Lady Chatterley's Lover

bloke
    Said Harry to Jack
    As they humped their way forward
    With rifle and pack
    But he did for them
    With his plan of attack. 7

    Sir Geoffrey, Clifford’s father, was intensely ridiculous, chopping down his trees, and weeding men out of his colliery to send them to the war in France. He sent them off with a hundredweight sack of coal. As the ship sailed he could hear them calling ‘You bastard!’ Many of them were killed by falling tea urns.
    In 1916 Herbert Chatterley was killed by bronchitis, his CO wrote to Lady Chatterley, ‘Your son died heroically of bronchitis for his country,’ so Clifford became heir. There now was the threat of conscription: soon England was a country of men hiding in coal-cellars, cupboards, and up trees. Sir Geoffrey chopped trees to find them, dressed as a nun. Sir Geoffrey, like Lloyd George, stood for England and St George but sat for China and Sun Yat Sen. Sir Geoffrey wanted Clifford to produce an heir: ‘One good shag should do it my son.’ He tried it, but being on his own didn’t help. No. He would have to marry.
    The gay excitement had gone out of the war, so far over a thousand gays had been killed; their lipstick and eye make-up were returned to their next of kin.
    The Chatterleys lived an isolated life at Wragby; they were cut off from the industrial Midlands that included Watson & Sons Steelmill, Mason & Mills Jam Factory, Rudgc Witworth Bicycle Assembly-plant, the Haliwell Custard Works. These had been part of their early lives. ‘What I miss most’, said Clifford, holding back his tears, ‘is the Jam Factory.’ The three children swore they would always live together. ‘We’ll bloody well live together.’ But now Herbert was dead. ‘Ah!’ said Sir Geoffrey cheerily. ‘One down, two to go.’ He put pressure on Clifford to marry, and this he did. As Clifford lay in bed, he would lay a barn door on him, then keep adding weights until he succumbed. So almost pressed flat, Clifford married Constance.
    As a wedding present Lord Geoffrey gave them a tree. The happy couple were ‘as intimate as two people who stand together on a sinking ship’: on the Titanic they’d have drowned! On honeymoon the sex part did not mean much to him. He was not keen on his ‘satisfaction’. No, he was more satisfied by the memory of Mason & Mills Jam Factory. Constance wanted children, if only to outnumber Clifford, but, alas, early in 1918 in action in France a naafi tea urn fell on his back, paralysing him from the waist down, so there was to be no child, and Sir Geoffrey died of chagrin — he had contracted it in Harrods: it was all over his body.

TWO
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    C ONSTANCE AND CLIFFORD came home to Wragby by wheelchair. Wragby was an old house begun in the eighteenth century and added to till it reached the nineteenth. From his windows could be seen the belching chimneys of Tevershall coal-mine. The village was rows of brick houses, sharp angles, wilful blank dreariness. The people who lived in them all had sharp angles and wilful blank dreariness. In Wragsby, when the wind was that way, the house was full of the stench of sulphur, some days it was the coal-mine, other times it was Clifford. At night Constance could see the glow of the furnaces against the sky. At first it filled her with horror — it was like living underground — then she got used to them. In time most people can get used to furnaces, one such person was Dick Turner of n Grunge Terrace, Luton, a retired haddock-stretcher. Constance had been used to Dresden and screwing Chermans, it was all so different here: all there was was Clifford’s dead willy. Clifford thought this countryside had a will of its own and the people had guts. Constance wondered what else they had. Well, they had piles, varicose veins, and rheumatism. Between the village and Wragby there were no communications. Clifford tried carrier pigeons, but the villagers ate them. The villagers kept at a distance, they found one mile the best, however tradesmen lifted their caps to Lady Chatterley, revealing mostly bald heads and dandruff. Sometimes it revealed pork pies and other rationed goods. They nodded awkwardly at Clifford, they would turn their back to him, raise one leg, pull their heads inside their shirt and shout ‘Owdo’ through a buttonhole. At first Lady Chatterley suffered resentment from the villagers. She hardened herself to it — she rubbed her body with arnica, it became a sort of tonic, it was something to live up