18 MAY 2002, Page 39

Three's a crowd

From Mr John Whitworth Sir: Grey Gowrie (Books, 4 May), in his amusing review of Larkin's girls' school stories, attributes the famous couplet 'I sometimes think that I would like/To be the saddle of a bike' to John Betjeman, an attribution given credence and currency by Bevis Hillier in his Young Betjeman. However, John Murray, Betjeman's publishers, vehemently deny that he had anything to do with it, and I was obliged to give it to Anon in my Faber Book of Blue Verse. Perhaps it was actually written as a parody by Auden and MacNeice, the two other poets Hillier credits with authorship. I really cannot imagine all three of them sitting down to write it, can you?

John Whitworth

Canterbury, Kent