Betjeman and Me: Rick Stein's Story

We used to picnic where the thrift grew deep and tufted to the edge.

We saw the yellow foam flakes drift in trembling sponges on the ledge below us

till the wind would lift them up the cliff and o'er the hedge.

Sand in the sandwiches, wasps in the tea, sun on our bathing dresses

heavy with the wet, squelch of the bladder-wrack waiting for the sea,

fleas round the tamarisk, an early cigarette.

In the late 1960s, I was an undergraduate at Oxford doing English,

and I was really into people like TS Eliot, Sylvia Plath,

and the girls were into Leonard Cohen, of course.

If you wanted to get anywhere with them, you had to be in with Leonard, too. Very gloomy.

So the thought of a very optimistic poet like John Betjeman,

when he was talking about village steeples

and holidaymakers in the sand, and splendour, splendour everywhere, it would not have worked.

But I've lived here in Cornwall ever since university,

and in fact, John Betjeman lived just over Bray Hill over there.

Everything he wrote about in his poetry, the sun, the sea,

the larks in the sky, the lark sang melodious, the blue sky,

it's all in those poems, so no wonder I'm such a fan.

I feel I've got something in common with Sir John.

Both our families originated in Germany, and both found a sense of escape in Cornwall.

My father and uncle built a house here,

and it became a haven that I was to enjoy for most of my early life.

John Betjeman's retreat was on the other side of the estuary, but he knew Padstow well.

I'm getting to know the man behind the poem

by finding people who knew him and really understood his affection for this part of the world.

My idea is to cook them a celebratory centenary meal in his honour, the sort of food

he'd enjoy for himself after a day's surfing at Polzeath Beach,

or just wondering amongst the tamarisk, searching for a muse.

It's funny, really. There's loads of books about John Betjeman's life

and poetry, but not many of them give a clue about what he would like to eat.

I really hope he liked fish.

When I was about 15, I started reading John Betjeman's poetry,

especially his Cornish verse.

They were so much better read by firelight in the depth of winter.

They bring to life the sights and sounds and smells

of a Cornish beach, nobody does it better.

And it's on that long train journey from Paddington down to Cornwall

that you get that first exciting glimpse of the sea,

when the train approaches Dawlish, to disgorge holidaymakers

from London, the Midlands and all points east.

It's where the smell of ozone, seaweed and suntan lotion

fill the carriages with optimism for the family holiday to come.

He captured the very essence of the British seaside holiday,

right down to the dinner gong in the guest house,

days of messing about on deckchairs, sandcastles, rock pools,

swims before afternoon tea - weather permitting, of course.

If you continue down the line, you can lose yourself

in an altogether more solitary and magical place.

There's something about Cornwall that's always excited artists and writers.

It's to do with the quality of the light and the wild, romantic nature of the place.

Regardless of where we come from,

Cornwall touches a nerve in all of us.

Betjeman instinctively knew the sheer joy of just being by the sea.

George III took the seaside cure for biliousness.

We need the seaside cure for relief from anxiety and tension.

We need it to realise there's something greater than ourselves,

even if it only comes in little things.

Turf, scented with thyme and mushrooms.

The feel of firm sand underfoot.

The ripple of an incoming tide.

A salt breeze, the smell of seaweed.

That's where the cure is, at the sea's edge.

I've known about this so-called seaside cure all of my life,

and it's really at the very core of my being

and my business here in Padstow.

I was brought up in Oxfordshire a long way from the sea,

and like John Betjeman, I was sent away

from home to a boarding school and couldn't wait to tick off the days

until the summer holidays came around,

and the family would all troop down to Padstow for the best time ever.

Escape. Escape from the holiday crowds.

Over Saltash Bridge.

Saltash Bridge by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, 1859,

the first railway link between Cornwall and England.

Cornwall - not another county, another country.

For years, an all-day journey by train,

and a wild reward at the end of it.

I happen to know that this was John Betjeman's favourite train journey.

Well, of course it was.

Going over the Tamar is still a magical experience for me,

just as it was for him.

But what he liked particularly was the journey from Waterloo,

all the way to the utter endness of the end of the line at Padstow.

In fact, when I was young, I used to do that journey, too.

It took forever, it took about nine hours, and all the way down,

you'd be shedding carriages, and the train would get smaller.

As you went over that last bridge into Padstow, there were just two carriages on it.

He wrote about it so nicely in Summoned By Bells,

and here's a bit from it:

"The long express from Waterloo that takes us down to Cornwall.

"Teatime shows the small fields waiting,

"every blackthorn hedge straining inland before the south-west gale."

He's so good at summing things up.

I'm right in a Cornish gale, a gale of wind there.

"The emptying train, wind in the ventilators,

"puffs out of Egloskerry to Tresmeer,

"through minty meadows, under bearded trees and hills

"upon whose sides the clinging farms hold Bible Christians."

Can it really be that this same carriage came from Waterloo?

On Wadebridge station, what a breath of sea scented the Camel Valley.

Cornish air, soft Cornish rains, and silence after steam,

as out of Derry's stable came the break to drag us up

those long, familiar hills, past haunted woods,

and oil-lit farms, and on to far Trebetherick by the sounding sea.

This is the Camel estuary,

which provided John Betjeman with much of his inspiration.

This place gave him a sense of freedom,

a release from an unhappy childhood in London,

and he's never really left it.

He's buried here, in the middle of the golf course,

in a little graveyard beside his beloved St Enodoc.

Thanks to that so-called expert on railways in the sixties, Dr Beeching,

the London train no longer goes to the utter endness

of the end of the line in Padstow.

The old railway track is now a cycle trail.

Well, it suits me.

Apparently, the young Betjeman thought nothing of cycling

15 or 20 miles a day around the lanes of Cornwall,

searching for wild flowers and churches.

The open air was warm and heavy with the scent of flowering mint,

and all the baking countryside was kind.

I get the feeling he was a bit of a loner as a lad,

and not too fond of organised games, or organised anything, come to that.

Like me, he needed a bolt hole, somewhere to be quiet and apart.

It was the same in later life.

This was his home in Daymer Lane, here in Trebetherick,

a welcome retreat from London life where he did a lot of his writing.

Down the bottom of the lane is St Enodoc church, with its witches hat.

That's his mother there. And this is Cliff Snell.

He retired to Wadebridge 20 years ago, and although he never met JB,

he's become something of an authority,

and is a popular guide for the many tourists who visit his grave.

If you go back to the early 1900s,

he was living a very repressive life in Highgate, going to school,

which he didn't like particularly,

and then suddenly to come down here by train, which he adored,

and he'd come out by horse and cart -

that's all the taxis were in those days - and then can you imagine

waking up next morning and running down to the high tide,

over this particular spot?

He loved it when it was low tide because he could see

nobody else had been on that sand at all except himself.

Can you imagine the young boy looking behind

and seeing his footmarks all the way down to the sea?

I think the reason I like him so much

is because I had similar feelings.

I remember me and my sister squabbling about who'd be

the first to see the sea when we drove in the old Jaguar.

It was somewhere between Wadebridge and Padstow.

Because I was older, I knew where I could see the sea,

and she used to get so cross.

Can't you remember the sheer joy of suddenly there was the sea,

as he says, on Wadebridge station?

"What a breath of sea, the scent of the Camel Valley."

I can remember that. Suddenly, somewhere, that's the sea.

And he wasn't on his own, friends used to come as well.

He preferred going out on his own,

but he loved to have afternoon picnics on the sand.

The whole thing was childhood as it should be today but no longer is.

Here I am down in Cornwall.

It's the most precious fortnight in the year for me.

I can't help coming down here every year without fail.

The outline of the hills seen through the windows there,

and Padstow, far off across the estuary are still the same,

and so are the smells of sea and thyme-scented turf on these cliffs.

The Atlantic and the sands are still the same.

They can't build on them, thank goodness.

He has captured a whole age of the '20s and '30s, tennis girls,

gin and lime, the Six o'clock News,

"Miss J Hunter Dunn, furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun,

"what strenuous singles we played after tea.

"We in the tournaments, you against me."

All those gorgeous things. He talks about going into the cool veranda

for a lime juice and gin, and then listening to the Six o'clock News.

Of course, when I came here nearly 50 years ago,

there were hardly any houses, and the fields now are all

peppered with villas, and I can remember it as just two farms.

And now, though I'm old and fat and ugly, I can still enjoy

as intensely as I did when a child all those little things

that make Cornwall so different from England.

I see it all as I used to know it in the days of horse breaks,

and silence, silence except for the sound of the wind

in the tamarisk and the crash of the waves.

We weren't Cornish, any of us, we were visitors,

and we came here for Easter and summer holidays.

And those gardens, which seemed so enormous then,

are full of the ghosts of hide and seek and treasure hunts.

I think most people liked him because he was a popular poet.

Ordinary people can understand the surface of the poetry.

If you want to look deeper, you can do,

and there's usually quite a dark strain underneath.

A rather melancholy man sometimes. Yes, I think he's melancholy,

but I mean that in a way I totally understand.

I just wonder why poetry has to be difficult to be serious.

Exactly. He was very pleased...

When he eventually wrote his autobiography, Summoned By Bells,

which is wonderful, that was received with acclaim the worldwide over.

I think that took away some of the worry about his previous work

being dismissed as not very good.

His peculiarly English light verse always managed to capture a popular mood, and he loved nothing more than

to have a mischievous dig at middle class pretensions.

I think the problem with Betjeman is that he can be very funny,

and it's not considered serious enough in a poet to make us laugh.

But this just makes me laugh so much.

He must have written this for Joyce Grenfell. It's called Hunter Trials.

Just listen to some of these verses.

"It's awfully bad luck on Diana, her ponies have swallowed their bits.

"She fished down their throats with a spanner, and frightened them all into fits.

"Just look at Prunella on Guzzle, the wizardest pony on earth.

"Why doesn't she slacken his muzzle and tighten the breech in his girth?

"I say, Mummy, there's Mrs Geezer, and doesn't she look pretty sick?

"I bet it's because Mona Lisa was hit on the hock with a brick."

"Mrs Blewitt says Monica threw it, but Monica says it was Joan.

"And Joan's very thick with Miss Blewitt, so Monica's sulking alone."

I love the bit at the end. It says: "Oh, wasn't it naughty of Smudges?

"Oh, Mummy, I'm sick with disgust.

"She threw me in front of the judges and my silly old collarbone's bust."

It's got to be Joyce Grenfell. You can hear her saying it!

This is a bit at my expense, but we've just been having some lunch,

and the crew and David, the producer, have just come up

with this poem that they think Sir John might have penned himself.

As you see, it's very much at my expense.

"And pasty-munching tourists come to gaze at Stein's emporium.

"With noses pressed to menu board, they work out what they might afford.

"Hey, Dad, what's salt and pepper squid?

"Forget it, son, it's 40 quid!"

I'm not amused.

Like Sir John, I value these cliff walks.

They are a good way to clear the head.

It was the same walk to Tregardock that inspired Sir John to write a very dark poem indeed.

A literary critic had slated his latest volume of poetry.

Well, I know what it feels like when some TV critic

has a go at me and my dog.

It really cuts you to the quick.

They called Betjeman a lightweight versifier

who kept to traditional verse forms and rhyming schemes -

the very things we now cherish and celebrate.

Scenery like this can often lift the spirits but equally can have an adverse effect.

So he came here to Tregardock.

It was a drizzly, foggy day which reflected his mood.

He wrote, "Only the shore and cliffs are clear,

"gigantic, slithering shelves of slate

"in waiting awfulness appear like journalism full of hate."

I think it reflects how depressed he was by these critics

and he wanted to be a popular poet.

There is nothing wrong with that. He was completely smashed by that.

He was almost suicidal.

The poem ends, "And I on my volcano edge exposed to ridicule and hate

"still do not dare to leap the ledge and smash to pieces on the slate."

But wounds heal and brighter moods roll in like the flooding tide.

And all the time the waves, the waves, the waves.

Chase, intersect and flatten on the sand

as they have done for centuries, as they will for centuries to come

when not a soul is left to picnic on the blazing rocks and seaside is forgotten.

Still the tides, consolingly disastrous, will return

while the strange starfish, hugely magnified,

waits in the jewelled basin of a pool.

Just as the dramatic scenery along this coast inspired some of Betjeman's greatest verse,

it's also been responsible for my ongoing love of the sea

and a desire to make the most of what comes out of it.

OK, Chalks, let's try over here now.

Like John Betjeman, I've been messing around in rock pools all my life.

Every one is a potential treasure trove, and of course,

when you have a seafood restaurant it comes in very handy too -

especially when the spider crabs are in season.

Look at that.

Look at that beauty.

They are good when cooked the Basque way

with peppers and breadcrumbs and baked in the oven - sweet as a nut.

But in Sir John's day, nobody ate spider crabs.

They were regarded by the fishermen as a blinkin' nuisance and thrown over the side!

One person who remembers those times on the beach long ago is Sue Harbor,

the daughter of one of his best friends.

He grew up with Dad on the beach, hence the crab hooks, prawning net,

and the seaside poems and north Cornwall recollections. Everything.

They just grew up... It was a slightly informal

but very loving group, and that is why he writes about it with such fond memories.

Waves full of treasure then were roaring up the beach,

ropes round our mackintoshes, waders warm and dry,

we waited for the wreckage to come swirling into reach,

Ralph, Vasey, Alastair, Biddy, John and I.

The poem, Trebetherick, is one where he refers to his closest friends

which includes Sue's father, so it has a particular resonance for her.

That's her dad - the little boy at the end.

Blessed be St Enodoc, blessed be the wave...

I read it at my mother's funeral recently. She and my father were dear friends of John's for ever.

And reading that last verse,

"Give to our children the happy times that you gave to Ralph,

"Vasey, Alastair, Biddy, John and me,"

really makes you choke because we've had beautiful times.

We've done the same things with the crabbing, the prawning, looking for cowries.

It's just handed down from generation to generation.

Do you think people still look for cowries, and blue and green glass?

Oh, you know about the blue glass. I was going to tell you about that!

And it's extraordinary how long one would spend on the beach

and the hoorahs, and how clever you were

if you found this tiny speck.

I imagine it was milk of magnesia...

Bottles. Bottles. But sometimes it was those glass buoys.

There were blue ones but they were very rare. They were magic on the tide line.

That was gold-dust going along there and finding one, and you really were a hero for a week.

Now, all you get is plastic which John hated.

As long as I can remember, I have come down on to one beach

to look for cowries, which are very small shells.

And I know just where to find them on the tide line.

The shells themselves are coloured pale pink.

The large shells we hardly notice at all.

We weren't interested in them. Always looking for the small ones.

And some of the larger cowries that you find have got freckles on them,

just like the nose of a tennis girl.

What was he like? He was so different from anything I'd ever met.

I think I was really conscious of him, in person, when I was 10.

He came to stay with us when we were in Bath.

I grew up in a very

well-organised, disciplined, naval family,

and everything was on time, and everything.

John appeared and he burst out of his bedroom before

he went to change and said, "Sheila, I've forgotten the bottom of my pyjamas!"

That was the first thing.

Then he had just got an electric razor,

he bought the razor and not the plug!

He always had his trousers done up with the tie.

He never had a belt. Why?

I don't know. He was obviously eccentric in those days.

He was gorgeous. He had the best chuckle I've ever heard in anybody.

When he had a mild stroke in London we went to see him.

You know when you take people a gift, and we didn't know what to take him

because we didn't know how bad the stroke was.

Do you know what we took him? A bag of beach.

We filled a polythene bag of Daymer Bay sand,

and we put it on the bed and his hand came out

and he knew what his bag of beach was. I bet he did.

Blessed be St Enodoc, blessed be the wave.

Blessed be the springy turf, we pray, pray to thee,

ask for our children all the happy days you gave

to Ralph, Vasey, Alistair, Biddy, John and me.

By the end of this programme, I would like to think

I know enough about Sir John to produce the sort of celebratory centenary meal he loved to eat.

I am pretty certain he'd like oysters.

I certainly know he's got a penchant for champagne.

I've heard he likes Dover sole cooked very simply,

it's called sole bon femme,

which means baked in the oven in the style of the good wife of the house.

I don't know whether that is quite upmarket enough

for this dinner for all his friends.

But on the other hand, if I make it too upmarket,

it will be too elaborate

and it won't reflect the simplicity of his poetry.

It is difficult but I think probably Dover sole,

turbot or lobster has got to feature in it,

and certainly nothing like a jus.

I just imagine what he would think of that word.

Or indeed a pyramid of

elaborate food on a plate.

It doesn't get more Cornish - splits and jam and clotted cream.

Splits - they are not scones.

They're the crowning glory of the Cornish cream tea - especially for those in the know.

And, of course, the tea, Lapsang Souchong, Earl Grey - nah.

I'd like to think that JB was a plain Typhoo man.

Sweet were the afternoons of treasure hunts

And in the Oakleys' garden after tea, of splits and cream,

Under old apple boughs with high tide offering prospects of a bathe,

the winners had their prizes.

90-year-old Molly Farmer is one of JB's oldest living friends.

She remembers those sunny days at Trebetherick.

I do remember my aunts were not very happy about the whole thing,

because John was making people come to Trebetherick

and my aunts didn't really like all these people coming.

What? His friends or...

No, these were tourists.

Oh, I see.

Oh, yes. That really was the beginning of

John's poetry.

He wrote about Trebetherick and all these different places, Polzeath and Padstow.

And that is what bought the people down.

Good Lord, it's like me with my restaurants.

I was going to say that. Two of a kind, really.

But, with John, I would think he wouldn't even think of that. Course not.

I don't know anything so exciting as getting a perfect surf.

Timing one's shoot-off

from the waves.

Riding along on the crest

and coming far inshore.

By Jove! That bald-headed fellow - it's me!

He used to come and have picnics with us on the beach.

He said the only time he got a good meal was when I came down

and we would sit on the beach and he would come down in his raincoat, done up with string,

because he wouldn't sew the buttons on.

He made himself look like an old man

and my youngest son once came up to me and said, "Is he so poor he can't put the buttons on?"

"Can't you put them on?"

I said, "No, the point of him being like that is so people don't come up and ask for his autograph."

Even when he was surfing at Polzeath,

people would wade into the water to get his autograph!

I know. I am that soldier.

Do you have that too? Yeah.

The old harbour at Padstow had walls of slate and the slippery quay,

made of upended slates, felt warm and smooth to feet that were bare.

And then the streets of Padstow closed around us.

That old house on the quay I always thought must once have been a monastery.

The narrow streets of the fishing town were emptier then,

but they are still very much the same.

Though the shops were more resorted to in our day for useful things,

for oil-lit houses, rather than for the souvenirs which fill them today.

The popularity of Padstow lies within itself.

It doesn't need John Betjeman or me, for that matter, to sing its praises.

I was quite surprised to hear John Betjeman had got it in the neck

from his Cornish friends and associates that he was popularising the place too much.

I was also delighted because I had a feeling of affinity with him.

The more I get to know about John Betjeman, the more I feel close to him,

because people keep going on about "Padstein",

because I've got a few modest businesses here.

I find it quite embarrassing. I think the same thing's happened.

All that John Betjeman did was to talk about a place he loved and that is exactly what I've done.

I feel a bit confounded by people that say, "Oh, you made the place too popular."

You think, what should I do?

Just say, it's a terrible place, don't come here?!

Much as I'd have you believe that every day's sunny in Cornwall, of course, it's not.

It's often like this, where there's an awful lot of people on holiday

rather bored with not a lot to do.

And, as ever, John Betjeman summed it up perfectly.

All put your macs on, run for shelter fast.

Crouch where you like until it's fine again.

Holiday cheerfulness is unsurpassed.

Why be put out by healthy English rain?

Are we downhearted?

No! We're happy still. We came here to enjoy ourselves, and we will.

"Our lodging house, 10 minutes from the shore, still unprepared to make a picnic lunch,

except by notice on the previous day." It's still the same.

"And still on the bedroom wall, the list of rules. Don't waste the water.

"It is pumped by hand. Don't throw old blades into the WC.

"Don't keep the bathroom long.

"And don't be late for meals. And don't hang swimsuits on the sills.

"A line has been provided at the back.

"Don't empty children's sandshoes in the hall.

"Don't this, don't that."

"Ah, still the same, the same as it was last year and the year before.

"But rather more expensive now, of course."

Queues for the cafes, and the seafront's bleak.

Go to the pictures then.

I'm not complaining, but didn't I see that film the other week?

As for our lodgings, we're in quite a fix.

They never want us back till after six.

What people really came to Cornwall for was picturesque villages.

Cornwall became an artists' paradise.

And the amateur photographers' as well.

The shrewd Cornish - independent, proud - cash in on the foreigners,

and small blame to them.

Plenty of car parks on the way to the quay

and plenty of gift shops on the way to the car parks.

It's economics, see.

Even in JB's time, holidaymakers would wander the harbour

eating something that predates the pizza and the hamburger.

I suppose you could call this the culinary symbol of Cornwall - a Cornish pasty.

Always should be eaten out of a paper bag. Never with a knife and fork on a plate.

And I think Sir John would agree with me on that one. Very non-U.

Other interesting thing about the Cornish pasty is that over here in Padstow, it's pasty.

Over there, with the more well-to-do types in Rock, it's par-sty.

It's amazing what a bit of water can do.

Pasty here, par-sty there.

For five months of the year, Padstow is as packed as its rubbish bins.

JB yearned for the days of sanity to return.

I'm glad it's quiet again and I'm on foot.

You know that sort of holy hush there is in the land on Christmas morning, the roads fairly empty,

the sky almost free of aeroplanes, and you begin to hear and see and smell once more?

The seaside can be like this if you find an unspoilt stretch of it.

We don't all want to be organised but, if we aren't, we seem to sprawl everywhere.

Where yonder villa hogs the sea was open cliff to you and me.

The many-coloured caras fill the salty marsh to Shiller Mill

and, foreground to the hanging wood, are toilets where the cattle stood.

Now, as we near the ocean roar, a smell of deep fry haunts the shore.

In pools beyond the reach of tide, the Senior Service packets glide.

And, on the sand, the surf line lists with wrappings of potato crisps.

The breakers bring, with merry noise,

tribute of broken plastic toys

and lichen spears of blackthorn glitter with harvest of the August litter.

The next bit is, like, easily his most controversial poem, Come Friendly Bombs And Fall On Slough.

JB was not a fan of caravan sites.

Perhaps, one day, a wave will break, before the breakfasters awake, and sweep the caras out to sea,

the oil, the tar and you and me, and leave, in windy crisscross motion, a waste of undulating ocean.

Out there, it's solitude.

They can't build on the sea.

Jonathan Stedall is a documentary film maker who made many remarkable programmes with Sir John,

including a film adaptation of his verse autobiography, Summoned By Bells,

and the intimate Time With Betjeman, the last film he did before he died in 1984.

What started as a stimulating working relationship developed into a strong friendship.

What happened here?

This was one of the last sequences I filmed with him.

It was about two years before he died and he was in a wheelchair by then, so I was pushing him.

And we came here

and we were talking about various things.

It was quite a deep conversation.

He was talking about eternity

and I was probing in that kind of area.

And then I saw a sort of little glisten in his eye and he clearly wanted to change the subject.

He had a tendency, when things were getting too earnest, to want to lighten things.

And I said to him, "Do you have any regrets in your life?"

That was when he made this famous remark.

John, have you got any regrets about your life at all? Yes.

What you've done or haven't done? Yes.

I haven't had enough sex.

That, I suppose, I'm not allowed to say.

And that's the remark that people remember almost best from the whole series.

There's a wonderful line in Summoned By Bells.

He's talking about himself. "An only child,

deliciously apart, misunderstood and not like other boys."

Fantastic.

I think that "deliciously apart" is a wonderful phrase because, actually, he's not really moaning.

There's a side in him that's relishing this being an outsider.

Crikey, I've trod on your dog!

I'm sorry.

I'm afraid Betjeman wasn't too fond of dogs.

He had an expression for them. He called them "turd droppers".

Oh, that's a shame.

He loved the whole process of filming, you see.

He liked being in a team. He was interested in people, interested in the crew.

He loved the jargon. Did he?

Well, all the funny expressions.

What, like "fly in the gate"?

Hair in the gate. Oh, God! I always think it's fly.

I don't know why.

And the names for the lights.

You know, they're called brutes and red heads and blondies. Oh, he would have loved that.

And then there's a thing that can happen in the cutting room

when the camera and the sound get out of sync -

"creeping sync". And he loved the expression.

He didn't understand what creeping sync was.

It sounds like some horrible disease.

No, he was lovely to work with.

He was interested in everybody.

I think that was the key to it, really.

Of course, there are some people who felt that he should have...

By doing so much television, that his poetry suffered

and that he should have just concentrated on poetry.

You know, I think that he brought a kind of poetry, in the wider sense,

to many, many more people by doing what he did.

His films are like poems.

Some he actually wrote the commentary in verse.

But even if he didn't,

there is a sort of poetry in the work that he did.

Then, before breakfast, down towards the sea I ran alone, monarch of miles of sand.

Its shining stretches satin smooth and veined.

I felt beneath bare feet the lugworm casts and walked where only gulls

and oystercatchers had stepped before me to the water's edge.

Well, it's time to put all I've learnt about the great man to the test

and cook a meal that he would have approved of.

And why not fish pie?

For one thing, it's simple fare but it's not simply won.

I thought it fitting that I'd use local fish from trawlers

that JB might have walked by as they tied up in the harbour.

I searched and searched but Betjeman didn't write a poem about fishing in Cornwall.

Pity, really.

So what I'm using, in this rather special, luxury version of the fish pie,

is lightly smoked Cornish haddock and fresh cod.

I'm going to poach them in milk and Cornish cream,

flavoured with onions studded with cloves and bay leaves.

I've only allowed about 10 minutes for that simmering because the fish has to be only just cooked.

Just enough so it flakes away from the skin and bones easily.

While that's cooling, I'm going to make the classic Bechamel sauce with butter -

one of the first things I was taught to cook.

Loads of butter, plain flour, stirred and cooked out to make a classic roux.

Then I add the poaching liquor.

I was thinking about Bechamel sauces and veloutes.

I love making them. I love stirring like this to get rid of those lumps.

I've made veloutes ever since I was 18 in large kitchens in big quantities.

So making a fish pie like this for eight to 10 people is right up my street.

You just have to add the milk and cream in a few batches otherwise it separates.

And you have to keep stirring to keep those lumps out the way.

Next I season the sauce with grated nutmeg, black pepper and flakes of sea salt.

Now I did say right at the start that this is a luxury fish pie and not the school-dinner version.

Lobster for this special occasion.

It has to be firm, sweet chunks of freshly cooked Cornish lobster.

Look at that. This is my idea of luxury.

This is real seaside holiday food.

Now for the assembly.

JB wrote a poem about food as experienced by a town clerk.

He says, "I can safely say a beautiful England's on the way.

"Already our hotels are pretty good.

"For those who are fond of very simple food.

"Well, cod and two veg, free pepper, salt and mustard,

followed by nice hard plums and lumpy custard."

Well, lumpy custard this is not.

It's creamy mashed spuds enriched

with the yolks of free-range eggs and hard-boiled eggs to go into the pie.

A fish pie, in my view, isn't right without the addition of hard-boiled eggs.

Now put the mashed potatoes on top and then, using the tines of a fork, plough a pattern.

It's ready for the oven.

Medium to high for 35 minutes until it's golden brown.

I think it's the sort of thing that

JB would like.

It's wholesome, British, but I'm just gonna try a bit to make sure

those real lovers of everything to do with Betjeman are gonna eat it.

It's a little bit hot.

That's very nice.

I'm sorry to praise my own food but I was just thinking,

I know Sir John was talking about St Enodoc golf course

and Daymer Bay and the estuary beyond, when he said,

"Splendour, splendour everywhere".

But this is my splendour, splendour everywhere.

Here we go. Isn't that wonderful.

This is where I drop the pie.

It wouldn't be the first time. I think we should clap.

This is the main course.

I started with a fruits de mer of Cornish shellfish -

langoustines, brown crab, razor clams, mussels and oysters.

And the guest of honour was Candida Lycett Green, John Betjeman's daughter.

In fact, it was her idea for us to have this lunch in the first place.

Now what do you serve with a fish pie?

In my book, you have to have peas and nothing wrong with frozen either.

I think he would have approved because he loved the ordinary.

He saw the world a different way.

We were very lucky, he came and gave the speech at our wedding.

We were all expecting great things from this poet.

We hadn't arranged for a platform so we gave him an old garden bench, which unfortunately was too old,

and he stood up and we all waiting with bated breath and he said,

"To the handsome Christopher and the beautiful Susan",

and disappeared down through the slats of the garden bench.

He'd had a little bit too much to drink.

Luckily, he was retrieved by the stewards at the naval establishment and went his way.

I'm afraid that was his speech.

Cliff, I just got a feeling he lit up your life really.

Absolutely. I've been privileged to read his poems for 20 years to the public on Bray Hill.

I just love that wonderful cast of characters.

There's a whole era captured in the poetry - the '30s and '40s.

It's all there, wonderful stuff.

The only first line I can think of immediately is

How To Get On In Society - "Phone for the fish knives, Norman,

"as Cook is a little unnerved.

"You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes

"And I must have things daintily served.

"Are the requisites all in the toilet?

"The rings round the cutlets can wait

"Till the Major's replenished the cruets

"And switched on the logs in the grate."

Isn't it wonderful stuff?

Why do you think people find him trite?

There's always this, "Oh, you like John Betjeman, do you?"

That's simply because it's too easy to like and modern poets are quite complicated.

Some of them are wonderful, but they have a different way of communicating

and they don't communicate to the masses, which my dad does.

I think that's the reason people say he's trite

and he's not on the school curriculum because he's not complicated.

I feel passionately about that.

I think that very profound and complicated things can be said very simply, actually.

He was brilliant at that in his poetry and in his life all together.

There was a favourite phrase of John's which comes to mind after this lovely meal.

He used to say, "Nothing succeeds like excess".

On a wild, wet May afternoon in 1984 a group of pallbearers,

including his friend Jonathan Stedall

slowly carried JB to his final resting place in St Enodoc graveyard.

He would join those who'd helped make his summers so memorable

and were now immortalised in his verse.

We had to walk about a quarter of a mile with the coffin.

We were absolutely soaked.

Somebody said when we came into the church, we looked like wreckers.

Here it is.

Slightly floral, don't you think?

I think so. I think he'd have liked it. You do?

Yeah. He was religious, wasn't he?

Yes. Certainly, his religion was very important to him.

I think, from my experience, he was also very courageous,

in the sense that he was able to live with doubt.

Yeah.

He used to refer to what we call God as "the management".

He said he...

he hoped, rather than believed, that the management was in charge.

I like to think of him not as somewhere else and us here,

but that we're actually at one level all together.

That's my feeling about him.

I just can't help feeling, with a slight smile,

what do you think John Betjeman would have to say

when he heard the serious way we were talking?

I think he'd probably think it was very funny that I was being so serious about him.

He'd probably be thinking it's time to go home.

The poor crew are getting wet.

How nice.

Enough.

It's lovely here.

Finished? Yes.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd, 2006

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Why on earth didn't I just go up to somebody

and complain and make a thing of it?