CURIOSITIES:I AM A LITTLE obsessed with the origins of words, and another weakness I confess to is an inability to pass a second-hand shop of any sort.
Living in rural Kent in the 1970s, my wife Síle and I discovered that we could survive well and cheaply by grazing for most of our bits and pieces in the various junk and charity shops around us. When, in one of these, I came across a book called Words Ancient and Modern, written by an Ernest Weekley and selling for the even then inconsiderable amount of five pence, it was not a book to pass by. And it turned out to be a treasure, a fount of well-researched trivia about the etymology of English written in the 1930s. I still dip into it with pleasure.
About 25 years later, I read a book by Brenda Maddox called DH Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage.
In 1912, Lawrence met Frieda von Richthofen, the wife of Ernest Weekley, his professor in Nottingham University, and fell in love with her. Von Richthofen left her husband and three children, and eloped to Bavaria with Lawrence and later married.
Lawrence's best known work is Lady Chatterley's Lover, first published in 1928, and it is generally reckoned to be based loosely on Lawrence's adulterous affair with von Richthofen. As I read that, a faint bell started to tinkle in my brain.
I realised that I had a book written by the same Prof Weekley, the model for 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. Not just signed, but dedicated with love to a Dorothy Pilkington.
Now, note the "With Love" - not a sentiment bandied about freely in staid 1930s England.
Suddenly, this changed the whole mood of my attitude to Lawrence and his slighting of Weekley, and also my attitude 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 offer the possibility of a different history for the slighted husband.
While Lawrence was travelling the world with the tempestuous von Richthofen, could Weekley have been living it up back in Nottingham with Dorothy Pilkington? It's possible. And it is a satisfying thought, isn't it?
Martin Dwyer (consultant chef, broadcaster and writer - www.martindwyer.com)