His father, possibly at Ned’s urgent pleading, moved quickly to buy him out of his enlistment, a recognized practice in those days. Thomas Lawrence not only managed to get Ned out of the army but may also have managed to erase the whole episode from the army’s files. Thomas demonstrated more skill at facing down the army bureaucracy than he gets credit for, and obviously knew how to resume the role of a gentleman with friends in high places when he had to.

This family crisis—no other word will do—evidently also led Thomas and Sarah, however reluctantly, to reconsider how to deal with their brilliant and difficult second son, who, it was now quite evident, was going to require very different treatment from the other four boys. It is not hard to see here too the evidence of the father’s quiet authority in persuading Sarah that this particular colt needed to be ridden on a lighter rein. Overthe next two years, a number of changes were made, all of them intended to give him greater freedom. His bicycling trips became longer and more extended; the peculiarities of his vegetarian diet became a pretext for his skipping family meals; he would eventually be allowed to switch from preparation for a mathematics scholarship at the university, which he hated, to history, which was more to his liking; and finally, less than two years after he had run off to join the army, his parents built him a small cottage in the garden at 2 Polstead Road, which allowed him to live separately from the rest of the family.

This was obviously a large concession to a son who had demonstrated just how far he was willing to go in placing himself beyond his mother’s reach. T. E. Lawrence later claimed that he had actually built the cottage himself, but his account was contradicted by his mother, and seems unlikely—the cottage (which still stands) not only is attractive but shows every evidence of skilled professional construction, especially in the steeply countered cathedral roof, rising to a solid central brickwork chimney. Given his own skills, Ned surely helped with the woodwork and the interior; the lines of the exterior woodwork are very elaborate and fanciful indeed for a simple cottage, and may show his hand and imagination at work. Although the cottage was explained away as a place for Ned to study in once he had switched to history and become an undergraduate at Oxford, it seems in fact to have been designed from the outset for him to live in, with a fireplace, a stove, running water, electric light, and “a house telephone.” It is impossible not to see this arrangement as a victory over his mother, giving him the ability to come and go without supervision, freeing him from her insistence on knowing what he was doing at all times, and giving him complete privacy—an unusual, indeed enviable situation for a boy of eighteen or nineteen living at home at that time!

Ned’s decision to switch from mathematics to history is probably a case of following his own growing interests—but more than that, it reflects his impatience with abstract learning, and with any subject having clearly defined rules. He appears to have learned languages, for example, instinctively, by talking and by trial and error, but without making any attempt to master and memorize tedious grammatical rules, which bored him. He was a familiar and difficult figure in academic life: the brilliant young man with rather too many interests, who resists learning the basics of anything thoroughly, and who skates by at examination time on a combination of omnivorous reading, strong opinions, and verbal dexterity. As a result, Ned’s entrance to Oxford was neither as easy nor as automatic as it might have been.

In the summer of 1906, when Ned was eighteen and had only one more year to spend in school, he made his first trip abroad, with his friend Beeson—another big step in the untying of his mother’s apron strings, though he would try to make up for that by the length and detail of his letters home. After taking the Oxford Local Examinations, a prerequisite for entering Oxford University, he set off on a two-week cycling tour of Brittany, using Dinard, where the Lawrence family was still remembered with fond feelings, as his home base. In the end, his friend Beeson (whose nickname was “Scroggs”) went home before Ned did, so he spent almost two weeks more touring by himself.

Ned’s letters home are remarkable, and not just for their length and their amazingly descriptive detail, but also for his evident determination to hide his own feelings from his mother. The letters were meant to be read by the whole family, and are affectionate enough in tone, but they also exude a certain steely detachment and distance, which may not have escaped his mother’s notice. Certainly they are very unlike the monosyllabic, dutiful letters that most schoolboys send home, and while the intelligence, power of observation, and insight they demonstrate would astonish and even alarm most parents, they are also a bit chilling. A single surviving earlier letter from Ned to his mother, from Colchester, when he and his father were on a cycling trip in 1905, is signed, “Love to yourself,” but perhaps significantly the letters from the 1906 trip, with a couple of exceptions, are mostly signed, “With love to all,” or, “With love to everybody,” or they simply end without any closing at all.

Two other things are noticeable in the letters. The first is that Ned’s commitment to a vegetarian diet was apparently rather less strict abroad than at home, since he boasts of having tried some of everything on the prix fixe luncheon menu at the Grand Hфtel de l’Europe in Dinan, which included sardines, fowl, cold meats, and hash. Second, he was scrupulously careful about accounting for every penny (and, indeed, halfpenny) he spent.

A longish letter, written on August 14 to his mother, runs to some 1,400 words, and includes two excellent architectural drawings. Almost all of it is about the Chвteau de Tonquйdec, with minute attention to the interesting details of the latrines, and it reveals an astonishing knowledge of medieval building techniques. (In some respects, his letters home were notes for future works.) He also mentions that he has reached his highest speed to date on a bicycle—thirty miles an hour in high gear on the sand of a nearby beach—and feels he is fit enough to ride 100 miles a day for months. All this must have been of interest to his father (and is perhaps intended to impress him) but probably not to his mother, to whom the letter is addressed. Another letter, 2,300 words long, is mostly about the Chвteau de la Hunaudaye; it reads like a learned guidebook, and contains a full-page detailed plan of the fortress, one of two in this series of letters home, done in pen and ink by Ned, which could hardly be improved on by a professional architect, and which illustrate not only his thorough knowledge of medieval architecture at this early age, but even more his understanding of medieval warfare. He knows why the fortress was built the way it was, and what its strengths and weaknesses were—in short, his is an expert’s view of how to defend or attack a fortified place, and how to make the best use of the topography in siting and building one.

It would be a mistake to leap from this to comparisons to the young Napoleon, who is said to have relied on his tactical instincts to win schoolyard fights; but much that is contained in young Ned’s letters to his family reads like a brilliant and insightful essay on medieval fortifications and warfare by a particularly gifted cadet at Sandhurst or West Point, and makes it easy to understand why T. E. Lawrence’s notes and dispatches from the field were read with such interest even at the level of the chief of the imperial general staff. His observation and grasp of significant details, his broad overview, and his crisply expressed conclusions are all in evidence here—the schoolboy demonstrates the same skill in writing reports and drawing maps as the temporary second-lieutenant and acting staff captain would demonstrate eight years later, though one guesses that none of it is what his mother wanted to hear.