I knew from my knowledge of Lawrence's life that in Germany in 1912 he had been competing for Frieda's affections with a rather effeminate German army officer. From where he was staying with his aunt, not far from the Black Forest, he had conducted a letter campaign with Frieda trying to convince her of his manliness, and the unsuitability of his mincing rival.

Perhaps, I thought, this was a real wooden heart (acquired, perhaps, at a local village fair) that Lawrence had sent to Frieda in May 1912 to reassure her of his virile intentions.

Maybe, I further speculated, it might have had on it the name of the village where it was made - perhaps the village of Rosenthal in the Black Forest.

As I was due to fly to England to attend the 1996 DH Lawrence conference in Nottingham, I thought I would make a side-trip to Germany to the nearest place from where I could travel to the village of Rosenthal.

This turned out to be Cologne. I hired a car there and started driving eastwards, following my road-map of the area. By the time I reached Frankenberg, in Hesse, on the edge of the Black Forest, it was dusk, so I decided to stop and go on to Rosenthal next morning.

Before dinner, I had a stroll around the old medieval town. On a noticeboard I saw a poster advertising a fair to be held a week later in the nearby village of Rosenthal.

It was in a state of some anticipation that I made my way into the dining-room of the inn where I was staying.

As I looked up from the menu I was perusing, I saw on the wall opposite a collection of plates displayed. Each one was decorated by a heart with dots around it...

Harriet had on her dressing-table tray a painted wooden heart, painted red with dots round it, a Black Forest trifle

Alas, that was as close as I got to solving "the mystery of the red wooden heart".

Early next morning I drove into Rosenthal, but, being Sunday, it was still sound asleep. There were no curio shops or anywhere else where I could acquire a souvenir of Rosenthal to bring back as evidence. I had to return to Cologne post-haste to catch the Eurostar back to London and the conference next day in Nottingham.