The Vulnerability of Passion

Abstract

As Lawrence settled to his teaching duties in Croydon he had to accept that his life there would be very different from what he had known in Nottinghamshire. In thinking about the writing of a new novel, for example, he had become aware that his changed surroundings presented new fictional needs. At this point, however, his career had profited from an unexpected intervention. Helen Corke, who was connected with the recently set up Davidson Road School (which had also turned out to be Lawrence’s, as it happened) and knew several of the people there, including the one woman member of staff, Agnes Holt, proved to be a person whose recent life offered exceptionally relevant material. She published in 1970 an autobiography covering the earliest years of her life, in which she remembered her horror when boys next door forced her to witness their cruelty to a frog, and her bitterness against her mother when she refused to continue looking after a kitten whom she had tried to nourish on a saucer of milk and whose starved body she later discovered lying near the house. Her intense feeling for animals, among the most vivid of her childhood memories, corresponded to similar sentiments in the Lawrence family.¹