Any 'New Town'

The aerial photographs of my home from GoogleEarth that I posted at the beginning of last week put me in mind of some of the more sinister uses that such satellite reconnaissance has been put to in recent years, and thus I headed the post with a quotation from the opening of this piece by the popular English poet, John Betjeman (Britain's Poet Laureate during my childhood, and an occasional, avuncular presenter of TV documentaries).

This is one of his angriest works, one of our first and ugliest 'new towns' (even its name is unpleasant!) becoming a pretext for an excoriating attack on all that he found unwholesome in modern life. However, it's direct and straightforward enough in its language to be reasonably accessible to some of the students I've taught here in China. Of course, they do all (ALL, without exception) fondly suppose that it is just about England. Oh, no: this is so painfully relevant to modern China: the tackiness of all the new building, the anomie and soullessness that a consumer culture engenders. I doubt if any Chinese poet has so well encapsulated the growing pains of the urbanization process in this country today as Betj did here, 70 years ago. "Tinned minds, tinned breath" - that's China.

Even the cabbages might seem to have a special relevance for readers here. Cabbages are hugely popular (the elongated, Chinese kind); here in the North, at any rate, they used to be way the most common vegetable, just about the only vegetable many people had access to - a staple of the common man's diet. The mass influx of cabbages into the cities used to be one of the early signs of Spring, and you'd see piles of them, sometimes standing several feet high, in any and every available corner. This was, apparently, still quite a common sight in Beijing as recently as 10 or 12 years ago. There's a nice description of it in Tim Clissold's book, Mr China (a classic on the perils of doing business in China - though Clissold himself seems superhumanly resilient despite the horror stories he suffered here). In the poor neighbourhoods around me, you do to this day occasionally see a stack of cabbages big enough to feed a single family for a few months.

The earth exhales.



Slough

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town—
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell.

It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

John Betjeman (1906-1984)