Happy home on the hill

THE Lawrence family certainly rose up in the world by moving from 28 Garden Road, The Breach, to a new block of bay-windowed properties on Walker Street, in Eastwood. DH Lawrence lived there from 1891 to 1903, aged six to 18, longer than anywhere else.

He called it Bleak House, after Dickens, as the elevated position exposed them to harsh weather. An old ash tree opposite, beneath which the children played, is gone now, but its howling with the wind at night is remembered in Lawrence’s poem Discord In Childhood.

Sister Ada recalls a happy home, lovingly furnished, with rocking chairs beside the fire for mother and father. Brother Bert had a genius for indoor games, excelling at charades. Returning from forays through fields and woods below, they joyfully approached their house, perched high on the hill.

When two pet rabbits died, accidentally suffocated in their hutch, a solemn burial was disrupted by brother Ernest’s theatricals.

Two tame white rats, from Pussy Templeman, ran among their hair and up sleeves, sleeping in pockets. When one popped out of Bert’s shirt front, Irish neighbour Mrs May shrieked “Deary me! Rots!”

The splendid world-famous literary-heritage “country of my heart” view from the Lawrence house on Walker Street was lost when a two-storey primary school block was built in front, called Lawrence View School!

Confusingly, a commemorative blue plaque stands on no.10, but William “Bill” Smith, who’s assisted in the past on a number of notable DH Lawrence film projects, has clear written evidence – from the late Enid Goodband, no less, who founded the Lawrence Birthplace Museum - that they lived at no. 3, now numbered 8.

Nevertheless, news of no. 10 being auctioned in Nottingham on February 18, by Auction Estates, should excite Lawrence lovers.

■■ 100 years ago – on January 25, 1921 – Lawrence’s letters to agents JB Pinker and Robert Mountsier seek to clarify “various affairs”. He tells Mountsier his new novel, Mr Noon, “will take me about a month still to finish”, and thinks “the first 200 pages... might make a rather funny serial”, being “an episode all by itself”.

He will “rejoice if we can have our ship and go to the South Seas”. He’s “game” they should “do something this year of disgrace 1921”. He will “finish those Sardinian snaps soon”.

He tells Beatrice Bland they found Sardinia “such fun”, but “decided we didn’t want to live there”.