Although Thomas Chapman—now Thomas Lawrence—had left behind most of his wealth, he received a modest but comfortable yearly income, and had some limited access to capital—they were by no means penniless exiles. What is more, there was a certain pattern to their moves. All these places were near enough to Ireland to make it easy for Thomas to go back to Dublin on “family business” connected with the estate when necessary; and the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, and Dinard were well placed to give him the maximum opportunity to indulge his love of sailing. The eventual move back to England, first to a house in Hampshire, then to one in suburban Oxford, reflects both a concern that if one of their boys was born in France he would become subject to military service there, and a desire to have the boys educated at home in their own language. By the time they reached Oxford in 1896, they had four children: Bob, Ned, Bill, and Frank. (The fifth boy, Arnold, was born in Oxford in 1900. In addition, Sarah gave birth to three other sons, two stillborn and one who lived for only a few hours.)

If one reason for the deterioration of the Chapmans’ marriage was that Edith Chapman produced four girls in succession and no son, Thomas can only have been satisfied by his decision to leave her for Sarah, who bore him eight boys, of whom five lived and thrived. In fact, by all accounts, Thomas, though not an ebullient personality, seems to have become far more cheerful than he had been when he was living with Edith. He enjoyed the company of his sons, and was anything but remote or diffident where they were concerned; indeed no detail of what they were doing seems to have been too small to interest him, and his letters to them when they were older are models of a what a parent’s letters ought to be—full of practical advice and commonsense suggestions, as well as letting the boys, particularly Ned, explore their own limits without nagging or scolding. Thomas remained an enthusiastic shot, though now on a smaller scale, having given up his estates, and he taught the older boys to shoot well, although they did not share his enthusiasm for shooting gamebirds. He also taught them how to sail, enjoyed bicycling with them, conveyed to them his own skill at carpentry and photography, and imparted, at least to Ned, his interest in church architecture. In an age when upper-class parents were often distant, and left the upbringing of their children to nannies and tutors, he was quite the reverse, deeply involved in everything they did.

There is no doubt that Sarah was the driving force in the family, however. She was always in motion, a whirlwind of energy, the family disciplinarian. People who did not know her well thought her “overpowering and terrifying,” and she pushed her sons relentlessly and ruled their lives with alarming strictness. Many who met Sarah found her charming, but her blunt outspokenness and fiercely held opinions could also be disconcerting to strangers. On the other hand, since these are exactly the characteristics that the English admire in the Scots, and that the Scots themselves believe set them apart from the distant politeness and hypocrisy of the English, the wiliness of the Welsh, and the charm-laden duplicity of the Irish, many people found this side of Sarah endearing too.

T. E. Lawrence himself, even when he was older and a national hero, still found his mother terrifying, and as soon as he could, he carefully arranged his life to see as little of her as possible. From the beginning, he seems to have attracted her attention like a lightning rod, unlike the other boys. During the war, Auda Abu Tayi would refer to Lawrence as “the world’s imp,” and impishness seems to have been a permanent part of his character even when he was an infant—certainly his mother seems to have come down much harder on him than on his brothers, for naughtiness, disobedience, and a general failure to live by her strict and unforgiving rules.

Against this picture of Sarah as a domestic tyrant is the fact that the Lawrences were in their own way a happy family,* in which both parentsarranged their lives around the needs of their children—although to a degree that may, at any rate to Ned, often have felt suffocating. Thomas Lawrence had no work or job, and apart from his infrequent visits to Dublin on “family business” and his occasional day in the field with a few shooting companions, he was often at home. Sarah, with or without “help,” was a constant presence, cleaning, tidying, polishing, and keeping the whole household up to her very high standards of perfection. They must have made an odd-looking couple: he very tall, courtly, stooped, and thin; she tiny, much younger, and continuously in motion. Socially, they were even odder, by turn-of-the-century English standards. Thomas was, despite his change of name, recognizably a member of the upper class, in the way he dressed, in his speech, and in his polite but detached relationship to workmen and others of “the lower classes.” Sarah’s accent was unmistakably Scottish; her firm, direct way of dealing with people was very different from his; and she was comfortable with members of what was then still called “the working class.” People who met them instantly thought that there was something strange about them as a couple, a mismatch between the languid politeness of the Old Etonian and the alarming energy of the former governess. Some even noticed that Sarah never referred to Thomas as “my husband,” but instead always spoke of him as “Mr. Lawrence,” or “the boys’ father.”

Though in later life T. E. Lawrence would remark, half in complaint, half in admiration, that his parents lived on a “workman’s salary” of not more than Ј400* a year, and had to pinch pennies to make ends meet with five sons, in fact they seem to have lived comfortably enough, and not to have wanted for anything. Doubtless it was a big step down in income for a man who had been born to considerable wealth, but in late Victorian and Edwardian England Ј400 a year was the income of a member of the middle or “professional” class, not of a workman, and its current equivalent would be at least $100,000, if we bear in mind that in 1890 taxation was very low. It is also clear enough that from time to time Thomas Lawrence had access to capital: hence his ability to buy bicycles for his sons and himself, to continue sailing and shooting, and to fund Ned’s bicycling tours in France and a walking tour in Syria when Ned was older. On the other hand, Sarah was certainly always aware of the need to scrimp and save—it was part of her character, implanted by her own impoverished childhood.

T. E. Lawrence would inherit both parents’ attitudes toward money: on the one hand, like his mother, he reduced his expenses to the absolute minimum; but like his father’s, his attitude toward money was “lordly” when it came to things like his custom-made Brough motorcycles (the Brough was a two-wheeled equivalent of a Rolls-Royce). He spent a fortune by any standards paying artists to do the paintings and the drawings for Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and having the copies individually bound in leather by the finest bookbinders in England. His generosity to friends was lavish to the point of impoverishing himself.

Naturally, the elder Lawrences’ lives were conditioned to a certain degree by the need to maintain their secret, but that apparently did not prevent them from having friends, from going out, or from having visitors—indeed everybody who knew them remarked on what good company the Lawrences were. During the years when they lived in Dinard, they had many friends among the British residents—the area around Dinard, in Normandy, was an inexpensive place for Britons to live or retire—and the family of their landlord, the Chaignons, not only became friends, but would maintain the contact when the boys were grown up.

The same was true during the time the Lawrences spent in the New Forest, when Bob, Ned, and Will had many friends, one of whom, Janet Laurie, would be a friend of Ned’s for life—so far as we know the only girl to whom he ever proposed marriage. This was the case in Oxford too. The “isolation” of the Lawrence family has certainly been exaggerated, especially when it came to the friends of the boys, who were constantly in and out of the house.