The bells in Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere tolled quarter to one — the longest sequence of bells: twelve long, three short. At the White Peacock Café a clock struck midday. I left and walked over to the Lawrence Museum. There was very little Lawrentiana in the gift shop window: teddy bears, mainly, and Christmas gifts. The house at 8a Victoria Street had been restored and refurbished to reflect ‘the lifestyle of the working-class of Victorian times, and the early childhood of Lawrence himself’.
The parlour was oppressive, dark, a far cry from the light, Scandinavian interiors of Ikea. On one wall a framed square of tapestry made ‘Home Sweet Home’ seem like a curse. The room was dominated by the fireplace and fireguard which were painted black, coal-colour. Everything about the interior suggested that homes aspired to the appearance of mines — which in a sense they did. Instead of the earth weighing down on the galleries there was the great weight of dark sky pressing down. The town was a narrow seam burrowed out between earth and sky. Even the vernacular of this architecture is oppressive: skullery, parlour, hob. . Heavy words: dark, sooty. The closed-in feeling of houses like this has nothing to do with cosiness. Everything has to be kept at bay (hence, perhaps, bay windows): dirt, weather, debts, the outside. This spirit lives on into the present day. Leaving the Lawrence Museum to follow the Blue Line Trail around Eastwood, the visitor will find the gates of many houses sporting signs like ‘Beware of the Dog: Enter at Your Own Risk’ or ‘No Hawkers, No Salesmen, No Religious People’. Beyond these warnings, for the benefit of anyone familiar enough to ignore them, there is usually a mat saying ‘Welcome’.
Upstairs from the parlour was a bedroom which looked like someone had died in it a century ago or the day before yesterday, whichever was the longer. Off-white, death-coloured night-dresses were spread on the bed which looked like it was designed to die in; either for dying in or giving birth in, ideally both at the same time. In a room like this rest seems a species of grief. Museum installations always have a touch of death about them. Houses have to live; they cannot be embalmed. This one died a natural death and then, after it had fallen into disuse, after it had decomposed, they tried to bring it back to life again but succeeded only in embalming it in death.
I moved quickly upstairs, experiencing that familiar urge to hurry through the part of the visit that should have detained me, the part that drew me to the place in the first instance. In another upstairs room, the ceiling was bedecked with bright plastic leaves to indicate — presumably — proximity to Sherwood Forest. In the centre of the floor, inscribed with the initials D.H.L., the author’s travelling trunk occupied pride of place. The travelling trunk had become a piece of site-specific sculpture. You walked around it. The one thing you would not want to do with a trunk like this is travel with it. Luggage was something that interested me, a theme I’d contemplated exploring in my study: its evolution and development, the matrix of requirements, function and limitations (of weight and size) that go to make up a particular item. It wasn’t a problem for Lawrence; back then there were legions of porters to lug around your trunks, no matter how unwieldy.
In the room next door a video gave an account of Lawrence and Eastwood. It opened with that northern brass band music which sounds like it marched to its own funeral more than a century ago, music whose every note is a lamentation for its having become extinct. Except extinction no longer means ‘no longer in existence’. Plenty of extinct things are still around. Brass bands, for example: they’re still going strong even though they are extinct; even though they’re extinct they’re still going strong. The video stressed that Eastwood and its environs was the ‘country of Lawrence’s heart’. He attended the Beauvale Board School, but, the commentary conceded, ‘by all accounts hated’ it, just as he hated the ‘sordid and hideous’ squares of purpose-built miners’ dwellings. It was odd sitting there, watching this video about the man who seemed to hate so many things about the town that was now seeking not simply to honour him but to reclaim him as a local author.
Tired of looking through my notes, I walked across the Tiber to the Piazza Farnese. Some boys were playing football exactly as if they were playing for Inter or Roma: fouling, time-wasting, diving, appealing to the crowd at the beautiful injustice of the game.
It was a relief to be outside, to leave the Lawrence Birthplace and Museum, to step out of the dismal interior and into the different dismalness of the outside. A gang of lads were hoofing a football down the street. I followed the Blue Line Trail, a blue line painted on the pavement, linking ‘the Birthplace with the three other houses [Lawrence] lived in and eight other Lawrence-related sites’ (not counting the Lawrence Snackery, Lawrencetown Car Sales or the Lawrence Veterinary Surgery). Several places were not on the itinerary, like the Beauvale School and the British School where Lawrence taught for a while. ‘Both buildings,’ the video explained, ‘were demolished in 1971 to make way for a new supermarket.’ There you have it: attempts at conservation take place in the midst of the ongoing culture of ruination that is contemporary England. This is the heritage effect in a nutshelclass="underline" protecting the odd pocket of wilderness or preserving the occasional building of historical interest, is actually a license to trash everywhere else. Not that Eastwood is worth preserving. The Blue Line Trail is a nice idea but there is no getting away from the fact that Eastwood is an ugly little town in an ugly little county. The countryside around Nottingham seemed beautiful to Lawrence, the mines an aberration, ‘an accident in the landscape’. Yet the real crime of nineteenth-century industrialism seemed to him ‘the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hopes, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationships between workers and employers’. These days we scarcely even notice ugliness. We notice its absence. In the face of this pervasive ugliness the workers, according to Lawrence, hungered for beauty. What was the piano, often found in colliers’ homes, ‘but a blind reaching out for beauty’?
Three or four times a year we went to stay with my grandparents in Shropshire. My grandfather was a farm labourer, my grandmother smoked. That is all I remember of her: her smell and her cough. First she smoked and then she died of smoking, coughing herself to death in the bedroom above the room that no one knew what to call except the room with the piano in it. Never the piano room or the music room, but the room with the piano, conceding by this strange locution that the piano was not at home there. There were sheets of depressing music on the piano but no one could play it. I bashed away at the keys without enjoyment: it wasn’t just that I had no aptitude for the piano or that there was no one around to teach me how to play: that piano had no music in it. So the only sound in the room was the noise of my grandmother coughing upstairs. She was dying of lung cancer but no one wanted to say the word cancer. Instead, to make things seem less hopeless, my parents said she had TB, the illness Lawrence could not bring himself to name, to acknowledge. He preferred to talk about trouble with his bronchials, pneumonia, flu — anything rather than tuberculosis.