For much of his life, Lawrence idealized masculinity because he knew that he was not conventionally masculine himself, in spite of his great physical strength. Though many have testified that he was stronger than most people of his size and weight, his appearance as a youth gave no impression of it, and his apparent sensitivity over the issue suggests that it bothered him. In a letter to his mother from France in 1906, there is a hint of defensiveness in his insistence: ‘people here say I’m much thinner than Bob, but stronger. Still Bob’s fatness is much better than muscle in their eyes, except for Mme. Chaignon, who got a shock when she saw my biceps while bathing. She thinks I’m Hercules.’⁷ During his march through Syria in 1909 he boasted of walking 120 miles in five days, then added: ‘Bob or Will will laugh … but not if they had to do it staggering and stumbling over these ghastly roads.’⁸ In the several accounts we have of Lawrence’s physical fights, he invariably seems to have come off the worse – once, at school, sustaining a broken leg. He would later tell Liddell Hart that he disapproved of hand-to-hand fighting: ‘when combats came to the physical, bare hand against hand,’ he would write, ‘I was finished.’⁹ The words ‘boyish’ and even ‘girlish’, which crop up with surprising frequency in descriptions of him until his last years, suggest an almost androgynous figure. As a twelve-year-old, Lawrence possessed a sensitivity rare in adolescent boys. He would delight in taking charge of baby Arnie, sometimes bathing him in an iron bath, wheeling him in his pram to the football field where his ‘manly’ classmates were engaged in ‘masculine’ sport. When the three-year-old Arnie conceived a terror of the statues in the Ashmolean Museum, Lawrence carved a face on a stone and made him smash it with a hammer to exorcize his fears. The strategy was not only effective – for Arnie later became Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge, and wrote a celebrated book on classical sculpture – but it also displayed as astonishing degree of empathy. Arnie believed that this special facility Lawrence had for seeing through the eyes of others stemmed from an inner lack of confidence, and described how he would take on the characteristics of anyone he had just seen or was about to see. Paradoxically, this shape-shifting responsiveness was one of Lawrence’s great strengths, and the quality which would later set him apart from the rigid, authoritarian generals of the war as a truly great, if unconventional leader.

Lawrence’s sensitive traits grew out of the deep imprint of his mother’s personality. Beneath his aloofness, he had a great capacity for friendship with both men and women. His most profound ties would be with other men, and according to Arnie, these friendships ‘were comparable in intensity to sexual love, for which he made them a substitute’.¹⁰ While still at school, he made friends with an older man called Leonard Green, then an undergraduate at St John’s College, and took great pride in flouting college rules to visit him in his rooms. Together they dreamed of printing fine books, and of living together in a windmill on a headland washed by the sea. Green, an aspiring poet, belonged to a secret homosexual order called the Chaeronea and to a circle of poets, artists and novelists known later as the Uranians, whose inspiration was the ‘innocence and sensuality of young boys’. A prominent member of the Chaeronea was the poet Laurence Hous-man, six of whose books were found in Lawrence’s personal library after his death, together with three homoerotic works by F. W. Rolfe, another member of the Uranians, whom Lawrence may have known personally while at school. Green was himself a Uranian poet, whose work Lawrence admired enough to tell him in 1910 that though he was unlikely to find a publisher he should not adulterate his verse by developing ‘a sense of sin or anything prurient’.¹¹ Lawrence was to include the work of two more Uranian poets in his own anthology which appeared in the 1920s, and listed Henry Scott Tuke, a Uranian artist, as one of his three favourite painters. He may have met Tuke while a schoolboy at Oxford, and even modelled for him, for Tuke was a friend of Charles Bell, Art Curator at the Ashmolean Museum, who was an early mentor of Lawrence’s. Bell himself certainly had interests in common with the Uranians. Though they idealized homosexual love – especially that between an adult male and a young boy: often a boy of lower social class – they rarely practised it. Many were respectable churchmen, and in any case, the first decade of the twentieth century was a mean time for homosexuals. The shadow of Oscar Wilde, sent to prison for his dabblings with telegraph boys in 1895, still loomed menacingly over the Edwardian literati. Lawrence’s relationship with Leonard Green was almost certainly platonic. That he shared at least some of the sentiments of the Uranians as a youth, though, was later suggested by Arnie, who would write that he was ‘impressed often with the physical beauty and animal grace of the young, particularly the young male, in uncivilised countries’.¹²

Though Lawrence despised women in their sexual role, he was able to form closer relationships with some women than most heterosexual men are capable of. He felt at home with older women of ‘the good-wife-and-mother type’,¹³ and Clare Sydney Smith – who fell into this category – wrote that he ‘was able to have a deep friendship for a woman – myself-based on the closest ties of sympathy and understanding but containing none of the elements normally associated with love. No effort on his part was needed to do this. His presence was … hardly a physical one and he never seemed to be aware of oneself physically’¹⁴ (my italics). Mrs Smith’s husband, Sydney, must also have been aware that Lawrence presented no sexual challenge, for when someone suggested that he and Clare might be having an affair, Smith’s reaction was to throw back his head and roar with laughter.¹⁵ Lawrence’s great struggle in childhood was to extricate himself from his mother’s smothering clutches, and afterwards he remained frigid towards women, especially those who were possessive or impulsive. He could happily consort with women like Clare Sydney Smith who sent him no sexual signals and behaved ‘like a man’, but the moment he detected any sexual advance his psychical barriers would snap shut. He would talk to a woman as if she was another man, and if she refused to do the same he would run away. Women’s bodies did not attract him: ‘I take no pleasure in women,’ he would write. ‘I have never thought twice or even once of the shape of a woman, but men’s bodies, in repose or in movement – specially the former, appeal to me directly and very generally.’

Lawrence was a rebel against convention by instinct, but his sense of history was profound. He was fond of declaring that ‘the world stopped in 1500 with the coming of printing and gunpowder’, and affected to despise the Renaissance with its reason and humanism. He became fascinated by the medieval world as a boy, and this interest quickly became a passion which eclipsed his school work. He would cycle to churches in and around Oxford, taking brass-rubbings of medieval priests and knights in armour, and by the time he was fifteen had acquired a fine collection of rubbings from all over the south-east of England, which decorated the brothers’ shared bedroom at 2 Polstead Road. Cyril ‘Scroggs’ Beeson recalled making his first rubbing under Lawrence’s direction at Wytham in October 1904: ‘… from that date onwards,’ Scroggs wrote, ‘… we made excursions by cycle to nearly every village in the three counties and to many places farther afield.’¹⁶ Lawrence pursued his interest with thoroughness, experimenting with different techniques, eliciting advice from the tradesmen who supplied the paper and ‘heelballs’ used to make the rubbings. He scoured libraries and museums for information about the knights, priests and ladies whose effigies he rubbed, and soon acquired a detailed knowledge of medieval costume and armour. He became obsessed with the devices of heraldry and collected heraldic terms: gules, blazons, flanches, maseles, octofoyles and bars sinister, rolling them richly off his tongue with the relish of a wordsmith. He would compile long scrolls of coats of arms, painting in the escutcheons and the armorial bearings in the correct colours with punctilious care. He lost himself in romantic literature: Tennyson’s Arthurian cycle Idylls of the King gave way to authentic medieval fare such as the Finnish epic Kalevala and the thirteenth-century chanson of the Charlemagne cycle, Huon de Bordeaux. His search for brasses and relics assumed almost the proportions of a sacred quest itself, and while other youths were out watching girls at St Giles’s Fair or at the festivities of Eights Week, Lawrence could be found scouring local crypts and churches. He spared no reverence for consecrated ground, though, and honed his powers of persuasion in dealing with caretakers – once, memorably, when he and Beeson were caught emerging from the crypt of St Cross church with armfuls of human bones. Theo Chaundy, another schoolfriend, remembered his ‘sinister’ chuckle as he once happily smashed his way to a brass through some obstructing pews. It was E. M. Forster who pointed out the parallel between Lawrence’s quest for brass-rubbings and his later archaeological adventures in the East, noting that the brasses were later transformed into ancient ruins, and the truculent guardians metamorphosed into savage Bedu tribes.