His quick withdrawal from the Artillery in 1906 may have shattered his own illusion that he was the ‘hard man’ he craved to be, yet in another sense the gambit had been eminently successful. Sarah no longer tried to force her will on him, no longer had recourse to the stick. Any freedom he felt himself to possess in the following years began the moment he showed his mother that he was capable of separating himself from her. Long afterwards he wrote that seventeen was the age at which he found himself. 8The incident had disturbed the family’s smooth running, but the respectable faзade had to be maintained for the world. On his return the waves closed over him swiftly, and the episode was hushed up. In exchange for his silence, he got his wish to have his name put forward for a history scholarship, and sat the Senior Locals examinations that summer with a more peaceful mind.
He was also allowed to make the cycling tour around the Cфtes du Nord in France that he had long been planning with his friend Scroggs Beeson. To this end he ordered a new bicycle from the Morris Company – a specially designed lightweight model with racing drop-handlebars and a unique three-speed gear, which, he liked to say afterwards, had been made by Lord Nuffield’s own hands when he was just plain Mr William Henry Morris. Cycling was a relatively new phenomenon at the turn of the century. Though the rear chain-driven bicycle with pneumatic tyres had been invented before 1895, it remained an expensive luxury item until 1900, when it was first mass-produced. Thomas Lawrence had been an enthusiast even in the early 1890s when the family lived at Dinard in Brittany, and Ned had acquired his first bike as a schoolboy in 1901. Whether his special racing model of 1906 was actually made by Lord Nuffield’s own hands remains unknown. It is a typically Lawrentian story, and Nuffield emphatically denied it, though since he is known to have made bicycles in Oxford High Street until 1908, it is at least theoretically possible. Whatever the case, there is no more poignant symbol of Lawrence’s youth than his racing bicycle, which was later remembered vividly by his friends, almost as if it had been an extension of himself. Edward Leeds recalled how it would vanish surely and swiftly up the road, ‘almost before one had turned one’s back’, while Vyvyan Richards remembered with pleasure how the machine would ‘slide silently into the Iffley Road after midnight’. Lawrence was to make eight cycling trips to France and to cover several thousands of miles on this machine.
He left England on a ferry bound for St Malo on 3 August 1906, in expansive mood. The examinations were over at last, he was away from his mother, and the brave new world seemed full of light. There was an appropriately magnificent sunset, and Lawrence stood on deck for hours, letting long stanzas of romantic poetry wash through his head, and taking in the glory of the moon reflected in the waters. Leaving England again more than twenty years later, he would remember this night as a dream of delight: the beginning of his voluntary travels. 9He was to remain in the Cotes du Nord for a month and cover the best part of 600 miles by bicycle, travelling with Beeson in a long figure of eight around the north-east of the region, staying in modest hotels and lingering among great cathedrals, churches and the ruins of ancient chвteaux. The delight he experienced in escape is reflected in his letters home, and towards the end of his holiday he described the glories of the Breton coast to his mother in a stream of verse from Keats and Shelley, concluding with a subliminal message to Sarah, that it was all so wonderful ‘because there was no-one else there’. This letter evidently reflects a near rapturous mood, for Lawrence was generally happier extolling the virtues of man-made objects than the beauties of nature. His letters contain descriptions of architecture and church interiors which sometimes run for pages, and though they were written principally for his own future reference they were also a barrier to real emotion, which – apart from some superficial expressions of familial affection – these letters lack almost totally. In this sense, Lawrence’s 1906 letters are a perfect showcase of his profound aloofness from his family, from the mother who believed they should have no secrets from each other. If Sarah must know everything, Ned felt, then he would tell her all, but instead of the expressions of warmth she hungered for, he would give her only dry stones. While human passions could be wild and unpredictable, architecture was a triumph of human order, a successful fusion of the conscious and the unconscious, a symbol of the human ability to transform matter. He would later assert – more than half seriously – that there could be no true creative work into which the hands did not enter, and would become convinced that the human mind was expressed most completely in the manipulation of material, whether stone, clay, wood, cloth, skin or steeclass="underline" by contrast with frail human flesh, human artefacts seemed solid and enduring. Another impulse behind these endless descriptions, though, was the sheer compulsion to describe. It is as if the things Lawrence saw and heard had no objective existence unless he described them to someone else. He admitted years later that his writing practice had been to put down more and more exactly what he had seen and felt. His talent for description became both his strength and his weakness as a writer: his sense of detail was photographic, but his skills were episodic and lacked economy and continuity. George Bernard Shaw would later conclude that Lawrence was ‘one of the greatest descriptive writers in English literature’, 10while Francis Yeats-Brown would add that his ‘itch for description … developed into a mania’. 11
The main business of the tour, however, was medieval castles, and the jewel of them all was Tonquedoc, a thirteenth-century Norman chвteau standing on a hill overlooking the wooded valley of the Guer. Lawrence and Beeson reached the ruins after riding from Lannion on the eve of Lawrence’s eighteenth birthday and spent four hours exploring them in idyllic sunshine. As he examined the castle, tower by tower, stone by stone, Lawrence found himself playing out a mental game of attack and defence – placing himself in the position of the besieged: ‘… the place would have been impossible to enter,’ he decided triumphantly. ‘An enemy would have had to make two bridges before he could reach the door. The drop to the ground was about 40 feet. …’ 12He declared that Tonquedoc was the best castle he had ever seen, and felt he had somehow lessened its glory by describing it. He had brought no camera with him on this trip, and to Beeson was assigned the task of sketching. The friends enjoyed each other’s company, but inevitably they argued. Beeson thought Lawrence needlessly reckless, jumping moats instead of using bridges and clambering up walls full of loose stones. He guessed that this was not boldness so much as bravado, and this was confirmed once when he noticed Lawrence’s legs quaking in fear as he struggled to climb some perilous rocks, and offered his hand only to have it brushed aside indignantly. Beeson was an enthusiastic naturalist, and noted that Lawrence was unusual in having not even the normal schoolboy’s interest in natural history. This grew, perhaps, from a subconscious disgust he felt for the idea of reproduction, which would become more apparent in his later life, when he would regard the word ‘animal’ as a term of abuse, conjuring up the ‘beastly’ instincts of the unconscious mind. Of all things in the world, he wrote later, it was ‘animal spirits’ that he feared most. 13Lawrence nursed a grudge against Beeson for being ‘such an ass’ in slowing the pace of their cycling, but the truth may be that Beeson lacked Lawrence’s special three-speed gears, whose superiority he demonstrated proudly once on the flat sands at Erquy by covering a measured half-kilometre in thirty seconds. Even this remarkable speed did not satisfy him, though, and he dropped hints in a letter to his family about the efficacy of a motorcycle.