Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (20 page)

There is no doubt that Sarah was the driving force in the family, however. She was always in motion, a whirlwind of energy, the family disciplinarian. People who did not know her well thought her “overpowering and terrifying,” and she pushed her sons relentlessly and ruled their lives with alarming strictness. Many who met Sarah found her charming, but her blunt outspokenness and fiercely held opinions could also be disconcerting to strangers. On the other hand, since these are exactly the characteristics that the English admire in the Scots, and that the Scots themselves believe set them apart from the distant politeness and hypocrisy of the English, the wiliness of the Welsh, and the charm-laden duplicity of the Irish, many people found this side of Sarah endearing too.

T. E. Lawrence himself, even when he was older and a national hero, still found his mother terrifying, and as soon as he could, he carefully arranged his life to see as little of her as possible. From the beginning, he seems to have attracted her attention like a lightning rod, unlike the other boys. During the war, Auda Abu Tayi would refer to Lawrence as “the world’s imp,” and impishness seems to have been a permanent part of his character even when he was an infant—certainly his mother seems to have come down much harder on him than on his brothers, for naughtiness, disobedience, and a general failure to live by her strict and unforgiving rules.

Against this picture of Sarah as a domestic tyrant is the fact that the Lawrences were in their own way a happy family,
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in which both parentsarranged their lives around the needs of their children—although to a degree that may, at any rate to Ned, often have felt suffocating. Thomas Lawrence had no work or job, and apart from his infrequent visits to Dublin on “family business” and his occasional day in the field with a few shooting companions, he was often at home. Sarah, with or without “help,” was a constant presence, cleaning, tidying, polishing, and keeping the whole household up to her very high standards of perfection. They must have made an odd-looking couple: he very tall, courtly, stooped, and thin; she tiny, much younger, and continuously in motion. Socially, they were even odder, by turn-of-the-century English standards. Thomas was, despite his change of name, recognizably a member of the upper class, in the way he dressed, in his speech, and in his polite but detached relationship to workmen and others of “the lower classes.” Sarah’s accent was unmistakably Scottish; her firm, direct way of dealing with people was very different from his; and she was comfortable with members of what was then still called “the working class.” People who met them instantly thought that there was something strange about them as a couple, a mismatch between the languid politeness of the Old Etonian and the alarming energy of the former governess. Some even noticed that Sarah never referred to Thomas as “my husband,” but instead always spoke of him as “Mr. Lawrence,” or “the boys’ father.”

Though in later life T. E. Lawrence would remark, half in complaint, half in admiration, that his parents lived on a “workman’s salary” of not more than £400
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a year, and had to pinch pennies to make ends meet with five sons, in fact they seem to have lived comfortably enough, and not to have wanted for anything. Doubtless it was a big step down in income for a man who had been born to considerable wealth, but in late Victorian and Edwardian England £400 a year was the income of a member of the middle or “professional” class, not of a workman, and its current equivalent would be at least $100,000, if we bear in mind that in 1890 taxation was very low. It is also clear enough that from time to time Thomas Lawrence had access to capital: hence his ability to buy bicycles for his sons and himself, to continue sailing and shooting, and to fund Ned’s bicycling tours in France and a walking tour in Syria when Ned was older. On the other hand, Sarah was certainly always aware of the need to scrimp and save—it was part of her character, implanted by her own impoverished childhood.

T. E. Lawrence would inherit both parents’ attitudes toward money: on the one hand, like his mother, he reduced his expenses to the absolute minimum; but like his father’s, his attitude toward money was “lordly” when it came to things like his custom-made Brough motorcycles (the Brough was a two-wheeled equivalent of a Rolls-Royce). He spent a fortune by any standards paying artists to do the paintings and the drawings for Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and having the copies individually bound in leather by the finest bookbinders in England. His generosity to friends was lavish to the point of impoverishing himself.

Naturally, the elder Lawrences’ lives were conditioned to a certain degree by the need to maintain their secret, but that apparently did not prevent them from having friends, from going out, or from having visitors—indeed everybody who knew them remarked on what good company the Lawrences were. During the years when they lived in Dinard, they had many friends among the British residents—the area around Dinard, in Normandy, was an inexpensive place for Britons to live or retire—and the family of their landlord, the Chaignons, not only became friends, but would maintain the contact when the boys were grown up.

The same was true during the time the Lawrences spent in the New Forest, when Bob, Ned, and Will had many friends, one of whom, Janet Laurie, would be a friend of Ned’s for life—so far as we know the only girl to whom he ever proposed marriage. This was the case in Oxford too. The “isolation” of the Lawrence family has certainly been exaggerated, especially when it came to the friends of the boys, who were constantly in and out of the house.

The eventual choice of Oxford was sensible, both because it offered excellent opportunities for education—the parents were determined to give the boys the best possible education—and because in a university town, which was essentially middle-class, there were fewer people who would have heard their story, or who might recognize Thomas Lawrence as Thomas Chapman. In London, by contrast, the story of Thomas Chapman’s running off with his daughters’ governess was well known among people of his class, a kind of scandalous object lesson in how not to conduct an affair; he would certainly have been recognized at his club, whereas in Oxford he could use the Oxford Union as a club without being bothered—the dons, wrapped up in their own insular world, were unlikely to have heard the gossip about him, or to care.

Another reason for choosing Oxford was that it was then a lively religious center. Sarah’s religious feelings had always been strong, and they grew stronger still as she took on herself the responsibility for the sin of breaking up Thomas’s marriage and giving him five illegitimate children. She was not a religious zealot like Edith Chapman, but she wanted a place to bring up her children in a religious atmosphere, and Oxford certainly was that. Hardly a day passed in Oxford without the sound of choral singing, organs, and bells somewhere. Not that Sarah was a High Church Anglican, or would have approved of the pomp and circumstance of religion as it was practiced at the university. She was a strict follower of the evangelical movement, and attended Sunday service at St. Aldates Church, in the center of Oxford, planted firmly opposite Christ Church College and Cathedral, in stubborn opposition to High Anglicanism, with its “Roman” rites and elaborate services. The evangelicals, or Low Church Anglicans, then as now, preferred simpler services, emphasized the personal relationship between the communicant and Jesus, and believed that the Bible should be taken literally. The Lawrence family met for prayers and Bible reading every morning before the older children left for school, as well as on Sundays, with the boys kneeling beside their father as he led the service, and he or Sarah read aloud to them from the Bible.

Of course this kind of religious home life was more common in the late Victorian era than it is now, but even by late Victorian standards religion played a large role in the lives of the Lawrence family, and was certainly a bond between Sarah and Thomas. She was fervent in her belief, and Thomas seems to have been too, though in the polite and unobtrusive manner of his class. He was a gentleman in religion as in everything else, whereas Sarah was consumed by a need to save him, to compensate by the intensity of her faith for the sin into which she had led him, and to atone for it by ensuring that her sons’ religious feelings were as strong as her own. To some extent, she succeeded—her eldest son, Bob, would eventually accompany her to China as a missionary; Frank and Will seem to have retained throughout their short lives a certain degree of religious feeling. But Arnold was much less religious; and with her second son, Ned, she failed completely, and therefore, throughout his life, fought all the harder to save him.

The problem went far beyond the fact that Ned was the “Peck’s bad boy” of the Lawrence family, an incorrigible rule-breaker and mischievous practical joker, with a gift for spinning imaginative tales—Sarah recognized that in other ways Ned was the child who most resembled her. He had her determination; her features; her piercing, bright blue eyes; and, as he grew older, her stature, though the other boys all took after the father in height as well as coloring. Frank, for example, was tall, lean, a good scholar, but also brilliant at exactly those team sports that are generally taken to indicate character in England: rugby and cricket. Will was described by a contemporary as “really an Adonis to look at, beautiful in body,” tall, graceful, a prizewinning gymnast. As striking as Ned’s face was, and as physically strong as he became, he hated competitive sports and avoided as much as he could all forms of organized games—not an easy thing to do in an English school, nor one that made for popularity, either with the masters or with the other boys.

Because of T. E. Lawrence’s fame, few families have been subjected to such intense scrutiny as the Lawrences, or have been the subject of so much retroactive psychoanalysis. The fact that his mother was the disciplinarian of the household, and that she carried out herself whatever physical punishment she decided was needed, has been given an exaggerated role in the development of Lawrence’s admittedly complex personality. In keeping with her very literal view of Christianity, Sarah had an equally simple faith in the old adage “Spare the rod, and spoil the child.” In her old age, when T. E. Lawrence became a friend of Lady Astor,
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his mother remarked that “one of the reasons that Lord Astor’s horses never won is because he wouldn’t whip them.” On the other hand, descriptions of Sarah as a sadistic mother are wildly overdrawn. Using a whip or a switch on children was more the rule than the exception at all levels of society in the late nineteenth century, and none of the Lawrence children, when they were grown, seem to have complained about it. She never had to whip Bob or Frank, and Arnold remembered being whipped only once, but she was obliged to whip Ned on his buttocks frequently, for fairly routine misbehavior, or for refusing to learn to play the piano. It seems likely that there was a clash of wills between Ned and Sarah—T. E. Lawrence would sum it up by writing that “we do rub each other up the wrong way"—which did not develop between her and the other boys. Her youngest son, Arnold, would later say that his mother wanted “to break T. E.'s will,” but this is merely to say that throughout her life she wanted all her sons to be obedient, pious, and truthful, and that Ned, unlike his brothers, was not necessarily or consistently any of those things. Biographers have speculated about the extent to which T. E. Lawrence’s strong streak of masochism in later life, as well as his extraordinary ability to endure pain and deprivation, was a product of the beatings he received from his mother, but this seems doubtful. Sarah loved her sons, was loved by them, and took an interest and great pride in everything they did. At all times, there were present in the house a full-time nanny and other servants, as well as Thomas Lawrence, so it is unlikely that the whippings were in any way cruel or unusual punishment, or carried out in such a way as to leave deep psychic scars. As in most English families of their class, the nannies were a calming and beloved presence—one of them stayed for several years, and when she left to join her sister in Canada, she was replaced by another with whom T. E. Lawrence was still in correspondence many years later, when he was famous.

As to the question of why such whippings were carried out by Sarah rather than Thomas, this may merely reflect the fact that he himself must have been caned by older boys (“prefects”) and by masters during his years at Eton, a practice which was then common in public schools. Thomas was not the only nineteenth-century Englishman of his class to leave school with a marked distaste for corporal punishment. Winston Churchill, who was beaten at Harrow (Eton’s rival) and much resented it, did not blame his father (whom he idolized) for sending him there, but as a result never laid his hand on his own son Randolph, whose behavior might have persuaded even the most benevolent of fathers to pick up a whip. All the Lawrence boys agree that their father retained a “quiet authority” in the family, and that he could be “very firm when necessary,” sometimes intervening when he thought Sarah was being “unduly harsh,” and invariably making the bigger decisions that affected their lives.

The biggest of these, of course, was deciding where the boys should go to school. It is impossible to guess whether Thomas regretted not being able to send his sons to Eton, but in any case there was no way that he could have afforded to send five boys there; nor, despite the fact that he was an Old Etonian himself, would Eton have accepted them in the knowledge that they were illegitimate. It also may be that having been sent to a boarding school, Thomas did not want to subject his sons to the same experience, but it is more likely that neither parent wished to send the boys away. The boys were the center of their lives, the main justificationfor their illicit union, the clearest sign that it had been “blessed,” and the greatest source of their happiness. The first thing any outsider ever noticed about the Lawrences was how close they were to each other—indeed when Ned went “up” to Oxford, to a college that was only a few minutes away from his home by bicycle, he came home every night, despite the fact that undergraduates were supposed to spend their first two years living in their college. The boys were not afraid to leave home; nor did their parents discourage them from doing so, even in the case of Ned, whose journeys on foot would take him through some of the most dangerous country in the world; but for different reasons neither Thomas nor Sarah shared the enthusiasm of the English upper class for sending children away to school as early as possible.