Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (21 page)

The school they chose was the City of Oxford High School, whose elaborate Victorian facade still stands on George Street, close by Jesus College, where Ned would spend his undergraduate years, and the Ashmolean Museum, where his interest in archaeology was first kindled. The school was a high-minded hybrid, founded in 1888 by Thomas Hill Green, fellow of Balliol College and White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy. It was originally intended to provide Oxford dons, now that they were allowed to marry and reside outside their college, with a school for their children that would form a kind of educational ladder leading them to Oxford University on their graduation, while also admitting children of Oxford’s growing middle class. Much admired in its time, the school’s architecture was in Victorian high Gothic style, and was eccentric and lavish even by the standards of Oxford, with a glazed domed tower of vaguely Turkish appearance, surmounted by an elaborate weather vane, and below it a wonderful clock with gilt hands set against a golden sunburst on a bright blue background. The cornerstone was laid by Prince Leopold, the youngest son of Queen Victoria, and the school was unusual in that it was a joint enterprise of the university and the city of Oxford. The fact that the City of Oxford High School did not attempt to imitate such great public schools as Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and Winchester was something of an asset for Oxford dons, many of whom would have beenuncomfortable with the atmosphere of snobbery and the bullying that went on in the famous boarding schools of England. The school’s staff, curriculum, and seriousness of purpose were second to none; its fees were reasonable; and no embarrassing or difficult questions were raised about accepting the sons of “Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence” as pupils.

Until the move to Oxford, Ned had had little in the way of formal schooling, except for an hour a day at the École Sainte-Marie in Dinard, and no experience of English school life, though he already showed signs of alarming precocity, and a voracious appetite for learning as much as he could about a wide variety of subjects. Both in France and in England he was taught by a governess, as well as by his mother and father, and it was clear to everyone that Ned was both enormously intelligent and naturally diligent. As to his precocity, Sarah claimed that Ned had learned the alphabet by the age of three, and his eldest brother, Bob, recalled that Ned could read the newspaper upside down at the age of five (though it is hard to gauge the usefulness of this feat). He spoke French fluently by the age of six, and started to learn Latin at age five. (Ned, who seems early on to have shown an aptitude for languages, learned French quickly as a second language; and in later life he would address the Council of Four at the Paris Peace Conference in fluent French.) His interests included the architecture of castles, armor, weapons, heraldry, old coins, medieval glassware, the geography and history of the Holy Land, and military tactics, as well as photography and carpentry. Ned, like many gifted children, paid more attention to what interested him than to the formal curriculum of the school, and on the subjects he cared about he was so well-informed and opinionated as to alarm even the most learned adults. A voracious reader, he went through books at a rapid rate, most of them outside his assigned reading, and although he would later claim to be able to extract the gist of a book quickly, the truth seems to be that like many bright children he skipped the parts he found dull, or disagreed with. All his brothers were intelligent, dutiful students, but Ned was in an entirely different category—a slightly unfocused prodigy.

It must be said that the masters at the City of Oxford High Schoolrecognized almost instantly that Ned was special. This might not have been the case at a boarding school, for it was clear from the beginning that he would never “fit in” conventionally, and that he was resolutely determined to avoid team sports of every kind, hanging on the sidelines with a knowing grin on his face—not an easy thing to get away with in any English school. Years later one of his masters would remark that “he knew no fear and we wondered why he did not play games.” This was a shrewd comment, for Ned was already almost totally fearless, and determined to build up his strength and put it to a test, but at the same time he disliked all forms of organized competition. He became, like his father, a bicycle enthusiast, and always had the latest kind of racing bike—another indication that Thomas Lawrence had access to money when he wanted it, and never stinted his boys on anything. Ned often tinkered with his bikes to make them faster, and at an early age he pushed himself to amazing speeds and distances. Other boys seem to have respected him, rather than being outraged by his peculiar sense of humor and by the fact that he was an unapologetic “loner,” perhaps because he was also a self-taught wrestler.

The fact that Lawrence was “different” from the two brothers nearest him in age, both of whom were enthusiastic about games and good “team players,” has sometimes been attributed to the fact that he knew early on about his parents’ secret whereas they did not. Lawrence claimed to have overheard, when he was four and a half years old, a conversation between his father and a solicitor about Thomas Lawrence’s estates in Ireland, and although he drew the wrong conclusion, it is not impossible that a very bright child might have managed to overhear enough of the conversation to deduce that there was something irregular about his parents’ situation. Lawrence would not have been the first child to pay an unhappy price for eavesdropping, and learning thereby something he did not want to know, and in his case he felt he must keep it a secret from his brothers. It would also, no doubt, have contributed to his resistance toward his mother’s strong religious exhortations and her insistence on complete obedience, knowing that her own behavior had been less than perfect. Atany rate, whatever significance young Ned’s knowledge of the family secret may have had, it did not prevent him from feeling a strong, protective, and often touching affection for his brothers. The fact that the Lawrence boys were so close must also have helped protect Ned from the kind of bullying that a boy who won’t play organized games might expect to attract in any school.

Although one of the “houses” of the City of Oxford High School would be named after T. E. Lawrence, he does not seem to have enjoyed his school years there. He disliked being forced to follow the curriculum, rather than devoting his time to his own interests, and he would complain, once he was grown up, that he had lived in morbid fear of being punished by the masters, even though there is little or no evidence that he was ever in fact disciplined severely in school. He wrote several essays for the school magazine, and these already demonstrated his ability as a writer—for he was as anxious to make his name as a respected author as he was to be a military hero. The ferocious, almost photographic attention to detail and the love of landscape that make Seven Pillars of Wisdom a great piece of nature writing as well as a war memoir are already evident in his essay on a family cycling tour in the countryside, as is the mocking, mordant tone that occasionally surfaces in his youthful satires on cricket and on the relentless pursuit of scholarships, neither of which can have pleased the masters who read them.

It would be a mistake, however, to see Ned as a misfit at the City of Oxford High School. He seems to have had plenty of friends, and he was not above ordinary rough horseplay—indeed, in the autumn of 1904 his leg was broken just above the ankle in “a playground scuffle.” This accident would not normally have been of any great consequence, but in Ned’s case, as is so often true of episodes in the life of T. E. Lawrence, there are certain mysteries about it. The break was apparently slow to heal, and kept Ned out of school for the rest of the term. This is odd—it was not a compound fracture, and if the leg was in a cast, there seems no good reason why he should have been kept at home. Some biographers have suggested that the break itself, or the slow mending of the bone, mayhave been caused by Ned’s preference for a vegetarian diet, but this too seems unlikely: a diet of bread, milk, cheese, vegetables, and fruit would have been high in calcium and might even have speeded the healing process better than the usual British diet of starchy foods and overcooked meat. Also, both Ned and his mother believed that the accident halted his growth.
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His mother may have preferred to imagine that the broken bone was the reason why he stopped growing, rather than accepting the more likely possibility that his shortness was a genetic gift from her.

In any event, Ned stopped growing after the schoolyard accident, and he would always be rather sensitive about his height, though he masked his sensitivity by occasional self-mockery. Even his friend Storrs refers to him as “a gnome,” and his fellow officers in the Middle East during the war often referred to him as “little Lawrence,” though not necessarily without affection. Usually, in group photographs nearly everybody towers over him, except Emir Abdulla and Gertrude Bell. His shortness was certainly accentuated by his very large head, though this effect was somewhat disguised when he wore long, flowing Arab robes and a headdress. That may have been one reason he continued to wear Arab clothing for portraits and official occasions even after the war was over.

The fact that Ned was out of school for the best part of one term did not prevent him from earning the prizes and scholarships he had mocked so cleverly in the school magazine. In the same year as the accident, at the age of sixteen, he took the Junior Oxford Local Examinations, which included tests in religious knowledge, arithmetic, history, English (language and literature), geography, Latin, Greek, French, and mathematics,and “was placed in the First Class.” His weakest marks were in arithmetic and mathematics, but “he gained a distinction in Religious Knowledge,” perhaps not surprisingly after all those prayer meetings and daily Bible readings.

During the year he continued his strong interest in archaeology. Together with a similarly inclined friend, C. F. C. Beeson, he toured Oxford and the surrounding areas, making brass rubbings of medieval tombs in churches and tipping workmen for old glass fragments and pottery in building sites. Beeson was somewhat awed by the intensity of Ned’s interest in archaeology, but the two boys seem to have gotten along well enough. Oxford was a good place for apprentice archaeologists at that time, owing to the numerous new buildings and enlargements being made to various colleges, and the boys brought most of their “finds” to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum—indeed they brought so many interesting sixteenth-and seventeenth-century finds to the museum, many of which were accepted for the Ashmolean’s collection, that the two schoolboys were praised by name in the Annual Report of the Museum for 1906, an unusual distinction. It is typical of Lawrence’s lifelong ability to attract the admiring attention of powerful older men that he eventually came to the attention of David G. Hogarth, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, who would become his mentor in archaeology and would make possible the years Lawrence spent in the Ottoman Empire as an archaeological assistant before the war. Indeed Hogarth was the first and by far the most important of Lawrence’s many surrogate father figures.

In
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
, Joseph Campbell, a student of myths, examines the psychology of the hero, and perfectly describes the part that David Hogarth would play in Ned Lawrence’s life: “His role is precisely that of the Wise Old Man of the myths and fairy tales whose words assist the hero through the trials and errors of the weird adventure. He is the one who points to the shining magic sword that will kill the dragon-terror … applies healing balm to the almost fatal wounds, and finally dismisses the conqueror back into the world of normal life, following the great adventure into the enchanted night.”

High-flown as these words may seem, they might serve as an aptdescription of Lawrence’s life—and his hold on our imagination. Ned may have had no idea where or how far the objects he and his friend Beeson dug up from the ground would eventually lead him, but like so much else in his life, they drew him inexorably toward the path of a hero, a first small step away from maternal protection and domination.

As mentioned, biographers of T. E. Lawrence have tended to focus on his mother as the source of his many problems, including a general aversion to women (with some notable exceptions); a morbid fear of sexual contact, even of physical touch; a self-punishing spirit; and a refusal to accept the rewards that he had earned. Lawrence himself certainly expressed the somewhat extreme opinion that it would have been better for his parents if he and his brothers had never been born. “They should not have borne children” was his final judgment on the matter, based on the deep psychological and social gulf between them, which, he supposed, was responsible for the painful conflict he felt within himself.

It is understandable that Sarah has received greater attention (and blame) than Thomas from those who have written about T. E. Lawrence—she lived for nearly a quarter of a century after her famous son’s death, and for forty years after Thomas Lawrence’s death, so that many of Lawrence’s friends met her, and were impressed by her strength of character. Lawrence’s father, by contrast, died before his son had achieved a kind of apotheosis as a hero and a worldwide celebrity, and has therefore been relegated to an offstage role in the Lawrence family drama.

Of course to become a fully functioning adult any son must break free from his emotional dependence on his mother, a task made more difficult when the mother is as strong-willed as Sarah, and as reluctant to let her children go. In Ned’s case there is another, and perhaps more powerful, influence at work: the desire to be heroic; and that is, inevitably, centered on the father.

Although Thomas (Chapman) Lawrence’s presence in most books about T. E. Lawrence is ghostly, that was by no means the case in life. This is, perhaps unconsciously, partly Ned’s doing; at fifteen he wasalready a master dissimulator. In Lawrence’s own accounts of his childhood—the most important sources being his letters to Charlotte Shaw, wife of Bernard Shaw; and to Lionel Curtis, who became something of a soul mate of Lawrence’s after the war, when they were both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford–it is his mother toward whom he directs attention, both for forcing her strict religious ideas on her sons and for taking their father away from the lordly status he had enjoyed as a wealthy landowner and baronet. The fact that his father had willingly given up wealth and status for love, and may have been happy with his decision, was not one that Lawrence wanted to contemplate; nor did he wish to consider the fact that his mother exchanged life as a domestic servant for a lifelong relationship with a gentleman (admittedly living under a false name), a huge leap upward in status.