England, My England
AND OTHER STORIES
by D.H. Lawrence
Contents
| ENGLAND, MY ENGLAND |
| TICKETS, PLEASE |
| THE BLIND MAN |
| MONKEY NUTS |
| WINTRY PEACOCK |
| YOU TOUCHED ME |
| SAMSON AND DELILAH |
| THE PRIMROSE PATH |
| THE HORSE DEALER’S DAUGHTER |
| FANNY AND ANNIE |
ENGLAND, MY ENGLAND
He was working on the edge of the common, beyond the small brook that ran inthe dip at the bottom of the garden, carrying the garden path in continuationfrom the plank bridge on to the common. He had cut the rough turf and bracken,leaving the grey, dryish soil bare. But he was worried because he could not getthe path straight, there was a pleat between his brows. He had set up hissticks, and taken the sights between the big pine trees, but for some reasoneverything seemed wrong. He looked again, straining his keen blue eyes, thathad a touch of the Viking in them, through the shadowy pine trees as through adoorway, at the green-grassed garden-path rising from the shadow of alders bythe log bridge up to the sunlit flowers. Tall white and purple columbines, andthe butt-end of the old Hampshire cottage that crouched near the earth amidflowers, blossoming in the bit of shaggy wildness round about.
There was a sound of children’s voices calling and talking: high,childish, girlish voices, slightly didactic and tinged with domineering:“If you don’t come quick, nurse, I shall run out there to wherethere are snakes.” And nobody had the sang-froid to reply:“Run then, little fool.” It was always, “No, darling. Verywell, darling. In a moment, darling. Darling, you must bepatient.”
His heart was hard with disillusion: a continual gnawing and resistance. But heworked on. What was there to do but submit!
The sunlight blazed down upon the earth, there was a vividness of flamyvegetation, of fierce seclusion amid the savage peace of the commons. Strangehow the savage England lingers in patches: as here, amid these shaggy gorsecommons, and marshy, snake infested places near the foot of the south downs.The spirit of place lingering on primeval, as when the Saxons came, so longago.
Ah, how he had loved it! The green garden path, the tufts of flowers, purpleand white columbines, and great oriental red poppies with their black chaps andmulleins tall and yellow, this flamy garden which had been a garden for athousand years, scooped out in the little hollow among the snake-infestedcommons. He had made it flame with flowers, in a sun cup under its hedges andtrees. So old, so old a place! And yet he had re-created it.
The timbered cottage with its sloping, cloak-like roof was old and forgotten.It belonged to the old England of hamlets and yeomen. Lost all alone on theedge of the common, at the end of a wide, grassy, briar-entangled lane shadedwith oak, it had never known the world of tod