Garnett took this as a suicide threat and, thoroughly alarmed, wrote to Shaw, who once again took the matter to Stanley Baldwin, and pointed out that the suicide of one of Britain’s most famous heroes because he had been refused permission to transfer from the army to the RAF would be a scandal. The last thing Baldwin wanted was a huge scandal—it was his fate to have to deal first with Lawrence and then with the far more embarrassing problem of King Edward VlII’s wish to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson and make her his queen. As a result, in August 1925 Private T. E. Shaw rejoined the Royal Air Force at last as 338171 AC2 Shaw.

* An exception was made for the acknowledged illegitimate children of members of the royal family. King William IV’s nine illegitimate children received titles and were ranked in precedence above a marquess. All of them attended the king’s coronation in 1830, and one of them later became a favorite aide-de-camp to King William’s niece and successor, Queen Victoria.

* The author served in the RAF from 1951 to 1953, and recruit training then (at RAF Padgate) did not seem all that different from training in Lawrence’s time.

* Johns’s words. Since he was an accomplished writer of fiction, he may have overdra-matized his role, but his account reads convincingly enough.

* In the RAF, as in all the British armed services, this is a long, painstaking, timehonored process involving black Kiwi boot polish, the handle of a service spoon heated in hot water to just the right temperature, methylated spirits, spit, and many hours of elbow grease, with a polishing rag.

* This does not necessarily mean that Lawrence was physically dirty—unlike most of his fellow recruits he devoted much time and effort, and occasional small bribes, to seeking out ways to have a hot bath as often as possible.in the RAF “dirty“ can imply nothing worse than a speck of tarnish on a cap badge or a smudged fingerprint on the polished lid of a shoe polish can.

* Although Lawrence had a remarkable gift for languages, and according to his youngest brother, A. W. Lawrence, could pick up the gist of any language very quickly, there is no other evidence that he knew Danish well enough to read it. This may have been a case of gilding the lily, on the part of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Sholto Douglas, who was a friend and contemporary of Wing Commander Bonham-Carter, and whose dyspeptic opinion of Lawrence—also expressed to this author, who edited Sholto Douglas’s memoir—was that “so far as the RAF was concerned, he was scarcely more than a nuisance,” deliberately creating difficulties for the junior officers under whom he served. (Sholto Douglas, Years of Command,New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966, 144-145.)

* He was referring to the British Museum Library and to the New York Public Library.

* There are a number of conflicting accounts of the relationship between Lawrence and Bruce, among them that of John E. Mack, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who actually met Bruce while researching his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lawrence in the 1970s; Jeremy Wilson’s much more cautious and skeptical take on Bruce in his biography of Lawrence; and the frankly sensation-alistic account given by Phillip Knightley and Colin Simpson in The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia,based on their series for the (London) Sunday Times.Bruce also wrote his own account, on which Knightley and Simpson based theirs. Even reduced to the bare minimum of what everyone accepts took place between Lawrence and Bruce, it is still a disturbing story.

* Lawrence sold the dagger to his friend Lionel Curtis, who donated it to All Souls College,where it still is.

† The “birch” was actually a bundle of twenty to twenty-four birch or elder twigs about twenty-eight to forty-eight inches in length, tied together at one end, the first six inches wrapped tightly with a strip of leather to form a handle, and was then in use as regulation punishment in British prisons. it was a big step up in severity from a schoolmaster’s cane, but several steps down from a cat-o’-nine-tails.

* The author owned a motorcycle from the age of seventeen to the age of sixty-six, including the two years he spent in the rAF. it was, in fact, reading about Lawrence as a boy (and hearing about him from the author’s uncle Sir Alexander Korda and from h. Montgomery hyde) that made him decide to buy a motorcycle and join the RAF.

* About $1 million in today’s money. A guinea was ₤1 and one shilling. Until the advent of decimal currency it was considered rather more respectable to charge in guineas than pounds—fashionable tailors, antique dealers, etc., always priced things in guineas. Thirty guineas was about the equivalent of $155 in the 1920s, or about $2,400 in today’s terms.

* Lawrence was right to fear this. For example, when the abridgment of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Revolt in the Desert,was published in 1927, Sir Arnold Wilson, former civil commissioner in iraq and Lawrence’s old antagonist, wrote that Lawrence was responsible for “the estrangement of Anglo-French relations in the Middle east … [and] helped induce [Britain] to adopt a policy which brought disaster to the people of Syria.” Wilson also accused Lawrence of condoning homosexuality, of imputing homosexuality falsely to the Bedouin, and of turning the Arab Bureau into “a cult of which Lawrence is the chief priest and Lowell Thomas the press agent.”(Wilson, “Revolt in the Desert,” Journal of the Central Asia Society,14, 1927.)

*This is from the tale about hippocleides,suitor of the princess Agarista. having drunk too much at dinner, hippocleides “disgraced himself by standing on his head and beating time [to the music] in the air with his legs (the Greeks wore short skirts).” (John Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder.) At this unseemly display Agarista’s father, angered, shouted, “You have danced away your wife!” to which hippocleides responded, “I don’t care.” Lawrence himself translated it as “Wyworri?” Note that there is a strong sexual element to the story, since Hippocleides had shocked his prospective father-in-law by exposing his genitals. This subtext may be read into the inscription; and Lawrence, and the better educated of his visitors, must surely have been aware of it. An alternative translation might be “I’ll do what I please, whatever you think of it,” which seems closer to Lawrence’s point of view.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Apotheosis

He is all adrift when it comes to fighting, and had not seen deaths in battle.—T. E. Lawrence, commenting on Homer,in the note to his translation ofthe Odyssey, 1932 Lawrence, like Homer’s Odysseus, was home again. On July 16, 1925, Trenchard signed the order approving Lawrence’s transfer from the army to the RAF for a period of five years of regular service and four years in the reserve. A week later Lawrence was ordered to report to RAF West Drayton for processing. All this was done far from the attention of the press. At West Drayton, he was immediately recognized. “A Flight-Sergeant came along …. ‘Hello, Ross,’ he greeted him, and was immediately corrected by a dynamo-switchboard attendant behind him who said: ‘Garn, that ain’t Ross … he ’s Colonel Lawrence.’ ”

After the usual medical examination, Lawrence was sent on to RAF Uxbridge in charge of a corporal. When he arrived there, on a Friday afternoon, nobody wanted to know anything about him, and nobody was willing to sign for him. He was “dragged in to the Headquarters Adjutant, the last hope. He glared. ‘What are you?’ I very stilly replied ‘Yesterday I was a Pte in the R.T.C.’ He snorted ‘Today?’ ‘I think I’m an A.C. twice in the R.A.F.’ Snort second. ‘Will you be in the Navy tomorrow?’ ‘Perhaps,’ said I. ‘I can’t sign for you. I don’t want you.’ ‘I don’t want anybody to sign for me.’ ‘Damned silly …who the hell are you?’ At this point my feeble patience broke. ‘If your name was Buggins, and I called you Bill …’ Then he yelled with joy, recognizing my names for him … and gave me tea.” (This from a long letter to one of Lawrence’s pals from Bovington, Private E. Palmer, nicknamed “Posh.”)