the jolly roger
foreign ‘exiles’ of British (or Irish) writers: James Joyce for exam- ple is associated indelibly with Dublin, but spent much of his life in Zurich and Paris, and lived for a decade in Trieste. Muriel Spark lived in Rome and Tuscany for close on forty years, while Graham Greene lived on the Cote d’Azur and Lake Geneva and had a house on the island of Capri for over forty years. Perhaps (as many expats can testify) living overseas only rein- forces one’s Englishness. ‘The thing to remember about Lawrence’s exile,’ wrote Anthony Burgess in Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence ‘is that it enabled him to serve England, or at least England’s literature, far better than if he had stayed at home.’ Towards the end of his life Lawrence rented a villa at Spotorno on the Italian Riviera, where Frieda began an a V air with their landlord, the dashing Bersaglieri o Y cer Angelo Ravagli. At Spotorno, Lawrence and Frieda were closely observed by Rina Secker, as I discovered from her letters. Born Caterina Capellero to a Piedmontese family in Monte Carlo, where her father Luigi ran an hotel, Rina moved as a child to London, where Luigi managed first a cafe at Archway and later a restaurant in Clapham. She met Secker on a train in Italy when he was on his way to Capri to see Compton Mackenzie, one of his authors: according to Mackenzie she helped Secker with his Italian, though I discovered from his letters that Secker’s Italian was actually not that bad, so possibly he used this as a ruse to get to know Rina better. Rina for a while worked for Secker’s publishing firm, until they fell in love and were married. Secker was nearly fifteen years older than Rina, thirty-nine to her twenty-five. Their son Adrian was somewhat sickly as a child and Rina took him to Italy where her father was by now running a hotel at the seaside resort of Spotorno, capitalising on the beginnings of Mediterranean tourism in the 1920s. It was Rina’s idea that Lawrence – who increasingly su V ered from tuberculosis - should also enjoy the benefits of sun and sea, and Rina who found the Villa Bernarda for them up on the hill over- looking Spotorno bay. Lawrence was enchanted by the sparkling blue Mediterranean, the red and white wine, the fried chicken and pasta flavoured with basil, the roasted co V ee and the oranges, and
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