City and Suburban
BY JOHN BETJEMAN FOR three glorious days my telephone in the City was out of order. The engineers told me that this was due to an Act of God, and it was nice to hear them using such reverent language around Christmas time. All I knew was that I was experiencing a peace which petrol rationing deepened and I had time to enjoy, what in London it is so difficult to enjoy, the reading of poetry and long leisurely books written in the last century. This led me to think about some of the blessings of petrol rationing which you too will have experienced in the enforced silence of Christmas week. One has time to look about and see things invisible from a motor-car. Old towns are a particular pleasure—for instance, Maidstone, where I found myself decanted from a bus station last week.
FOUND IN MAIDSTONE Maidstone has always seemed to me like Chelmsford, Reading and High Wycombe, an infuriating traffic block on the way to somewhere else. But when I had several hours to walk about in it I found much of beauty and interest. Above the chain store fascias of the main streets, many pargetted and old-fashioned Kentish houses, one of them coloured; at the foot of Gabriel's Hill a hunting boot the size of a man and gilded, held by elaborate Georgian ironwork from the first and second floors of a shop; around Holy Trinity Church, elegant classic villas in yellow brick; in a suburb the Church of St. Luke (architect Seth Smith, 1896-97) in the most fan- tastic version of art-nouveau Gothic I have ever seen; behind the bus stop, in a tithe barn once the stables of the Archbishop of Canterbury, a museum of carriages, two floors of them, coaches, broughams and a London horse-bus on the ground floor, children's carriages above. But the most attractive thing of all was the Parish Church of All Saints, in silvery white Kentish limestone, standing in a forest of fine Georgian head- stones. The beauty of these was not so much in their lettering, much of which was washed away, as in the variety of their tops, carved into more different and elegant shapes than one would have believed possible. Opposite the church are the ivy-covered walls of the ruined palace, and church and palace hang, tree-embowered and picturesque, above the Medway. Inside, All Saints must surely have one of the most splendid fifteenth-century interiors in Kent, spacious, broad and with elegantly moulded pillars. It is a fine, many-vistaed town church, with regimental banners hanging tattered and vener- able in the nave. A mayor's pew gives that curiously English and Anglican atmosphere of municipal holiness, Church and State, if you see what I mean.
MOUSTACHE OR CLEAN-SHAVEN?
Even literary gents, and I suppose I must call myself one, have their literary heroes. To me these are those who never go to parties nor are seen on television nor are heard on the wireless, but are just names on printed pages. They never even publish portraits and biographies of themselves on their dust wrappers. I have sought out and found a few. I knew Anthony Hope, I have met Ralph Hodgson, and `Bartimeus' is a friend of mine, but I have never heard anything about the personality or appearance or age of one of the best English novelists, Patrick Hamilton, whose Hangover Square, Slaves of Solitude and Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse seem to me in the top class of English novels. What is he like? Has he a moustache or is he clean-shaven? Where is he now? Is he happy? I am inspired to wish him a prosperous New Year.
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