s Sacramental Politics andAnglican Pastoralism Dear Old, Bloody Old England 4 Here lies the England we are all beginning to wish we knew, as the roar of the machine gets louder and the suburbs creep from London to Land’s End.1 On a cold and dark day in May 1984, with a raking wind and rain soaking the mourners, John Betjeman was laid to rest in the graveyard of St. Enodoc Church, near Trebetherick, Cornwall, the setting that had inspired his 1944 poem, “Sunday Afternoon Service in St. Enodoc Church, Cornwall.” The church, which was within walking distance of Betjeman’s home in Treen, was one he had known since childhood. It was fifteenth-century, nondescript beyond its memorably crooked spire and the romanticized local legends of the saint above whose cell the church was constructed. More importantly, it exhibited the very ethos of Betjeman’s world. According to Simon Jenkins, St. Enodoc’s embodied all that Betjeman valued in English life and landscape. Landward are the secure Edwardian villas of Trebetherick, hidden among the Scots pines and cedars. Holidaying children play adventures in large gardens and along sandy footpaths. Between the beach and the site of the church is a golf course that barely harms the scenery.2 Though unremarkable in the usual aspects of architectural merit, it has about it nonetheless a “dark and ancient” air of mystery that continues to fascinate visitors and a remoteness from the “telegraph poles 120 Betjeman: Writing the Public Life s and tin” of the rest of “Dear old, bloody old England.”3 The church’s presence here is moreover miraculous. Drifts of sand from the surrounding dunes began to settle and rise in the nave of the church in the nineteenth century, and before its restoration in 1864 it remained consecrated by the vigilance of a vicar who annually entered the church by a hole in the ceiling in order to utter the words of a divine office, though this appearance of devotion is diminished by the rather prosaic fact that at least one service per year was required for the parson to collect his yearly stipend.4 It was just the sort of story—and just the sort of place—to inspire Betjeman to poetic flights. The efforts of the parishioners in the nineteenth century to empty the church of sand, to restore the damaged interior, and to resuscitate the parish must have been of particular inspiration to Betjeman, who dedicated a nearly unimaginable measure of his life to the preservation of England ’s threatened ecclesial heritage. Indeed the preservation of English churches was probably as important to Betjeman as his poetry. In “The Fabric of our Faith,” an essay in Punch written in 1953 as an appeal for readers to contribute to the Historic Churches Trust Fund, Betjeman asked, “Yet what would England be without her old churches? Not the England we know and love.” Indeed England’s churches, which Betjeman believed existed in a richer variety of styles than in any other country in the world, “are the living record, not the museum, of English craftsmanship.” But more importantly they “are the history of the people of the parish.” Betjeman reminds readers that parsons have more important tasks than fundraising for repairs and should not be “diverted from their work of ministering to the sick and feeding the souls of the faithful and converting indifference to belief, by having always to bother about money for the fabric of their churches.” He explains why the faith of the parishioners and their parsons is no longer enough to sustain the buildings threatened by disrepair or by apathy: “Too many bishops to-day, worried by finance and the need for new churches in the growing suburbs and new towns, show a lack of faith by shutting some of them and selling the sites— often important ones in the heart of a city—in order to find money to build other churches and halls in the new suburbs.” Betjeman’s desire to preserve endangered churches is rooted in his desire for a spiritual conservation of the England he knows and loves. Such bishops driven s Dear Old, Bloody Old England 121 by the bottom line “forget that a church as a building is a more lasting witness to our Christian faith than any bishop, vicar, churchwarden or congregation. A civilization is remembered and judged by her buildings . That...