No work, poems, and St Pancras

A day of very little satisfactory work. Changeable weather - from not-quite-raining to raining to pouring to drizzling to showers to about-to-rain, while all the while really wanting to storm - has left me feeling restless. I have, however, had my hair cut and bought some second-hand books: an old English-Italian dictionary (I've needed a replacement for my Collins for ages); The New Poetry, A. Alvarez's 1962 anthology; The Best of Betjeman, an anthology of his poetry and prose edited by John Guest; and Penguin Modern Poets 8, which anthologizes Edwin Brock (of whom I know nothing), Geoffrey Hill and Stevie Smith. I like the fact that the Penguin gives absolutely no biographical details about the poets whatsoever, just their poems. Opening it more or less at random, these lines, from Brock's 'Turn the Key Deftly' found me:

Side by side under kind covers we try

to push the heavy years away, resurrecting

for a moment an afternoon beside a pond.

Yet, sophisticated, prefer to joke,

allowing sleep to do our dreaming for us.

I suppose the obvious parallel is with Larkin. As with Larkin, Brock's documenting of a refusal to dream shows the dreaming going on regardless. The melancholy doesn't quite overcome the sense of possibility, which, of course, remaining unrealized, itself intensifies that melancholy.

I enjoyed Betjeman's strange, small poem 'Dorset', too, perhaps largely for the incantatory repetition of familiar place names:

Lord's Day bells from Bingham's Melcombe, Iwerne Minster, Shroton, Plush,

Down the grass between the beeches, mellow in the evening hush.

Gloved hands that hold the hymn-bok, which this morning milked the cow -

While Tranter Reuben, Mary Borden, Brian Howard and Harold Acton lie in

Mellstock Churchyard now.

Elsewhere it's "T.S. Eliot, H.G. Wells and Edith Sitwell" who are in the churchyard. A note at the end of the poem reads: "The names on the last lines of these stanzas are put in not out of malice or satire but merely for their euphony". Hmmm.

Betjeman's essay on St Pancras is also included. It describes the clearing of the very large and very crowded burial ground of old St Pancras in order that the Midland Railway's line might come into London. When the work started, Betjeman tells us, 'skulls and bones were seen lying about; a passer-by saw an open coffin staved in through which peeped a bright tress of hair'. The scandal forced the company to arrange for reverent reburial. The architect in charge sent one of his assistants, one Thomas Hardy, to supervise the carrying away of the dead. Hardy never forgot the event, and wrote 'The Levelled Churchyard' and 'In the Cemetery' out of the experience:

O Passenger, pray list and catch

Our sighs and piteous groans,

Half stifled in this jumbled patch

Of wrenched memorial stones!

We late-lamented, resting here,

Are mixed to human jam,

And each to each exclaims in fear,

"I know not which I am!"

I'll remember that "human jam", and hear it, the next time I'm pulling in to London.

St Pancras now - or at least the last time I saw it - is in the process of being transformed into a luxury hotel and penthouse flats that are selling for several millions each. Writing of the original building of the hotel, Betjeman observes that 'It could be a fine hotel again'. I wonder if it will be. At the close of his essay, Betjeman laments how 'the now old-fashioned with-itry of the fifties, which has given us the slabs and cubes of high finance, and ruined most of London, has made St Pancras all the more important to us for the relief it brings'. Looking at it in its spruced-up state will perhaps still bring relief, but that relief will be tempered by the knowledge that I am unlikely to ever be able to afford to explore it again.

When I was living in London in the late nineties, I went to a kind of art and design fair held inside the old hotel building - I can't remember who organized it, but it was probably Masters students from the RCA. This must have been around the same time the Spice Girls

made a video there. I remember exploring its grandiose but beautifully proportioned staircase and exploring dusty corners, rooms that gave off rooms with trailing cables, peeling murals and old-fashioned light switches. It was a glimpse into what St Pancras might have become - a space anyone could freely enter, part of London's - and Londoners' - patrimony. Visiting Tacheles, the squat in Berlin, reminded me of that trip to St Pancras - how great it might have been if the hotel had become London's version of the Berlin squats. Given that I was, technically, squatting at the time (in Vauxhall), perhaps I should have tried it.

Betjeman's essay closes with something a former Station Master said to him: it is a magnificent building, yes, and he was fond of it; and 'moreover it works'. Hopefully that's true of the station in its new guise, too. It's only a shame it isn't also true of the trains.

The storm that has been brewing all day has just broken. Dayadhvam!