The famous novelist, David Herbert Lawrence, was a Nottingham County Council Scholarship pupil at Nottingham High School from 1898-1901.
For a number of reasons, despite his fame as one of the 20th century’s greatest novelists, Lawrence soon became persona non grata at his old school, and, even more so at his old university, which was then called University College, Nottingham.
The problem was that he wrote dubious books where the main characters indulged in naughty practices which embarrassed many of the good citizens of Nottingham and elsewhere:
Furthermore, in 1912, Frieda, the wife of Professor Weekley, the Head of the Modern Languages Faculty at University College, Nottingham, had run off with Lawrence. She left behind her her three children, who, by the divorce laws of the time, she was forbidden to see. And it was all Lawrence’s fault, and everybody in Nottingham thought Lawrence was a cad and a bounder and they were all firmly on the side of the much wronged Professor Weekley.
Given that Lawrence was an Old Nottinghamian, and had behaved so badly, the School had little choice but to condemn him whenever the occasion arose. And those negative feelings extended as far as everything that Lawrence had ever written. Well, how could a cad and a bounder write anything of any value? And exactly the same thing happened at University College, Nottingham.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened the July 1941 edition of the School Magazine, the Nottinghamian, and found the following poem:
CAT
(After D.H. Lawrence)
In the daytime,
She only sits licking her back with a rough, pink tongue
Like emery paper rubbing on a wooden frame.
Or curls up in a chair before the fire and mews.
Only milk can tempt her into the kitchen, and then she
Laps,
As gold-fish nibble ant-eggs, or cows munch grass,
With an insatiable longing for more.
Her tail, swishing gently to and fro ;
Her little black funny nose.
She purrs, purrs more gently than a ticking clock or than a baby
breathing in his sleep.
Her small, black feet and glossy shining fur,
Her dark-green eyes blinking in the bright day sunshine.
No more lively than a tired horse, or an old man sitting on a seat in the
park.
Only occasionally does she ring in a sparrow, clawed in a moment of
fiendish exertion ;
Or a mouse, mauled by those deadly cat-claws.
But at night, when the dark shadows hide the corners of the roofs and
people sleep,
She goes out and meets the other cats from down the road.
Then life begins, night-life of a thousand cats,
The cat life.
The black life.
They go and roll on the irises, and on the lilies, and hold a cat-
conference behind dark trees.
Life returns,
The cat life.
Squealing, scratching, and miaouwing and chasing one another through
the shrubs.
Squealing like naughty children, and then miaouwing again.
And then they squeal.
I wake, and wonder what the squealing is,
Like a child strayed from its mother.
Cats in the garden, sitting on the lilies or chasing one another through
the green shrubs.
The night-life.
The cat life.
The poem was written by DE Rhodes of 6 Cl. That is to say, Dennis Everard Rhodes of 6 Classics. Dennis was born on March 14th 1923. He was the son of the schoolmaster at East Bridgford, a country village to the east of Nottingham, and he entered the High School, on a Nottinghamshire County Council Scholarship, on September 20th 1934, at the age of eleven.
He left the school on July 29th 1941 and went to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge with an Open Scholarship.
Dennis Rhodes lived to be 97, and he died only months ago. His adult life was on the academic world stage and some of it was so academic that a simple old codger like myself cannot even understand what he was doing. So, sometime soon, there will be a blog post about Dr Dennis Rhodes PhD, and what he got up to in the last seventy years of his life.
John Knifton 