YEARNINGS AND CLOSING DOORS
Any attempt on my part to explore the cord that links motherhood and manhood is bound to recall the emotional landscape of my youth, South Cheshire in the 1950s – and its literary distant cousin the South Nottinghamshire of the 1890s.
Like David Lawrence, I caught sparks under the skies from weathered, good-humoured callous-handed sons of toil, only to be nagged to take off my boots when I came inside, hang up my cap and let glow turn grey among the respectability of tea cups, cakes and doilies in the front parlour or, in our case, the ‘Green Room’.
Any inner life it seemed was feminine.
D.H. Lawrence’s "country of my heart" was a mosaic of mining villages and farmland. He would walk out of Eastwood to visit Hagg's Farm, where he developed a friendship with the farmer’s daughter Jessie Chambers.
I was a farmer’s boy (or rather farmer’s step son) who sometimes went to the open market the nearby salt town Winsford, and who attended the delivery of a Christmas chicken to an impoverished but artistic great aunt in the back street terraces of industrial Crewe.
Lawrence attended Beauvale Board School from 1891 until 1898, becoming the first local pupil to win a County Council scholarship to Nottingham High School . He left in 1901. I attended Calveley County Primary School from 1949 until 1955, becoming the first pupil to pass the ’11 Plus’ and win a place at the King’s School, Chester.
Reading Lawrence, I can easily find my way around his landscapes – they are family familiar.
As for pairing off:
Needles and pins
Needles and pins
When a Man marries
His Trouble begins.
Young miner - young farmer, beware the falling latch because it’s a smart lad as can take the sugar but slip the bridle:
‘I, the man with the red scarf,
Will give thee what I have, this last week's earnings.
Take them, and buy thee a silver ring
And wed me, to ease my yearnings.
For the rest, when thou art wedded
I'll wet my brow for thee
With sweat, I'll enter a house for thy sake,
Thou shalt shut doors on me’.
DAVID, ARTHUR AND JOHN LAWRENCE
Lawrence’s father, Arthur is found in the 1851 Census as the John Arthur, (3) the eldest son of a tailor, John Lawrence, who had been born in Birmingham around 1817. Lawrence’s grandmother Louisa (33) had been born in Hinckley, Leicestershire. The family lived in the village of Old Brinsley, Greasley, Nottinghamshire and can be traced there in successive censuses, with John retaining his trade as a tailor. Both Arthur John (as he is better known) and his younger brother James became coalminers.
Arthur married Lydia in late 1875. In the 1881 Census, they are recorded under the name ‘Laurence’ living at Sutton in Ashfield. Arthur (33) is recorded as a coalminer and at that point Lydia was the mother of two sons, George (4) and William (2).
By 1891, the Lawrence family is shown established in Eastwood / Greasley, with George having already flown the coop.
The children remaining at home were then William (15), Emily (9), David H. (5) and Lettie (2). It is interesting that William was still being supported as a student at the age of 15, unlike many of his peers who would have already ‘gone down the pit’.
Clearly the values of an independent artisan tailor are not necessarily those of the institutionalized working class aristocracy of the miners, so there may well have been some tension between D.H.L’s father Arthur and his grandfather John. Maybe Arthur played up his rough, local image a bit, as the son of a newcomer to Nottinghamshire who practised a fairly genteel trade.
So Arthur was likely desperate to be seen as a real man – and to all accounts he succeeded. Honest, hardworking and a good companion, he was much liked among his peers, though prone to heavy drinking and the odd bout of fisticuffs. But, having taken up the local masculine culture, he occasionally also stood up against and even locked out his hard to please a strident wife who claimed that she had married below her rightful expectations.
In an early version of Sons and Lovers, under the working title ‘Paul Morel’, Lawrence gives his father his due as a story-teller, prankster and well-regarded workman.
For example, he is shown making the family rock with laughter by imitating the snuffling of a pit pony for tobacco in the miners’ pockets.
And he delights the children by bringing them a wild baby rabbit which he has found on his way home across the fields; and he gently contradicts his wife when she protests that it will simply pine and die.
‘At tea-time and breakfast it became the custom to have ‘Adolphus’ on the table. Mrs Morel objected, but Paul persuaded her.
“Well, mother, don't you want to see him, how pretty he is? Just look!”
'Adolphus, the friskiest atom, would give a wild start at the jam, turn, dart six inches, then reconsider himself. He climbed with his fore-feet on the rim of the sugar basin, and helped himself to a lump...’
But it was to be decades before Lawrence could break away from refinement and again portray a gentle but playful full-grown man who whispered into the same sweet spot both natural creatures and women.
In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, there is a scene that illustrates this maturity. Mellors, as part of his game-keeping duties is brooding pheasant chicks under domestic hens and Connie is drawn to the coops at his cottage, by the hatchlings and his husbandry:
‘It was late, and she fled across the park like one who fears to be called back. The sun was setting rosy as she entered the wood, but she pressed on among the flowers. The light would last long overhead.
‘She arrived at the clearing flushed and semi-conscious. The keeper was there, in his shirt-sleeves, just closing up the coops for the night, so the little occupants would be safe. But still one little trio was pattering about on tiny feet, alert drab mites, under the straw shelter, refusing to be called in by the anxious mother.
“I had to come and see the chickens!” she said, panting, glancing shyly at the keeper, almost unaware of him. “Are there any more?”
“Thurty-six so far!” he said. “Not bad!”
‘He too took a curious pleasure in watching the young things come out.
‘Connie crouched in front of the last coop. The three chicks had run in. But still their cheeky heads came poking sharply through the yellow feathers, then withdrawing, then only one beady little head eyeing forth from the vast mother-body.
“I'd love to touch them,” she said, putting her lingers gingerly through the bars of the coop. But the mother-hen pecked at her hand fiercely, and Connie drew back startled and frightened.
“How she pecks at me! She hates me!” she said in a wondering voice. “But I wouldn't hurt them!”
The man standing above her laughed, and crouched down beside her, knees apart, and put his hand with quiet confidence slowly into the coop. The old hen pecked at him, but not so savagely. And slowly, softly, with sure gentle lingers, he felt among the old bird's feathers and drew out a faintly-peeping chick in his closed hand.
“There!” he said, holding out his hand to her. She took the little drab thing between her hands, and there it stood, on its impossible little stalks of legs, its atom of balancing life trembling through its almost weightless feet into Connie's hands.
But it lifted its handsome, clean-shaped little head boldly, and looked sharply round, and gave a little `peep'. “So adorable! So cheeky!” she said softly.’
LYDIA
The conventional assessments still credit Lawrence’s mother Lydia for his gifts and drive:
‘Lydia was the second daughter of Robert Beardsall and his wife, Lydia Newton of Sneinton. Originally lower middle-class, the Beardsalls had suffered financial disaster in the 1860s and Lydia, in spite of attempts to work as a pupil teacher, had, like her sisters, been forced into employment as a sweated home worker in the lace industry.
But she had had more education than her husband, and passed on to her children an enduring love of books, a religious faith, and a commitment to self-improvement, as well as a profound desire to move out of the working class in which she felt herself trapped.’
This appears to confirm that Lydia’s family were indeed a cut above the Lawrences, though the census records are more ambiguous.
In the 1861 census, Lydia appears as a 9 year old, living with her father George Beardsall (36) and her mother an elder Lydia (32) in Sheerness, on the NE Kent Coalfield. The younger Lydia was the second of four daughters and there was also a one year old son George. As the head of household, George had been born in Nottinghamshire but had moved to Kent to become a better remunerated colliery ‘Engine Smith’.
By 1871, the family was back in Nottinghamshire, Lydia was 19 years old and the eldest daughter Emma had left home. However, there were still 7 children in the family house, with the youngest being one month old Herbert. As for George, he is described as an ‘Engine Fitter (superannuated)’.
One assumes then that he had met with an accident at work, leaving his family of nine dependent on a small pension. To help with the now straightened finances, Lawrence’s mother Lydia had taken up employment as a Lace Drawer.
So Lydia’s disappointments in life began at an early age when her father was laid off sick. Not surprisingly, she resented risky dependence on male earnings and having to become, as a young girl, a breadwinner for a large family of siblings. Marrying a relatively high earning young miner as a 24 year old provided an out.
Ever pining for a better life, she took on her sons as protégées, gradually working her way down from the oldest to the youngest. And the youngest provided the best ground to till.
Scrawny and prone to illness, David preferred the company of girls to boys at school and he was bullied wimp. No doubt, he would have been described locally as a ‘mardy custard’ or sissy - what we in New Zealand would now call a ‘girl’s blouse’.
It got worse. A contemporary George Neville recalled that, in his first job, as a tidily-dressed and stuck-up young clerk at Haywood’s Surgical Appliance Factory in Nottingham, D.H. had been cornered in a basement storeroom by ‘devilish coarse, strange wild creatures’ of the feminine variety, who took him down a peg by checking his credentials. Apparently this led to a severe bout of pneumonia so it must have got down to basics.
This was even more fertile soil for suffocating mother love. Not surprisingly, as a writer Lawrence is generally seen as sex-obsessed and neurotic – a sort of worked example of oedipal drives and homoerotic tendencies.
To me though, he’s largely a lad who needed some travel and a few accommodating girl friends to steer him away from the shoals on the dark side of his relationship with his mother.
BREAKING AWAY
Clearly, Lydia Lawrence and I would have not had that much in common – given her preference to ‘sit perfectly at peace, in a quiet room, taking tea with people all of refined manners’.
More to the point, she appears to have shared with my own mother the notion that, having given birth to a male child, she owned its life.
Her personal drama was rekindled in her son’s birth:
‘Mrs. Morel leaned on the garden gate, looking out, and she lost herself awhile. She did not know what she thought. Except for a slight feeling of sickness, and her consciousness in the child, herself melted out like scent into the shiny, pale air.
After a time the child, too, melted with her in the mixing-pot of moonlight, and she rested with the hills and lilies and houses, all swum together in a kind of swoon.’
Assuming a similar coincidence between parent and offspring, my mother would inquire in the wake of my defeats and or the face of my disasters, ‘Why is this happening to me - what have I bred?’
So mixed and melted or not, I could never write as Lawrence did when Lydia was dying:
‘There has been this kind of bond between me and my mother... We knew each other by instinct... We have been like one, so sensitive to each other that we never needed words. It has been rather terrible and has made me, in some respects, abnormal.’
But as stressed by commentators like Anouchka Grose [No More Silly Love Songs: A Realist’s Guide to Romance (2010)], it is one thing to flag an oedipal footnote to a chapter of one’s life and quite another to assume that it explains the book cover to cover. [And social attitudes change. Doesn’t Jocasta now have to share some responsibility - as a cougar?.
‘The elementary understanding being that “You have to stop trying to be everything for your primary carer, and get on with being something for the rest of the world”.
I believe that myself and that Lawrence came to the same view.
In the words of the novelist Ethel Mannin:
"D. H. Lawrence turned his back in disgust on civilization as we know it and attempted to find uncorrupted life in the Mexican wildernesses. Since his death various little people have written patronizing little articles about him pointing to his limitations, regardless of the fact that in his limitations he was infinitely greater than any of them in their fulfilments.
His preoccupation with sex was a preoccupation with life."
While I too spent a good deal of time at my mother’s death bed, I can confidently claim that our relationship was nowhere near as straightforward as that of Lydia and David.
Quite apart from the added complexities of widowhood, posthumous birth, and remarriage, our differences were a tawdry and bitter affair and our affinities were only recognizable in distortion. I would have loved a memorable moment in final resolution but it never came.
That I too was abnormal as a boy, I never doubted. I was quite literally the mother’s boy of a dead father in another man’s house. And best matriarchal efforts were made to divide and rule, by separating the practical outdoor world of my stepfather from the more bookish world of my own father.
I was under threat, walking a thin line of acceptable masculinity drawn by an unstable woman.
I just had to get away.
So in early 1967, I boarded a train at Crewe Railway Station for Southampton, accompanied by my mother. She was travelling with me to farewell me on my departure for the voyage to Australia. My stepfather had driven us from the farm, appearing unusually taciturn and grim.
As I the train began to pull away, I stood at the carriage window and watched him standing half way up the wide staircase that led down to the platform. Suddenly and totally unexpectedly, he burst into sobbing tears.
Perhaps that is what became so unforgivable to my mother.
Arthur Lawrence died on the 10th September 1924, aged 77. In March, 1924, his son David had left England to establish a community of the like-minded at Taos, New Mexico. My stepfather Horace Darlington died on the 4th August 1968, while I was sleeping under the stars undertaking research in the Northern Territory of Australia. Neither man had their son at hand at the end.
I like to think though that they both would have had few regrets, having done what good fathers can do so well - set their sons on the road to independence.
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