Silk-dressing-gowned, to Sunday morning bells,
Long after breakfast had been cleared in Hall,
I wandered to my lavender-scented bath;
Then, with loosely knotted shantung tie
And hair well soaked in Delhez' Genet d'Or,
Strolled to the Eastgate. Oxford marmalade
And a thin volume of Lowes Dickinson
But half-engaged my thoughts till Sunday calm
Led me by crumbling walls and echoing lanes,
Past college chapels with their organ-groan
And churches stacked with bicycles outside,
To worship at High Mass in Pusey House.
Those were the days when that divine baroque
Transformed our English altars and our ways.
Fiddle-back chasuble in mid-Lent pink
Scandalized Rome and Protestants alike:
"Why do you try to ape the Holy See?"
"Why do you sojourn in a halfway house?"
And if these doubts had ever troubled me
(Praise God, they don't) I would have made the move.
What seemed to me a greater question then
Tugged and still tugs: Is Christ the son of God?
Despite my frequent lapses into lust,
Despite hypocrisy, revenge and hate,
I learned at Pusey House the Catholic faith.
Friends of those days, now patient parish priests,
By worldly standards you have not 'got on'
Who knelt with me as Oxford sunlight streamed
On some colonial bishop's broidery cope.
Some know for all their lives that Christ is God,
Some start upon that arduous love affair
In clouds of doubt and argument; and some
(My closest friends) seem not to want his love-
And why this is I wish to God I knew.
As at the Dragon School , so still for me
The steps to truth were made by sculptured stone,
Stained glass and vestments, holy water stoups,
Incense and crossings of myself-the things"
That hearty middle stumpers most despise
As, all the inessentials of the Faith'.
What cranking-up of round nosed Morrises
Among the bicycles of broad St Giles'!
What mist of buds about the guardian elms
Before St John's! What sense of joys to come
As opposite the Randolph's Gothic pile
We bought the Sunday newspapers and rush'd
Down Beaumont Street to Number 38
And Colonel Kolkhorst's Sunday-morning rout!
D'ye ken Kolkhorst in his artful parlour.
Handing out the drink at his Sunday morning gala?
Some get sherry and some get Marsala-
With his arts and his crafts in the morning.
The overcrowded room was lit by gas
And smelt of mice and chicken soup and dogs.
Among the knick-knacks stood a photograph
Of that most precious Oxford essayist,
Upon whose margin Osbert Lancaster
Wrote 'Alma Pater' in his sloping hand.
George Alfred Kolkhorst, you whom nothing shocked,
Who never once betrayed a confidence,
No one believed you really were a don
Till Gerard Irvine (now a parish priest)
Went to your lecture on Le Cid and clapped.
You swept towards him, gowned, and turned him out.
I see the lines of laughter in your face,
I see you pouring sherry-round your neck
A lump of sugar hanging on a thread
'To sweeten conversation': to your ear
A trumpet held 'for catching good remarks.'
An earlier generation called you 'G'ug':
We called you 'Colonel' just because you were,
Though tall, so little like one. Round your room
The rhyming folklore grew luxuriant:
G'uggery G'uggery Nunc
Your room is all cluttered with junk:
Candles, bamboonery,
Plush and saloonery-
Please pack it up in a trunk.
You loved the laughter at your own expense:
That's the wise G'ug, he says each thing twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
That first fine careful rapture:
How trivial and silly now they look
Set up in type, acknowledgments and all,
Those rhymes that rocked the room in Beaumont Street,
Preposterous as th' apostrophe in Gug,
Dear private giggles of a private world!
Alan Pryce-Jones came in a bathing-dress
And, seated at your low harmonium,
Struck up the Kolkhorst Sunday-morning hymn
"There's a home for Colonel Kolkhorst"-final verse
ff with all the stops out:-
There big nose plays the organ
And the pansies all sing flat,
But G'ug's no ear for music,
He never notices that.
The stairs are never smelly,
The dogs are well behaved
And the Colonel makes his bonus mots
To an audience of the saved.
Perhaps you do. Perhaps you stand up there,
Waiting with sherry among other friends
Already come, till we rush up the stairs.
Extract from Summoned By Bells
John Betjeman
