By the time they reached Oxford, Sarah had long ago parted Thomas from the bottle and, as Sir Basil Blackwell later commented, the Lawrences had a reputation as ‘punctilious, church-going and water-drinking’ folk even by the strict standards of the day.⁹ Thomas’s religious convictions provided him with a degree of spiritual comfort, and he would read to the boys from a well-thumbed and annotated Bible before school every morning, and lead the domestic prayers at home on Sundays. A tall, bearded, retiring man, he made little impression on outsiders: ‘He was always friendly and charming,’ said Mrs Ballard, whose son often played with the Lawrence boys. ‘But it was Mrs Lawrence who was the leading spirit… I said to my boy once, “you talk a lot about Ma Lawrence but you don’t even [mention] Pa Lawrence.” He replied, “Oh yes, he’s just Mrs Lawrence’s husband!” ‘¹⁰ Diffident, shy, seeming to feel out of place in the genteel surroundings of Oxford, he rarely expressed his feelings. Some thought him distinguished-looking, others remembered him as a cadaverous figure on whom the clothes flapped like a scarecrow. Some believed him eccentric, idealist, or just plain barmy. Lawrence later painted a romantic picture of his father as a man ‘on the large scale, tolerant, experienced, grand, rash, humoursome … naturally lord-like’, who, before having been ‘tamed’ by Sarah, had been ‘a spend-thrift, a sportsman, a hard rider and drinker’.¹¹ Thomas was a gentleman by profession and, despite his somewhat reduced circumstances, never needed to work. He spent his days pursuing interests such as photography, cycling, carpentry, or the study of church architecture, and occasionally yachting or potting pheasant and snipe in the New Forest, where he had taken out a shooting licence. He had plenty of spare time on his hands to teach these skills to his sons, and as a result Lawrence’s photography became technically accomplished even before he left school. Like his father, he became a devoted cyclist and waterman, a carpenter of sorts, an expert on medieval architecture, and a crack pistol shot. Thomas enjoyed the company of his sons, playing word-games with them, leafing through boys’ magazines, taking them on outings to hunt for fossils or to explore medieval ruins. But his influence was far less profound than Sarah’s. Their characters were so much in contrast that Lawrence was later to blame their ‘discordant natures’ for the demons that haunted him.¹² In fact, there is little evidence of discord. By all accounts, indeed, their relationship was affectionate and the domestic atmosphere a harmonious one. Thomas’s reserved nature seems to have complemented Sarah’s more fiery spirit: peace-loving and gentle, he had consummate skills in tact, diplomacy and tolerance to impart. Lawrence’s picture of his ‘hard riding, hard-drinking’ younger days, though, was highly idealized. Thomas was essentially a submissive man, clearly dominated by Sarah, and, subconsciously, Lawrence despised his lack of authority. He would search for more powerful father-figures throughout his life, writing to one of them, Lord Tren-chard, in 1928, ‘If my father had been as big as you the world would not have had spare ears for my freakish doings.’¹³ Beside Sarah, Thomas remains a shadowy figure, a reformed drinker whittling out his days, ‘just sitting in his chair and smoking and perhaps reading a book’, as Mrs Ballard recalled.¹⁴

It was, nevertheless, Thomas’s income upon which the family depended. Shortly before his second son’s birth in 1888, he had signed an agreement handing over his estates in Ireland to the care of his younger brother Francis, in return for an annuity of Ј200. Lawrence later claimed that his parents lived in near poverty, a fiction taken up with righteous conviction by his biographer Basil Liddell Hart. In fact, with other capital, income and inheritances, the family may have had an income of up to Ј600 per year. This placed them fairly high up in the social scale of the day, for in 1903-4 the population of Great Britain amounted to 43 million, of whom only 5 million lived on an income of more than Ј160 per year. The 3 million persons with incomes of between Ј160 and Ј400 per year were described as ‘comfortably off’, while those with over Ј700 were said to be ‘rich’. Though for most of Lawrence’s childhood the family did not fit into this latter category, they were able to employ one or two servants and to enjoy expensive holidays every year. Lawrence’s trip to Syria in 1909, for instance, cost over Ј100 – a good annual wage for most Britons of the era. By any other standards than the very highest, their financial circumstances were extremely happy ones.

Lawrence said later that he regarded his father as a friend rather than a figure of authority, suggesting an equality unusual in father-son relationships of the time. In fact, Thomas was too gentle and imaginative to administer corporal punishment to his sons, and left this task to the more resolute Sarah – an inversion of the generally accepted Victorian ethos. Reared strictly by her puritan foster-parents, she had imbibed the Biblical adage, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child; but he who loves him chastens him betimes’,¹⁵ and would administer severe thrashings to the boys’ bare buttocks for disobedience, wilfulness or dishonesty, convinced that in doing so she was perpetuating God’s will. According to the Evangelical canon, babies were born not innocent, but tainted with the sins of their forefathers: the children of adulterous parents were likely to develop a premature sensuality themselves.¹⁶ As the boys grew up, Sarah exercised a hawk-like vigilance for the appearance of such sensual traits, ready to nip them in the bud with a sound thrashing. She stood guard over her brood with the possessive greed of one who has known abandonment, distrusting women as dishonest schemers: ‘she never wanted any of the sons to marry,’ Mrs Ballard said. ‘In fact, when Arnie [the youngest son] was engaged he wrote and asked me to break it to [his] mother.’¹⁷

Sarah’s need to control and dominate her world was blind, desperate and beyond reason. Her omnipotent, omniscient exterior actually concealed a fathomless rage of doubt and pain within. Victoria Ocampo, who knew her in old age, sensed that she was a woman seething with violent passions kept tight in the straitjacket of her unbending determination. Her childhood deprivation had left her with a chronic fear of abandonment and a massive emotional vacuum, which she could fill only by draining energy, attention and reassurance from her husband and children and anyone else who came within her reach. Bob – kind, solicitous, prudish – was the first to succumb to her insatiable demand for love and attention and never managed to escape it. He adopted her fundamentalist religious philosophy, did not marry, and remained attached to her for the rest of his life. Of all her sons, he was the only one who fulfilled her ambitions, becoming a medical missionary in China, where he was joined by Sarah herself after Thomas’s death in 1919. Ocampo, who visited Sarah in the 1950s, found her confined to her bedroom by a broken leg, with Bob, himself an elderly man, occupying the room immediately below. Whenever she banged on the floor with her stick, Bob would scurry upstairs like a servant – an arrangement, Ocampo noted with amusement, that Sarah referred to as ‘convenient’.

As a child, Ned developed a terror of Sarah discovering his feelings: ‘If she knew, they would be damaged, violated, no longer mine,’ he later wrote.¹⁸ Unlike Bob, his disposition was prickly, and any pressure applied to him was likely to meet resistance. Even his teachers at school felt an instinctive recoil if they tried to push him in a way he did not wish to go. Given Sarah’s character, a clash of personalities was inevitable: ‘No trust ever existed between my mother and myself,’ he wrote later. ‘Each of us jealously guarded his or her own individuality, whenever we came together.’¹⁹ He and Sarah were mirror-images, attracted to each other but repelled by their sameness. He was sensitive to her wishes and anxious to please her, but intensely aware that if he lifted his emotional shield, she would get in and devour his independence, just as she had devoured Bob’s. Though he was not her favourite son, she had great expectations of him, and for her he had to be perfect: brave, noble, strong, hard-working, honest, respectful, obedient and loving – a white knight, sans peur et sans reproche. Arnie revealed that it was Ned who received the lion’s share of Sarah’s beatings, and felt that his life had been permanently injured by her. Though Bob and Will were never beaten, and Arnie required only one dose, Ned’s more dogged obstinacy occasioned frequent repetition. Beneath the Biblical justifications, there lay a simple power-struggle.²⁰ Bob was never whipped because he offered no resistance: he and his mother were ‘at one’. Ned provoked her determination to ‘break his will’. She did not succeed. In fact, she only strengthened his resolve, as with every blow he became more and more determined never to give in. He became detached from the pain and from the body which sustained punishment, but the will he developed to such an immense degree of strength became a monster with a life of its own – a serpent which would eventually suffocate his creative power. His character – no less than his elder brother’s – was ultimately to be defined by Sarah. The two elder Lawrence boys were predisposed to react to her demands in ways that were diametrically opposite – Bob by total surrender, Ned by total resistance – and both were scarred by the experience. ‘I know Ned had a real struggle to achieve spiritual – let alone physical – freedom,’ Celandine Kennington wrote. ‘He and his mother were better friends apart. When together for more than a short time [he] was constantly forced to refight his battles for mental freedom.’²¹ Arnie – twelve years younger than Ned – had a similarly traumatic struggle to free himself from Sarah’s grip, but eventually succeeded by choosing a third way: he simply ‘took no notice of her’. Of the three sons who survived the war, he was the only one to marry, have a child, and lead a ‘conventional’ life.