Sons and Lovers.pdf

Sons and Lovers

D. H. Lawrence

This eBook was designed and published by Planet PDF. For more free

eBooks visit our Web site at http://www.planetpdf.com/ . To hear

about our latest releases subscribe to the Planet PDF Newsletter .

Sons and Lovers

Part One

2 of 801

eBook brought to you by

Sons and Lovers

Create, view, and edit PDF. Download the free trial version.

CHAPTER I

THE EARLY MARRIED LIFE OF THE

MORELS

‘THE BOTTOMS’ succeeded to ‘Hell Row". Hell

Row was a block of thatched, bulging cottages that stood

by the brookside on Greenhill Lane. There lived the

colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away.

The brook ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled by

these small mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by

donkeys that plodded wearily in a circle round a gin. And

all over the countryside were these same pits, some of

which had been worked in the time of Charles II, the few

colliers and the donkeys burrowing down like ants into

the earth, making queer mounds and little black places

among the corn-fields and the meadows. And the cottages

of these coal-miners, in blocks and pairs here and there,

together with odd farms and homes of the stockingers,

straying over the parish, formed the village of Bestwood.

Then, some sixty years ago, a sudden change took

place. The gin-pits were elbowed aside by the large mines

of the financiers. The coal and iron field of

Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire was discovered. Carston,

3 of 801

Sons and Lovers

Waite and Co. appeared. Amid tremendous excitement,

Lord Palmerston formally opened the company’s first mine

at Spinney Park, on the edge of Sherwood Forest.

About this time the notorious Hell Row, which

through growing old had acquired an evil reputation, was

burned down, and much dirt was cleansed away.

Carston, Waite & Co. found they had struck on a good

thing, so, down the valleys of the brooks from Selby and

Nuttall, new mines were sunk, until soon there were six

pits working. From Nuttall, high up on the sandstone

among the woods, the railway ran, past the ruined priory

of the Carthusians and past Robin Hood’s Well, down to

Spinney Park, then on to Minton, a large mine among

corn-fields; from Minton across the farmlands of the

valleyside to Bunker’s Hill, branching off there, and

running north to Beggarlee and Selby, that looks over at

Crich and the hills of Derbyshire: six mines like black

studs on the countryside, linked by a loop of fine chain,

the railway.

To accommodate the regiments of miners, Carston,

Waite and Co. built the Squares, great quadrangles of

dwellings on the hillside of Bestwood, and then, in the

brook valley, on the site of Hell Row, they erected the

Bottoms.

4 of 801

Sons and Lovers

The Bottoms consisted of six blocks of miners’

dwellings, two rows of three, like the dots on a blank-six

domino, and twelve houses in a block. This double row of

dwellings sat at the foot of the rather sharp slope from

Bestwood, and looked out, from the attic windows at

least, on the slow climb of the valley towards Selby.

The houses themselves were substantial and very

decent. One could walk all round, seeing little front

gardens with auriculas and saxifrage in the shadow of the

bottom block, sweet-williams and pinks in the sunny top

block; seeing neat front windows, little porches, little

privet hedges, and dormer windows for the attics. But that

was outside; that was the view on to the uninhabited

parlours of all the colliers’ wives. The dwelling-room, the

kitchen, was at the back of the house, facing inward

between the blocks, looking at a scrubby back garden, and

then at the ash-pits. And between the rows, between the

long lines of ash-pits, went the alley, where the children

played and the women gossiped and the men smoked. So,

the actual conditions of living in the Bottoms, that was so

well built and that looked so nice, were quite unsavoury

because people must live in the kitchen, and the kitchens

opened on to that nasty alley of ash-pits.

5 of 801

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: