Lady Chatterley's Lover

to. There were many tonics one could live up to — Keplers Malt, Virol, and Dr Hall’s Invalid Wine. The villagers’ social rule was ‘You stick to your side, we’ll stick to ours.’ What it was to stick to your side they never said.
    The villagers sympathized with the Chatterleys in the abstract, something they were often in. In the flesh it was — You leave me alone, so to leave somebody alone you had to have flesh on. The miners’ wives were all Methodist, a doctor examined one and found her all Methodist from head to foot. The way the miners’ wives treated Lady Chatterley puzzled and baffled her, it also biffled and boffled her, the suspicious way they met her overtures, even the whole 1812 complete with maroons and cannons didn’t impress. In all this Clifford stood his ground, not easy from a wheelchair. The miners neither liked nor disliked him, he was just one of those things like the pit-bank. Try as he might, even with make-up, he failed to look like the pit-bank. At one stage, for a fleeting moment, he looked like Dick Turner, the haddock-stretcher, as for being just one of those things, one of his things wasn’t working.
    Clifford was self-conscious about being crippled; he hated seeing anyone except servants, the one exception being Dick Turner, a retired haddock-stretcher. Clifford had to sit in a wheelchair, also a wheeled chest-of-drawers, but most of all he liked to be wheeled around in a gas stove: he loved variety. He always dressed well, he wore those careful Bond Street neckties, he only ever shopped in careful Bond Street. Constance and he were attached to each other, they used a chain. Connie stuck to him passionately, using double-sided tape. With him and people there was little or no connection, like Piccadilly to the Circle Line. He had no feelings for the miners, in all his life he had never felt one. He saw them as objects. A wash jug, a fish knife, a Ming vase, a mounted stuffed fish, a sheet anchor, an inlaid basalt snuff box, a three-piece dressing-table set and, strangely enough, a mushroom farm. The miners’ life seemed as unnatural as hedgehogs’. 8
    Clifford was remote from mankind. He was not in touch, he was not in touch with anybody except Dick Turner, the haddock-stretcher. Clifford depended on Constance, he needed her every moment, with a ten-minute break every hour. Strong as he was, he was helpless. He tried shouting ‘Help!’ from his wheelchair but nothing happened. On holiday on the coast at Hastings he shouted out ‘Help!’ loudly from his window, and the Rye lifeboat put to sea to save him.
    At Wragby he had a bathchair with a motor which he drove at eighty miles per hour through the village trying to kill miners. But always he was like a lost thing. To comfort him Constance let him spend the night at the railway lost property office and she claimed him in the morning. He needed Constance to assure him he existed. So she told him he existed. ‘Darling, guess what? You exist!’ He took it very well and spent another night at the railway lost property office.
    Still he was ambitious, he wanted to be a train-driver, but a train-driver in a wheelchair would never work, the train service was bad enough. He took to writing stories. ‘Once upon a time,’ he started. Constance helped him with all her might. ‘Yes, darling,’ she said with all her might. ‘That’s very good, darling,’ she’d say with more might. Of the physical life they lived, there was very little — a better description would be bugger-all. She had to supervise the house and the servants, the aged butler had served the late Sir Geoffrey for dinner, they say he tasted delicious.
    In the meantime Clifford’s writings became popular. So Lady Chatterley, with the aid of aged servants, ran Wragby Hall. It was in her second winter of discontent at Wragby with aged servants, that her father said: ‘I hope you’re not becoming a demi-vierge.’
    ‘A demi-vierge!’ she repeated, automatically putting her hand over it.
    To crippled Clifford he said, ‘Being a demi-vierge doesn’t suit Connie.’
    ‘Demi-vierge,’ repeated Clifford as he hurriedly thumbed through the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Useless Sexual References . ‘It means half a virgin,’ he said, closing the book and setting fire to it — he was like that. ‘Well, half a virgin is better than none,’ he laughed. All the while Lady Chatterley’s father was trying to release the brakes on Clifford’s chair and push