Now on this out of season afternoon
Day schools which cater for the sort of boy
Whose parents go by Pullman once a month
To do a show in town, pour out their young
Into the sharply red October light.
Here where The Drive and Buckhurst Road converge
I watch the rival gangs and am myself
A schoolboy once again in shivering shorts.
I see the dust of sherbet on the chin
Of Andrew Knox well-dress’d, well-born, well-fed,
Even at nine a perfect gentleman,
Willie Buchanan waiting at his side {—}
Another Scot, eruptions on his skin.
I hear Jack Drayton whistling from the fence
Which hides the copper domes of {“} Cooch Behar {“}.
That was the signal. So there’s no escape.
A race for Willow Way and jump the hedge
Behind the Granville Bowling Club? Too late.
They’ll catch me coming out in Seapink Lane.
Across the Garden of Remembrance? No,
That would be blasphemy and bring bad luck.
Well then, I’m for it. Andrew’s at me first,
He pinions me in that especial grip
His brother learned in Kob‰ from a Jap
{(}No chance for me against the Japanese{)}.
Willie arrives and winds me with a punch
Plum in the tummy, grips the other arm.

{“} You’re to be booted. Hold him steady, chaps! {“}
A wait for taking aim. Oh trees and sky!
Then crack against the column of my spine,
Blackness and breathlessness and sick with pain
I stumble on the asphalt. Off they go
Away, away, thank God, and out of sight
So that I lie quite still and climb to sense
Too out of breath and strength to make a sound.
Now over Polegate vastly sets the sun;
Dark rise the Downs from darker looking elms,
And out of Southern railway trains to tea
Run happy boys down various Station Roads,
Satchels of homework jogging on their backs,
So trivial and so healthy in the shade
Of these enormous Downs. And when they’re home,
When the Post-Toasties mixed with Golden Shred
Make for the kiddies such a scrumptious feast,
Does Mum, the Persil-user, still believe
That there’s no Devil and that youth is bliss?
As certain as the sun behind the Downs
And quite as plain to see, the Devil walks.

COMMENTS

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One response to “Original Sin on the Sussex Coast – John Betjeman”

1. David Zahl says:

   06/17/2016 at 12:54 pm

   What brought the poem to my attention was Alan Jacobs’ prescient essay on distraction in Comment. A few of his notes being:

   “Persil is a laundry detergent, and if you look at the history of Persil advertising, you’ll see that the emphasis has pretty much always been on the cleaning of children’s clothes. By calling Mum “the Persil-user” Betjeman is telling us that there is only one kind of uncleanness she is concerned with, and it’s the kind that laundry detergent can fix. Mum is in the grip of a comprehensive ideology that, in this particular situation, has three interlocking elements.

   First: youth is bliss because children are innocent. Don’t all our TV shows and ads remind us of this every day? Our problems are not caused by anything internal to us, any deficiency in our fundamental makeup, but solely by external forces.

   Second: those external problems are fixable by technology—in this case, the technologies of cleanliness, sanitation, hygiene.

   Third: it is possible to purchase those technologies, and since those technologies keep your children clean, it would be quite irresponsible for Mum not to take advantage of them.

   Ideology is, by definition, not a body of explicitly held beliefs but the unspoken, unacknowledged system of ideas that lie beneath and provide the unexamined foundation for all our explicitly held beliefs. Its purpose, then, is to bring certain things into our sphere of vision while hiding other things. What Mum sees is a ruddy-cheeked little boy in shorts with a book satchel on his back: the very picture of young innocence and bliss. But could she strip away the blinders of her ideology, Betjeman says, the Devil walking along the Sussex downs would be quite as real, quite as evident, as the sun.”

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