Sarah’s need to control and dominate her world was blind, desperate and beyond reason. Her omnipotent, omniscient exterior actually concealed a fathomless rage of doubt and pain within. Victoria Ocampo, who knew her in old age, sensed that she was a woman seething with violent passions kept tight in the straitjacket of her unbending determination. Her childhood deprivation had left her with a chronic fear of abandonment and a massive emotional vacuum, which she could fill only by draining energy, attention and reassurance from her husband and children and anyone else who came within her reach. Bob – kind, solicitous, prudish – was the first to succumb to her insatiable demand for love and attention and never managed to escape it. He adopted her fundamentalist religious philosophy, did not marry, and remained attached to her for the rest of his life. Of all her sons, he was the only one who fulfilled her ambitions, becoming a medical missionary in China, where he was joined by Sarah herself after Thomas’s death in 1919. Ocampo, who visited Sarah in the 1950s, found her confined to her bedroom by a broken leg, with Bob, himself an elderly man, occupying the room immediately below. Whenever she banged on the floor with her stick, Bob would scurry upstairs like a servant – an arrangement, Ocampo noted with amusement, that Sarah referred to as ‘convenient’.
As a child, Ned developed a terror of Sarah discovering his feelings: ‘If she knew, they would be damaged, violated, no longer mine,’ he later wrote. 18Unlike Bob, his disposition was prickly, and any pressure applied to him was likely to meet resistance. Even his teachers at school felt an instinctive recoil if they tried to push him in a way he did not wish to go. Given Sarah’s character, a clash of personalities was inevitable: ‘No trust ever existed between my mother and myself,’ he wrote later. ‘Each of us jealously guarded his or her own individuality, whenever we came together.’ 19He and Sarah were mirror-images, attracted to each other but repelled by their sameness. He was sensitive to her wishes and anxious to please her, but intensely aware that if he lifted his emotional shield, she would get in and devour his independence, just as she had devoured Bob’s. Though he was not her favourite son, she had great expectations of him, and for her he had to be perfect: brave, noble, strong, hard-working, honest, respectful, obedient and loving – a white knight, sans peur et sans reproche.Arnie revealed that it was Ned who received the lion’s share of Sarah’s beatings, and felt that his life had been permanently injured by her. Though Bob and Will were never beaten, and Arnie required only one dose, Ned’s more dogged obstinacy occasioned frequent repetition. Beneath the Biblical justifications, there lay a simple power-struggle. 20Bob was never whipped because he offered no resistance: he and his mother were ‘at one’. Ned provoked her determination to ‘break his will’. She did not succeed. In fact, she only strengthened his resolve, as with every blow he became more and more determined never to give in. He became detached from the pain and from the body which sustained punishment, but the will he developed to such an immense degree of strength became a monster with a life of its own – a serpent which would eventually suffocate his creative power. His character – no less than his elder brother’s – was ultimately to be defined by Sarah. The two elder Lawrence boys were predisposed to react to her demands in ways that were diametrically opposite – Bob by total surrender, Ned by total resistance – and both were scarred by the experience. ‘I know Ned had a real struggle to achieve spiritual – let alone physical – freedom,’ Celandine Kennington wrote. ‘He and his mother were better friends apart. When together for more than a short time [he] was constantly forced to refight his battles for mental freedom.’ 21Arnie – twelve years younger than Ned – had a similarly traumatic struggle to free himself from Sarah’s grip, but eventually succeeded by choosing a third way: he simply ‘took no notice of her’. Of the three sons who survived the war, he was the only one to marry, have a child, and lead a ‘conventional’ life.
In his later life, Lawrence paid a man named John Bruce to flog him at intervals over a period of thirteen years, and invented a complex farrago of lies to explain why such treatment was necessary. Bruce disclosed that Lawrence experienced orgasm as a result of some of these beatings. It is possible that this behaviour might have been initiated by horrific experiences during the war. On the other hand, there are clear traces of Lawrence’s masochism in his early interest in self-punishment and self-denial. As an adolescent he would fast, go without sleep, deny himself pleasure, and continually push himself on long and arduous walks and bicycle rides. He would even dive through the ice into the frozen river Cherwell on chilling winter nights. It seems likely that any trauma Lawrence suffered in the war only intensified a capacity for masochism which had been part of him since his earliest days – a capacity which emerged through his relationship with Sarah. The intolerable conflict of attraction and repulsion he experienced could only be resolved by physical punishment. Severe beatings could not make the sexual feeling go away, but they could atone for the forbidden desire. Pain thus became a means of release. As he grew up, he developed a terror of the feelings he associated with the sexual act, and was compelled to diminish his anxiety by intentionally bringing about the situation he feared: instead of fleeing awayfrom the threat, he fled towardsit: ‘When a thing is inevitable,’ he advised Charlotte Shaw years later, ‘provoke it as instantly and as fully as possible.’ 22His position was like that of the little girl who was obliged by her mother to take showers in cold water, and who, terrified by the prospect, would open the tap prior to shower-time and expose herself to the numbing water for a few moments. This act served to relieve the girl’s anxiety. She did not derive pleasure from the pain itself, but from the relief of tension it provided. All his life, Lawrence was utterly terrified of pain: ‘pain of the slightest had been my obsession and secret terror since I was a boy,’ he later wrote. 23His brother Arnie confirmed that his fear of pain was abnormal. 24By inflicting punishment on himself – by diving into freezing water, fasting, resisting sleep, pushing himself to the limits of physical endurance – he was able to preview what he most feared, and gain a kind of mastery over it. Lawrence may even have subconsciously provoked the violent clashes with his mother, in his compulsive ‘flight forwards’.
It was not only physically, but also psychically that Lawrence felt himself threatened. His mother would probe constantly into his innermost feelings, giving him a lifelong hatred of what he called ‘families and inquisitions’. He chose to protect himself against this psychical threat by emotional withdrawal – by assuming an aloofness which extended from his mother to almost every other person with whom he came into contact. Even when he was quite small he seemed to remain aloof from the ring of children, and had some unfathomable sense of sadness about him. His schoolmasters noticed that he was silent, self-possessed and inscrutable, and gave a hint of a latent power, just out of reach. 25As a young man he was difficult to know, unobtrusive, cheerful, even jocular in moments, but extremely reserved about himself. Ernest Altounyan would write that he was simply ‘impersonal’: ‘someone cleaving through life, propelled by an almost noiseless engine’. 26His need to protect his spiritual independence would emerge throughout his life in an obsession with images of siege warfare, of attack and defence: ‘I think I’m afraid of letting her get, ever so little, inside the circle of my integrity,’ he wrote of his mother, ‘and she is always hammering and sapping to come in… I always felt she was laying siege to me and would conquer if I left a chink unguarded.’ 27This image of his self as a circle or citadel of integrity recurs repeatedly. Even as a boy, he would tell his brothers an endless tale about the defence of a tower by warlike dolls against hordes of barbarous enemies, 28and the motif appears again in the study of crusader castles in Britain, France and Syria to which he devoted much of his youth, and which led to the thesis he presented for his degree. Cyril ‘Scroggs’ Beeson, who accompanied him on some of his trips around castles in France, noted that his interest was not primarily in military history but in the hearts and minds of the designers, and the extent to which history had tested their intentions. It was upon the military knowledge acquired from this study of castles that he would later found his theory of guerrilla war. So it was that the pattern forged in the dark recesses of his childhood struggle would one day spill out into the light as the strategy he would wield to brilliant success in the Arab Revolt.