With the Murrys renting the cottage next door to the Lawrences’ all went well, at first, with Lawrence hoping it would be the start of the commune he’d always dreamed of – his so called ‘Rananima’ – where he could spend part of day writing, then take a short walk to Lower Tregerthen Farm (most of the farm workers were in the army) to do a couple of hours work on the land, followed by some time in his own garden cultivating  vegetables.

There has also been some speculation that Lawrence had a homosexual relationship with young William Henry Hocking, who owned Lower Tregerthen Farm, a speculation reinforced by Frieda in a statement to that effect she made after Lawrence’s death. But, at this distance in time who knows?

But then, after only four weeks, Lawrence and the Murrys fell out, resulting in the Murrys returning to a London now under threat from nightly bombing raids by German Zeppelins.

But they were probably safer than the Lawrences, who, soon after the Murrys departure, came under daily  suspicion of spying when Frieda – who was a cousin of the celebrated German air-ace Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the ‘Red Baron’ – was heard singing German songs as she walked the cliff tops, as well as having the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper delivered every week (a bad move, and logistically quite amazing in the middle of a war); plus she was seen hanging-out her red stockings and underwear on the washing-line, in what were thought to be coded signals to passing U-boats.

To a 21st century ear and eye that attitude of suspicion may now sound rather ridiculous, but it must be understood that back in 1916, with ever longer lists of the British war dead taking up more and more space in the newspapers, the residents of St.Ives and Zennor, and the surrounding villages (and the rest of the country) were in shock and felt threatened, and not unreasonably took against the rather bohemian couple who acted as if the war was not happening, and could not possibly touch them. A dreadful resentment began to build.

Helen Dunmore’s evocative novel, Zennor in Darkness, gives a wonderful, and moving, account, not only of the Lawrences’ time in Cornwall, but also of the negative affect the war was having on a small, vulnerable, and tightly-knit community; a vulnerability capitalised upon by the authorities, who were always looking for a handy scapegoat. And in the Lawrences they found one, and were not slow in taking action against them.

Helen Dunmore writes:

” If the cottage ever had that virginity of lostness and secrecy which Lawrence once thought it possessed, it is gone now. The red floor is printed with clumsy bootmarks from yesterday’s search. The searchers did not care what traces they left. They wanted the Lawrences to know that their lives had been stripped bare and pawed over. Drawers had been pulled open, small belongings tipped out and searched. Letters and manuscripts had been taken.

” The Lawrences were not at home when the men came yesterday. The first search is over, and nothing that follows it can shock them as sharply. Frieda came home humming to herself, pushed her door open absently, thinking of something else, and found her home broken open like an egg.”

Go to Zennor today and there is a reluctant acceptance that Lawrence and Frieda once lived nearby. The local Wayside Museum in the village has an informative, but rather small, exhibition about Lawrence (which is more than St.Ives has), with the cottage, less than a mile from the village, itself bearing no sign of its historic tenants.

Take a drink in the Tinners Arms at Zennor (where the Lawrences stayed before moving into the cottage) and you feel the place hasn’t really changed much in the last 93 years. One can imagine the consumptive Lawrence sitting hunched by a barely smouldering, cheerless open fire, perhaps working on a short story or a poem, or writing to the Murrys to come and vistit.

Then, when you’ve finished your drink walk across the road to the Church of St.Senara, where you can still see, and caress, as Lawrence did, the Mermaid carved into the side of a small mediaeval oak bench that was once considered corrupting and evil. And you won’t find any reference to Lawrence inside the church either.

The time Lawrence spent in Cornwall would haunt the writer for the rest of his life, making him increasingly bitter toward the working-classes (from which he came), and their, as he saw it, intolerance toward art and literature.

To Be Continued…

Read Part 1 of this series.