I was in a strange state when we got back to Rome, to the apartment, to the home that was not my home. I found myself wondering about the trip to Sicily, about the absence of whatever feeling it was that I’d expected to have at the Fontana Vecchia, even though I hadn’t known what that feeling was meant to be. I thought about an earlier trip I’d made, to Eastwood, that had played a decisive part in simultaneously making me want to write a study of Lawrence and in making me doubt that I ever would. I looked through the notes I had made and was surprised by the way so few of them were even about Eastwood. Laura had an interpreting job which took her out of town for a few days and I sat in the apartment in Rome, feeling sad, I suppose, missing my parents, thinking about Eastwood, about England, about Cheltenham and Algiers.
I had driven there, to the Lawrence country — north of Shakespeare’s county, south of the Brontë country, bang in the middle of motorway country — from Gloucestershire (Dyer country) in December. Two hours of motorway weather: Contraflow Showers, Lanes Merge Squalls, Delays Possible Drizzle. For several miles, just south of Birmingham, signs warned that there was ‘No Hard Shoulder’. This seemed inaccurate: there were six lanes of hard shoulder but no motorway. Cars were triple-parked in both directions. I’d hoped there might be time to stop off at Ikea near one of the Birmingham exits but with the traffic jammed solid that looked increasingly unlikely. Probably the hold-up was caused by people heading to and from Ikea. Ikea had become so successful that, while still functioning as a retail outlet, it was also a museum. People visited these furniture hypermarkets as theme parks devoted to the Ikea Experience just as they would sample the Industrial Experience at Ironbridge, or anything else from the Experiential repertory of Heritage Britain. The difference was that at Ikea you could buy the experience as it was happening, before it became history; you could experience history as it was being made, take it home in flat-packs and install it yourself. Faced with the choice I was half tempted to abandon the Lawrence Experience in favour of the Ikea Experience: it’s a recurring problem this urge to abandon what I’ve set out to do in favour of something else, not because this other option is more enjoyable but simply because it is something else. It’s something I have half a mind to address — not just in this book, but now, immediately, even though this ambition is itself symptomatic of the condition it seeks to diagnose, a diversion from the task I’d originally set myself — whatever that was. In this instance, en route to Eastwood, a trip to Ikea was a particularly pointless diversion since I didn’t have a home to put any furniture in. For the moment I was stuck with the Traffic Experience.
On either side of the motorway was a strip of grey-green countryside and then, just out of sight, another six-lane motorway: the countryside as hard shoulder. In the 1960s cities sprawled until they joined in conurbations; now motorways are following suit: since there is no longer anywhere for them to go they expand sideways, they merge. No need to travel in England any more: just wait for everything to merge.
It was almost midday by the time I merged into Eastwood. I was too irritable from the drive to go straight into the D. H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum and Gift Shop so I ordered a calming cup of tea in the White Peacock Café.
‘Mug or cup?’
‘Cup please,’ I said, thinking that I could have said ‘I said “cup”.’ I said cup because I have never enjoyed tea from a mug — and, for that matter, only rarely from a cup. Basically I don’t like tea but what else is there? Life is really no more than a search for a hot drink one likes. Compared with cold drinks (beer, fruit juices, sodas, varieties of mineral water) there is a dearth of hot drinks, I thought to myself, sipping my cup of — as it happened — rather nice tea in the White Peacock Café. There was another customer in the café, smoking. I said, ‘Hi,’ and he grunted back. I could see him looking at me, thinking I was another of those Lawrence tourists come to visit the Lawrence Museum. For my part, I too was thinking: I am behaving exactly like someone who has come to visit the D. H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum. Impossible to pass oneself off as anything else. Why else would I be drinking tea in the White Peacock Café? Why else would I be in Eastwood?
The café was heated by a two-bar electric fire with wood surround, plastic coals and a corrugated backscreen, flickeringly suggestive of flame. A song by The Who came on the radio, taking me back down the vista of the years. .
When I was twelve, we moved from our (end) terrace house to a semi-detached place on the corner of the Shurdington Road, five miles from the village where my father was born. The new house had a real (i.e. electric) fire; in the old house we had had coal fires. Some days in the old house, in November or January, I came home from school to find the living room filled with smoke. If the wind was blowing in a certain direction, or if the logs were damp, the living room would be smoky, my mother would be sitting there, waiting for me to come home from school. Winter. Dark already at four-thirty. A smoky room, my mother sitting there, my mother who is old now, who is getting older every day as she sits in the back room of the semi we moved to when I was twelve.
She loves to do jigsaws. We did them when I was a child and she still makes them now, on the same sheet of hardboard that my father cut for us thirty years ago. We sorted out the side pieces and made a hollow, unstable frame, then filled in the middle. (For years my father worked in a factory; even at home, in matters of carpentry, he was a conscientious craftsman. My mother too was diligent and careful in everything she did. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that we should approach our jigsaws in a methodical not to say semi-industrial spirit. Work had entered into every facet of my parents’ lives; even their leisure had some of the qualities of labour.) We allowed ourselves to consult the image on the box: quaysides usually, or lakes reflecting (confusingly) blue skies, the yellow leaves of surrounding trees. I liked action scenes from popular TV series like Ripcord (parachutists in freefalclass="underline" hundreds of pieces of uniform sky) but my mother preferred images from nature which, with the exception of those taken in spring, summer or winter, were overwhelmingly autumnal in mood. Other people make jigsaws in different ways, imposing different rules (no looking at the box), granting themselves other freedoms (start where you like), but we always started with the edge. One, which we made several times, was an illustrated map of the British Isles with a curving blue edge of sea. For once we reversed our usual method: we started in the middle and worked our way outwards to the coast, to the sea. I remember it clearly, that jig-map, but I cannot see it as clearly as I remember it. Many famous places were illustrated but I can picture only the three we started out from: a Highland piper, Jodrell Bank, Stonehenge. (There was no plan to frame this book, to hold it in shape. I started in the middle with one or two images and am working my way outwards, towards an edge that is still to be made.) My mother still does jigsaws and she also loves to do crosswords, whole magazines of them. She is probably doing one now, just as she was doing one when I returned home from Eastwood that day, sitting by the fire in her red sweater, blue slacks and glasses. I sat with her for a while and she asked me for help with some clues. I grunted answers, usually ‘I don’t know.’ To help her — the equivalent of using the image on the jigsaw box — she had an old reference book called Words on her lap. She sat by the fire, consulting Words, while my father, who has never seen the point of doing jigsaws or of reading, watched telly, the volume turned high because he is slightly deaf. Upstairs were all my books, a few on shelves, most in boxes, waiting for a permanent address.