Golden Warrior, The Page 3

  Ever since he had taken the incumbency of St Aldate’s in 1859, Canon Christopher had followed the central tenet of Evangelicalism and looked for converts, especially among undergraduates. Young men, saved for Christ, would, at the canon’s bidding, become teachers, clergymen and missionaries and disseminate the Evangelical gospel. This pattern was followed by three of Mrs Lawrence’s sons. Her eldest, Robert, qualified as a doctor and after front-line war service became a medical missionary in China in 1925, where she joined him. William, the third son, followed a successful Oxford career as a historian and athlete by taking up a teaching post at the boys’ school in Delhi. Before his enlistment in the army in September 1914, the fourth son, Frank, had been deeply involved in the Church Lads’ Brigade as an organiser and leader of their summer camps.

  Mrs Lawrence actively encouraged her sons in these vocations, which were as spiritually satisfying for her as they were for them. Although her guide, Canon Christopher, would have rejected the Anglo-Catholic doctrine of confession, he may well have discovered the truth about the Lawrences’ union. Whether or not at his prompting, Mrs Lawrence came to believe that she could redeem her own sin through service to God as a Christian mother. Though her sons had been conceived in wickedness, they would grow to manhood in godliness. Then, in accordance with Evangelical doctrine, they would be ready to serve God’s purpose.

  The regime at 2 Polstead Road was typical of that in contemporary Evangelical households in Britain and the United States, and had its roots in the traditions of English and Scottish Puritanism. Family prayers, which were believed to be a bulwark against moral waywardness, were held daily, and there were frequent readings from the annotated family Bible. The byways to vice were blocked by Mrs Lawrence’s strictures against strong drink (Mr Lawrence appears to have been allowed an occasional glass of claret), the non-Shakespearean theatre, and dancing. Flirtation was impossible. Girls were kept at a distance and Mrs Lawrence saw to it that her sons stayed clear of such opportunities for dalliance at the annual St Giles Fair or Christmas parties. There were no incontinent words or thoughts. The domestic moral tone was such that, when Frank found himself a junior subaltern in the mess of the 3rd Gloucesters, he was horrified by what he heard. ‘I cannot describe the language, sentiments and thoughts freely expressed here by the officers,’ he told his brother William. ‘It is beyond words abominable.’ In a letter written to be delivered to his parents if he were killed in action, he admitted to having lived ‘through indescribable depths of infamy’ from which he emerged unsoiled thanks to what he had learned at home. ‘If I had been accustomed to going to theatres, music halls etc. in the seemingly harmless way other boys go I should have found it trebly hard to have kept myself clean.’3

  Mrs Lawrence’s Puritanism was not just a barricade against vice. There was a strong vein in contemporary religious thought which insisted that moral weaknesses could be passed from one generation to another like the cast of the jaw or the colour of eyes. In terms of moral heredity, her sons had a baleful pedigree. Their mother lived in sin, their maternal grandmother had borne an illegitimate child and died from drink, and, if T.E. Lawrence’s version of his father’s life in Ireland contains even a shadow of truth, there was a tendency to loose living on his side of the family. Mrs Lawrence would have her work cut out to prevent recidivism, and there could be no sparing the rod or the sermon.

  There was a positive side to the Puritan regimen of Lawrence’s childhood. Learning was held in high regard by Evangelicals, who saw ignorance as the yoke-devil of vice. Education had to be at the centre of the Lawrence boys’ lives if they were to develop intellectual gifts necessary for their future callings. Much energy therefore was concentrated on their education; reading was encouraged, they were exhorted to work hard at school and, to judge by the family letters, the household was a place of intellectual stimulation in which books and ideas were commonly discussed. In consequence all the young Lawrences flourished at school, passed exams and proceeded to the university at Oxford or Cambridge. Their achievements were, in the eyes of Mrs Lawrence, stepping-stones towards future vocations in the service of God.

  On 20 July 1919, while attending the Paris Peace Conference, Lawrence admitted his bastardy to his friend and fellow guest at the Continental Hotel, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen. The colonel’s reply, a characteristic mixture of common sense and flippancy, was that ‘In these enlightened times, it mattered little and anyway he shared something in common with Jesus Christ.’ Lawrence had already confided the circumstances of his birth to several close friends and by the time of his death they were widely known, although never publicised. It seems to have been common knowledge among Lawrence’s brother officers at Aqaba, one of whom was overheard to remark, ‘He’s a bastard, did you know?’, much to the irritation of some other-ranks who were near by. According to Robert Graves, ‘he was not informed of the “guilty secret” until he was so emancipated that, as he told me, “My mother was shocked that we weren’t shocked at her news and that we took it lightly.” ’ Lawrence told Mrs Bernard Shaw that he had uncovered the truth when he was about ten, but delayed letting his mother know of its discovery until his father’s death in April 1919.4

  How Lawrence had unravelled the ‘guilty secret’ when so young can only be guessed. Like all children, he must have questioned his parents about their own childhoods and enquired after relations. He was a quick-witted, observant boy and so may have deduced something from the correspondence to and from Ireland and meetings with land agents and lawyers. His father’s exciting tales about Land League terrorism may have led him to wonder why the family never visited Westmeath. An acute and thoughtful listener might have been puzzled by Mrs Lawrence’s linguistic precision, which made her call Mr Lawrence ‘Tom’ or ‘the boys’ father’ rather than the usual ‘my husband’. Somehow, Lawrence evaluated the evidence and came to a correct conclusion. Whether he shared it with his other brothers is not known, although he did tell Arnold.

  Lawrence’s initial reaction must have been coloured by moral attitudes which had been instilled by his parents. Their relationship flew in the teeth of all that they publicly professed. They were defaulters against their own moral code, and maybe something worse, since they condemned others such as Wilde. Like their spiritual predecessors, the Puritans known to Samuel Butler, they:

  Compound for sins they are inclined to

  By damning those they have no mind to.

  If the young Lawrence wholeheartedly accepted his parents’ dogmas, then he was devalued by their sins, and they became hypocrites. Yet his own experience, before and after his discovery, made it abundantly clear that their union was a loving one. They were affectionate and attentive parents who loved him and cared for his welfare.

  When he finally came to terms with the implications of what he had found out, Lawrence condemned the morality and faith of his parents rather than their behaviour. Knowing too well that ‘living in sin’ had brought them much inner torment, he developed a revulsion against all religious fanaticisms and their attendant urge to convert. ‘Religious theories are the devil, when they are ridden too hard, and begin to dictate conduct,’ he wrote of the Muslim Wahabbis. The same was true of the doctrines on which his parents had built their lives, and which, as their son knew, had given them endless miseries of guilt. News of the funeral service for Thomas Hardy in 1927 provoked Lawrence to sudden anger. ‘I grow indignant for him, knowing that those sleek Deans and Canons were acting a lie behind his name. Hardy was too great to be suffered as an enemy of their faith: so he must be redeemed.... I wish these black suited apes could once see the light with which they shine.’ The sentiments were those of one who, in his youth, had been on the receiving end of such proselytising. Men, Lawrence later told Liddell Hart, should be spared the attentions of converters and be left in peace.

  Lawrence’s brothers-in-arms, the Sunni Muslim Arabs, managed these matters better. ‘The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that-he was with
in God,’ Lawrence wrote in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Looking back perhaps to the faith and observances of his family, he added:

  There was a homeliness, and everyday-ness of this climatic Arab God, who was their eating and their fighting and their lusting, the commonest of their thoughts, their familiar resource and companion, in a way impossible to those whose God is so wistfully veiled from them by despair of their carnal unworthiness of Him and by decorum of formal worship. Arabs felt no incongruity in bringing God into the weaknesses and appetites of their least creditable causes.

  How different from his mother’s austere god, who was revealed through suffering. Lawrence’s own faith in that god, learned from her, evaporated. When it went he did not say, but in a letter to Liddell Hart he admitted that, after it had gone, he scarcely noticed the loss.

  Faith might slip away unnoticed, but Lawrence could not shake off his Evangelical inheritance of thought and behaviour. All his life he adhered to that ascetic Puritanism which considered sensual indulgence an obstacle to mental concentration. Physical pleasures were to be shunned. He very rarely drank alcohol. Touring southern France in August 1908 he told his mother, ‘My water-drinking is the subject of general amazement, by the way, far beyond what I had thought possible,’ and hotel staff were astonished when he asked for water rather than wine. This must have pleased Mrs Lawrence, although her son overheard waiters call his choice blague [humbug]. Lawrence’s abstinence set him apart from those of his wartime friends for whom the bar at Cairo’s Shepheard’s Hotel was a second home. On campaign, he disapproved of his brother officers’ whisky-drinking and, long after, he found knowledge of Hilaire Belloc’s drinking habits a barrier to the enjoyment of his writing.

  Lawrence did not smoke, which was unusual when the habit was all but universal, especially in the Forces. Food seems not to have interested him and between sixteen and nineteen he was a vegetarian. These were the years of his French excursions and his attitude to the local cuisine was fiercely practical. Once he wrote home, ‘We had déjeuner in one of the embrasures of the gateway: our déjeuner was an innocent one: nothing had to be killed to feed us. Milk, bread, butter was our total. Price 4d [two pence].’ While he later relented and learned to enjoy Middle Eastern cooking, his diet was usually spare. In the 1920s and 1930s visitors to his cottage at Cloud’s Hill discovered that he had perfected a form of culinary minimalism which involved their being presented with a tin-opener and cans of pre-cooked food. Those so victualled had to prop themselves up against the fireplace, since their host’s Spartan regime did not permit an abundance of furniture. There were additional discomforts: cups and saucers were scarce before 1934, when Lawrence set to making some at a local pottery.

  The Puritan virtue of simplicity in all mundane, physical things, which had its roots in medieval asceticism, appealed deeply to Lawrence and lay at the heart of his love affair with the desert. There was, as well, the form if not the spirit of intense Christian meditation in his interminable self-analysis. While the pietist looked within himself to uncover the nature of his soul and explore its relationship with God, Lawrence’s end was the discovery of a quintessential self which was independent of any god. In the Seven Pillars, he presents himself as an instrument of Providence, who gave the vital impulse to the Arab national movement, rescued it and gave it direction. In this guise he became an apostle of what he called ‘our creed’, a secular religion which he claimed would bring political salvation to the Arabs, but the threads of self-sacrifice, single–mindedness and an urge to enlighten which run through his narrative unconsciously reflect elements of the Evangelical creed to which he had been introduced as a child.

  II

  Boyhood and Schooling, 1888‒1907

  Lawrence appears to have had a happy childhood, to judge from the accounts of his early years written soon after his death by his mother, elder brother, boyhood chums and schoolmasters. He preferred to think otherwise. The sight of the tin bath in which he had been washed as an infant, and which Mrs Lawrence had kindly passed to Robert Graves’ family, gave him a ‘violent revulsion to recall such physical dependency’. In his later letters, Lawrence grumbled about the constraints of family and schoolroom life and the deflection of his energies into boring tasks. ‘Schools are queer places,’ he warned a godson just before he went up to Eton in 1929. ‘I was very happy when I finished with them all. Oxford was like a heaven to finish up with.’ A few years before, he had told Robert Graves that he had been educated ‘very little, very reluctantly, very badly’ at school and not at all at Oxford.

  Before he joined the first form at Oxford High School in September 1896, Lawrence’s education had been disjointed. It had begun in France where he attended a Jesuit academy and the St Malo junior gymnastic class, and after his parents’ return to England in 1894 he was taught by a governess and tutor. In those eight years, he made considerable headway. He had learned to read before he was five and practised his new skills on the police reports in the newspapers — reading matter which suggests that his parents were either unvigilant or less strict than they became in Oxford. At Oxford High School, Lawrence showed himself a well-read, apt and biddable pupil who picked up prizes for English Language, Literature, Scripture and History. The final measure of his academic achievement was a Meyricke Exhibition to Jesus College, Oxford, to read Modern History, awarded in January 1907 and worth £40 a year.

  During his eleven years at school, Lawrence took great pride in his evasion of team games. When his youngest brother Arnold was about to begin his first term at the high school, Lawrence urged him to ‘carry on our tradition: “no games”’, forgetting for a moment that his other brother Frank was making his mark in cricket and soccer. Had Lawrence been at public boarding school, his avoidance of team games would have been a source of interminable misery, for membership of an eleven or fifteen was a passport to general acceptability; outstanding prowess on the pitch automatically won popularity with masters and boys. As it was, whenever he was coerced into a match, he would find a chance to sidle off to the edge of the playing field from where he would watch the game with a fixed grin on his face. He was not a weakling: he relished the rough and tumble of boyish horseplay and wrestling and proved himself a good distance runner. His quirkiness was discounted by his school mates who found he could take care of himself, was good–natured and had a sense of fun. All the Lawrence boys embodied the ideals of manliness, then so prized by schoolmasters. One later observed that they were ‘an ideal family of boys’, each ‘clean in limb and life’. At one stage their brotherhood was emphasised by their mother, who dressed each for school in striped, Breton-style sweaters. Yet for Ned, in this conspicuous dress, the shift from home to school may not have been easy for, as both his teachers and fellow pupils noticed, he seemed on first meeting to be a shy and self–contained boy.

  All the boys were well kempt and in good shape physically, thanks to the diligence of Mrs Lawrence. She breast-fed her first four sons, and all her life tirelessly fulfilled her responsibilities as a mother and housewife. She had control over all household routines and servants, although, unlike other women in her position, she preferred to do some of the chores herself. When her boys were young, however, she was helped by nannies. Every particular of their welfare was given careful attention. During the summers of 1906, 1907 and 1908 when Ned was bicycling through France, his mind full of matters Gothic, he was chased by anxious notes from his mother, who was concerned about the state of his health and wardrobe. He could not have cared less, and thought her obsessions trifling: ‘Mother was always caring (to my mind) too much about such essentials as food and clothes,’ he told Mrs Bernard Shaw in 1927. ‘Life itself doesn’t seem to matter, in comparison with thought and desire.’ Maybe not for an adult determined to live within himself on his own terms, but the eighteen–year–old in France took care to assure his mother that all was well with his laundry. In turn, he cautioned her not to overstretch herself with housework, and also warned his father not to weary hi
mself with domestic repairs. ‘Do nothing rather than too much,’ he advised; ‘you are worth more than the house.’

  Maternal care and Mrs Lawrence’s wholesome but very plain cooking made sure that her son was a robust, sturdy boy, but small for his age and class, at least when set alongside his brothers. At fifteen he was five foot four and a half inches, and a year later he was just under five foot six, the height he remained for the rest of his life. The average height for a middle-class boy at the time would have been nearer five foot nine, and many were taller; brother William topped six feet. Mrs Lawrence mistakenly blamed her son’s shortness on a broken leg, gained in a schoolyard tussle when he intervened to rescue a victim of bullying, probably in his sixteenth or seventeenth year. The spare diet which he was following could not have stimulated either growth or girth. Between 1905 and 1908 he limited himself to vegetables, milk (drunk by the litre in France), eggs, fruit, cakes and abundant helpings of porridge, which he believed reinstated energy lost in exercise. His small frame got plenty of this, running and bicycling. Just after his eighteenth birthday, the sight of his biceps, seen when he was sea-bathing, amazed a French mademoiselle. ‘She thinks I am Hercules,’ he told his mother.

  Inside the Lawrence household, the boys’ moral welfare and correction were Mrs Lawrence’s province. She was untroubled by the theories of child psychology to be laid down by the pundits of a later generation. For boys there was simply right and wrong, so when her sons misbehaved or flouted her authority they were whipped on their bare bottoms. Ned was the most wilful and suffered more chastisement than his brothers. Among his misdeeds were a refusal to persevere with piano lessons, and indulgence with a friend in that schoolboy vice known to Edwardian clerics and educators as ‘beastliness’. Many years later Mrs Lawrence was still sticking to her code for she advised Lord Astor that his horses would win races only if they were whipped. Her views and actions were commonplace at a time when all but a handful of parents and pedagogues were guided by that bleak principle, Castigo te non quod odio habeam, sed quod amam (I beat you not from hatred, but out of love). Mr Lawrence disagreed. According to his son Arnold, he found the infliction of such punishment distasteful and against the grain of his nature. Nevertheless, he allowed his wife to usurp what was generally considered a duty of fatherhood–Prince Albert had thrashed his sons at least once. Ned Lawrence did not openly resent this form of repression, although he later admitted a deep fear of punishment at school, which no doubt explains why he behaved so well there.1