Dear Old England by Christine Joanna Hart

Christine Joanna Hart doesn't consciously go to Zennor looking for her father.

She thinks she is going there because of D. H. Lawrence. Because the rent is cheap. Because she needs to escape. Because England is changing. And because, after years of wanting to write, she still believes there might be a great British novel somewhere inside her.

Chrissy has lost her home. Then she loses the family home she thought, somehow, still belonged to her. With nowhere left that feels entirely hers, she retreats to Zennor, Cornwall, the wild village once inhabited by D. H. Lawrence, the writer she has been obsessed with for years.

She wants to write something sexual, elemental and alive, something with the dangerous pulse of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Then Chrissy begins to believe she can communicate with D. H. Lawrence's ghost.

The dead writer has some advice.

You're a grey stick. Live again.

Then Noah Vaughan arrives.

English, angry and caught up in the Stop the Boats movement, Noah is asking a question that is spreading through the country:

Where is my country going?

Chrissy has another:

Where did mine go?

Their collision becomes political, sexual and increasingly strange.

When Lawrence's ghostly instruction sends Chrissy onto a Cornish beach to do what she has spent years merely reading about, she begins to understand that perhaps the novel she has been trying to write can only be written after she has dared to live it.

But England is changing. The shops change. The language changes. People arrive and people leave. Houses change hands. Families disappear. Lovers vanish. Children grow up. The country Chrissy remembers exists increasingly in memory, while another England is being made around her.

And death waits patiently beyond all our little arguments about who possesses England.

Chrissy believes she came to Zennor looking for Lawrence.

But perhaps she has been looking for someone else all along.

Her father was her first country. The lost family home was its last remaining territory. And losing it has made England itself feel as though it, too, is disappearing.

Yet Lawrence and Chrissy are caught in the same impossible desire: to keep something still.

A lover.

A house.

A father.

A country.

A life.

But nothing stays still.

Bodies change. Families change. Countries change. Even the land beneath them changes. England has changed before and will change again. Lawrence is dead. One day Chrissy will be dead too.

There is no permanent inheritance because there is no permanent possession.

We live for a while among things we call ours.

Then they belong to somebody else.

Where is my country going?

Where did mine go?

Perhaps they were always the wrong questions.

You idiots. None of you owns any of it.