When D.H.Lawrence first moved with his wive, Frieda, to Cornwall in the summer of 1916, he saw it as a first step toward emigrating to America, and away from a Britain with which he had become disaffected, and from a war he did not support. But the travel restrictions, and the fact that the new Military Service Act of 1916, meant he was in danger of being called-up for military service himself, made it impossible for him to leave the country.

And it wasn’t only the travel restrictions brought about by the war that made him feel dreadfully trapped (in fairness he felt trapped wherever he lived), no, this time it was also because of the suppression, due to its ‘obscene’ content, of his recently published novel, The Rainbow, that Lawrence knew he had to get away somewhere, anywhere, otherwise his growing anger and depression could lead to a nervous breakdown. He chose Cornwall.

After much searching in a pony and trap around the Penzance area, the couple eventually came to rest in a small cottage (rented for £5 a year from a retired sea captain) on the wild north-west coast of the county, less than a mile from Zennor, and some six miles or so from St.Ives. The cottage, at Upper Tregerthen, was set high overlooking the sea ( the very dangerous Western Approaches, where dozens of British ships were sunk by German U-boats), which, even at the height of the war – U-boats notwithstanding – was filled with small vessels fishing for pilchards.

In their extraordinary innocence neither the green corduroy suited Lawrence, or Frieda, in her long flowing dresses, realised they had chosen one of the most security sensitive areas in Britain to settle.

Frieda describes in her 1936 autobiography, Not I But The Wind, how they made the cottage liveable:

” We made it very charming. We washed the walls very pale pink and the cupboards were painted a bright blue.

” There was a charming fireplace on which lived two Staffordshire figures riding to market, ‘Jasper and Bridget’. On the wall was a beautiful embroidery Lady Ottoline Morrell [a great champion of Lawrence's work] had embroidered, after a drawing by Duncan Grant, a tree with big bright flowers and birds and beasts. Behind the sitting room was a darkish rough scullery, and upstairs was one big room overlooking the sea, like the big cabin on the upper deck of a ship. And how the winds from that untamed Cornish sea rocked the solid little cottage, and howled at it, and how the rain slashed it, sometimes forcing the door open and pouring into the room.”

Frieda goes on to write about the arrival of the Kiwi writer Katherine Mansfield, arriving perched on top of a wagon with her husband, the writer and critic John Middleton Murry:

” Like an emigrant Katherine looked. I loved her little jackets, chiefly the one that was black and gold like bees.” And it was “…great fun buying very nicely made furniture for a few shillings in St.Ives, with the Murrys. The fishermen were selling their nice old belongings to buy modern stuff. Our purchases would arrive tied to a shaky cart with bits of rope, the cart trundling down the uneven road. I think our best buy was a well-proportioned bedstead we got for a shilling. Then, such a frenzy broke out of painting chairs and polishing brass and mending old clocks, putting plates on the dressers, arranging all the treasures we had bought.”

The good times were not to last.

To Be Continued…