…Yes, with a deep and throaty cough
The phone was finally turned off,
As girl and forecourt, cars and all
Exploded in a blazing ball,
Reducing half the street to rubble.
The fire brigade had major trouble.
As for Sally — well, it’s said
They never did retrieve her head…
Murden’s Cosmic Verses are more ambitious: they remind me of Martyn Skinner’s majestic epic, The Return of Arthur. But, like Murden’s earlier Rhyming History of Britain, the new poem is shot through with humour, as much comic as cosmic.
At this guttering end of John Betjeman’s centenary year there is just time to mention two little books about his passion for the railways. In 1982, naming a locomotive after him, the late Sir Peter Parker said he had ‘an infinite capacity for taking trains’. Jonathan Glancey has edited a selection of Betjeman’s writings, On Trains (Methuen, £7.99), with a sparkling introduction; and Chris Green has written John Betjeman and the Railways (courtesy of Transport for London, in aid of the Parkinson Disease Society, 99p). Neither is a book for anoraks. Betjeman understood, and conveyed, the romance of the railways. Ruskin was impervious to that; but one of the extracts in Friedman’s Commonplace Book records that Proust’s favourite bedtime reading was a railway timetable. No wonder so many of his characters marry above their station.
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