Digested classics: Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence

The cataclysm has happened, but we've got to live. This was more or less Constance Chatterley's position. Her husband Clifford had returned home from the war a cripple, unable to have children. He was not downcast for he could propel himself in a bath chair, yet he was a blank of insentience.

Constance was a ruddy-faced woman who had known the sex thing as an 18-year-old girl in 1913 when she had roamed the woods near Dresden with guitar-playing German youths, Twang-Twang! and her father, a man of experience, was now concerned she was unsuited to life as a demi-vierge.

Clifford and Connie had returned to Wragby Hall in 1920, yet despite its proximity to the earthy Nottinghamshire mining village of Tevershall, there was no connection between the two. They lived in the world of ideas, where Clifford's insubstantial writing had brought him a certain celebrity among the well-to-do London literati.

"The penis is much overvalued," he declared to Connie. "But if you are desperate for a child, I would overlook an act of congress on your part and raise whatever may result as my own."

Connie was fading, her womb deprived of the life seed, and she found a connection in the contours of Michaelis. He was an outsider with the nobility of a Negro! A man despised for being arriviste! And yet he had the tiny, disconnected penis of the London Modernist. She felt nothing and he had his crisis all too quickly, leaving her to achieve her own by rubbing herself abstractedly against him.

"This is my England," Clifford said, vibrating with the bitch-goddess Success, as the gamekeeper tended his chicks. Connie's eyes took in the man's red moustache and Nottinghamshire loins. Oh for the integrated life! How dare she be defrauded of her womanhood!

Later that day she walked alone to the gamekeeper's hut. "What's your name?" she asked. "And what are you doing?"

"Mellors, mi' Lady," he replied. "Ah've bin killin' a bad pussy."

Oh Persephone! Oh anemones! Connie hated him for using the earthy Nottinghamshire dialect instead of the received pronunciation he had acquired in the Army that made his commonness acceptable; yet her womanhood was set afire with sexual symbolism. He was like a lonely, erect pistil of an invisible flower. He was a wounded lion, bound by his class to the pain of his rejection by his wife.

The mental excitement for Clifford had gone. It was Money and Society he sought! The Power of being Upper-Class! By day he was taken down the mines to view his mastery of the Bolshevik workforce; by night, he rested his head like a child on the ample bosom of his housekeeper, Mrs Bolton.

Clifford, the Great-I-Am, never touched her. She felt detached as Mellors' buttocks thrust against her, but her womb opened up to him and she felt a culmination as he emptied his seed. He had made her reconnect.

"We came 'arf together tha' time,' he said, their juices comingling.

Connie, Clifford, Mrs Bolton and Mellors all thought separate deep thoughts of Hopelessness and Eternity, yet Connie knew she must keep her Bacchante passion. She must have a baby! Go to Venice even!

"I love you, Mellors," she whispered. "You complete me."

"Th'art a good cunt," Mellors said. "Best bit o' cunt oi eva' 'ad."

"And you are the swarthy ever-ready cock of a horny-handed son of the soil who is a little bit middle-class and can quote Latin. Fuck me till I fart."

Clifford became evermore tainted by commerce, his disconnection from Nature laid bare as his bath-chair got stuck in the mud. How furious! How impotent!

"Oh Persepolis and Timbuctoo," said Mellors, eschewing the vernacular. "I had good fucking with my wife, Bertha. Before I thought only black women came naturally. But she left me for another man."

"Let's both get divorced and live in Phallos world," Connie gasped.

He took her like an animal. "I like it that tha' shits and pisses and my John Thomas longs to fuck tha' secret places." The purity of her sexuality could not be denied as she surrendered her arse and they fucked and shitted and pissed all that last night.

Italy felt barren in comparison to her belly that was swelling with Mellors' fertile seed. She dared not tell Clifford she was pregnant, for she was in a Funk. If Mellors' Phallos had entered Bertha, was it not tainted with Commonness?"

"You will have to pretend Duncan Forbes is the father," said her father. "He is a posh aesthete and he'll be happy to go along with it if he can see you naked."

"It's not true," cried Connie, as Clifford buried his infantile, crippled frame deeper into Mrs Bolton's swinging breasts. "I love Mellors. I must live with the man whose cock I love and in whose arms I strive for the bliss of a continuous Nottinghamshire orgasm."

"There will be no divorce," Clifford shouted, toying with his nappy. "It's just nostalgie de la boue."

"I am chaste but long to fuck tha'," Mellors wrote. "My John Thomas may droop but it lives in hope."