John Thomas & Lady Jane

to live no matter how many skies have
fallen. Since records were kept the total number of skies that have fallen is
1,372. Having tragically rung our hands without them making a sound, we now
proceed to develop a new species of duck with a quieter quack.
    This was Constance Chatterley’s
position. She would spend long periods on her back. The war had landed her in a
tight situation — gin did the damage.
    She married Clifford Chatterley in
1917, when he was home on leave. They had a month’s honeymoon when they hardly
left the bed. Then he went back to the war to be wounded, and was shipped back
over to England, more or less in bits. A parcel containing several fingers, an
ear, and a nose was posted to his wife. His hold on life was marvellous. He did
not die and the bits seemed to grow together again, except that his knees were
at the back, so that he had to kneel backwards with his face behind him. He
remained in the doctors’ hands, then he was pronounced cured, and could return
to life again, with the lower half of his body paralysed for ever. It was
goodbye to screwing — for ever as well.
    Clifford and Constance returned to
the home of his family, Wragby Hall. His father, a general, had died in action
— of bronchitis — for his country. They came to start housekeeping in the
rather dilapidated home of the Chatterleys where the servants had to keep
running away to avoid falling masonry. Clifford had no near relatives: they
lived a half a mile away, but he had distant relations who lived in Australia and Canada. His brother, older than himself, was dead. He was screwing the wife of a
French farmer when he shot him in the back. Crippled for ever, knowing he could
never have any family, he came home with his young wife to keep the Chatterley
name alive as long as he could. He started straight away and kept the name
going all that day.
    He was not downcast. He could wheel
himself about in a bath chair, with a motor attached, that could do sixty miles
an hour. At sixty mph in a wheelchair he could view all his estate in half an
hour, having knocked down several of the estate workers on the way. He remained
bright and cheerful: almost, one might say, chirpy, with his handsome face and
his bright, challenging blue eyes. His shoulders were broad and strong, his
hands were very strong, and the hairs on his chest were very very strong. But
his dick was dead. He was expensively tailored, and wore very handsome neckties
from Bond Street. He bought trousers bent at the knee to fit his legs.
    He had so very nearly lost his life,
that what remained to him seemed inordinately precious. He valued it at £500-
One saw how proud he was of himself being alive, he and his sixty-mph
wheelchair, and he could no longer feel anything from the waist downwards. He
never knew whether he was wearing underpants or not, so Constance put a bell on
them.
    Constance, his wife, was a ruddy,
country-looking girl with soft brown hair and sturdy body and slow movements
full of unused energy. She had big, wondering blue eyes and big tits, and a
slow soft voice, and seemed just to have come from her native village. This was
not so — she had just come from Royal Ken-sing-ton. Her father was once a
well-known Scots RA, Reid, but only once. Her mother had been an active Fabian,
printing pamphlets accusing the Royal Family of standing in the way of
progress. Between artists and highbrow performers, Constance and her sister
Hilda had what might be called a cultured-unconventional upbringing. Seeing her
in the streets people would say: ‘Look, there goes a cultured-unconventional
upbringing pair of girls.’ They had been screwed in Paris, Rome, The Hague, and finally Berlin. These two girls were not in the least abashed, neither by
art nor harangues, primarily because they were dim. They were at once
cosmopolitan and provincial with high-brow provincialism and high-brow
cosmopolitanism. One glance and people would, say: ‘Look, there goes the
cosmopolitan and provincial girls with their high-brow provincialism and
high-brow cosmopolitanism.’
    Clifford too had had a year at a
university in Bonn, studying things connected with coal-mines, such as shovels,
pick-axes, and hundredweight sacks. Because the Chatterley money had come out
of coal royalties, Clifford wanted to be up-to-date, and for this effect every
day he changed the date on his calendar. He was second son. It behoved him to
give the family fortunes a shove if only he knew where they