Aaron Sisson walks out of his house on Christmas Eve-wife, children, pit job and all-with a flute and no plan, and drifts through post-war London and Italy in the company of a writer who will not leave him alone. Lawrence wrote it in the years he was leaving England for good, and the argument between the two men about love, submission and what a man owes anyone is the real plot. The Florence chapters were written in Florence, and it shows. Fifty-two plates of night docks, moonlit quays and winter harbours by Philip Wilson Steer and John Atkinson Grimshaw follow Sisson's drifting course from the pit towns to the sea.
