The bear who sits above my bed
A doleful bear he is to see;
From out his drooping pear-shaped head
His woollen eyes look into me.
He has no mouth, but seems to say:
‘They’ll burn you on the Judgement Day.’
Those woollen eyes, the things they’ve seen;
Those flannel ears, the things they’ve heard—
Among horse-chestnut fans of green
The fluting on an April bird,
And quarrelling downstairs until
Doors slammed at Thirty One West Hill.
The dreaded evening keyhole scratch
Announcing some return below,
The nursery landing’s lifted latch,
The punishment to undergo:
Still I could smooth those half-moon ears
And wet that forehead with my tears.
Whatever rush to catch a train,
Whatever joy there was to share
Of sounding sea-board, rainbowed rain,
Or seaweed-scented Cornish air,
Sharing the laughs, you still were there,
You ugly, unrepentant bear.
When nine, I hid you in a loft
And dared not let you share my bed;
My father would have thought me soft,
Or so, at least, my mother said.
She only then our secret knew,
And thus my guilty passion grew.
The bear who sits above my bed
More agèd now is he to see:
His woollen eyes have thinner thread,
But still he seems to say to me,
In double-doom notes, like a knell:
‘You’re half a century nearer Hell.’
Self-pity shrouds me in a mist,
And drowns me in my self-esteem.
The freckled faces I have kissed
Float by me in a guilty dream.
The only constant, sitting there,
Patient and hairless, is a bear.
And if an analyst one day
Of school of Adler, Jung, or Freud
Should take this agèd bear away,
Then, oh my God, the dreadful void!
Its draughty darkness could but be
Eternity, Eternity.
- Archibald by Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984)
Archibald Ormsby Gore, a teddy bear, was “born” in 1908 - two years after John Betjeman himself came into the world.
Quite how the bear became christened with this name, no one knows; presumably Betjeman just loved the name of this distinguished old Welsh family and decided to align his bear to it. He wrote in 1931,“There was once an elderly bear/ Whose head was the shape of a pear/. He sat in deep gloom/ And longed for the tomb/ As he had lost nearly all of his hair”.
In any case I cannot help thinking that Betjeman at Oxford, where I believe the bear accompanied him to Magdalen College in 1925. It was there his good friend Evelyn Waugh used Archibald as an inspiration to create Aloysius, the teddy bear that was the constant companion of the aristocratic Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited.
I think it’s more likely that John Betjeman himself was far more like Charles Ryder, the narrator, than Sebastian Flyte. He was an observer of grand people rather than actually being one himself. Like Ryder he came from comparatively humble origins in London — the son of a furniture manufacturer; but at Oxford he was intrigued, for instance, by a peer who rushed round a college quadrangle shouting: “I am as drunk as the lord that I am.”
And while Aloysius may be Archibald’s most famous literary representation, it’s not the only one: in the 1940s, Betjeman wrote a book for his children, titled Archie and the Strict Baptists. (The main character, a practicing Baptist, is a keen amateur archeologist.) An illustrated version appeared in 1977. The bear, which Betjeman was holding when he died, now resides in St. Pancras, with his elephant companion, Jumbo.
