The biggest of these, of course, was deciding where the boys should go to school. It is impossible to guess whether Thomas regretted not being able to send his sons to Eton, but in any case there was no way that he could have afforded to send five boys there; nor, despite the fact that he was an Old Etonian himself, would Eton have accepted them in the knowledge that they were illegitimate. It also may be that having been sent to a boarding school, Thomas did not want to subject his sons to the same experience, but it is more likely that neither parent wished to send the boys away. The boys were the center of their lives, the main justificationfor their illicit union, the clearest sign that it had been “blessed,” and the greatest source of their happiness. The first thing any outsider ever noticed about the Lawrences was how close they were to each other—indeed when Ned went “up” to Oxford, to a college that was only a few minutes away from his home by bicycle, he came home every night, despite the fact that undergraduates were supposed to spend their first two years living in their college. The boys were not afraid to leave home; nor did their parents discourage them from doing so, even in the case of Ned, whose journeys on foot would take him through some of the most dangerous country in the world; but for different reasons neither Thomas nor Sarah shared the enthusiasm of the English upper class for sending children away to school as early as possible.

The school they chose was the City of Oxford High School, whose elaborate Victorian facade still stands on George Street, close by Jesus College, where Ned would spend his undergraduate years, and the Ashmolean Museum, where his interest in archaeology was first kindled. The school was a high-minded hybrid, founded in 1888 by Thomas Hill Green, fellow of Balliol College and White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy. It was originally intended to provide Oxford dons, now that they were allowed to marry and reside outside their college, with a school for their children that would form a kind of educational ladder leading them to Oxford University on their graduation, while also admitting children of Oxford’s growing middle class. Much admired in its time, the school’s architecture was in Victorian high Gothic style, and was eccentric and lavish even by the standards of Oxford, with a glazed domed tower of vaguely Turkish appearance, surmounted by an elaborate weather vane, and below it a wonderful clock with gilt hands set against a golden sunburst on a bright blue background. The cornerstone was laid by Prince Leopold, the youngest son of Queen Victoria, and the school was unusual in that it was a joint enterprise of the university and the city of Oxford. The fact that the City of Oxford High School did not attempt to imitate such great public schools as Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and Winchester was something of an asset for Oxford dons, many of whom would have beenuncomfortable with the atmosphere of snobbery and the bullying that went on in the famous boarding schools of England. The school’s staff, curriculum, and seriousness of purpose were second to none; its fees were reasonable; and no embarrassing or difficult questions were raised about accepting the sons of “Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence” as pupils.

Until the move to Oxford, Ned had had little in the way of formal schooling, except for an hour a day at the Йcole Sainte-Marie in Dinard, and no experience of English school life, though he already showed signs of alarming precocity, and a voracious appetite for learning as much as he could about a wide variety of subjects. Both in France and in England he was taught by a governess, as well as by his mother and father, and it was clear to everyone that Ned was both enormously intelligent and naturally diligent. As to his precocity, Sarah claimed that Ned had learned the alphabet by the age of three, and his eldest brother, Bob, recalled that Ned could read the newspaper upside down at the age of five (though it is hard to gauge the usefulness of this feat). He spoke French fluently by the age of six, and started to learn Latin at age five. (Ned, who seems early on to have shown an aptitude for languages, learned French quickly as a second language; and in later life he would address the Council of Four at the Paris Peace Conference in fluent French.) His interests included the architecture of castles, armor, weapons, heraldry, old coins, medieval glassware, the geography and history of the Holy Land, and military tactics, as well as photography and carpentry. Ned, like many gifted children, paid more attention to what interested him than to the formal curriculum of the school, and on the subjects he cared about he was so well-informed and opinionated as to alarm even the most learned adults. A voracious reader, he went through books at a rapid rate, most of them outside his assigned reading, and although he would later claim to be able to extract the gist of a book quickly, the truth seems to be that like many bright children he skipped the parts he found dull, or disagreed with. All his brothers were intelligent, dutiful students, but Ned was in an entirely different category—a slightly unfocused prodigy.

It must be said that the masters at the City of Oxford High Schoolrecognized almost instantly that Ned was special. This might not have been the case at a boarding school, for it was clear from the beginning that he would never “fit in” conventionally, and that he was resolutely determined to avoid team sports of every kind, hanging on the sidelines with a knowing grin on his face—not an easy thing to get away with in any English school. Years later one of his masters would remark that “he knew no fear and we wondered why he did not play games.” This was a shrewd comment, for Ned was already almost totally fearless, and determined to build up his strength and put it to a test, but at the same time he disliked all forms of organized competition. He became, like his father, a bicycle enthusiast, and always had the latest kind of racing bike—another indication that Thomas Lawrence had access to money when he wanted it, and never stinted his boys on anything. Ned often tinkered with his bikes to make them faster, and at an early age he pushed himself to amazing speeds and distances. Other boys seem to have respected him, rather than being outraged by his peculiar sense of humor and by the fact that he was an unapologetic “loner,” perhaps because he was also a self-taught wrestler.

The fact that Lawrence was “different” from the two brothers nearest him in age, both of whom were enthusiastic about games and good “team players,” has sometimes been attributed to the fact that he knew early on about his parents’ secret whereas they did not. Lawrence claimed to have overheard, when he was four and a half years old, a conversation between his father and a solicitor about Thomas Lawrence’s estates in Ireland, and although he drew the wrong conclusion, it is not impossible that a very bright child might have managed to overhear enough of the conversation to deduce that there was something irregular about his parents’ situation. Lawrence would not have been the first child to pay an unhappy price for eavesdropping, and learning thereby something he did not want to know, and in his case he felt he must keep it a secret from his brothers. It would also, no doubt, have contributed to his resistance toward his mother’s strong religious exhortations and her insistence on complete obedience, knowing that her own behavior had been less than perfect. Atany rate, whatever significance young Ned’s knowledge of the family secret may have had, it did not prevent him from feeling a strong, protective, and often touching affection for his brothers. The fact that the Lawrence boys were so close must also have helped protect Ned from the kind of bullying that a boy who won’t play organized games might expect to attract in any school.