Lady Chatterley's Lover

shot.

    GAMEKEEPER NAMED AS OTHER MAN

    said the Tevershall Times . Indeed the gamekeeper had been having a lot of the other.
    Mellors, the mean bastard, sent her a telegram that had ‘to be paid by the recipient’. He was staying with his old landlady, Mrs Aida Grotts, No. 4 Terrible Street, Lewisham.

EIGHTEEN
    ------------

    C ONSTANCE WAS confused. She did not know what to say or do. So she said and did nothing, which is exactly the same as not knowing what to say or do. First she told her father, ’I’m going to have a child.’ He was unconscious for three minutes. A bucket of water brought him round.
    ‘Whose child?’ he asked.
    ‘ Mine , of course,’ she said.
    ‘Oh good!’ he said. ‘As long as it isn’t anybody else’s.’
    She wrote Mellors asking him to meet her at Hartlands Hotel. Oh London. On arrival there she found a letter from him.

    I won’t come around to your hotel, but will wait for you outside the Golden Cock 64 at 7.

    They sat in the Golden Cock.
    ‘My, you look well,’ he said. ‘Have you been away?’
    She broke the news, ’I’m going to have a baby.’
    He was unconscious for three minutes. Revived, he felt little flames run over his belly, a rare condition known as the shits.
    He was silent then said, ‘They used to say I had too much of a woman in me.’
    The reverse applied, there’d been too much of him in a woman.
    ‘You’ve got more than most men,’ she said.
    That he had.
    She looked so lovely, warm and wistful, his bowels stirred towards her with a loud rumbling and gurgling.
    ‘I suppose we can go to my room,’ he said, feeling a glow in his trousers.
    They walked to No. 4 Terrible Street. Up to his attic, by the time they’d reached the top she was undressed. Soon the people in the room below heard what they thought was a donkey-engine.
    ‘Oh yes! yes!’ she uttered in a sexual delirium, ’I’ll leave Wragby and live with you.’
    The rest of the night was a conveyor-belt of coitus. When morning came she told him, ‘The baby’s due in February.’
    He was unconscious for three minutes.

    Constance confided in her father.
    ‘Where did his gamekeeper spring from?’ he asked. ‘Originally from a bush, he’s very presentable.’
    ‘He sounds like a gold-digger to me.’
    ‘Oh, I’ve never heard that sound — and I’ve stood very close to him.’
    ‘Think of how your stepmother would take it.’ Constance thought of how her stepmother would take it.

    To have the baby Constance went to her family’s home in Scotland. Mellors got a job on a farm as a labourer at thirty shillings all found. So far he hadn’t found anything. Constance wrote to Clifford saying she was leaving him, what she left him was never revealed.

    THE END



1 Not quite sure what this means. Ed.

3 Shag.

4 Unknown Second World War soldier.

6 Very smart, they never went to France.

7 Siegfried Sassoon.

8 There is nothing unnatural about hedgehogs. Ed.

9 Lawrence doesn’t say what. Ed.

10 Classic D. H. Lawrence dialogue. It meant they wanted a shag.

13 Lawrence's unfortunate choice of word for a cripple. Ed.

14 War horse.

15 Horse Chestnut.

16 Stretched haddock.

17 Famous Army entertainment.

18 The price was going down.

19 That is, he was nailed against the wall.

20 Iron used to flatten our gurns.

21 Dick shot off.

22 Christian.

23 A cry of cur.

24 He said that will be fifty guineas.

26 Art Blake, the family doctor.

27 In D. H. Lawrence’s day this word had a different connotation.

28 Yes, hirror.

29 Where the screwing was.

30 Like Switzerland.

31 Grant Road, Bombay.

32 Old soldier ballad.

33 George Gershwin.

34 Traditional Ronnie Scott joke.

35 Fuck.

36 She herself was a bad bit of crumpet. Ibid .

37 Ronnie Scott joke.

38 Where does Lawrence get these strange un-British names, vide Wragby etc.?

39 This D. H. Lawrence sentence baffles me. Does it mean if farmers’ wives want to become school-teachers they have to wear sun-bonnets or vice-versa?

40 Burnt by the English, they were terrible cooks.

41 Please somebody explain! S.M.

42 Noisy, drunken revelry.

43 In this country she’d get pneumonia.

44 Time for another shag.

45 She had had a gas stove rather than a bath.

46 I have no idea how this job is performed, Lawrence doesn’t say.

47 All original D. H. Lawrence stuff.

48 There was a 100—1 chance of finding this.

49 It would eventually give him a coronary.

50 Ibid .

51 Soldier jargon for sexual organ.

52 Scientist