The Three Tuns or The Moon and Stars

Just round the corner from the Walker Street house in Eastwood, the Three Tuns pub still offers a warm welcome. It is a substantial building, apparently dating from an early stage in the town's growth, and has given its name to the lane running parallel to Nottingham Road.

This was Arthur Lawrence's local, and features in Sons and Lovers as 'The Moon and Stars', where Mr Morel helps out during the wakes in the first chapter, while Mrs Morel passes by, full of disapproval:

'As she crossed the open ground in front of the Moon and Stars she heard men shouting, and smelled the beer, and hurried a little, thinking her husband was probably in the bar.'

The wakes, or annual fair, was held on the large open space in front of the pub, now the car park. Lawrence also used this event in The White Peacock, where it is moved to Cossall (Cossethay in the novel), though clearly he is describing the Eastwood fair, and even uses the pub's real name:

The organ flared on – the husky woman came forward to make another appeal. Then there was a lull. The man with the lump on his chest had gone inside the rag to spar with the other fellow. The cocoanut man had gone to the “Three Tunns” in fury, and a brazen girl of seventeen or so was in charge of the nuts. The horses careered round, carrying two frightened boys.

Today the pub displays a collection of Lawrence photographs on the walls, and also provides a good selection of decent beers - Arthur Lawrence would certainly approve!

Where have all the cowslips gone?

In Sons and Lovers , one spring day Paul, Miriam and Clara go for a walk from Haggs Farm up the hill to High Park Wood:

They found at the top of the hill a hidden wild field, two sides of which were backed by the wood, the other sides by high loose hedges ... The field itself was coarse, and crowded with tall big cowslips that had never been cut ... It was like a roadstead crowded with tall fairy shipping.

Today it is easy to follow the track uphill from the Mill, but finding the 'wild field' is more difficult. The wood must have changed considerably in the past century, although the bluebells which Lawrence saw 'flowed over into the field' are still there. Yet I failed to find a single cowslip.

In the novel these flowers form the basis of a debate among the walkers about the morality of picking wild flowers. Clara argues against, while Paul and Miriam, in different ways, feel it doesn't matter. Illogically, I wondered if there was a connection between the fictional harvesting of the flowers and their disappearance today. Later I found a couple of clumps (pictured above) by the roadside on the track to Annesley, but in general they have become quite rare in this district.

No go at Wingfield Manor

Sons and Lovers contains a detailed description of an Easter walk made by Paul Morel with friends and family from Alfreton to Ambergate. Separate accounts by Ada Lawrence and Jessie Chambers confirm that the walk really took place, in 1905. The highlight of the day was a visit to the ruins of Wingfield Manor, which provoked a lengthy and lyrical description: 'The young folk were in raptures.They went in trepidation, almost afraid that the delight of exploring this ruin might be denied them ...'.

They were lucky not to visit the Manor today, since they would have no chance of exploration now. Despite being  what is ludicrously called in the 'care' of English Heritage, the site has been effectively closed to the public for the last few years, except for the occasional day when pre-booked parties can visit. English Heritage have produced no clear reason for denying access to one of the most remarkable historic sites in the North Midlands.

The photo shows the east side of the manor on a misty, frosty winter's morning.

Fanny's chapel?

The photo shows the current state of what was Moorgreen Congregational Chapel, an eighteenth-century structure which is now private housing. This appears to have been the location of the chapel featured in Lawrence's early short story 'Fanny and Annie'. Fanny has reluctantly returned to the district to marry Harry, her long-term sweetheart, but suffers the embarrassment of hearing him denounced as a philanderer from the floor of the chapel during a harvest festival service:

Morley was a hamlet on the edge of the real country, and in its little Congregational Chapel Fanny and Harry had first met ... and again the little old chapel was a bower, with its famous sheaves of corn, and corn-plaited pillars, its great bunches of grapes, dangling like tassels from the pulpit corners ... .

It seems likely that Lawrence based his story on a real incident, as he generally did, and it provides a particularly vivid insight into the morality of the non-conformist tradition that was so powerful in late-Victorian Eastwood. Half of the chapel is currently for sale, at £250,000.

The desolation of the Haggs

The photo shows all that can be seen of Haggs Farm from the public road, a glimpse of red brick buildings, though there is a better view from High Park Wood opposite.

But the farm was the emotional centre of Lawrence's world for a number of years: 'Only to be there was an exhilaration and a joy to him'. At that time the Chambers family were the tenant farmers, and Lawrence became close friends with several of them, especially Jessica, the 'Miriam' of Sons and Lovers. But the farm and its surroundings also features in a number of short stories, including his first, 'A Prelude', while it can be argued that the description of Mellor's hut in his last work, Lady Chatterley's Lover, has its origins in a similar place in the adjoining Willey Spring Woods.

According to Ann Howard, Jessie's niece, writing in 1985, the farm belonged to the Barber family, who loathed Lawrence on account of his portrait of them as the Criches in Women in Love. Consequently they have denied all access to the farm to Lawrence lovers, and resisted appeals for its preservation. It's remarkable that a quarrel nearly a century old can still be festering today.

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.