Summoned by Bells (film)

Summoned by Bells
Written by	John Betjeman
Produced by	Jonathan Stedall

Summoned by Bells is a BBC TV film of John Betjeman's verse autobiography of the same name - " a unique and touching account of an Edwardian middle-class childhood." It was first broadcast on Sunday 29 August 1976, the day after the Poet Laureates 70th birthday. In the film Betjeman re-visits the places he knew as a child, the houses he grew up in, his schools, his holiday haunts in Cornwall , and his college in Oxford. The film ends with his being sent down from Oxford and enrolling in desperation as a cricket master at a private prep school.

In an interview given to Radio Times Betjeman spoke about his verse autobiography and the making of the film : " i always had filthy reviews for it, and I didn't think it very good." He recalls that Joe Orton was arrested for defacing books in the public library - among them Summoned by Bells - on which he had stuck a pornographic picture. "I wrote it thinking it the best way to write about being young. I was thinking about Tennyson's English Idylls and I had been reading Wordsworth's Prelude and I thought why not put down being a schoolmaster and this kind of thing in to very plain blank verse. It's the shorter way of writing prose and I think easier. I think peoples lives are interesting only up until they're 21. It's our first humiliations and struggles that are very interesting, so I thought I'd record them. I remember the sensual thrills one has as a child, the feeling of textures and the smell of things. I tried to put that down." " Doing this thing has been the most devastating experience, I had no idea the kind of draining effect it has on one. I was an only child, considered very brilliant by my mother, and considered the future heir to the factory by my father. I mustn't let the men (workers) down, and I was thought to have let them down."