The November photography class had already begun, and in the usual rigid way of the air force it was considered impossible for Lawrence to join late and catch up with his fellow students, so he was put down for the next class, which began in January. The notion of wasting an airman’s time was not one that occurred to anyone in authority in the RAF—his time belongedto the RAF, to be wasted or used as his superiors and the station schedule determined. For Lawrence, however, sweeping floors or emptying the grate of the adjutant’s stove while everybody else was studying photography was insupportable. He wrote to Air Vice-Marshal Swann, partly to thank Swann for getting him out of RAF Uxbridge early, and partly to ask Swann to get him into the November class, or even an earlier one, since, as Lawrence pointed out, “I’m already as good as the men passing out. My father, one of the pioneer photographers, taught me before I was four years old.” This was a mild exaggeration, but the letter exudes a certain overconfidence, as if Lawrence were writing to a family retainer rather than an air marshal, and can only have increased Swann’s dislike of his role.

In the meantime, since nobody in authority in the RAF likes to see an airman sitting around doing nothing, Lawrence “was appointed to the Adjutant’s office as an orderly,” running messages and cleaning the office first thing in the morning—menial but not demeaning duty, for an airman without a trade. The adjutant of the photography school, Flight Lieutenant Charles Findlay, who seems to have been a decent sort, did not pay much attention to his new orderly: Lawrence did not seem to him in any way out of the ordinary. At some point Lawrence must have signaled his disapproval of this waste of his time to Swann, however, for about three weeks later the station commander, Wing Commander W. J. Y. Guilfoyle, called Findlay into his office to say that Air Vice-Marshal Swann had called to ask “why A/c2 Ross is not engaged in photographic training?”

Findlay began to explain that the pupils arrived “in penny packets,” and had to be kept busy until there were enough of them to form a class, but the commanding officer cut him off short—he had already explained all that to Air Vice-Marshal Swann, but Swann “was not at all sympathetic,” and insisted that “Ross’s training must begin at once.”

The two men were “frankly perplexed.” “Who is this Ross? What’s he like?” the commanding officer asked, and the adjutant suggested that he might like to see the airman himself. Ross was sent for, on the pretext of giving him a message to deliver. As Findlay described him, “His blue eyes were set in a long, finely chiseled face. His jaw was square. But the most outstanding features were his long, sensitive fingers.” He was trim, erect, short, and while crisply respectful, his face conveyed none of the awe in which a recruit AC2 might be expected to hold his commanding officer on seeing him at close range. On the contrary, Ross gave the faint impression of being in command himself.

Once he had saluted and gone, the commanding officer “turned to the Adjutant with a look of amazement.”

“ ‘Findlay! Do you know who I think he is? Lawrence!’

‘Lawrence?’

‘Yes, Lawrence of Arabia! I saw him once in Cairo early in the war, and this airman looks uncommonly like him.’ ”

The two officers had no idea what to do next. Guilfoyle’s suspicion that AC2 Ross was Colonel Lawrence left him in the uncomfortable position of feeling that Air Vice-Marshal Swann had pulled a fast one on him, or had so little confidence in him that he had not seen fit to inform him of the real identity of one of his own airmen. Since he didn’t know what else to do, Guilfoyle ordered Findlay to start Ross’s instruction as soon as possible, even if he was in a special class of one, and to keep an eye on him for any clues as to whether he was really Lawrence. Lawrence immediately provided the clues. Recruits were given a mathematics test and were supposed to hand in their worksheets along with the answers to the problems. All Lawrence’s answers were correct, but he turned in no worksheets. When reprimanded by the instructor, he said that he had worked them out in his head, and when given another problem, he worked that one out in his head too, and immediately wrote down the correct answer. The instructor in optics complained to Findlay that Ross knew more about the subject than he did, and the same thing happened when he was put in the “Neg. Room.” As may be imagined, this did not make him popular with the instructors, and it added to the mystery surrounding Ross’s special treatment. Perhaps Lawrence would have been wiser to feign a certain degree of ignorance, rather than, to put it crudely, showing off.

He made matters worse by replying flippantly to reprimands about his turn-out on guard duty, and by answering the orderly officer “in a foreign language,” presumably Arabic, since the orderly officer would surely have recognized French; all this was bound to increase curiosity. It seems clear that Lawrence was suffering from overconfidence, brought on by the ease with which he had prodded Swann into getting him into a special class, and perhaps also by good news on the literary front.

For while Lawrence was astonishing (and provoking) his instructors, Edward Garnett was progressing rapidly with the abridgment of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.Lawrence was beginning, partly because of Garnett’s shrewd knowledge of how to handle authors, to come around to approving the idea of an abridged volume of 120,000 to 150,000 words, preferably the former. Neither he nor Garnett had any doubt that the book would sell, so Lawrence was relieved of his worries about running up a considerable overdraft for an AC2 to pay the artists who were making the drawings and the paintings for the limited edition of the complete text, to which he was becoming more and more committed.

At the same time, his approach to Shaw had paid off in a most surprising fashion. At the end of October, impatient at having heard nothing, Lawrence wrote a brilliantly self-depreciatory little note to the great man:

Dear Mr. Shaw,I am afraid you are rather making a labour of it, or you don’t want to tell me that it’s rubbish. I don’t want to bore you (nice of me!), and if you say it’s rot I’ll agree with you & cackle with pleasure at finding my judgment doubled.Please laugh & chuck it.Yours sincerely,T. E. Lawrence Unlike most such letters, this one very soon produced a lengthy reply, urging Lawrence to be patient and revealing that Charlotte Shaw had read the book with great admiration and had urged her husband to read it—more than urged, in fact. In his absence—he was “road tubthumping round England” for the forthcoming general election—she read every word of the awkward six-pound book, and on Shaw’s return “she began ecstatically reading passages of it aloud to him.” Shaw’s letter to Lawrence, if allowance is made for the somewhat hectoring style he used to everyone, was thoughtful, encouraging, and full of advice, much of which Lawrence was to ignore, and it clearly opened up to Lawrence the possibility of friendship with the Shaws.

Of course forming a friendship with “G.B.S.” was like letting the proverbial camel stick its nose inside the tent. Shaw was bossy, fussy, opinionated, indefatigable, irascible, determined not only to offer his friends advice but to ensure that it was followed in every detail. He was overwhelmingly generous with his time, despite his widespread commitments—a workload that would kill a horse; a firm determination to introduce to Britain not only socialism but a total reform of everything from English grammar, punctuation, and spelling to the way the British dressed, ate, and educated their children; and campaigning vigorously for such principles as wearing woolen garments next to the skin instead of cotton, total vegetarianism, and a radically different relationship between the sexes. On many of these subjects, Shaw sounded like a crank; on others, he wrote some of his greatest plays. But in any case his genius; the unstoppable flow of his eloquence; his sheer output of books, plays, letters, and pamphlets; and above all his willingness to argue with anyone about anything until whoever it was gave in out of exhaustion—all this made him seem to many like the Nietzschean superman improbably manifesting himself in England, as a fiercely bearded Anglo-Irishman.