Not far from Milford, where we're staying, is Eastwood. Which is the birthplace of D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)...

It's a long, long time since I read any of his work. In the list of books I made during one of our great disposal exercises, I note three books. My copy of The Rainbow is dated 1978. Then there are Sons and Lovers and Twilight in Italy, which have no dates. On the list they're marked PWRA (Probably Wouldn't Read Again), and there's a note that reads: "Again, you HAD to read DHL, but he was never an author who gripped my heart."

Having visited the house where he was born, however, and hoofed round Eastwood in search of other connections, I'm definitely up for trying a bit more.


David Herbert was born in a mining cottage in Victoria Street. It has been beautifully restored, and in the adjoining house, there's a small but informative museum:



Bert (as he was known to the family) was the fourth child of parents Arthur and Lydia.









There's an excellent extended biography here. For the brief version, click here.

It sounds like a fairly riven family. Arthur started work as a coal-miner at the age of 10, and continued until he was 66. He was well regarded in the town. Lydia came of lower middle-class stock, and although her parents had fallen on hard times, she had had far more education than her husband, and longed to break free from the working-class life that she felt was holding her back. She attempted to pass on to her children a love of books, and a desire for self-improvement.

As a child, Lawrence was shy and awkward, and never enjoyed robust health. He won a scholarship to Nottingham High School, but didn't do particularly well. After a period of work as a factory clerk, and a spell of serious illness, he returned to education as a pupil-teacher at a school in Eastwood. Having excelled in the scholarship examinations of 1904, he eventually began to study for a teacher's certificate at the University College of Nottingham, after which he went to teach in London. Here he also started to write.


Meeting and falling in love with his Nottingham professor's wife, Frieda von Richthofen, in 1912, was a turning-point for Lawrence, and he decided he would dedicate himself to writing alone. The couple travelled to Germany and Italy, and Frieda eventually agreed to live with him.

The writing career didn't go smoothly, however. The Rainbow was banned. After this, "he left London to live in Cornwall as a temporary refuge until they could get out of England altogether. The idea of leaving marked the first stage of his disillusionment with what England offered him, and with what he could do for it as a writer."

But Cornwall didn't work either, and the couple ended up back in the Midlands (more below). But, again, that was only temporary, and they began to travel extensively. Italy, including Sardinia and Sicily; Ceylon; Australia; the United States; Mexico; Italy again; Switzerland; France...

We're in the late 1920s by now, and Lawrence's tuberculosis (though he refused to use the word) was majorly problematic. "A visit to England during the coal-strike of 1926 brought his last opportunity to see his old haunts, and it was probably this experience which provoked the first version of Lady Chatterley's Lover; one of a series of works revisiting the themes and places of his youth, and the problems of his own early life. His sympathy was now far more with his father (who had died in 1924) than with his mother, and the novel's central character was thoroughly working-class."

He died in Vence, on the French Riviera, and is buried there.

There's a D.H. Lawrence trail you can follow in Eastwood (look for the blue line). Here are some of the highlights:






Eastwood, be it noted, is an inexpensive place to eat. We had lunch at Coffee and Cream. Basic and homely, but solid and reasonably priced:


And we popped in for tea and cake at Julie's Tearooms, where a massive pot of tea and two Bakewell tarts will set you back just GBP 4...



As a sideline to keep you amused, there are plenty of places that draw on the famous names:




That was all last Thursday (16). Today we followed another thread of the D.H. Lawrence trail, and went to Middleton-by-Wirksworth.

I noted above that D.H. and Frieda had had to move from Cornwall. This is the story: "Early in 1917 the Lawrences made another, more serious attempt to be allowed to go to America, but they could not obtain passports. To make matters worse, in October they were expelled from Cornwall; the military authorities objected to a suspect writer and an enemy alien living near shipping lanes where German submarines were bringing heavy losses to allied ships... By 1918, Lawrence was back in the Midlands, at Middleton-by-Wirksworth, living in a cottage paid for by his sister Ada... The death of his old friend and neighbour, Frankie Cooper, in Eastwood, however, brought back poignantly his hatred of the Midlands. He was himself desperately ill again in the influenza outbreak of February 1919, and only just pulled through... Only in the summer of 1919 did he start to regain what he felt was his freedom. In the autumn, Frieda returned to Germany to see her family (her father had died in 1915), while Lawrence finally scraped together what money he had, and left England for Italy. It was the real end of his relationship with England. Italy in 1912 had been a radical new experience; it was now a place to go when England was finished."

They lived for just under a year in Mountain Cottage, a little outside Middleton. There's a footpath nearby, and if we'd been better organized, and the ground had been less muddy, we could perhaps have devised some circular walk that took us past the cottage. But we didn't. And there's no footpath on the quite busy road it stands on. So we have to rely on a drive-by shooting:




The little settlement of Middleton-by-Wirksworth is definitely worth visiting in its own right. It's very picturesque:









How interesting this all is, and how much food for thought it provides...