We’re going away to Margate tomorrow. Oh dear, oh Lord, Margate!
Letter to Katherine Clayton, 8 July 19131

David Herbert Lawrence, a coal miner’s son and struggling writer from Nottingham, visited Kent in the autumn of 1911. Depressed by his work as a teacher, he had sent two short stories to critic and literary editor Edward Garnett who invited him to stay at his home The Cearne at Crockham Hill, Edenbridge. Lawrence had a ‘ripping time’ with Garnett discussing literature in his ingle nook fireplace and was to return to the house several times.2 It was here that he wrote three dialect ballads: ‘The Collier’s Wife’, ‘Whether or Not’ and ‘The Drained Cup’.3

In 1912, Lawrence eloped with Frieda, the wife of his modern language professor. He and Frieda stayed at Garnett’s home en route to the continent and it was here that Lawrence wrote ‘At the Cearne’:

‘The Weald, the enormous bed
Between the Downs, grows hazy with sunshine.
Slow cattle stir on the steep meadow nearby.
On the little bank our two souls
Glow like blossoms astart with gladness’.2

After their elopement, the couple spent several months in Germany and Italy, where Lawrence wrote Sons and Lovers, returning to England for a short visit in the summer of 1913. They stayed once again at Edenbridge with Garnett who was instrumental in the the publication of Sons and Lovers .

Although disappointed to be back in England, Lawrence thought The Cearne was beautiful, writing:

‘The air is fragrant with roses, the house is adorned with many large roses, red and white, and pink, they come in the windows, and upstairs, great rose-faces peep into the bedroom’.4

However, soon the ‘English dimness in the air’ began to oppress him and he craved a change of scene.5 He and Frieda had been arguing a lot so the couple decided to take a holiday to the seaside.6 They found a ‘most jolly little flat’7 at 28, Percy Avenue, Kingsgate, about three miles from Margate:

‘The big bedroom has a balcony that looks across the fields at the sea. Then the house has a tent, and the way-down to the sea is just near, so one can bathe.’8

Short of cash, Lawrence began to edit some of his short stories for a collection, but he did not enjoy the work, complaining:

‘I have been grubbing away among the short stories. God, I shall be glad when it is done.’9

He also bored of his surroundings, writing:

‘We bathe and I write among the babies of the foreshore: it is an innocent life and a dull one.’10

Frieda ‘could not help dwelling’ on the time when she was there with Ernst and the children11 which may have influenced Lawrence to write ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’.12 It was during this time that he completed ‘The Primrose Path’ which would later feature in his collection England, my England and other stories.13

Lawrence became increasingly dissatisfied with Kingsgate and on the 11th July he wrote to Constance Garnett:

‘We are here very peaceful among the holiday makers. Of course, I am not yet happy in the place. There is no fault to be found with it, except that I do not belong to it at all. But – ca arrivera. Soon, no doubt, I shall be here like a bird that broods on her nest. But I am sick, sick, sick of shifting.’14

He began to miss The Cearne saying:

‘It is the sort of place I fit into – something so solid and unmovable about it, something unexpected and individualized: that bare, workmanlike study, that farmhouse hall, that burst into country houseism and culture in the big room, with the lapse into disgraceful, almost brutal roughness – nearly like Squire Western – under the fire-place; the common place kitchen and the dejected scullery – oh Lord, I could live for ages at the Cearne and be happy’.15

Whilst staying at Kingsgate, Lawrence and Frieda met Beb and Cynthia Asquith who were staying at Maryland close to Botany Bay.16 Herbert was the son of the Prime Minister and later served in the Royal Artillery during World War One. He wrote poetry about his war experiences including ‘The Volunteer’ and ‘The Fallen Subaltern’.

Cynthia Asquith recalls of Lawrence:

‘He loved to stroll on the sands under the white chalk cliffs, watching the gulls swinging, as he said, ‘like a half-born thought between the sky and the shore’’.17

On one occasion he found a gull with a broken wing. Cynthia observed: ‘While Lawrence looked at that bird, he was that bird.’18

By the 13th of July, Lawrence complained that the place bored him as he was ‘drudging away revising the stories’19 and he made antisemitic remarks about some of the holidaymakers.20 Margate had a Jewish community and offered kosher hotels making it a popular destination for Jewish families from London.

Desiring the company of friends, Lawrence begged John Middleton Murry and the New Zealand author, Katherine Mansfield to come and stay for the weekend and bathe at Kingsgate with them:

‘We’ve got a tent in a little bay on the foreshore, and great waves come and pitch one high up, so I feel like Horace, about to smite my cranium on the sky. I can only swim a little bit and am a clown in the water, but it is jolly.’21

John and Katherine were struggling financially, so Lawrence sent Katherine a sovereign to fund the journey. They arrived for the weekend and enjoyed bathing and eating beefsteak and tomatoes. 22

Lawrence and Frieda left Kingsgate at the end of July. On 17 August, Lawrence wrote to Cynthia Asquith from Irschenhausen, Germany:

‘I might have found myself hurrying over the edge of the cliff in my haste to get away from that half-crystallized nowhere of a place – Kingsgate. Kingsgate – oh God! The last was a pathetic little bill for one and fourpence, the dregs and lees of our housekeeping down there: I believe it was the baker. But it dogged our footsteps, and ran us down here. So I made a little boat of it, and set it afloat’.23

Lawrence visted The Cearne again in July 1914, a week before he married Frieda.

This article was published: 28 August 2023.

References

  1. Lawrence, D.H. The letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, 1979, 30. ↩

  2. Worthen, J. D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, 2005, 96; ‘To Ada Lawrence Clarke’ Oct 1911. ↩ ↩2

  3. Brown, Catherine. D.H. Lawrence and: the Cearne https://catherinebrown.org/cearne/ ↩

  4. Lawrence, D.H. The letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, 1979, 25. ↩

  5. Lawrence, D.H. The Collected letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 1, Viking Press, 1962, 211. ↩

  6. Worthen, J. D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, 2005. ↩

  7. Lawrence, D.H. The letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, 1979. ↩

  8. Lawrence, D.H. The letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, 1979, 32. ↩

  9. Lawrence, D.H. The letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, 1979. ↩

  10. Lawrence, D.H. The letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, 1979, 48. ↩

  11. Worthen, J. D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, 2005. ↩

  12. Worthen, J. D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, 2005, 136. ↩

  13. Lawrence, D.H. The letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, 1979. ↩

  14. Lawrence, D.H. The letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, 1979. ↩

  15. Lawrence, D.H. The letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, 1979, 33. ↩

  16. Lawrence, D.H. The letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, 1979. ↩

  17. Asquith, Cynthia. Remember and be glad, 1952, 135. ↩

  18. Asquith, Cynthia. Remember and be glad, 1952, 136. ↩

  19. Lawrence, D.H. The Collected letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 1, Viking Press, 1962, 212-213 ↩

  20. Lawrence, D.H. The letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, 1979, 45-6. ↩

  21. Worthen, J. D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, 2005, 138. ↩

  22. Lawrence, D.H. The Collected letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 1, Viking Press, 1962, 219. ↩

  23. Lawrence, D.H. The Collected letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 1, Viking Press, 1962, 219. ↩