Lady Chatterley's Lover

Marie Antoinette, sometimes Salome, other times she was the bride of Frankenstein: being herself was denied her. When she came down to breakfast her husband would say, ‘Good God, not you again!’ There and then to please him she turned into a werewolf, heaven knows why. She had her own income from her fruit stall at Covent Garden. She blamed her husband — at night she would shout through his bedroom key-hole, ‘You are to blame.’ Actually her condition was nothing to do with Sir Malcolm and his key-hole, he left his spirited greengrocer wife to ‘rule the roost’, and went his own way — which led to Miss Whiplash in Streatham. So the girls went back to Dresden (these were the days before Bomber Harris), and their music, the university, the young men and screwing, and their lovely young Cher-mans with poetry on their lips. ‘Ach you are still ein gute shag darlink.’ O how exciting were the things the young Chermans thought, the poetry they wrote. There on the lavatory wall it was ‘Connie is ein gute shag.’ O the romance of it! In fact Connie’s young Cherman was musical: in the middle of screwing he would leap off her and sing ‘The Blue Danube’ — how she loved him for it. Hilda’s Cherman was mechanical, he did it with a stop-watch in his hand. ‘Von two three in! Von two three Aus!’ How she loved him for it!
    In the sex-thrill within the body (Faster! Adolph Faster!) the sisters nearly succumbed to the strange male power, football. But the Chermans in exchange for the sex-thrill, gave each of them a year’s subscription to the Völkischer Beobachter. Then one night of this sex-thrill thing, there was a bugle call, both leapt off the girls shouting ‘Zer Kaiser is calling,’ and were gone, leaving the girls steaming from every orifice. It was War. To avoid an attack by the Second Battalion of Prince Ruprecht’s regiment, the girls fled back to England in time for their mother’s funeral who, to please her husband, had died as Queen Salote of Tonga. By Christmas 1914 both the girls’ Chermans were dead, both shot by jealous French husbands home early on leave, the sisters wept, they had loved their Chermans passionately, but (wait for it) underneath forgot them, where else but underneath where it all happened?
    Both sisters lived in their father’s Kensington house, mostly owned by the Bradford and Bingley. They ‘mixed’ with the young Cambridge set, flannelled fools who stood for freedom but never a round of drinks. They were ‘well-bred’, with an ultra-sensitive manner. Some of the men used eyeliner, if you touched one they screamed. Hilda suddenly found a flannelled fool with a big one and married him before it went down. Constance did a mild form of war work, she made mild cups of tea for wounded soldiers. She consorted with the flannelled fools from Cambridge who mocked at everything, they even mocked wheelbarrows, hat-stands, fish and Mount Everest.
    Her ‘friend’ was Clifford Chatterley. With the war he had hurried like the clappers from Bonn, where he was studying coal-mining; he brought back a hundredweight sack of best nuts. This impressed Constance — he gave her one of the best nuts as a love token. ‘Oh, Clifford, I’ll burn it when I’m on my own,’ she sighed. Clifford was of landed aristocratic society, he never went anywhere on horseback. Constance’s class was of the well-to-do intelligentsia, who only drank Horlicks and squeezed the toothpaste tube from the bottom. Clifford, even on horseback, was frightened of the middle and lower classes and of foreigners armed with pistols, swords and bows and arrows; another thing was unattended fish tanks.
    Constance fascinated him — the thought of her burning that piece of coal just for him and his horse he found very moving. Now he had become a first lieutenant in a smart regiment 6 he mocked anybody not in uniform. ‘You coward,’ he’d say. ‘Take that civilian suit off.’ Most of all he rebelled at his own class. ‘You coward,’ he’d say to them, ‘take that civilian suit off!’ Where he lived the streets were strewn with suits.
    The armies were ridiculous men who, when blown up, would say ‘This is ridiculous.’ A man shot in, say, the leg would point to it and say, ‘That is ridiculous.’ On some gravestones it might say, ‘Pte L. Conway, he was ridiculous.’ And those ridiculous generals, red-faced Kitchener, pink-faced French, off-white Haig, all bird-brained.

    He’s not a bad