room with a pew
“TRACE ME YOUR WHEEL-TRACKS, YOU fortunate bicycle,” wrote poet Sir John Betjeman in 1940. His focus wasn’t on that bicycle, but on Myfanwy, the person riding it. She was an amalgam of women he knew and wanted to bed (and generally later did). Britain’s official poet laureate had a thing for women on bicycles; in 1930, for a literary magazine, he perved, “I sometimes think that I should like/To be the saddle of a bike.”
But the sex- and cycling-crazed bard had another passion: English churches.
“Church crawling is the richest of all pleasures,” he wrote. “It leads you to the remotest and quietest country, it introduces you to the history of England in stone and wood and glass which is always truer than what you read in
