Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,
Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament - you against me!
Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.
Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won,
The warm-handled racket is back in its press,
But my shock-headed victor, she loves me no less.
Her father's euonymus shines as we walk,
And swing past the summer-house, buried in talk,
And cool the verandah that welcomes us in
To the six-o'clock news and a lime-juice and gin.
The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath,
The view from my bedroom of moss-dappled path,
As I struggle with double-end evening tie,
For we dance at the Golf Club, my victor and I.
On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and shorts,
And the cream-coloured walls are be-trophied with sports,
And westering, questioning settles the sun,
On your low-leaded window, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.
The Hillman is waiting, the light's in the hall,
The pictures of Egypt are bright on the wall,
My sweet, I am standing beside the oak stair
And there on the landing's the light on your hair.
By roads "not adopted", by woodlanded ways,
She drove to the club in the late summer haze,
Into nine-o'clock Camberley, heavy with bells
And mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells.
Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
I can hear from the car park the dance has begun,
Oh! Surrey twilight! importunate band!
Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girl's hand!
Around us are Rovers and Austins afar,
Above us the intimate roof of the car,
And here on my right is the girl of my choice,
With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice.
And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said,
And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.
We sat in the car park till twenty to one
And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
7 comments:
I never realised Betjemen's poem was about a real woman that he was really fond of...I thought it was a satirical portrait!
Just so. Good obit in The Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3760566.ece
Bless her. A life well led, it would seem. And I have a soft spot for Betjeman; he chronicled what he saw, how he saw it. What can be the fault in that? And he was and remains right about Slough.
Too tender about a whole way of living to be satirical, perhaps L? It was gone long before tennis racket-wielding was something I did, but the summer evening closing in with the six o'clock news (no gin and lime, not in our house), and that suburban settledness that came from uniformity of hours, incomes, lifestyles, hopes...It's described by Kingsley Amis too.
In some places it got an extension, biking back from the UL past the big Grange Road houses for instance, but it was on life (and massive unearned and college income) support even then. I was born too late and all my cultural and intellectual heroes were old when I was young, at best.
Soft spots for poems are lovely. Often something I'm reading makes one spring to life briefly in my mind, so I thought that as this is just a blog I might print them out, and savour them, complete, no matter how famous. I find they change as my viewpoint alters, anyway, which is interesting too. I'm glad I didn't read English, I wasn't ready for it then. Do you wonder if you might like another go at all those masterpieces Elby?
Oh Lordy yes, HG. Oxford damaged my love for literature for a long time, with it's dry probing scalpel that had no heart. So there's much to catch on again.
Gin & French (Dry Martini - the classic Martini in effect) the 6 o'clock tipple of my parents' choice.
Grange Road? Cambridge? I was at The Leys; friends with one of the Keynes dynasty, who lived in a wonderful house in Grange Road. He was a day boy, and I would often stay with them at weekends. It was my first taste of how the intellectual other half lived. We only saw mum & dad at mealtimes, and Sunday lunches would have all sorts of worthies there. The Rothchilds were up the road. Picasso print on the wall, and I recall having Sunday lunch with them, and Jonathan Dimbleby being there. Daughter Victoria, later a socialite, my first "sort of" girlfriend. Cambridge brought much to me that I still cherish, certainly with regard to validating my own unformed world view at that time. Quite a contrast for a middle-class boy from green belt Cheshire.
Keats popped up in our conversation yesterday; we have a lovely Yoga teacher, a gorgeous 30 year old lass with a heart like a lion. She has been given her "Yoga" name, Sundari, which means "Beautiful", and was disappointed - she wanted a name that spoke more of courage.
Suddenly Keats popped into my mind ....
"Beauty is truth,
Truth beauty,
That is all ye know on earth,
And all ye need to know"
I learnt Grecian Urn and Nightingale off by heart at Prep school. Can't recite them now, but the odd line pops up now and again and always makes me smile ...
Oh for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene!
No, I wasn't ready for English. Sadly, as my English Master at The Leys brought huge enthusiasm to his teaching, we roamed all over literature in way that quite clearly no longer happens. A glass of blushing Hippocrene to Colin Wilcockson, who I can still remember coming into a noisy classroom, jumping on to his table size desk, and laying us low with a bout of full-on Shakespeare. Living literature, as opposed to the dead literature we had to dissect (with a few noble exceptions) under the rule of long past their sell by date dons.
Nice, describing an England probably gone forever.
The last time I glimpsed it Nomad was at the beginning of the 1980s, in the Midlands. Though there it was gin and tonic rather than lime. And the wonderful gardens, the tennis courts, the clever, competence and understanding of what was happening as Britain de-industrialised in the face of intransigent and infiltrated unions. Those infiltrators are the Executive now, but the Midlands is still in their fighting their corner; so-called social enterprises of the Third Sector are still much lower than the share of all businesses, despite large areas of 'high multiple deprivation'. East Midlands is holding out too.
Post a Comment