ABSTRACT
The story of Lawrence's life has been told many times over but no one has written better about his childhood and early youth than Lawrence himself. In letters, essays, novels, stories, plays and poems, he returned over and over again to those much loved landscapes which lay in the curve of the river Erewash where it divides Nottinghamshire from Derbyshire. Long after he had left it for good, he evokes with poignant clarity the fields, streams and houses which made up what he called ‘the country of my heart’. ‘If you're ever in those parts again,’ he writes to a correspondent towards the end of his life,
go to Eastwood, where I was born, and lived for my first 21 years. Go to Walker St - and stand in front of the third house - and look across at Crich on the left, Underwood in front — High Park woods and Annesley on the right; I lived in that house from the age of 6 to 18, and I know that view better than any in the world. Then walk down the fields to the Breach, and in the corner house facing the stile I lived from 1 to 6.
