That night Lawrence was fully “kitted out,” and at long last exchanged the hated army khaki for the beloved RAF blue, carrying back to his hut “two kit bags, a set of equipment,** great coat, bayonet, like a plum tree too heavy with fruit.” Saturday he “squared” the camp tailors to alter his uniforms to the preferred tight fit and knife-edge creases. Sunday he spent “Blancoing” his webbing (it was issued in the same khaki color as the army’s but had to be altered to RAF blue with a product called blanco) and polishing his bayonet. On Monday he took the train for RAF Cranwell, home of the Royal Air Force Cadet College, where candidates for a regular commission were trained. This was the RAF equivalent of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and the Royal Naval Academy at Dartmouth. It was also a real aerodrome, where the cadets learned to fly. Like all airmen, Lawrence was really happy only with the comforting noise of engines revving up. Trenchard had chosen well. The commandant of the Air College was Air Commodore A. E. (“Biffy”) Borton, who had flown with the RFC in support of Lawrence in the desert, and later commanded the air force in Palestine. It was Biffy Borton who had flown the big Handley-Page bomber that so awed Lawrence’s tribesmen when it landed on a desert airstrip, and he instantly recognized Lawrence and sent for him. Lawrence was not only back in the air force; he was under the command of a man whom he liked and trusted, and who admired him. The gloom of the past two years lifted ever so slightly.

Lawrence was posted to B Flight, as an aircraft hand. His immediate world consisted of a sergeant, a corporal, and fourteen airmen, who shared the same hut. Their job was to look after the six training aircraft used by the fifteen officers and cadets of B Flight. The work interested Lawrence, who loved machinery, and except for an early morning parade he spent most of his day in overalls working around the aircraft. Inevitably, there was a close relationship between the pilots and their ground crew—a pilot’s life depended on the men who serviced his aircraft, so there was none of the distance that existed between officers and men in the army. Nor was any great secret made of the fact that AC2 Shaw was in fact Lawrence of Arabia. A good many of the airmen knew or guessed it, and Biffy Borton and his wife occasionally invited AC2 Shaw to their quarters for the evening, as did Borton’s chief staff officer, Wing Commander Sydney Smith, and his lively and beautiful wife, Clare. The Smiths had known Lawrence in Cairo, and both of them liked and understood him. Clare shared Lawrence’s passionate interest in music, and was able to maintain an easy and unforced relationship with him, in which neither his present rank nor his past glory was an issue. She may have been the only woman who actually flirted with Lawrence, an experience which he seems to have enjoyed.**

As for Lawrence, he himself was discreet, and never took advantage of his friendship with the Bortons and the Smiths, or with the college medical officer, an elderly wing commander who was a former surgeon to the king, and now quietly took on Lawrence as, in effect, a private patient. Normally, an airman who makes friends with officers is distrusted by other airmen, but Lawrence never lorded it over his mates or sought special favors. His own sergeant, Flight Sergeant Pugh, summed up his feelings about AC2 Shaw in words rarely heard from an NCO about any of his men: “He was hero-worshipped by all the flight for his never failing, cheery disposition, ability to get all he could for their benefit, never complaining…. Quarrels ceased and the flight had to pull together for the sheer joy of remaining in his company and being with him for his companionship, help, habits, fun and teaching one and all to play straight.” Something of his old spirit, which he had shown when teasing Auda Abu Tayi, seems to have returned, touching the men who slept in Hut 105 at Cranwell.

Of course a service college is not an ordinary camp, even for the lowliest airman. At Cranwell the focus was on the cadets, not the airmen who looked after their aircraft—and it boasted amenities that included an excellent library (to which Lawrence would add a specially bound copy of the subscribers’ edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom),a weatherproof hut for his latest Brough “Superior” motorcycle, a noncommissioned aristocracy of sergeant pilots and sergeant technicians, and even a swimming pool. Lawrence and some of his mates would run to the pool “at first dawn” on summer mornings, “to dive into the elastic water which fits our bodies as closely as a skin:—and we belong to that too. Everywhere a relationship: no loneliness any more.”

“No loneliness any more,” expresses very precisely what Lawrence sought and found in the RAF; and while the bond between Lawrence and his air force mates was hard for friends like the Hardys, the Shaws, Winston Churchill, Hogarth, and Lionel Curtis to understand, it was vital to him. He was like the kind of schoolboy who goes home on a holiday from boarding school reluctantly, because his closest friends are his schoolmates. Lawrence corresponded with his mates when he was away, sending long, interesting letters, full of what he was doing; he even corresponded with some of the soldiers he had liked at Bovington, such as Corporal Dixon and Posh Palmer, and with those airmen who had been with him in Uxbridge. He made them small loans and did them small favors, and remained genuinely interested in their lives and open about his own life.

However widespread his friendships among the rich, the famous, the talented, and the politically powerful were, it was in the barracks, not the drawing room, that he found an antidote to his loneliness.

This is not to say that Lawrence could not switch from one world to the other. He would ride his Brough motorcycle (he had christened the first one Boanerges, “Sons of Thunder,” and would continue naming the others Boanerges II, Boanarges III, etc.) down to London, or off to country houses when he could get leave, always turning up in the uniform of an airman, to the astonishment of butlers and hall porters. He paid a visit to Feisal, now king of Iraq, in London, and they both went off for lunch at Lord Winterton’s house in Surrey. Winterton, now undersecretary of state for India, had served with Lawrence in the advance on Damascus, but Lawrence tried to resist being drawn into nostalgic talk about the war. He “found Feisal lively, happy to see me, friendly, curious,” as well he might be at the sight of “Aurens” in a simple airman’s uniform—as much of a disguise, of course, as the Arab robes and headdress had ever been. Even in Lawrence’s letter to Charlotte Shaw describing this visit, his ferocious self-renunciation is replayed with frightening intensity: “So long as there is breath in my body my strength will be exerted to keep my soul in prison, since nowhere else can it exist in safety. The terror of being run away with, in the liberty of power, lies at the back of these many renunciations of my later life. I am afraid of myself. Is this madness?”

Lawrence takes delivery of a Brough Superior Motorcycle. George Brough is on the left.

Seldom has anybody stated more clearly his determination never again to be placed in a position of power over others. With all his formidable willpower Lawrence was determined to shackle the part of himself that had sought fame, glory, and greatness, and never allow it to rise again except in the pages of his book. Nobody knew better than Lawrence what he was capable of. He had executed a man in cold blood, suffered torture, killed people he loved, witnessed the ruthless murder of prisoners in the aftermath of battle. Nor was anybody more anxious to do penance. It was as if one of the great heroes of medieval times, one of those figures whose castles and tombs Lawrence had spent so much of his boyhood studying, had put aside his honors and retired in midlife to a monastery, tending to his herb garden and performing his humble chores, a simple brother, hoping not to evoke curiosity, pity, or interest. Yet, with the contradictory impulse that was so much a part of his nature, Lawrence was hard at work on two projects that were bound to stir up renewed interest in him: the completion of the thirty-guinea subscribers’ edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom(now planned to consist of 150 copies) and the abridged, popular version of the book, to be called Revolt in the Desert.Also, he had allowed Robert Graves, who desperately needed money, to convert a proposed children’s book about him into a full-scale biography.