Anyone who has been reading my “Lost in Translation “pieces will be aware that I have an interest in the origins of words.
Another weakness I confess is been an inability to pass a second hand shop of any sort, from the poshest of Antiques to the most down market of Junk Shops.
Living in England in the Seventies Sile and I discovered that we could survive well by grazing for most of our bits and pieces in the various junk and charity shops around us in Kent.
In our village of Wye alone there must have been three or four we would check out most weeks.
When, in one of these, I came across a book called “Words Ancient and Modern” selling for the, even then, inconsiderable amount of five pence it was not a book to pass by.

The cover of “Words”

And it did turn out to be a treasure, a fount of well researched trivia about the etymology of English written in the 1930’s I still dip into it with pleasure to this day.

About 25 years later I read a book by Brenda Maddox called: D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage.
This was the story of Lawrence’s marriage to the aristocratic Frieda von Richthofen.

The basic story is that in 1912 Lawrence met Frieda von Richthofen, the wife of Ernest Weekly,his professor in Nottingham University, and fell in love with her. Frieda left her husband and three children, and they eloped to Bavaria. In 1914 Lawrence married Frieda, and travelled with her in several countries.

Lawrence’s best known work is Lady Chatterley’s Lover, first published privately in Florence in 1928. It tells of the love affair between a wealthy, married woman, and a man who works on her husband’s estate.
This is generally reckoned to be based loosely on Lawrence’s adulterous affair and afterwards elopement with Frieda.

It was at the moment when I read that that a faint bell started to tinkle in the Dwyer brain.

I realised that I had a book written by the same Professor Weekley, the model for the Lady Chatterley’s cuckolded husband, Clifford.

It was at that stage that I remembered that my 5p purchase of 30 years ago was signed by the author.

The actual fly sheet of my copy.

Not just signed but dedicated with love to Dorothy Pilkington.

Now note the With Love
Not a sentiment bandied about freely in staid 1930’s England.

Suddenly this changed the whole mood not just of my attitude to Lawrence and his slighting of Earnest, but also to Mellors,the gamekeeper and eponymous hero of the novel, and his treatment of Clifford Chatterley.
My little 5p purchase in a junk shop in Kent seemed to indicate a different possible history for the slighted husbands.
While Lawrence was travelling the world with the tempestuous Frieda, Earnest was living it up back in Nottingham with Dorothy.
It’s possible.
And it is a satisfying thought isn’t it!