Better Homes and Gardens (Australia)

Literature WORDSEARCH

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Below is the opening part of DH Lawrence’s famous novel Sons and Lovers. Your task is to find the highlighte­d words in the wordsearch grid. The words read in straight lines in any direction and letters may be used more than once.

“THE BOTTOMS” succeeded to “Hell Row”. Hell Row was a block of thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the brookside on Greenhill Lane. There lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away. The brook ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled by these small mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by donkeys that plodded wearily in a circle round a gin. And all over the countrysid­e were these same pits, some of which had been worked in the time of Charles II, the few colliers and the donkeys burrowing down like ants into the earth, making queer

mounds and little black places among the corn-fields and the meadows. And the cottages of these coal-miners, in blocks and pairs here and there, together with odd farms and homes of the stockinger­s, straying over the parish, formed the village of Bestwood. Then, some sixty years ago, a sudden

change took place. The gin-pits were elbowed aside by the large mines of the financiers. The coal and iron field of Nottingham­shire and Derbyshire was discovered. Carston, Waite and Co. appeared. Amid tremendous excitement, Lord Palmerston formally opened the company’s first mine at Spinney Park, on the edge of Sherwood Forest. About this time the notorious Hell Row, which through growing old had acquired an evil reputation,

was burned down, and much dirt was cleansed away. Carston, Waite & Co. found they had struck on a good thing, so, down the valleys of the brooks from

Selby and Nuttall, new mines were sunk, until soon there were six pits working. From Nuttall, high up on the

sandstone among the woods, the railway ran, past the ruined priory

of the Carthusian­s and past Robin Hood’s Well, down to Spinney Park, then on to Minton, a large mine among corn-fields; from Minton across the farmlands of the valleyside to Bunker’s Hill, branching off there, and running north to Beggarlee and Selby, that looks over at Crich and the hills of Derbyshire: six mines like black studs on the countrysid­e, linked by a loop of fine chain, the railway. To accommodat­e the regiments

of miners, Carston, Waite and

Co. built the Squares, great

quadrangle­s of dwellings on the hillside of Bestwood, and then, in the brook valley, on the site of Hell Row, they erected the Bottoms. The Bottoms consisted of six blocks of miners’ dwellings, two rows of three, like the dots on a blank-six domino, and twelve houses in a block. This double row of dwellings sat at the foot of the rather sharp slope from Bestwood, and looked out, from the attic windows at least, on the slow climb of the valley towards Selby.

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