Golden Warrior, The Page 4

  Nothing of this appears in Mrs Lawrence’s short memoir of her son, written soon after his death. She recalled a small, strong infant, who from the moment he could crawl was recklessly exploring the world around him. She also remembered a cheerful, warm-hearted lad, who was always helpful. What he became remained a source of puzzlement to her. Anxious to probe her mind on this subject, Thomas Jones, a senior civil servant, quizzed her at a lunch party in February 1936. She could only answer, ‘He was a genius.’ Later, Jones noted in his diary, ‘The old lady, I imagine, was much more at home with the Chinese medical missionary than with Ned, who had travelled in worlds beyond her gaze.’2 3

  Meeting her a few months before at another lunch, a formal affair given in her son’s honour, Colonel Meinertzhagen was impressed by Mrs Lawrence’s bearing. She was ‘a pathetic little figure with all the pluck and character of her son and some of his looks’, who sat through the speeches ‘with a very charming smile on her face, looking very young and terribly proud’. She had, as everyone recognised, bequeathed to Ned her clear, blue eyes, strong jaw line and crop of almost Nordic blonde hair. There were too, as she and he were aware, interior likenesses, for each possessed iron willpower and single-mindedness.

  After his final return from the Middle East in 1922, Lawrence knew that he had irrevocably parted company from his mother. ‘I have a terror of her knowing anything about my feelings or convictions or way of life,’ he told Mrs Bernard Shaw, since such knowledge would leave her ‘damaged: violated: no longer mine’. Mrs Lawrence had already been distressed by what she had read of the draft of the Seven Pillars. ‘The horrors of the book shake her painfully,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘and she hates my having noted, or seen such things.’ In time Lawrence dreaded the arrival of her letters and felt uneasy when she asked to hear from him as ‘we haven’t a subject we dare to be intimate upon.’ What he feared most was a reassertion of her possessiveness and a revival of attempts to dominate him. He was forced to resist ‘letting her get ever so little inside the circle of my integrity; and she is always hammering and sapping to come in.’ The deaths in 1915 of her sons Frank and William and of her husband four years later had made her intensify her efforts. ‘She has so lived in her children, and my father, that she cannot relieve herself on herself at all. And it isn’t right to cry out to your children for love.’

  To some extent these were the reactions of a disturbed man wanting only to create his own world and live inside it, but they also contained an element of childhood emotions recollected at the onset of middle age. The battle which was still flickering on as Lawrence approached forty had started in the nursery. Its features were recalled in another letter to Mrs Bernard Shaw: ‘No trust ever existed between my mother and myself. Each of us jealously guarded his or her own individuality, whenever we came together. I always felt that she was laying siege to me and would conquer, if I left a chink unguarded.’

  Twice, Lawrence chose words from the vocabulary of siegecraft to explain their relationship. He was a fortress, she the investing army, ever seeking some weak point which could be exploited. He knew much about sieges. The close study of medieval fortification was one of his ruling passions between his eighteenth and twentyfirst years. His painstaking examination of curtain walls, barbicans and flanking towers, and analyses of the advantages and disadvantages of defenders and assailants, in a curious way touched on his own life.

  Lawrence knew that prolonged sieges were marked by alternate periods of lassitude and violent activity. Presumably his mother’s efforts to penetrate his defences followed the same pattern, otherwise family life at 2 Polstead Road would have been a continuous wrangle, which it was not. From what is known of her own and Evangelical views in general, Mrs Lawrence wanted to get control over all her sons’ minds so that they would understand how to fight temptation and prepare themselves for lives in which their Christian values would bring benefit to others. With Robert, William and Frank she accomplished her end, but with Ned things were different. So they were with Arnold, who, encouraged by Ned, ignored efforts at conversion.

  Yet Ned was not a complete disappointment. Mrs Lawrence must have approved of his austerity and schoolboy seriousness but, as he would remember, there was never trust between them. Either she suspected Ned of dissembling or else she detected a shallowness in his sincerity. There was certainly something about his peculiar smile, which looked like a smirk, that might have troubled her and perhaps for good reason. Unknown to her, he knew her ‘secret’ and therefore how far she had fallen short of the standards she tried to impose. That smile certainly vexed others. Seeing him grin in ‘that typical Mona Lisa manner’, a fellow undergraduate immediately assumed that Lawrence was secretly laughing at him. This was not so, Lawrence assured him; ‘Everything amuses me.’

  When Lawrence was small, his mother had quite literally held the whip hand, so skirmishes were one-sided, but not decisive. Her son’s will stayed unbroken and, as he grew into manhood, physical coercion was replaced by a more subtle kind, based on affection. The outlook was not completely unpromising for Mrs Lawrence. Ned’s school progress must have been cause for satisfaction, just as a few years later she was keenly interested in his decorations for gallantry and even hoped that he might get the Victoria Cross.4 Yet achievement was not a goal in itself: it took on a greater worth when it was harnessed to some higher ambition. This Lawrence lacked when he left school in 1907.

  In fact, by this time, Lawrence’s character was being moulded into a recognisable shape, but it was not one which his mother could comprehend. As its outlines became clearer to her, a clash was inevitable. Unlike many others in the long siege which must have occurred inside 2 Polstead Road, this engagement was conducted by letter.

  The opening shot was fired by Mrs Lawrence and its weight and trajectory can be judged from Ned’s reply, written at the beginning of August 1908 when he was at Aigues Mortes on the shores of the Mediterranean. He wrote, ‘You are all wrong, Mother dear, a mountain may be a great thing, a grand thing, “But if it is better to be peaceful, and quiet, and pure”, pacata posse omnia mente tieri [Lucretius V 1203], if that is the best state, then a plain is the best country.’ In such a landscape ‘one can sit down quietly and think, of anything, or nothing which Wordsworth says is best.’ Beauty and calm were absent from mountain peaks where ‘there is always the feeling that one is going up or down: that one will be better, will see clearer from the top than from the valleys; stick to the Plains, Mother, & all ye little worms [family argot for the brothers], you’ll be happiest there.’ Mrs Lawrence hoped that her sons would soar, overcome spiritual heights and fulfil a mission in the world, not enjoy selfindulgent, sedentary dreams.

  Contemplative exile had for some time been on Lawrence’s mind. Among poems he had strongly recommended to an undergraduate friend, Vyvyan Richards, had been Tennyson’s ‘The Palace of Art’, in which the aesthete builds himself a ‘pleasure house’ of art and artefact on a high mountain.

  My soul would live alone unto herself

  In her high palace there.

  ... I sit as God, holding no form of creed,

  But contemplating all.

  Finally isolated hedonism cloys, and the builder descends to ‘make a cottage in the vale’ where he repents of his selfishness. Remoteness is the theme of the few lines from Shelley’s ‘Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation’, which were the prelude to Lawrence’s letter from Aigues Mortes.

  I love all waste

  And solitary places; where we taste

  The pleasure of believing what we see

  Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be....

  It was an appropriate piece, in that these had been the thoughts of another young English exile on the shores of the Mediterranean. There may, however, have been more to Lawrence’s choice of this poem than mere geographical appositeness. He read verse carefully and, while his tastes were wide, Shelley does not appear to have enjoyed the same favour as Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, the medieval sagas and ch
ansons. What may have drawn Lawrence to ‘Julian and Maddalo’ was Shelley’s preface, which lays out the temperaments of the two protagonists. Each was a man capable of action who had confined himself to the world of the spirit. Count Maddalo, based upon Byron, was an Italian nobleman ‘of most consummate genius’, a word spinner, a traveller, contemptuous of all lesser men, and aware of the nothingness of human life. Had he chosen, he could have been ‘the redeemer of his degraded country’. Julian, like Shelley an atheist, believes in the power of man over his own mind, and of the possibility that society can improve itself. ‘We know’, he argues,

  That we have power over ourselves to do

  And suffer–what, we know not till we try;

  But something nobler than to live and die–

  So taught those kings of old philosophy

  Who reigned, before Religion made men blind;

  And those who suffer with their suffering kind

  Yet feel their faith, Religion.

  Lawrence, by his rigorous physical exercise and diet, had shown he had a power over himself and that he could be a doer as well as a thinker. Many years later he confessed to having had passing dreams of doing something ‘nobler’. At the end of the Seven Pillars he wrote, ‘I had dreamed, at the City School in Oxford, of hustling into form, while I lived, the new Asia which time was inexorably bringing upon us.’ Learning about Garibaldi and the Risorgimento aroused a schoolboy ambition to lead a national movement, or so Lawrence told Liddell Hart. If this was so, his reaction was understandable. The colourful tale of the unification of Italy in the 1860s was presented in British schools as a high adventure in which courageous visionaries overcame huge obstacles and won a triumph for the noble cause of liberal nationalism. Reading of this, whether in a school textbook or in the vivid pages of G.A. Henty, an imaginative boy could easily identify with Garibaldi and his guerrillas, and invent a destiny for himself. The same impulse made Lawrence mislead his schoolfriends with the claim that he shared a birthday, 15 August, with another man of destiny, Napoleon.

  At the age of twenty, Lawrence had set his mind on another ideal, that of the contemplative, introspective life. As he insisted to his mother, he had no desire to ascend the heights. Fulfilment of this ambition would require physical detachment from the routines of the household and its noise. Lawrence had developed an intense loathing for noise. The nocturnal barking dogs of southern France irritated him intensely–‘my brain would go if I lived here long,’ he complained in a letter of August 1908. When he returned to Oxford, he asked for and obtained a divorce from his family. After discussions and advice from Canon Christopher and his academic mentors, Mr Lawrence agreed to provide his son with a study and bedroom in a bungalow built late in 1908 at the bottom of the garden.

  Lawrence got his way and achieved self-imposed exile. Not only was he cut off from the rumpus of the household and his three brothers aged eight, fourteen and eighteen, but he had secured an additional defence against his mother. Family life played an important part in the Evangelical regime, and Lawrence’s wish to distance himself from it must have been a blow to her. Nevertheless she could console herself with his continued performance of his duties at St Aldate’s, even if she was unsure whether his heart was in them. There was already a strange duality about her son: he could and did quote an atheist poet to her yet, at the same time, extol the value of Christina Rossetti’s ‘The Martyr’ in which the Christian virgin seeks and finds perfection through God.

  The decision to pander to Ned’s wish for solitude and silence had been his father’s. He had always fostered his sons’ intellectual interests and saw it as his duty to inspire and direct their enthusiasms. As small boys they had learned to sail, ride and cycle under his instruction, and they had read boys’ magazines with him. Ned learned how to ride his bicycle and to maintain it from his father, who also passed on to him his considerable skills as a photographer.

  Encouraged by his father, Ned had become addicted to antiquarianism which, by his sixteenth birthday, had all but taken over his life. His enthusiasm was total and all–consuming–of energy, thought and time. Walking around Oxford his curiosity had been aroused by tiles and shards, uncovered as workmen dug the foundations for new buildings. Coins and bones were also revealed, and he was soon offering his pocket money to labourers for their finds. Into his hands came medieval artefacts, pieces of pottery, fragments of glass, and brass jettons (trading tokens) which aroused his enthusiasm for the Middle Ages. Brass–rubbing expeditions into the Oxfordshire countryside followed, on which he was often accompanied by another budding antiquary, his schoolfriend, C.F.C. (‘Scroggs’) Beeson.

  By 1905, Lawrence was an accomplished brass-rubber, to judge from examples of his work which remain among the Ashmolean collection; they include a beautiful copy of an early fifteenth–century knight, nearly seven feet tall, from Wisbech in Cambridgeshire. Passion soon developed into fanaticism. There was an element of ruthlessness in his antiquarianism: box–pew floors in Waterperry church, five miles from Oxford, were torn up in the quest for a hidden knight. As an undergraduate, he bicycled out to churches with a screwdriver in his pocket, and while a friend kept ‘cave’, he unscrewed Tudor brasses and looked at their reverses to discover if they were re-used spoil from the dissolved monasteries. In August 1905, accompanied by his father, he cycled through East Anglia, rubbing brasses, examining churches and castles, and touring museums. The forty-nine-year-old Mr Lawrence was well up to the cracking pace, as his son noted when they reached Colchester on the last leg of the trip. ‘We came here from Ipswich over a rather hilly road 18 miles long. Still we took two hours over it; and walked about six hills; a proceeding Father does not like. We are feeding splendidly.’

  The end products of these excursions finished up hung on the walls of Lawrence’s room, which was soon covered with rubbings, all numbered. He took a special joy in the bizarre figure of Ralph Hamsterley, a Tudor parson from Oddington, Oxfordshire, who was shown as a cadaver riddled with eel-like worms. Knights and ladies looked down on him as he pored over and mastered the literature of armour, heraldry and architecture. The rubbings offered a tangible link with medieval men and women, showing them as they looked at court or on the battlefield.

  What captivated Lawrence were the flowers of medieval civilisation, the world of courts and courtliness, tournaments, sieges, coloured glass and manuscripts, the ballads of chivalry and the architecture of castles. He cared nothing for the roots of medieval society, and never showed any interest in the drudgery of the peasantry or manorial routines. By his nineteenth year, he had settled on castles as a subject for detailed investigation. They had a double attraction, offering scope for purely antiquarian research, measuring, examining stonework, drawing sketches and taking photographs, which Lawrence enjoyed most. There was also the intellectual challenge of piecing together evidence collected on the spot and using it to explore the minds of the castle-builders. What considerations of general strategy dictated the siting of a castle, how did the builders exploit inaccessible places created by nature, and how did novel architectural ideas travel across Europe? It was a study which fused the romantic with the intellectual. At Chateau Gaillard, set on an outcrop above the Seine, he was impressed by how Richard I had exploited the site. ‘The whole construction bears the unmistakable stamp of genius,’ he told his mother. ‘Richard I must have been a far greater man than we usually consider him; he must have been a great strategist and a great engineer, as well as a great man-at-arms.’ At Chepstow, Lawrence was reminded of Yniol’s castle in Tennyson’s ‘Geraint and Enid’. Other literary associations made him take a detour in August 1908 to Hautefort, the Périgord seat of the twelfth-century balladeer, Bertrand de Born, whose verses in praise of war he must have known well.

  And my heart fills with gladness when I see strong castles besieged, and the stockades broken and overwhelmed, and the warriors on the bulk, girt about by fosses, with a line of strong stakes, interlaced....

  Such poetry,
and the courtly culture which produced it, was, like the art of fortification, international. To understand both, Lawrence had to travel. He pleaded for and got his parents’ backing for an excursion to Normandy in August 1906, which he toured with ‘Scroggs’ Beeson. A further trip followed in August 1907 when he crossed the province with his father, and then, alone, penetrated the former Angevin domains as far as the Loire. He went alone for his final and most ambitious expedition during July and August 1908. By then an undergraduate at the end of his first year, he had in mind writing a thesis on castles as part of his final degree, and his route took him southwards beyond the Loire into Provence as far as the Mediterranean coast and back through the Marches of Gascony.