20 JANUARY 2007, Page 11

'To be with John Betjeman was to enter another world'

Andrew Geddes recounts the long affair between his mother Margie and the great poet, and the passion of his letters to her over many decades My mother first met John Betjeman in the summer of 1929. She was 20 and he was a master at Heddon Court prep school in Potters Bar where her brothers Dick and John Addis were pupils. Together with her parents, she had driven over from Primrose Hill in an open landau (my grandparents did not seem to be aware of the invention of the motor car) to attend the school sports day. It was a hot summer's day and they sat in deck chairs on the edge of the games field watching the sports. A slim young master with large brown eyes and sticky-out teeth caught my mother's attention. He was kneeling to adjust the high jump, and as she wrote later, 'Quite suddenly in a flash I was aware that this was no ordinary person, but someone very special. No, it wasn't love, it was just an awareness of potential greatness.' Who is he?' she asked Dick. 'He's called John Betjeman. He's a new master and teaches English. He climbs through the classroom window, and lies on the floor to teach; he says this is to make sure he's got control.'

Dick adored him, and that summer, my grandfather, the banker Sir Charles Addis, invited him to stay at Hartrigge near Jedburgh which the family had taken for the summer holidays. He and my mother would play tennis together on the lawn. He wore carpet slippers and played abominably. 'He would gain sneaky points,' my mother recalled, 'by picking up the ball and serving it over the net while he was walking back to the serving line and we weren't even looking — actually nor was he.'

Sir Charles enjoyed reading aloud. After tea he would gather his 13 children and any guests around him and for an hour or more he would read from some improving book of his choice. Nobody dared utter a word. On one such occasion, with `Betje', as he was known, sitting beside her, my mother was horrified to hear him starting to groan very loudly. Sir Charles stopped reading and looked inquiringly over his spectacles; the groaning had ceased. Reading was resumed and so were the loud groans — 'ERR-ERR-ERR'. Again a pause and again silence. 'The culprit was never discovered,' my mother recalled, 'but it was sacrilege! We were a very disciplined puritanical family and to make mock of Father was unthinkable.'

That autumn he came to my mother's 21st birthday party at her home in London and gave a slide show on 'Boarding House Decor'. 'It was a complete breakthrough into an area hitherto unexplored,' she remembered, 'an absolute masterpiece, and goodness it was funny.' Afterwards they danced in the drawing-room to Trevor Stamp playing at the piano.

He invited her to lunch at the Café Royal as a thank-you for arranging a lecture with Mrs Curtis at Langford Grove school. 'You saved me financially,' he told her. 'I was down and out.' Mrs Curtis told her later that he had spent most of his time on the roof looking at the leads and endlessly going to the loo on account of his nerves.

At this point in the story, my mother paused. 'I heard. . . that Betje had married a Penelope Chetwode,' she told me, 'who apparently whenever she heard Beethoven would eat the mat — whatever that signified — and I married your father in Johannesburg.'

In 1953 my family moved to Jersey, and slowly and sadly my parents' marriage unravelled. My mother became the secretary of the 'Jersey Ladies Literary Luncheon Club' and wrote to John Betjeman at his address in Cloth Fair inviting him to give a lecture. He wrote back in characteristic style: Dear Margie, My goodness, I remember you and how much I loved you, but was too shy to say. I would love to come to Jersey for the nice fee and also the pleasure of seeing you and talking about Dick.

He came in January 1960. My mother met him at the airport. 'There he was, grubby mac, squashed hat and carrying a meat bag full of books.' They went out to dinner with friends and when they returned home, he said quietly, 'I want to lie in your arms on the sofa.' 'And so he did,' my mother wrote later, 'while he poured out to me his inner fears and terrors, how his life was emotionally empty, how Penelope neglected him "She left me when I had flu; you wouldn't have left me, would you?" Nowhere it seemed could he find the peace and tranquillity he so earnestly desired. Afterwards he wrote: I can't get you out of my mind. You were such a rest and such a companion to me. I have an idea we get on so well that we may well be essential to each other in moments of crisis. It is very odd that this should be. Not odd perhaps when one considers how beautiful you are. What a deliciously indiscreet letter this is! . . . I loved you and love you, Margie. Stick to your old friend, me, for we can help each other.

I hope you weren't too alarmed by 5 Cheyne Walk. You did not seem to be. Old Victor S is a sweet and good friend and so is poor, white, effete, wasted out, dear Elizabeth Cavendish [she was 34 at the time] . . . I fear you are bound to haunt my mind for the rest of my life. I like this haunting. I feel I can rest in you and depend on you. Nip and tuck with me.'

In 1964 my parents divorced and my mother fled to London to escape her sorrow. Their meetings became more frequent, first in Highgate and then, when my mother moved, in her house in Kensington. He often came over to visit her, not infrequently after a marital row.

One day in the early 1970s John and Penelope unexpectedly came to tea after visiting the V&A. Penelope stayed on after John had left. 'She talked of Feeble [Elizabeth Cavendish, Betjeman's acknowledged mistress] with some sadness, my mother recorded. "It's the eternal triangle Margie," she said, "but I don't think there is any sex in it, he is past that now." Mother, perhaps wisely, kept her counsel. Afterwards she told us, 'He was a highly sexed man, practically to his death. Feeble was his great love. She looked after him devotedly, but when I knew him it seemed he no longer desired her.' Mother's remark about sex seems to qualify what A.N. Wilson describes in his perceptive biography as his 'hunch' that `Betjeman, like many depressives, was low-sexed and that his televised regret [that he hadn't had enough of it] was true'.

One afternoon the following year the telephone rang. It was John and he was in a state of panic. 'I can't get out of the house. Help me,' he cried. Mother went round to Radnor Walk where he had his office and found him in hysterics, unable to get the key to work. After calming him a little she managed to persuade him to pass the key through the letterbox and she was able to open the door from the outside. He flung himself into her arms. 'You've saved me,' he cried, `oh thank you, thank you.' At that moment Feeble walked up the street. She said nothing, but a few minutes later the telephone rang and her peremptory voice could be overheard to say, 'You've got to get rid of that woman at once.' He protested, but then turned to Mother almost in tears and, giving the impression of a small boy being summoned by the headmaster, he said, 'I'll have to go to her', and, abject and visibly shaking, he left.

On another occasion, driving together down to lunch at Faringdon, they had to stop for petrol. Suddenly John started to tremble all over. 'We can't stop here,' he said, 'do you see that Arab ahead, he is putting poison in the petrol.' But John,' Mother protested, 'we must get petrol or we'll run out."No, no, we can't stop here, drive on, drive on!' And so they did and duly ran out of petrol some miles further on. 'How full of fears and terrors he was,' she later commented; 'his was not a happy life.'

He was immensely proud when he was made Poet Laureate, but found writing to order an agony. He had to compose a poem for Princess Anne's wedding and he had gone round to Mother's Kensington house, where he sat by the fire, pencil and pad on his lap, while she wrote letters at her desk. Groans came from the chair from time to time and then a sound like a death rattle. 'What is wrong, John?' my mother turned to him in alarm. 'Oh gosh, Margie,' he sighed, `the only thing I know about Princess Anne is that she likes horses and the only thing I know about horses is that they sting.'

`To be with John B,' my mother recorded, 'was to enter another world — a more scintillating world, with the freshness of a child's outlook, where everything is a discovery, nothing taken for granted, things seen not with the sight but with his vision and enhanced by his imagination.'

Towards the end of the 1970s my mother's life took a different path and the relationship came to an end, but when he fell ill she got in touch again and they lunched together, sometimes in his office and sometimes at an Italian restaurant in Radnor Street. 'There were lots of jokes and laughter,' she recalled, 'but I could not get near, he was withdrawing into that other world which not very long after he entered.'

My mother, aged 98, died in October 2006. She had asked that this account should not be published until after her death.