Chapter 1: A Prophet in His Own Country

Excerpt from Chapter 1

 

 

 

 

1. A Prophet in His Own Country

 
In November 1960 this book’s authors were both thirteen-year-old pupils at Nottingham High School, a castellated neo-Gothic structure that seemed permanently shrouded in fog. This was the product of thousands of smoking chimneys of Nottingham’s homes and factories, a city that for well over a hundred years had been fuelled by the local coalfields. But that gloomy November there was an unexpected ray of light for the boys in their Victorian classrooms: an Old Bailey jury delivered a ‘not guilty’ verdict in the trial for obscenity of D.H. Lawrence’s last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
 

Although Lawrence was an ‘old boy’ of the High School it is doubtful whether, before then, many of our classmates had ever heard of him; his achievements were not a subject of headmasterly approval. Thanks to an inept prosecution his fame soon blossomed; before long copies of the book, mostly wrapped in brown paper to disguise the famous orange and black cover, were inside our desks. It is unlikely that many boys in 3B read the whole novel, but along with millions of other readers they were certainly fascinated by the forthright descriptions of alfresco couplings.

Provoking a prosecution was clearly a master-stroke by Allen Lane and the Penguin Press to exploit the new law relating to obscene publications: they went on to sell over six million copies of the book. But the consequences of the verdict were considerably more far-reaching. It has been claimed that the tide of permissive liberalism which distinguished the sixties was unleashed by the Lady Chatterley trial; that the whole edifice of the British establishment and its moral order began to crumble after the unexpurgated story of passion between an upper-class woman and her husband’s servant became freely and cheaply available.

This is debatable, but for us the revelation was that here was a powerful writer who had trodden the same school corridors and portrayed places that we knew well, such as Nottingham Castle or Sneinton Market. Alan Sillitoe described a similar experience on first reading The Rainbow: ‘I knew exactly what he was talking about, at least as far as the places were concerned. I’d walked those fields, and seen the same church tower.’