He left England on a ferry bound for St Malo on 3 August 1906, in expansive mood. The examinations were over at last, he was away from his mother, and the brave new world seemed full of light. There was an appropriately magnificent sunset, and Lawrence stood on deck for hours, letting long stanzas of romantic poetry wash through his head, and taking in the glory of the moon reflected in the waters. Leaving England again more than twenty years later, he would remember this night as a dream of delight: the beginning of his voluntary travels.⁹ He was to remain in the Cotes du Nord for a month and cover the best part of 600 miles by bicycle, travelling with Beeson in a long figure of eight around the north-east of the region, staying in modest hotels and lingering among great cathedrals, churches and the ruins of ancient chвteaux. The delight he experienced in escape is reflected in his letters home, and towards the end of his holiday he described the glories of the Breton coast to his mother in a stream of verse from Keats and Shelley, concluding with a subliminal message to Sarah, that it was all so wonderful ‘because there was no-one else there’. This letter evidently reflects a near rapturous mood, for Lawrence was generally happier extolling the virtues of man-made objects than the beauties of nature. His letters contain descriptions of architecture and church interiors which sometimes run for pages, and though they were written principally for his own future reference they were also a barrier to real emotion, which – apart from some superficial expressions of familial affection – these letters lack almost totally. In this sense, Lawrence’s 1906 letters are a perfect showcase of his profound aloofness from his family, from the mother who believed they should have no secrets from each other. If Sarah must know everything, Ned felt, then he would tell her all, but instead of the expressions of warmth she hungered for, he would give her only dry stones. While human passions could be wild and unpredictable, architecture was a triumph of human order, a successful fusion of the conscious and the unconscious, a symbol of the human ability to transform matter. He would later assert – more than half seriously – that there could be no true creative work into which the hands did not enter, and would become convinced that the human mind was expressed most completely in the manipulation of material, whether stone, clay, wood, cloth, skin or steel: by contrast with frail human flesh, human artefacts seemed solid and enduring. Another impulse behind these endless descriptions, though, was the sheer compulsion to describe. It is as if the things Lawrence saw and heard had no objective existence unless he described them to someone else. He admitted years later that his writing practice had been to put down more and more exactly what he had seen and felt. His talent for description became both his strength and his weakness as a writer: his sense of detail was photographic, but his skills were episodic and lacked economy and continuity. George Bernard Shaw would later conclude that Lawrence was ‘one of the greatest descriptive writers in English literature’,¹⁰ while Francis Yeats-Brown would add that his ‘itch for description … developed into a mania’.¹¹

The main business of the tour, however, was medieval castles, and the jewel of them all was Tonquedoc, a thirteenth-century Norman chвteau standing on a hill overlooking the wooded valley of the Guer. Lawrence and Beeson reached the ruins after riding from Lannion on the eve of Lawrence’s eighteenth birthday and spent four hours exploring them in idyllic sunshine. As he examined the castle, tower by tower, stone by stone, Lawrence found himself playing out a mental game of attack and defence – placing himself in the position of the besieged: ‘… the place would have been impossible to enter,’ he decided triumphantly. ‘An enemy would have had to make two bridges before he could reach the door. The drop to the ground was about 40 feet. …’¹² He declared that Tonquedoc was the best castle he had ever seen, and felt he had somehow lessened its glory by describing it. He had brought no camera with him on this trip, and to Beeson was assigned the task of sketching. The friends enjoyed each other’s company, but inevitably they argued. Beeson thought Lawrence needlessly reckless, jumping moats instead of using bridges and clambering up walls full of loose stones. He guessed that this was not boldness so much as bravado, and this was confirmed once when he noticed Lawrence’s legs quaking in fear as he struggled to climb some perilous rocks, and offered his hand only to have it brushed aside indignantly. Beeson was an enthusiastic naturalist, and noted that Lawrence was unusual in having not even the normal schoolboy’s interest in natural history. This grew, perhaps, from a subconscious disgust he felt for the idea of reproduction, which would become more apparent in his later life, when he would regard the word ‘animal’ as a term of abuse, conjuring up the ‘beastly’ instincts of the unconscious mind. Of all things in the world, he wrote later, it was ‘animal spirits’ that he feared most.¹³ Lawrence nursed a grudge against Beeson for being ‘such an ass’ in slowing the pace of their cycling, but the truth may be that Beeson lacked Lawrence’s special three-speed gears, whose superiority he demonstrated proudly once on the flat sands at Erquy by covering a measured half-kilometre in thirty seconds. Even this remarkable speed did not satisfy him, though, and he dropped hints in a letter to his family about the efficacy of a motorcycle.

After Beeson left on 19 August, Lawrence stayed on for another two weeks, and shortly before leaving received the anxiously awaited results of the Locals examinations. They were excellent. He had come thirteenth out of more than 4,500 candidates, and had collected first place in English and third in religious knowledge. His place in Oxford University seemed assured, yet the result did not satisfy him: ‘… on the whole,’ he wrote, ‘[it is] not as good as I’d hoped.’¹⁴ Such dissatisfaction would haunt him throughout his life. No matter to what heights he scaled, it would never seem good enough for the perfectionist soul within: ‘It does not seem to me,’ he would write, ‘… as though anything I’ve ever done was quite well enough done. That is an aching, unsatisfied feeling and ends up by making me wish I hadn’t done anything.’¹⁵ This was evidently true of the 1906 cycling tour. Lawrence had covered 600 miles, and had even ridden 114 miles from. Dinard to Fougйres and back on one of the hottest days of the year. Yet this was not good enough. On returning to Oxford, he told Scroggs Beeson that he had continued the tour alone, ‘eager to set his own pace’, and presented such ‘glowing descriptions of what was to be seen in Normandy and the Loire Valley’ that Beeson was stimulated to meet him there the following year. But Lawrence’s letters make clear that he never went near Normandy or the Loire Valley in 1906, spending the two weeks after Beeson left him based at Dinard, where – apart from occasional excursions – he went bathing almost every day.

That autumn, while Lawrence and Beeson worked for their ‘Repositions’ – the Oxford University entrance examination – several major building projects were taking place in the city, particularly in Cornmarket Street, at various university colleges, and in the High. Lawrence, ever alert to the possibility of archaeological treasures, would make a round of these sites almost daily, slipping the labourers a few pennies to preserve their finds. After months of persistence, he and Beeson had assembled a superb collection of pottery, glazed ware, bottles, pipes, coins and tokens, and though it was disappointingly modern for Lawrence’s taste – dating mainly from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – it was interesting enough to present to the Ashmolean Museum, where Lawrence had already made the acquaintance of the junior Assistant Keeper, Leonard Woolley. Woolley, who would come to know Lawrence better than most in the pre-war era, was then twenty-five, and had recently graduated from New College. He was just embarking on the career which would bring him a knighthood in recognition of his brilliant work as an archaeologist. A kind, energetic and sensitive man, Woolley was one of the few who never succumbed to the spell of Lawrence’s later fame, and confessed that though he had found the young Lawrence charming, even talented, he had not recognized in him any special ‘genius’. He characterized their early acquaintance in Oxford as ‘slight’. The Ashmolean’s Art Curator, Charles Bell, took a greater interest in Lawrence, however, and soon accepted him at the museum as an unofficial acolyte. He gave him odd jobs such as sorting out collections of brass-rubbings and pottery, and Lawrence quickly became more familiar with the medieval collection than the museum’s own staff.