‘England, My England’ is a collection of ten short stories by D. H. Lawrence. They were written between 1913 and 1921 and most of them had been published in magazines or periodicals. This ten were later selected and extensively revised by Lawrence for publication in this volume.
All bar the final two are war stories in the sense that they take place at least partly during the war or the characters have been affected by the war or, as in the first story, are shown actually fighting and dying in it.
- England, My England
- Tickets, Please
- The Blind Man
- Monkey Nuts
- Wintry Peacock
- You Touched Me
- Samson and Delilah
- The Primrose Path
- The Horse Dealer’s Daughter
- Fanny And Annie
1. England, My England
Winifred and Egbert are married and live in Crockham Cottage, by woods and commons and bogs and streams in rural Hampshire. The cottage is in the extensive grounds of Winifred’s father, a successful businessman, who has also provided cottages for his other daughters, Priscilla and Magdelen. The mother is a published poetess. It’s an arty family.
The bulk of the text describes the tortuous emotionally fraught marriage of Winifred and Egbert. They married ten years before the start of the war i.e. 1904. Initially they are very much in love and Egbert is a handsome charming fine figure of a man, very interested in the folk stories and folk music of Olde England. And Lawrence repeatedly describes the cottage as having a mysterious atmosphere, of somehow invoking the spirit of the ancients.
Strange how the savage England lingers in patches: as here, amid these shaggy gorse commons, and marshy, snake infested places near the foot of the south downs. The spirit of place lingering on primeval, as when the Saxons came, so long ago… t belonged to the old England of hamlets and yeomen. Lost all alone on the edge of the common, at the end of a wide, grassy, briar-entangled lane shaded with oak, it had never known the world of today…
But Egbert, for all his charm, is, alas, useless. He has an inherited income of £150 which is just enough to prevent him trying for a job or career or profession and so he dawdles about doing DIY on the farm which always ends up breaking or not working.
He… had such a passion for his old enduring cottage, and for the old enduring things of the bygone England. Curious that the sense of permanency in the past had such a hold over him, whilst in the present he was all amateurish and sketchy.
With the arrival of three children Winifred has become a full-time mother, worried about practicalities and finds her husband exasperating.
Egbert’s thoughtless impracticality is exemplified one day when he leaves a scythe he’d used for mowing grass carelessly lying about and his favourite daughter, Joyce, cuts her knee on it. Local doctor Dr Wing is very prolix and calming but doesn’t treat the wound properly and the leg becomes infected. So the practical father sends Egbert further afield to fetch Dr Wayne from Bingham. By this time the joint is infected and Wayne recommends having Joyce stretchered to a car to drive her to a London clinic. Here commence weeks then months of laborious treatment but the upshot is the girl will be crippled for life, requires clunky leg braces and crutches. Egbert is mortified. You can imagine Winifred’s feelings.
Then the Great War starts (August 1914) and Egbert is called up to the army. A year of training. He hates coming home in his khaki. Nowadays Winifred and the girls are mostly based in London to be near the hospital, so often Egbert is alone, working at his rather futile projects in the cottage grounds.
The story reaches a climax when, after a year’s training, he’s sent to France and the narrative cuts to him in action, in a machine gun nest under command of an officer trying to locate the enemy from the sounds of distant firing. Then shells begin to descend, at first at a distance, then getting nearer, then there is a direct hit and Lawrence gives a florid and persuasive account of being knocked out and slowly, groggily regaining consciousness.
Were they the stars in the dark sky? Was it possible it was stars in the dark sky? Stars? The world? Ah, no, he could not know it! Stars and the world were gone for him, he closed his eyes. No stars, no sky, no world. No, No! The thick darkness of blood alone. It should be one great lapse into the thick darkness of blood in agony.
Death, oh, death! The world all blood, and the blood all writhing with death. The soul like the tiniest little light out on a dark sea, the sea of blood. And the light guttering, beating, pulsing in a windless storm, wishing it could go out, yet unable.
The last line has the knockout punch of a classic short story, when the Germans who’ve occupied his position hear a slight noise, of earth falling away, and from the heap of earth thrown up by their shells, see the dead face.
Thoughts
This is a dense, packed and ultimately unpleasant story. To start at the end, the description of dying – which is what I take it to be – is fulsome and persuasive but, as a subject, strikes me as the kind of thing you find in school magazines.
The half dozen pages devoted to the little girl being cut, inflamed then losing the use of her leg are upsetting. Even in fiction I don’t like children being hurt. What makes it Lawrentian is the emotional ambiguity because, even after Joyce has been confirmed disabled, there is a secret sympathy between her and her father, which has them sharing glances and smiles in a way she just can’t with her more conventional mother. The irrationality of emotions.
But the real puzzle is why the story is titled ‘My England’. At the beginning Lawrence goes on repeatedly about the ancientness of the landscape and the way the old cottage has seen countless generations of inhabitants live out their lives and passions, stretching back to Saxon times. So you think the story is going to be a paean to English country living. But as my summary shows, it’s anything but. The positive vibe of the deep ancestral England trope is cut across by three big negatives:
- The deep problems with the Egbert-Winifred marriage.
- The terrible accident with the scythe.
- Egbert’s grisly death in the end.
In what sense is any of this Lawrence’s England? Is he showing that the war ruined his England? But the supposed rural idyll was wrecked long before the war came along? Does the first half demonstrate how difficult it is to live up to the image or inheritance of deep England?
Or is the point that he was writing during an era marked by a national outpouring of relatively unthinking, uncritical patriotism, when headlines went on about patriotism and decency and women handed out white feathers in the street and Lawrence’s response is to show that life is never that simple or inconvenient; that life is full of complexity and cross-currents and disappointments and ineffectuality and stupid accidents?
That his England wasn’t the unquestioned totem of the jingos but a deeply fraught and complex and troubling entity?
2. Tickets, Please
Set during the war. The first half sets up life on the long tram line which runs out of Nottingham into the countryside, beside rivers to collieries, and the happy-go-lucky lives of the staff. Since it’s wartime and the men have been called up, the conductors are women. They have a great collegiate spirit and love flirting with the (still male) drivers.
Inspectors hop on and off the trams to inspect tickets. The cheekiest is a lad who fancies himself, John Thomas Raynor, known, behind his back, as Coddy.
There is considerable scandal about John Thomas in half a dozen villages. He flirts with the girl conductors in the morning, and walks out with them in the dark night, when they leave their tram-car at the depôt. Of course, the girls quit the service frequently. Then he flirts and walks out with the newcomer: always providing she is sufficiently attractive, and that she will consent to walk.
The feistiest of the girl conductors is Annie Stone, ‘something of a Tartar’. She has Coddy’s measure. They know each other almost like man and wife. November arrives and the annual Statutes fair. Lawrence gives a fascinating account of the fair: roundabouts, coconuts:
Here was the same crush, the press of faces lighted up by the flares and the electric lights, the same smell of naphtha and a few fried potatoes, and of electricity.
Who should she bump into but John Thomas? They have a whale of a time, he is great fun, ladding about on the dragons, the horses, playing quoits, slipping his arm round her in the darkness of the cinema.
In the days that follow she wants to develop this into what we nowadays call a relationship, what Lawrence calls ‘taking an intelligent interest’ in her; but (to put it mildly) any form of commitment is the opposite of what John Thomas wants and he sheers away. Annie is upset then goes into a tailspin, typically Lawrentian in its extremity:
Then she wept with fury, indignation, desolation, and misery. Then she had a spasm of despair. And then, when he came, still impudently, on to her car, still familiar, but letting her see by the movement of his head that he had gone away to somebody else for the time being, and was enjoying pastures new, then she determined to have her own back.
Annie goes round the other girls determined to discover who John Thomas’s latest conquest is. This has the effect of rallying all the girls against him. The climax of the story comes at the end of a long day when the girls are all in their cosy warm waiting room and Coddy drops by to flirt with them.
To his surprise he is met with scorn which turns to anger. It starts with a joke about which one of them he’ll take home that night to keep warm but quite quickly it becomes menacing. They all shout at him demanding to know and he turns from bantering cock of the roost to irritated and then intimidated.
And then it goes wild. As he turns to go, Annie leaps forward and clouts him round the head. As he’s staggering, the others jump on him too. They are screaming and cuffing him and scratching him and tearing his clothes while he can’t throw them off, not seven shrieking women. Again and again they scream in his face, ‘Choose one!’
It’s only when he shouts through the mayhem that he chooses Annie that they stop fighting. Stunned, Annie refuses to touch him and backs away and the other girls get off him. Trying to recover his dignity, Coddy gets to his feet, collects his overcoat from the peg and goes to the door. It’s locked and Annie has the key. Dazed, she lets him out, and turns to the other girls who are fixing their hair and getting ready to go home. None of them can process what’s just happened.
Thoughts
Is it about the mayhem the war has unleashed? Is it that the war has unleashed the violence in everyone, a tone established at the funfair, which has a feverish gaiety? The sentence just before John Thomas goes into the girls nice, snug waiting room, reads: ‘Outside was the darkness and lawlessness of war-time’, suggesting that what follows is ‘the darkness and lawlessness of war-time’ invading even the young womens’ retreat?
Or is it the more modern idea that the war upended ‘gender norms’, with women doing ‘mens’ jobs? But why, then, the mob violence?
To my mind the girls are modern reincarnations of maenads, defined as ‘female follower of Bacchus, traditionally associated with divine possession and frenzied rites’. In one version of the Greek myths, the maenads tear Orpheus to pieces.
The point of literature is it leaves you to make your own mind up.
(It also reminds me of the early Ian McEwan story where two women discover a man is cheating on them both, so drug him, tie him to a table and surgically remove his penis. More graphic in a schlocky way, but the same underlying idea of female fury at the cock of the walk.)
3. The Blind Man
A blistering, intense, strange tale. Big strong, self-contained Maurice Pervin has been blinded in the war. Now he lives with his loving wife, Isabel, on a farm. They are educated middle class. The actual farming is done by the Wernham family, more working class, who talk in dialect, who live in the lower farm buildings.
There is much description, in the classic Lawrence style, of the vacillating moods of the couple. To begin with, surprisingly, despite his blindness they revelled in a new kind of intimacy because it brought them so very close together, as he learned his way about the rooms, blind. But then both of them experienced fallings away Isabel feeling exhausted, Maurice liable to plunges into deep depression.
They had a baby but it died young. Now Isabel is very heavily pregnant and expecting a second baby in the next few weeks. She has invited an old friend to visit, Bertram Reid, a barrister and a man of letters, a Scotchman. They’ve been close friends for decades, almost like family. But when Maurice went away to war, Isabel asked Bertie to stop writing, as a gesture of faithfulness to her husband.
The key points are that Maurice and Bertie met several times before the war and instinctively didn’t like each other. Bertie is morbidly sensitive about being touched or even being close to people, emotionally close. He is small and dapper and intelligent and likes the company of women until they start to crowd him, when he recoils.
It was Maurice who suggested her old friend visit. He thinks it will cheer his wife up. He’s off in the form doing something while night falls and she becomes more anxious about the arrival of the ‘trap’ i.e. horse and cart, which will bring Bertie.
In an evocative scene she goes out and past the Wernham part of the farm and they very hospitably invite her in to share their tea. Chat and a roaring fire. But then she makes her excuses and presses on into the dark farm buildings to find her husband.
Of course her husband, blind for a year, knows his way round the farm buildings in the dark, so there are no lamps, and there are no electric lights, and so Lawrence gives a vivid, thrilling account of her moving through the absolute pitch black, amid the noises and smells of the cattle stalls, quietly calling his name.
Anyway she finds him and leads him back to their house. Here they both go to their rooms to wash and change. The trap finally arrives and she goes out to greet Bertie and Maurice overhears their conversation and is troubled with jealousy and emotions.
Down in the living room Bertie settles in and a servant brings dinner. The whole topic of the big blind man brings out the supernaturally brilliant in Lawrence’s imagining and writing. At the table:
Maurice was feeling, with curious little movements, almost like a cat kneading her bed, for his place, his knife and fork, his napkin. He was getting the whole geography of his cover into his consciousness. He sat erect and inscrutable, remote-seeming Bertie watched the static figure of the blind man, the delicate tactile discernment of the large, ruddy hands, and the curious mindless silence of the brow, above the scar.
They eat then afterwards, draw their chairs up to the fire. Making conversation, Bertie tentatively asks about his blindness and Maurice shrugs it off. But extended talk about it upsets him and he begins to feel stifled.
At length Maurice rose restlessly, a big, obtrusive figure. He felt tight and hampered. He wanted to go away.
He makes an excuse to go and talk to the farmer and leaves. Bertie and Isabel talk on for a time, but then it is late. By now it’s raining outside. The final part of the story is that Isabel is 9 months pregnant and tired so she asks Bertie, the dapper urban intellectual, to go and find Maurice and fetch him back.
So now we see the narrow walkways of the pitch-black farm buildings from Bertie’s point of view. He finds him, right enough, turning the handle of a turnip pulper. They talk. Maurice asks him to tell him, candidly, what his face looks like. And then, in this dark and spectral environment, Maurice asks if he can touch Bertie’s face. Taken by surprise, Bertie says yes, and so the big man very gently lays his big hands on the small fellah’s hair, head, eyes, cheek, mouth, down to his shoulders and arms – as when he was settling into his place at the table, so now he is accommodating Bertie into his blind universe.
Then he asks Bertie to touch his eyes which the little man very reluctantly does. Now, the big man declares, they know each other. Now they can be friends. And allows himself to be taken back to the main house living room.
Big Maurice is smiling, is satisfied with his knowledge. You might have expected some kind of happy ending, like the two men have reached a new understanding but as so often in Lawrence, it isn’t a happy ending, it is conflicted and broken. Because Isabel instantly realises that her clever friend has just received the greatest trauma of his life and is screaming with discomfort inside. And ends it with a disgusting simile.
He could not bear it that he had been touched by the blind man, his insane reserve broken in. He was like a mollusc whose shell is broken. (p.75)
4. Monkey Nuts
Just after the war (I think) Albert the 40-year-old corporal and stupid young Joe are still in the army but now back in England. They work forking hay from carts which bring it from the country into train trucks at a station. They share the same bedroom so know all about each other.
One of the troops of carts that come is run by Miss Stokes. She’s a ballsy woman who knows her own mind. She falls for Joe and becomes domineering, insisting on talking to him at their daily meeting, listening to Albert’s endless jokes and banter but ignoring him.
A new level is attained when Miss Stokes writes Joe a letter asking for a rendezvous at a nearby station. She signs it MS. Joe shows Albert the letter but ignores it. When Miss Stokes next arrives with haycarts Albert can’t stop himself ribbing her about the letter and asks what MS stands for. Angrily, Miss Stokes replies ‘monkey nuts’. Because this becomes the leitmotiv of the story, I assume it’s an Edwardian insults.
The circus arrives in a nearby town and Albert and Jo go to visit it. They see Miss Stokes in the audience but ignore her. But on the 6-mile walk home they come across her, banter, then she asks Albert to take her punctured bicycle onto the town for repair, while she asks Joe to walk her home to the farm where she lives. Joe is super reluctant but it is the chivalrous thing to do so can’t back down.
From that evening he keeps disappearing every night to squire her around but hates it. He goes so far as to say ‘There’ll be murder done one of these days’ and the reader wonders whether it really will turn into a gruesome murder story.
One night Albert asks Joe if he can go on the date with Miss Stokes. He is surprised to discover Miss Stokes in a fine dress and hat; she is mortified that the old joker and not Joe has come, turns and walks back to her farm without saying a word; Albert is mortified to see tears rolling down her face.
They have one last encounter. On a cold grey morning she brings her cart up to the station and begins pestering Joe, calling his name. Eventually he turns round a cries at her ‘monkey nuts’ and this has a dramatic effect.
‘Joe!’ Her voice rang for the third time.
Joe turned and looked at her, and a slow, jeering smile gathered on his face.
‘Monkey-nuts!’ he replied, in a tone mocking her call.
She turned white – dead white. The men thought she would fall. (p.89)
The hay is unloaded, she drives off and never returns. They never see her again. And, Lawrence tells us, Joe is more relieved than when he heard news of the armistice.
5. Wintry Peacock
A rarity in a Lawrence story, a first-person narrative. He appears to be an educated, middle-class man. It’s winter and he’s living alone in a nice house. He’s out walking when a farmer’s wife he’s seen before comes out of a building, spots him and beckons him over.
She’s Mrs Goyte. She’s received a letter, written in French, addressed to her husband, Alfred. He served in the Army in France, was wounded and is currently away convalescing. And this French letter has arrived. She can’t read French and knows the narrator is an educated man, so asks if he can read it for us.
First he reads it through to himself which allows Lawrence to give us the full unexpurgated text. We learn that it is from a Belgian girl, Élise, who is writing to tell him that she has had their baby. She says she loves him, misses him and threatens to come and visit him with the child.
So when Mrs Goyte insists that he translates it, the narrator gives a censored or bowdlerised version, insisting that it’s to tell him that the girl’s mother has had a baby, a new baby brother for him, and letting him know because he was such a lovely guest when he was billeted on them.
This is quite funny, as funny as Lawrence gets. What gives it relish is that Mrs Goyte doesn’t believe a word of it, insisting the girl is pregnant, imagining she’s only one of the women her husband went out with.
This performance is interrupted by the arrival of three peacocks. Mrs Goyte makes a big fuss of the eldest of them who’s in fact father of the other two, Joey, a grey-brown peacock with a blue neck.
Well, the narrator does his best to pitch his version of the letters but Mrs Goyte isn’t having any of it. Next morning the estate is covered in snow but looking out his big west windows, the narrator sees something struggling in the snow down by a copse, puts on coat and boots and tramps down to the copse where he discovers it’s none other than Joey.
He brings the bedraggled bird back to the house, dries him, puts him in a basket in a warm room with food. Next morning Joey’s made a mess of the food and is sitting on the back of an armchair. He bundles him into a fishing basket and carries him over to the Goyte farm. He’s welcomed by Mrs Goyte whose name we learn is Maggie, backed up by the father-in-law, old Mr Goyte and his grey-haired wife. It’s the details about people and places in Lawrence which are so lovely, which snag and delight your mind.
Mr. Goyte spoke very slowly and deliberately, quietly, as if the soft pedal were always down in his voice. (p.101)
And here is Alfred, the addressee of the famous letter, dressed in khaki, standing tall, his beret at a rakish angle, a brash, confident man’s man.
The family invite the narrator in for tea and the father quietly tells the narrator that Alfred and Maggie had a big fight over the letter but he reckons they should forget about it, it all happened a long way away and need come no nigher.
Tea is pleasant enough and afterwards the narrator is walking back down the snowy road when he sees a figure making a bee line across the field to him. It’s big confident Alfred. He confronts the narrator and tells him his wife burned the letter, he wants to know what was in it. The narrator recites it honestly, as far as he can remember, then emphasises that he cooked up a story for the wife, denying it was Alfred’s baby.
The two men square off, circling each other psychologically, the narrator asks questions about this Élise, Alfred laconic, not giving anything away.
He stood smiling, with the long, subtle malice of a farmer.
Alfred reveals very little about the Belgian woman except that he doesn’t give a damn about her and her baby. He’s far more exercised by Joey the peacock who he hates; he reveals he tried to shoot it once and he’s going to wring its neck before long.
As their exchange draws to an end, the big man starts laughing out loud at the preposterousness of the whole situation, before turning and setting off back to his house, and then, in an unexpected last line, which leaves the story ringing in your memory:
I ran down the hill, shouting with laughter.
6. You Touched Me
Set in an old pottery after it’s closed (compare the closing of the Pervin horse trading business in the Horse Dealers Daughter). Two sisters, Emmie and Matilda Rockley, live on in the silent buildings where there had been so much noise and hubbub. Brought up in a middle class household they refuse to consort with the mostly working class population of this ugly industrial town and so are turning into spinsters.
Having set the scene, Lawrence gives us the backstory:
Ted Rockley, the father of the girls, had had four daughters, and no son. As his girls grew, he felt angry at finding himself always in a house-hold of women. He went off to London and adopted a boy out of a Charity Institution. Emmie was fourteen years old, and Matilda sixteen, when their father arrived home with his prodigy, the boy of six, Hadrian.
Hadrian enjoys a privileged boyhood but continually rebels, sells off his school uniform etc. The four sisters try to make him welcome but he never fits in. Aged 15 he declares he wants to go to the colonies and gets passage to Canada. He writes to the family for a while then stops.
The First World War starts (August 1914) and Hadrian enlists and comes to Europe but he doesn’t visit the Rockleys in Pottery House. Finally, after the armistice (November 1918) Hadrian writes to say he wants to visit. The two remaining daughters (the others have married and left) set about cleaning and tidying the house for his arrival the following day, but he arrives on the day of the cleaning, finding them both dirty and unprepared, while he is sporting his best uniform.
What happens is Hadrian ends up staying for weeks and inveigles his way into the good books of old man Rockley, who is very sick and dying. On the second day Matilda stays up with her father and they discuss the future. He makes her promise not to leave the house. He says everything will be left to her and Emmie, equally and he’d like them to give Hadrian his watch and chain, and a hundred pounds.
Back in her room Matilda stays up late worrying about the future and her father, who might die at any minute. She feels she must be with him so at midnight, tired and slightly dazed, goes down the hall to his room. She tiptoes in in the dark and finds the bed and whispers to him as she reaches out to find his face, running her hand over his hair, forehead, nose, moustache.
It’s only at this point that Hadrian speaks up. In her daze Matilda had forgotten that they had moved their father down to the living room and put Hadrian in his old bedroom. God, she’s embarrassed! She apologises and runs back to her room. She is mortified and feels she hates Hadrian. Unfortunately her touch has woken something in him which he has been fighting against his whole life, his feelings.
The soft, straying tenderness of her hand on his face startled something out of his soul. He was a charity boy, aloof and more or less at bay. The fragile exquisiteness of her caress startled him most, revealed unknown things to him. (p.116)
And so:
The same glamour that he knew in the elderly man he now saw in the woman. And he wanted to possess himself of it, he wanted to make himself master of it. As he went about through the old pottery-yard, his secretive mind schemed and worked. To be master of that strange soft delicacy such as he had felt in her hand upon his face,—this was what he set himself towards. He was secretly plotting. (p.117)
So during one of his sessions sitting with his adoptive father, Hadrian slowly brings the conversation round to who will stay at the house, who will look after it, how the girls will be lonely and then… springs the idea that he would like to marry Matilda. But Emmie is the youngest, his father days. But secretly the father has always loved the boy and this incongruous idea pleases him.
A few days later Matilda is sitting with him and he floats the suggestion of her marrying Hadrian. She is so appalled and reacts so negatively that she makes the sick old man angry. In a rage he threatens to call for his solicitor, Whittle and cut both the girls out of his will and leave everything to Hadrian.
Emmie confronts Hadrian in the garden and calls him a money-grubber. He hadn’t actually realised he wanted the money, he had only intended to have Matilda, but now she mentions it, he realises he wants the money too. He wants to be one of the employing class, not an employee.
Mr Rockley calls for the solicitor and presses ahead with a new will. The old division between the daughters becomes provisional.
The old will held good, if Matilda would consent to marry Hadrian. If she refused then at the end of six months the whole property passed to Hadrian.
Why? Maybe the motivation is the key thing here. Old Rockley had had four daughters and come to hate being surrounded by women. That’s why he went and got a 6-year-old boy from a charity, because his masculinity felt embattled and isolated. Same now.
Mr. Rockley told this to the young man, with malevolent satisfaction. He seemed to have a strange desire, quite unreasonable, for revenge upon the women who had surrounded him for so long, and served him so carefully.
Hadrian suggests the old man calls a meeting with the two women, which he does. The malice of decision has, paradoxically, given the sick old man a burst of energy. ‘His face had again some of its old, bright handsomeness.’ He puts the same ultimatum, Matilda must marry Hadrian. She refuses. They argue and Emmie in a rage says, well alright then, the filthy guttersnipe can have everything. Rockley is overcome with fatigue and tells them to leave. The nurse sits up with him all night.
With Rockley approaching his end, Emmie takes the initiative and calls the solicitor for a family meeting (without the old man) and tries to get the lawyers, and then the local vicar and other relatives, to intimidate Hadrian and make him back down. Of course they don’t, they just make him angry.
A few days later Hadrian manages to corner Matilda, who’s been avoiding him, in the garden. She lists all the negative reasons, starting with she’s old enough to be his mother, was 16 when he came as a surly 6-year-old to the household. None of this washes with Hadrian who insists, with robotic repetition, that it’s her fault because she touched him and woke something which can’t now be put back to sleep.
‘You put your hand on me, though,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have done that, and then I should never have thought of it. You shouldn’t have touched me.’
‘If you were anything decent, you’d know that was a mistake, and forget it,’ she said.
‘I know it was a mistake—but I shan’t forget it. If you wake a man up, he can’t go to sleep again because he’s told to.’ (p.123)
Matilda goes to see her father and… agrees. She agrees to marry Hadrian. the very ill father is pleased. But it doesn’t mean she’ll like him. Hadrian is a short man and Matilda is tall. She continues to look down on him, literally and figuratively. When they meet she refuses to answer his conversation.
The arrangements are swiftly made (before the father dies) and just three days later they’re married in a registry office. Then they hasten to the sick old man on his death bed, and there’s a wonderfully fraught, emotionally charged scene, in which all kinds of cross currents and mysterious motivations are at play.
Matilda and Hadrian drove straight home from the registrar, and went straight into the room of the dying man. His face lit up with a clear twinkling smile.
‘Hadrian—you’ve got her?’ he said, a little hoarsely.
‘Yes,’ said Hadrian, who was pale round the gills.
‘Ay, my lad, I’m glad you’re mine,’ replied the dying man. Then he turned his eyes closely on Matilda.
‘Let’s look at you, Matilda,’ he said. Then his voice went strange and unrecognisable. ‘Kiss me,’ he said.
She stooped and kissed him. She had never kissed him before, not since she was a tiny child. But she was quiet, very still.
‘Kiss him,’ the dying man said.
Obediently, Matilda put forward her mouth and kissed the young husband.
‘That’s right! That’s right!’ murmured the dying man.
Who’s won? Is it about the triumph of the old man, the dead hand of the dying generation? Or will Matilda succumb, over time? Is it the triumph of malicious, calculating little Hadrian? Or all of the above? It feels rich and strange and perverse and improbable but, on some other level, weirdly right. The Lawrence effect.
7. Samson and Delilah
It is the first year of the war. A man alights from the motor-omnibus that runs from Penzance to St Just-in-Penwith, and turns uphill towards the Polestar. Night is falling and the lighthouse light circles round over sea and land. He arrives at The Tinners’ Rest pub and goes in. The buxom landlady is serving some soldiers.
Long story short, the stranger insists he is the landlady’s husband who ran off to America 16 years earlier: he is Willie Nankervis, she is Alice Nankervis, and the young serving girl is their daughter, Maryann. When closing time comes (10pm) he refuses to leave. The landlady insists. He refuses and says he’s going to sleep there. The soldiers mildly suggest he leave, he refuses.
Mrs Nankervis fetches some rope from behind the bar and asks the soldiers to tie the stranger. He’s a big man but there are four soldiers so after a titanic struggle with chairs and tables thrown everywhere, they manage to rope him like a steer, with some spare braces used to knit his knees and ankles.
They carry him outside and lay him in the empty town square under the cold stars. The soldiers undo the braces and the sergeant loosens the rope. Then they both go back inside the bar and lock it. The stranger staggers to his feet and frays the rope against the corner of a wall till it snaps and he staggers off through the empty town.
He comes to the graveyard and leans against the wall for a while. This is to allow Lawrence to let the soldiers finally leave the inn. The man turns and walks back to the pub. He is surprised to find the door open and walks through the empty bar to the kitchen. The landlady is sitting in front of a fire. She isn’t surprised or angry when he appears but resigned.
He sits down next to her and they talk, both tentative, she sparking into anger several times at the way he left her, at the way he stopped even writing letters after six months. But slowly they settle into what you could call a connubial mood, and then into intimacy.
Lawrence is supposed to be ‘sex mad’ but it’s a very rare moment of explicitness when the big handsome man leans forward and places his hand between her big breasts. This kind of candid intimacy happens hardly at all in Lawrence before Lady Chatterley, which makes it all the more beautiful and striking.
‘We fet from the start, we did. And, my word, you begin again quick the minute you see me, you did. Darn me, you was too sharp for me. A darn fine woman, puts up a darn good fight. Darn me if I could find a woman in all the darn States as could get me down like that. Wonderful fine woman you be, truth to say, at this minute.
She only sat glowering into the fire.
‘As grand a pluck as a man could wish to find in a woman, true as I’m here,’ he said, reaching forward his hand and tentatively touching her between her full, warm breasts, quietly.
She started, and seemed to shudder. But his hand insinuated itself between her breasts, as she continued to gaze in the fire.
‘And don’t you think I’ve come back here a-begging,” he said. “I’ve more than one thousand pounds to my name, I have. And a bit of a fight for a how-de-do pleases me, that it do. But that doesn’t mean as you’re going to deny as you’re my Missis…’
It has that strange uncanny correctness, a truth to some deeper vein of feeling, which so much Lawrence reveals, in his characters and, by extension, in us.
8. The Primrose Path
Daniel Sutton the black-sheep, the youngest, the darling of his mother’s family. He had three older sister. He ran away to Australia. The story starts with him back in England, in London, where he’s set up as a taxi driver. The narrative opens here, at the taxi rank of a rural train station, when he is approached by his nephew, Daniel Berry, his sister, Anna’s, boy.
In a flashback we learn that Daniel married a factory girl, Maud, they had two daughters but were never close, their house lacked warmth. Eventually he fell in love with a sentimental young woman and emigrated to Australia. His jilted wife settled in with a publican.
The nephew requests a ride to Watmore. On the way the driver tells him he dumped the woman he ran off with in Wellington, convinced she was trying to poison him, and decamped for Sydney. The nephew asks if he’ll go back to Maud but he angrily says no, she wouldn’t take him. Tells him she’s living in the Railway Arms pub. In fact he got a message this morning to visit her. She’s dying of tuberculosis (which they called consumption back then).
In Watmore the nephew does his business, they have a pint in a pub then Dan drives him back towards the station. En route the uncle is visibly nervous. They pull over at the pub and go in. The landlord is startled to see Dan there but draws him and the nephew a pint. Then takes Dan upstairs to the room over the bar. Here his abandoned wife is lying very sick in bed. She has a little pet bird in a nest of ivy leaves on the wall. She is very sick and can barely speak. She asks him to look after their daughter, Winnie. Dan is gruff and nervous, asks if there is anything he can do for her, eventually says his goodbye and leaves.
From the pub Dan drives his nephew to his own house. This he finds looked after by a mature woman, cowed and obedient, and her pretty daughter, who Uncle Dan is obviously having an affair with. When Berry mentions that they’ve been to see his uncle Maud she, like Dan, looks scared. All these people are scared of the consequences of the life choices they’ve made.
And it’s to hide his fear and anxiety that Dan is so rough. ‘Already Berry could see that his uncle had bullied them, as he bullied everybody.’ Dan is all gruffness. When the scared mother serves soup he refuses to come and sit at table to eat it but insists on standing in front of the fire. The young mistress tries to soften him, asks him to take off his coat. And then there’s one of those many, many alchemical scenes in Lawrence, where he reveals the strange twisted nature of our affections, the crooked timber of humanity.
‘Do take your coat off, Dan,’ she said, and she took hold of the breast of his coat, trying to push it back over his shoulder. But she could not. Only the stare in his eyes changed to a glare as her hand moved over his shoulder. He looked down into her eyes. She became pale, rather frightened-looking, and she turned her face away, and it was drawn slightly with love and fear and misery. She tried again to put off his coat, her thin wrists pulling at it. He stood solidly planted, and did not look at her, but stared straight in front. She was playing with passion, afraid of it, and really wretched because it left her, the person, out of count. Yet she continued. And there came into his bearing, into his eyes, the curious smile of passion, pushing away even the death-horror. It was life stronger than death in him. She stood close to his breast. Their eyes met, and she was carried away.
And she does get his coat off. And the nephew sees that ‘the pain, the fear, the horror in his breast’ are all transformed into ‘the new, fiercest flame of passion’. Maybe love is a way of hiding from fear, fear of age, illness and death. Maybe this kind of desperate love.
And you think you’ve figured out the twisted depths of the story but Lawrence has a sharp blow to the gut still to deliver.
‘That girl will leave him,’ [Berry] said to himself. ‘She’ll hate him like poison. And serve him right. Then she’ll go off with somebody else.’ And she did. (p.156)
9. The Horse Dealer’s Daughter
Three brothers and a sister sit in a front room trying to discuss their futures. The family business in horses has gone bankrupt and they watch the last posse of shire horses being led through their gates. The servants have left, the house – Oldmeadow – is empty. They have to clear out by the following Wednesday.
The siblings are Joe Pervin, 33, handsome. He’s engaged to a woman his own age who is steward of a neighbouring estate, he’ll find him a job. Fred Henry is the second eldest. Malcolm is the youngest, a mere 22. Mabel, the sister, has been talked at and ignored by her brothers for so long she ignores them now.
Enter a family friend, Jack Fergusson. He’s got a bit of a cold. He banters with Fred Henry who’s his friend, they agree to go to the pub that night. Then the men exit, leaving sullen Mabel to clear things away. For ten years she’s been slaving for them. Initially she loved her mother till she died, then loved her father till he remarried. Then he, too, died the three sons lived in high style, spending money, sleeping with the serving women who had a terrible reputation and bore them illegitimate children. She put up with the humiliation because there was always money which made her feel special. Now all that’s ended. Probably she’ll have to go and live with her married sister, Lucy.
Faithful to the memory of her dead mother, that afternoon she takes scissors and brush to visit the graveyard, to trim and scrub her mother’s grave. Nearby is the town doctor’s house. Fergusson is a hired assistant, always overworked with chores. He happens to glance out the window and see her at her mother’s grave. Their eyes meet. But she is not a bright young happy women, she is heavy and mournful and imperturbable. They both continue with their tasks.
A lot later, as dusk is falling, Fergusson is coming back from his round of handing out pills and potions to colliers and iron-workers, heading back towards the ugly town when, at some distance, he sees someone walking down to the big pond in the dip. In the failing light he just about makes out Mabel and is amazed that, when she gets to the edge of the pond, she just carries on walking, into the water, up to her knees, her hips, her bosom, then disappears from view.
Flabbergasted, he runs bounding over the field down to the pond and starts to wade out. Lawrence gives a masterful description of the feel of the thick filthy clay at the bottom of the pond sucking his feet as he wades in then, inevitably, slips and falls underwater, panicking in the freezing water, before surfacing with Mabel’s dress in his hands and seizing and carrying her out, laying her on the grass – it doesn’t sound like anyone knew about pumping the chest or the kiss of life, but she starts to breathe.
Then he carries her very heavy weight back up to the empty house, strips her naked, rubs her dry with towels and wraps her in a dry blanket. Then fetches spirits for himself and her. He plans to strip and find dry clothing himself when she comes to with a start. She can’t remember walking into the pond. Confused she asks if he jumped in to save her.
Only then does she fully realise she is naked and ask if he undressed her. And this triggers a – to us – wildly irrational development which is she becomes convinced this means he loves her. And as if a dam burst in her rigid impassivity she crawls to him and embraces his knees (he is standing).
‘Do you love me then?’ she asked.
He only stood and stared at her, fascinated. His soul seemed to melt.
She shuffled forward on her knees, and put her arms round him, round his legs, as he stood there, pressing her breasts against his knees and thighs, clutching him with strange, convulsive certainty, pressing his thighs against her, drawing him to her face, her throat, as she looked up at him with flaring, humble eyes, of transfiguration, triumphant in first possession.
‘You love me,’ she murmured, in strange transport, yearning and triumphant and confident. ‘You love me. I know you love me, I know.’
Lawrence often depicts emotional ambivalence, maybe it is his core subject. All his most vivid characters love and hate each other and experience wild mood swings in between. Same here. Fergusson had thought that rescuing Mabel, stripping and towelling her dry, was done from purely professional motives. Now she has confused things. This rather mad desperate declaration of love triggers something in him, too. And when she sees her face flicker and lose its happiness as she starts to realise he doesn’t, he hurries to reassure her.
One minute he hates her touching him, next he finds himself gushing ‘I love you, I love you!’ One minute she is clasping his knees in a mad declaration, next she sobers up and realises she is half naked before a stranger, hobbles to her feet and runs upstairs to find him some dry clothes.
She chucks them downstairs, he strips, towels himself in front of the fire, and dresses in her brothers’ clothes, smiling at the result. He sees the time (6pm) and realises he needs to go back to work. He calls up the stairs and she straightaway appears, now dressed in completely formal lady’s wear, a big dress of black voile.
And they act like shy strangers to each other. To calm her he repeats that he loves her but she bursts out that she is horrible, horrible, he can’t possibly, and his reassurances become more extreme, telling her he wants to marry her! Tomorrow if possible!
‘I feel awful. I feel awful. I feel I’m horrible to you.’
‘No, I want you, I want you,’ was all he answered, blindly, with that terrible intonation which frightened her almost more than her horror lest he should not want her.
Strange, weird, uncanny, impenetrably different and hard to parse because at two removes. Lawrence is difficult and strange, but then the social conventions of the day are almost incomprehensible to us nowadays. Would the Edwardian audience have thought it a bit odd or breaking taboos but still essentially comprehensible? To me it seems wildly over the top but it’s precisely its psychological weirdness which makes it so compelling.
I think this is the only one of the stories which doesn’t mention the war at all.
10. Fanny And Annie
Fanny is:
a lady’s maid, thirty years old, come back to marry her first-love, a foundry worker: after having kept him dangling, off and on, for a dozen years. Why had she come back? Did she love him? No. She didn’t pretend to. She had loved her brilliant and ambitious cousin, who had jilted her, and who had died. She had had other affairs which had come to nothing. So here she was, come back suddenly to marry her first-love, who had waited—or remained single—all these years.
The foundry worker is called Harry Goodall. He is a fair-haired fellow of thirty-two, easy going and popular but with absolutely no drive or ambition.
Harry meets her off the train and the whole scene is lit up by flames from the giant foundry. He can’t even afford a dog cart but carries her bags by hand. Word can’t express how depressed she is to be back in this dump.
Harry carries her bags all the way to her aunt’s place, a little sweet-shop in a side street. Her aunt knows her well for a tall, proud woman. She knows she thinks herself way above Harry’s class and Harry knows it too. She, also, married a man beneath her and that night weeps for her niece’s fate.
Next day Fanny has to endure the ordeal of visiting Harry’s domineering, coarse mother, Mrs Goodall, matriarch of four boys and a vixen of a daughter, Jinny.
Harry has a fine singing voice, a tenor, but is a joke on the choir circuit because he cannot pronounce his h’s. Fanny goes to the church that Sunday, her heart sinking seeing the same old vicar, hearing the same old hymns. Harry is a handsome man but marrying him means being dragged back down into the common people. It feels like a doom.
In the middle of Harry’s singing, a notorious local character – Mrs Nixon, who is know to beat her feeble husband – she stands up and denounces Harry as ‘a scamp as won’t take the consequences of what he’s done’ – which I take to mean that Harry has had sex with her but then dumped her. Mrs Nixon describes Fanny as his ‘new fancy woman’, implying that she’s the latest in a long line. Fanny goes bright red. Harry looks down in amusement. There’s a pregnant pause and then the vicar stands up to announce the final hymn.
After church the congregation leaves, Mrs Nixon staring them all out, till it’s just Harry, Fanny and the vicar. The vicar comes and apologises to Fanny. Harry comes down from the choir stalls and when the vicar asks him what it’s all about, he readily admits it’s Mrs Nixon’s youngest daughter, Annie. She’s in the family way. Harry says she’s gone to the bad and is always in and out of the pubs with the fellers. Now she’s with child and claiming it’s Harry’s. When the vicar asks whether it is his, Harry replies ‘It’s no more mine than it is some other chap’s.’ Is he confessing that has slept with young Annie?
Fanny and Harry walk the long mile back towards his house in silence. At one point is the turning off to her aunt’s place. It crosses her mind that she could take it, go to stay, walk away from this whole Harry business. But ‘some obstinacy’ makes her turn with him towards the Goodall household. It’s packed with the entire clan, ma and da and all the siblings with their spouses and they’ve all heard about the scandal at the church.
The thing is, as the clan all chip in with their stories about awful Mrs Nixon and how she’s emasculated her husband, how she beat her daughters and made them bathe in a tin bath outside in the freezing cold, and as they devour a big tea of sardines and tinned salmon and tinned peaches, besides tarts and cakes, all this has the effect of making Fanny feel at home. Her warming to the big friendly supportive clan is dramatically indicated when the others prepare to set off for chapel that evening. Fanny says she (understandably) doesn’t want to go but then goes on to say:
‘I’m not going tonight,’ said Fanny abruptly. And there was a sudden halt in the family. ‘I’ll stop with you tonight, Mother,’ she added.
‘Best you had, my gel,’ said Mrs. Goodall, flattered and assured.
She’s reverted. She’s gone native. She’s been tamed. She realises she wants to be part of the clan. And it’s taken her fiancé’s infidelity, not to make her jealous or set her moralising, but to make her remember the warmth provided by such a large, extended Midlands family which, by implication, is all that she’d been missing in all those years as a fine lady’s maid. Now she’s back home, reabsorbed into her roots. It’s marvellously done.
Credit
‘England, My England’ by D.H. Lawrence was first published in the UK in 1924 by Martin Secker, having been first published in the USA in 1922. References are to the 1966 Penguin paperback edition.
Books & Boots 