He was posted first to RAF Gattewater on Plymouth Sound, where he developed a genuine friendship with his commanding officer, Wing Commander Sydney Smith, and his wife Clare. Later, after witnessing the crash of an Iris flying-boat in which nine air-crew were killed, he threw himself enthusiastically into a programme of improving fast rescue-boats. He found that he had a special talent for mechanics, which was complemented by his passion for speed – a passion pursued avidly at sea in his private motor-launch Biscuit, and on land on his 1000cc Brough Superior motorcycle, Boanerges. Over the years, Lawrence got through seven Brough motorcycles, which were among the most powerful machines of their day. Speed became one of the few luxuries he indulged in to excess, and only at speed did he seem to recapture that intense feeling of connection with the cosmos which he had felt during the war: ‘When I open out … at 80 or so,’ he told Robert Graves, ‘I feel the earth moulding herself under me … Almost the earth comes alive, heaving and tossing on each side like a sea … It is the reward of speed … I could write you pages and pages on the lustfulness of moving swiftly.’²⁹ At speed, the body – the part of himself which he had always despised and tried to subdue – was transcended: ‘In speed we hurl ourselves beyond the body,’ he wrote, in one of his few attempts at verse. ‘Our bodies cannot scale the heavens except in a fume of petrol … Bones. Blood. Flesh. All pressed inward together.’³⁰

He continued to meet Bruce on occasions, and entertained former colleagues from the RAF and the Tank Corps for musical weekends at Clouds Hill. He wrote scores of letters to artists, writers, composers and former colleagues. He made new friends among the powerful, including the local MP for Plymouth, Nancy Astor, and the Labour MP for Shoreditch, Ernest Thurtle. He became a sort of surrogate son to Bernard Shaw and kept up a lively literary dialogue in hundreds of letters to his wife Charlotte. He undertook reviews and introductions. He started work on a translation of the Odyssey from ancient Greek for an American publisher, insisted on publishing it anonymously in Britain, revealed to the literary establishment that he was working on it, and threatened to stop work when the fact was inevitably leaked to the press. Although he occasionally had ideas for books, there was nothing new after The Mint, which Trenchard felt was damaging to the RAF and had asked him not to publish until after his death. He authorized two biographies of himself, by Robert Graves and Basil Liddell Hart, vetted virtually every word, asked both to publish notes declaring he had had nothing to do with the books, and then complained to acquaintances that the authors had availed themselves of too much ‘artistic licence’. He criticized Hart, his sincere admirer, in particular, for having succumbed to his charm and failed to take an objective view, and disdained his biography as ‘Panegyric III’. He also began to realize that while he had thought of himself as a writer, he actually lacked the creative urge: he had all the tricks of writing, he knew, but he had nothing further to say. Occasionally this knowledge led him to fits of melancholy and despair: ‘Life isn’t very gay, I fancy,’ he wrote, ‘and I shouldn’t like to feel that I’d brought anyone into the world to have such times as I’ve had and still have … I have found nothing to justify my staying on, and yet one can’t go – it’s a sad state.’³¹ The RAF station had now become his world and at times his prison: he felt afraid and hesitant when outside it. He told a new friend, writer Henry Williamson, that he felt like a clock whose spring had run down. He knew, ultimately, that he was a misfit who had found his proper niche only in the extraordinary circumstances of the Arab Revolt. He had been the perfect man in the right place at the right time, had won the war in the desert, had restored a kind of freedom to the Arabs after 500 years, had written a wonderful book about that experience which nobody would ever forget, and had become the most famous man of his era. He was a phenomenon, but unlike the artists, writers and poets he envied so much, his was a one-time accomplishment which could never be repeated or improved: ‘You have a lifetime of achievement,’ he wrote to Sir Edward Elgar, sadly, in 1932, ‘but I was a flash in the pan.’³²

Lawrence left the RAF on 25 February 1935, and drove his Brough from his last posting at Bridlington in Lincolnshire to Clouds Hill: ‘My losing the RAF numbs me,’ he wrote, ‘so I haven’t much feeling to spare for a while. In fact I find myself wishing all the time that my own curtain would fall. It seems as if I had finished now.’³³ However, the press had got wind of his retirement and hounded him for the next month, making his life a misery until he came to an arrangement with various newspaper proprietors, and the reporters began to drift away. By April he was alone, and he began to settle in and plan a motorcycle journey around Britain for the summer. He considered writing a biography of the Irish patriot Sir Roger Casement, and began inviting friends to the cottage. Nancy Astor wrote to him, hinting that there might be a possibility of government work – even reorganizing British defence forces. He wrote back that wild horses would not drag him away from Clouds Hill: his will was gone, he told her: ‘there is something broken in the works.’³⁴

On 11 May 1935, Lawrence kick-started his motorcycle, Boanerges, and set off to Bovington village, about a mile and a half from Clouds Hill, to send a parcel of books and to dispatch a telegram to Henry Williamson inviting him to lunch the following Tuesday. This was to be Lawrence of Arabia’s last ride. At about 11.20 he drove back to his cottage. The road between Bovington and Clouds Hill was straight, but marked by a series of three dips, and concealed behind one of them were two boy cyclists, Frank Fletcher and Bertie Hargreaves, who were pedalling in the same direction. Lawrence changed down twice to take the dips, and Pat Knowles, his friend and neighbour, who was working in his garden opposite Clouds Hill, heard the crisp changes of gear. Precisely what happened in the next moments is, like so much of Lawrence’s life, a mystery. The boys claimed to have heard the motorcycle coming and moved into single file. Corporal Ernest Catchpole, of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, who was walking his dog in the waste land to the west of the road, later told the inquest that Lawrence passed a black car coming in the opposite direction, though the boys stated there was no car, and no such vehicle was ever traced. It seems unlikely that Lawrence was travelling at more than forty miles an hour, for Knowles heard the gear changes clearly, and the motorcycle was later found to be stuck in second gear, in which its top speed was thirty-eight miles an hour. Whether his concentration momentarily deserted him, or whether the boys were actually riding abreast, will never be known for certain: what seems to have happened is that Lawrence clipped Bertie Hargreaves’s back wheel, knocking the boy off his bicycle, and swerving to avoid further damage was thrown over the handlebars of his motorcycle and pitched head first on to the road five yards away. The motorcycle twisted and turned and finally lay still. It was over in seconds. Lawrence lay in the road quivering, with his head a mass of blood. Shortly, Corporal Catchpole ran up and tried to wipe away the blood with a handkerchief. At this moment an army lorry came along, and Catchpole stopped it. Lawrence’s body was placed on a stretcher and taken to Wool Hospital. He had suffered severe brain damage, and never recovered consciousness. At last, the rider had hurled himself beyond the body, beyond the point of no return. Six days later, on 19 May, he was dead.