From the sublime to ...

This branch of Iceland, on the corner of Albert Street and Nottingham Road in Eastwood, stands on the site of the Congregational Chapel which Lawrence attended for years, and which he described as:

Then the chapel was like home. It was a pretty place, with dark pews and slim, elegant pillars, and flowers. And the same people had sat in the same places ever since he was a boy.

The chapel, which was  demolished in the 1960s, was not only a place of worship.The various social groups which met there, such as the Literary Society, did much to foster the cultural interests of Lawrence's circle.

In a late story titled 'Autobiographical Fragment' Lawrence imagined himself falling asleep in a Derbyshire cave and waking up a thousand years later. A new civilization has emerged, and on visiting Eastwood the author finds:

We came out on top into a circular space, it must have been where our Congregational Chapel stood, and in the centre of the circle rose a tower shaped tapering rather like a lighthouse, and rosy-coloured in the lamplight. Away in the sky, at the club-shaped tip of the tower, glowed one big ball of light.

Sadly, our current civilization has replaced the 'Congo' not with a phallic symbol, but with a cut-price supermarket.




Eastwood Congregational Chapel interior

Misreadings?

On May 5th the Guardian Review featured a leading article by Blake Morrison titled 'Dream Country', concerning the British Library's new exhibition 'Writing Britain', about writers and landscape. According to Morrison, Lawrence was one of a group of writers, alongside Dickens and Bennett, who wrote of 'towns and cities', a genre that Morrison christens 'gritlit'.

It is curious that Lawrence should be included in this category when he repeatedly stated his horror of urban England, and located all his memorable scenes in rural settings, particularly in his greatest work such as The Rainbow or Women in Love. After leaving England in 1912 he rarely lived in a city, preferring small communities which perhaps reflected the semi-rural village of Eastwood where he had grown up.

Lawrence never wrote in defence of the proletariat, as Morrison claims, being too complex a writer for such easy pigeon-holing. Perhaps the fact that the same article claims that Birkin was a character in The Rainbow (in fact he is introduced in the first chapter of Women in Love, 'Sisters') shows how closely the critic has read these novels.

Goodbye to Felley Mill

For years Felley Mill has been just a heap of brick rubble beside the overgrown mill pond, but now most of this has been removed. The result can be seen above, making this desolate spot seem even bleaker.

Felley Mill was one of Lawrence's key places in the Moorgreen district, having a role in three novels: as 'Strelley Mill' in The White Peacock and Sons and Lovers, and just as 'the mill' in Women in Love, where Birkin takes lodgings. In each case it is described in idyllic terms:

The closes were so beautiful, with the brook under all its sheltering trees, running into the pond that was set with two green islets.
(The White Peacock)

There is a mill marked here on a map of 1765, predating the reservoir, and it seems likely that it originally belonged to Felley Priory nearby. Thanks to recent heavy rain the upper mill pond, which was dry last year, has now been partly refilled (below).

Cold winter at Mountain Cottage

When Lawrence and Frieda were expelled from Cornwall in 1918 under the draconian wartime regulations they were homeless and nearly broke. Unable to continue a peripatetic life in borrowed houses they, somewhat reluctantly, accepted his sister Ada's offer to rent for them a cottage near her home in Ripley. This was the aptly-named Mountain Cottage,  just outside the upland village of Middleton-by-Wirksworth, on the road leading down to the Via Gellia.

Lawrence may not have relished returning to his home district and the confines of his family, but his letters from this period show that there were positive aspects, such as seeing his sisters' children. He described it as:

... a bungalow on the brow of the steep valley at Via Gellia - near Cromford. ... It is a nice place - with pleasant little grounds, and two rough fields.

It was secluded but also Spartan:

Pamela (his sister Emily) is lamenting because the eggs in the pantry have all frozen and burst. I have spent half an hour hacking ice out of the water tub ...

That post-war winter must have been unusually cold, but even today snow tends to linger at this altitude. The one story that clearly belongs to this district is 'Wintry Peacock', set on the other side of the valley around Ible, but Lawrence must also have become familiar with Cromford, which he needed to walk through to reach the mainline station there. This would later provide him with the setting for the vicarage in The Virgin and the Gipsy, under the fictional name of Papplewick. Today a blue plaque marks the Lawrences' residence here.

The Ram Inn, then and now

For the son of a dedicated teetotaller, pubs feature quite frequently in Lawrence's work. In his first novel, The White Peacock, the Ram Inn (above) was the home of Meg the barmaid, who George Saxton carts off (literally) to the Registry Office in Basford one fine morning. In describing the course of their courtship Lawrence provides an intriguing picture of pub life at the turn of the 20th century:

It was Saturday night, so the bar parlour of the Ram Inn was fairly full. … The men talked on the most peculiar subjects: there was a bitter discussion as to whether London is or is not a seaport – the matter was thrashed out with heat; then an embryo artist set the room ablaze by declaring there were only three colours, red, yellow and blue, and the rest were not colours, they were mixtures: this amounted almost to atheism and one man asked the artist to dare to declare that his own brown breeches were not a colour, which the artist did, and almost had a fight for it ...
(The White Peacock)

The Inn was on Dovecote Lane between Hill Top and Moorgreen. A new Ram Inn was later built on the other side of the road, though today named The Dovecote. The original pub is now a pair of houses, shown below:

Lawrence's voice: from the Breach?

Lawrence’s upbringing in an East Midlands mining community gave his work more than a physical setting.  It also provided him with a particular tone of voice which, at its most distinctive, contributes to the appeal that so many readers have found in his best work:

They came to the silent house. He took the key out of the scullery window, and they entered.  All the time he went on with his discussion. He lit the gas, mended the fire, and brought her some cakes from the pantry. She sat on the sofa quietly, with a plate on her knee. She wore a large white hat with some pinkish flowers. It was a cheap hat, but he liked it.
(Sons & Lovers)

Here the story is developed in short, simple sentences which parallel narrative speech. His tone can be characterised as natural and informal, with a touch of sardonic humour that sprang from his working -class roots, the product of generations of scraping by, with the expectation that life is unlikely to improve. At the heart of working -class culture is the instinct for deflating humbug and pomposity, as in this description of Baron Skrebensky:

When Anna was about ten years old, she went with her mother to spend a few days with the Baron Skrebensky. He was very unhappy in his red-brick vicarage. He was a vicar of a country church, a living worth a little over two hundred pounds a year, but he had a large parish containing several collieries, with a new, raw, heathen population. He went to the north of England expecting homage from the common people, for he was an aristocrat. He was roughly, even cruelly received. But he never understood it. He remained a fiery aristocrat. Only he had to learn to avoid his parishioners.
(The Rainbow)

Lawrence's old school sold

Greasley Beauvale School, on the corner of Dovecote Road and Mill Road, which Lawrence attended from 1890 to 1898, was recently sold by Savills. At auction it failed to meet the reserve price of £250,000 and was subsequently sold privately, apparently for conversion into housing.

It is an impressive building with three wings which meet at the central entrance shown in the photo. As an indication of the birth rate in the district when it was built in 1878, it was designed to hold 550 children, including 150 infants. With class sizes well over 50 it must have been a daunting place to teach in.

Although Lawrence later went on to win a county scholarship to Nottingham High School from here, with the help of the headmaster's coaching, he at first found the school's atmosphere oppressive. Being a sensitive and rather frail child he found playground life difficult to cope with, and some of the antipathy he later felt for Eastwood may be traced back to his suffering at the hands of more boisterous boys.

It will be interesting to see how the developers use the link with Lawrence in marketing the maisonettes.