Many years
ago I gave a paper on ‘The Politics of The
Rainbow’ to a meeting of the D.H. Lawrence Society in Eastwood Public
Library. Since this was a gathering of
amateur enthusiasts, my rather academic paper was perhaps not ideally judged for
the occasion. None the less, everyone
listened attentively, and after some thoughtful questions, as the meeting broke
up, a little elderly lady sitting at the front came up to me, shook my hand
cheerfully, and said, ‘Thank you for your paper, Mr Pinkney, I think Uncle Bert
would really have liked that’. Uncle
Bert! I had hardly, before that moment,
even wondered what the H. in D.H. Lawrence actually stood for; and here I now
was, to my amazement, meeting his last surviving niece, who had always known him
by the contracted form of his middle name Herbert.
That was a
wonderful moment for me as a Lawrence scholar, and I can still see the fondness
in her eyes as she recalled her Uncle in thanking me. All these years later I know that kind of
fondness myself at firsthand, as when my sister Carole and I lovingly recall
our Uncle Harry – miner, sailor in the Royal Navy in World War Two, and
prison-officer thereafter - who died seven years ago. So I am struck, having become a Morris critic
in the meantime, by how little we get in
the biographies, all the way from Mackail to MacCarthy, of what William Morris’s
nephews and nieces made of him. Uncle
William must surely have been as memorable a figure as Uncle Bert or Uncle
Harry, yet we don’t seem to have much in the way of memories of or tributes to
him from his gaggle of nephews and nieces.
Or am I missing something here?
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