D
D.h. lawrenceD.H.LAWRENCE
David Herbert Richards Lawrence drew his first breath on September 11 1885, in a small house in Victoria Street, Eastwood, near Nottingham. The fourth child of a coal miner, Arthur Lawrence and Lydia (nee Beardsall), it is not recorded if that first breath was taken easily, but within two weeks the child had bronchitis. It was to be a warning: 'Bert' Lawrence's lungs would plague him all his life.
David started school at only four years of age, he was withdrawn and didn't return to the Beauvale Board School until he was seven. This late start, no doubt, disadvantaged him socially, setting him apart from the other children. Indeed, he had few friends of his own, preferring the company of his younger sister, Ada, and her friends. He was a good scholar, however, and became the first boy from the school to win a scholarship to Nottingham High School. It caused the family considerable hardship to allow the boy to take up this scholarship but in September 1898, three days after his thirteenth birthday Lawrence went to the High School. (Bocker 45)
He worked hard and made the best of this opportunity, but it was a strain, certainly on the family finances, and also on a delicate boy. He took the train to Nottingham at seven in the morning and didn't reach home until evening. Once again, he made few friends; Frieda, his wife, wrote that one boy who took Lawrence home to tea was horrified to discover that his father was a miner and refused to have any more to do with him.
Brinsley Colliery - source of the Lawrence family income.
Lawrence spent much of what today would be thought of as 'leisure time'(and there was precious little of it) helping his overworked, and beloved mother. His early life is open to scrutiny in his third and autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers. (Cambers 173)
At fifteen, with High School and the 19th Century over, Lawrence began work at Haywoods, a surgical appliance manufacturer in Nottingham. He seems to have had similar difficulties in making friends here too; finding the factory girls frighteningly ugly for his rather refined ways. Now away from home for fourteen hours per day, except on Sunday and one half day
per week, working in dark and airless conditions, the frail health of the youth broke; within six months Lawrence had pneumonia. Due to his mother's devoted nursing, and against expectations, he recovered.
He went back to school within a few weeks. Lawrence's health, however, had been weakened and it was not considered wise that he should return to the Nottingham factory. He joined the local British School as a pupil-teacher. Pupil teachers were expected to help with classes after having arrived at school an hour earlier than the pupils in order to take lessons from the headmaster. Later he also attended the Pupil-teacher Center at Ilkeston where, for possibly the first time in his life, he made...
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