Beauty and Betjeman
OVER in London’s fashionable Mayfair, as the estate agents say, the Grosvenor Chapel has a newly blessed memorial plaque. It is in memory of Joan and Michael Constantinidi, worshippers there, as was Sir John Betjeman. So it may not surprise our readers to learn that this is, in part, the story of a poet and his muse.
Betjeman attended the chapel from 1972 until his death in 1984. Seeing from afar a fellow worshipper, Joan Constantinidi, née Price, he never spoke to her. Instead, he imagined this happily married woman as a “mistress”. Well, that’s poets for you.
At six feet tall, she was a model and beauty editor for Queen; so perhaps Betjeman can be forgiven for getting carried away. She also owned two beauty shops and a teaching studio, and was even invited to No. 10 to do Margaret Thatcher’s make-up before party conferences, the Chaplain, the Revd Dr Richard Fermer, tells us.
A. N. Wilson and members of the Betjeman Society read at the 11 a.m. service when the plaque was blessed on 2 October — which brings me to the poem, published under the title “Lenten Thoughts of a High Church Anglican”.
Mrs Constantinidi’s beauty gave Betjeman “a hint of the unknown God”. His poem speaks of her “glance of amused surprise” and the nonchalance with which she wore expensive clothes.
And the sound of her voice is as soft and deep
As the Christ Church tenor bell. . .
The angel choir must pause in song
When she kneels at the altar rail.
Appropriately enough, the occasion of the blessing was the chapel’s sung eucharist for Michaelmas.
Making connections
A CROSS-COUNTRY rail journey can be a challenge in what, I suppose, an Anglican bishop might call a “season” of striking. But the journey that the Revd Michael Page, a Baptist minister in Peterborough, made seems to have been just the ticket.
“As I sat on the train to make the return trip, I looked at the stations it would be calling at and was struck by the number of episcopal connections that it made,” he writes.
“Leaving Norwich (bishop and cathedral), it called at Thetford (bishop), Ely (bishop and cathedral), Peterborough (bishop and cathedral), Grantham (bishop), Nottingham (RC cathedral and bishop), Alfreton, Chesterfield, Stockport (bishop), Manchester (bishop and cathedral), Warrington (bishop), Widnes, and finally Liverpool (bishop and cathedral, RC archbishop and cathedral).”
Mr Page couldn’t help but think, he says, about “what kind of purple knees-up” would be had if all these prelates got together.
But, reading his letter, I had a sense of déjà-vu. Someone, surely, has written about the link between new sees and transport hubs in the steam age — which, never forget, gave birth to both Bradshaw and Crockford. I don’t know where I saw it, but an erudite reader may enlighten me.
Aboriginal humour
WHEN I am told that something was in our columns in time gone by, no date given, a warning bell tinkles sanctus-like in my head. One reader assured me a few years ago that a particular piece on the seal of confession had appeared “recently”. I suppose so — if that’s how he felt about 1963.
So it was tinkle, tinkle, again with a letter about the Rt Revd Arthur Malcolm (Gazette, 19 August). It recalled, supposedly, our report of the1988 Lambeth Conference, and was interesting if true. (I suppress the writer’s name, lest I be thought to criticise.)
In 1988, our informant said, the bishops from Australia included, for the first time, an Aborigine. Newspaper reporters and television journalists had heard about this man, and had seen photos of him “in his native apparel”, and were expecting to have some sport at a press conference; but he proved to be more than a match.
One reporter asked: “Bishop, your people say that the first humans evolved in Australia, 40,000 years ago; and many parts of your country are, indeed, like paradise. If that is true, then could you tell us: if Adam and Eve had been your ancestors, would they have eaten the apple?”
The Bishop seemed to be thinking about this. Then he said: “Nah, mate. We’d have eaten the bloody snake.”
Alas, I can find no evidence that we reported this ripe riposte, or that it was Bishop Malcolm’s, in 1988; but Herb Wharton, a former cattle drover, turned novelist, did make the same “bloody snake” joke in a talk at Lincoln Cathedral a few years later (News, 11 October 1996). Could it be part of the stock-in-trade of Aboriginal humour?
Exciting holiness
ONE correspondent (16 September) has predicted the canonisation of Queen Elizabeth II, with a feast, presumably in the Common Worship calendar, on a suggested date of 21 April; but a Canterbury Reader, Dr P. W. L. Clough, puts forward an alternative, 2 June (Coronation Day), for the Queen’s commemoration.
“Several British monarchs are remembered in the Anglican calendar as lesser festivals: Charles I (1649), Oswald of Northumbria (642), Edward the Confessor (1066), Alfred the Great (899), Margaret of Scotland (1093), and Edmund of East Anglia (870),” Dr Clough writes.
The speed with which Rome moves to accomplish such things, like the process by which it does so, is another world to most of us plain Church of England folk. Many, I am sure, found the alacrity with which Pope John Paul II was canonised rather startling. Newman, on the other hand, already had the aura conferred by history and dreaming spires.
The Lambeth Conference of 1958 resolved that “In the choice of new names [for the kalendar] economy should be observed and controversial names should not be inserted until they can be seen in the perspective of history. . . The addition of a new name should normally result from a wide-spread desire expressed in the region concerned over a reasonable period of time.” So we have scope for interpretation.
Customers in black
AFTER so many General Synod meetings, Cost of Conscience rallies, and Forward in Faith assemblies near by, not to mention, of course, being so handy for Westminster Cathedral, the Italian restaurant in Horseferry Road, frequented particularly by cab drivers, ought to be used to customers in black. But in full mourning, and even wearing their decorations?
In a corporal work of mercy, it stayed open on the day of the late Queen’s funeral. Not long after the Abbey service had finished, I sat next to an elegant woman, with something chivalric pinned on her mourning, who was clearly gasping for a cup of tea (accompanied by a bowl of penne). On the other side of me were French television people who looked as if they needed, above all, their sleep.
And there above us, on the café’s television screen, the cortège continued its stately progress past Buckingham Palace. In the midst of life . . . indeed.
