Lawrence spent ten years at this school, and while a student there dreamed of freeing the Arabs from the shackles of the Ottoman Turks: ‘I fancied to sum up in my own life,’ he wrote, ‘that new Asia which inexorable time was slowly bringing upon us. The Arabs made a chivalrous appeal to my young instinct and while still at the High School in Oxford, already I thought to make them into a nation.’ 2This might seem an extraordinary premonition for a schoolboy who had never set foot in the East, yet Lawrence was acquainted with the geography, history and ethnology of the Arab lands long before he arrived there. Daily study of the Bible had made the deserts and mountains of Midian, Moab, Edom, Judah and other places almost as familiar to him as the streets of Oxford, and a remarkable little volume entitled Helps to the Study of the Bibleprovided him with up-to-date details. Between its modest covers he found surveys of the Holy Land, lists of topographical features connected with the Gospels, indices of biblical plants, flowers, mammals, reptiles, birds and fishes in their English, Latin, Hebrew and occasionally their Arabic names. As a youth he chose as school prizes two books on the history of Egypt, and later he obtained Henry Layard’s works on the excavation of ancient Nineveh. These were no stilted academic reports, but thrilling adventures which epitomized the Victorian view of the East as a place of mystery and exoticism, where fabulous cities lay buried under desert sands prowled by wandering Bedu tribes. In Layard, Lawrence discovered all the elements the East should possess: the bizarre, the sensuous, the alluring. It was an irresistible picture, and throughout his youth he was aware of the East as a parallel world, a dimension to which, in future, he might find the chance to escape.
Meanwhile, though, there was the more prosaic business of school to be attended to. Lawrence looked back on his schooldays as a time of misery, yet he proved to be a remarkably quick learner, outpacing Bob, from whose lessons he had picked up reading and writing early, as many young siblings do. He had a precocious ability with language, and knew colloquial French from his time in Brittany, as well as some Latin, which the boys had been taught by a private tutor in preparation for school. He had a retentive memory and became an unusually fast reader, able, according to his own testimony, to assimilate the core of any book within half an hour. He won two prizes during the years 1896 and 1903, and in 1904 took the Vth Form prize for Divinity, despite claiming to have left the paper unfinished so that Bob, who was still in the Vth Form, might gain first place. In the same year, he was listed eightieth in the Junior Section of the Oxford Locals examinations. Yet despite his apparent success, school did not interest him, for it did not teach him the kind of thing he wanted to know: he later wrote that it had been ‘an irrelevant and time-wasting nuisance, which I hated and contemned’. 3
One reason for this may have been that at school Lawrence felt himself a misfit among his peers. From his schooldays onwards he developed a sense of oddity which he never quite lost:’…the oddness must be bone deep,’ he wrote years later. ‘At Oxford I was odd … In officers’ messes, too, I’ve lived about as merrily as the last-hooked fish choking out its life in a boat-load of trippers.’ 4As a youth Lawrence often saw himself as a giant trapped in a dwarf’s body, and his smallness and unimpressive appearance would colour his self-concept throughout his life. In later years ‘big’ would become his favourite accolade to those he admired, and even to works of art and literature he appreciated. Although he claimed to despise organized games simply because they had rules and results, it was actually a sense of physical inadequacy which led him to reject them. ‘Never compete in anything’ became his personal motto, so impressing his youngest brother that Arnie admitted years later to having been embarrassed when Ned asked him how he had done in a race. 5Though his brothers paid lip-service to his non-competitive whim out of deference, their physical qualities overshadowed his. Will – only sixteen months younger and often compared with him – was tall, athletic, and a paragon of classical excellence. The athletic ability which later brought Will a half-blue at St John’s College was surpassed by that of his younger brother Frank, who won the Challenge Cup for Athletics while at the High School, and was three times school gymnastics champion as well as captain of football and vice-captain of cricket. Lawrence, who would later mutter darkly about the ‘sinful misery’ of games, was affronted at this apparent break in ‘family tradition’. Actually the motto ‘never compete’ was an aspect of Lawrence’s paradoxical mask which hid a nature so extremely competitive that he could not even bear to hear someone else praised without feeling diminished. Yet so low was his self-esteem that if he was directly praised he would dismiss it as undeserved. His rejection of the norms of middle-class society was an aspect of his reverse exhibitionism, and his refusal to take part in organized sport was his most overt expression of that rejection. It is perhaps difficult to conceive now that in the late Victorian-Edwardian era sporting prowess was close to Godliness, and the qualities sport was supposed to engender – ‘true grit’, ‘fair play’, ‘good form’, ‘team spirit’ and ‘decency’ – were closely tied up with the mythology of Empire. It was seriously believed in many quarters that Britain actually owed her Empire to her sport, and that the battles which had made her great had first been won ‘on the playing-fields of Eton’. The purity campaign of the late nineteenth century had led to a shift in the concept of manliness, away from moral strength to physical strength, and away from moral integrity to sexual abstention. One authority of the time defined masculinity as ‘the duty of patriotism; the moral and physical beauty of athleticism; the salutary effects of Spartan habits and discipline; the cultivation of all that is masculine and the expulsion of all that is effeminate, un-English and excessively intellectual’. 6
For much of his life, Lawrence idealized masculinity because he knew that he was not conventionally masculine himself, in spite of his great physical strength. Though many have testified that he was stronger than most people of his size and weight, his appearance as a youth gave no impression of it, and his apparent sensitivity over the issue suggests that it bothered him. In a letter to his mother from France in 1906, there is a hint of defensiveness in his insistence: ‘people here say I’m much thinner than Bob, but stronger. Still Bob’s fatness is much better than muscle in their eyes, except for Mme. Chaignon, who got a shock when she saw my biceps while bathing. She thinks I’m Hercules.’ 7During his march through Syria in 1909 he boasted of walking 120 miles in five days, then added: ‘Bob or Will will laugh … but not if they had to do it staggering and stumbling over these ghastly roads.’ 8In the several accounts we have of Lawrence’s physical fights, he invariably seems to have come off the worse – once, at school, sustaining a broken leg. He would later tell Liddell Hart that he disapproved of hand-to-hand fighting: ‘when combats came to the physical, bare hand against hand,’ he would write, ‘I was finished.’ 9The words ‘boyish’ and even ‘girlish’, which crop up with surprising frequency in descriptions of him until his last years, suggest an almost androgynous figure. As a twelve-year-old, Lawrence possessed a sensitivity rare in adolescent boys. He would delight in taking charge of baby Arnie, sometimes bathing him in an iron bath, wheeling him in his pram to the football field where his ‘manly’ classmates were engaged in ‘masculine’ sport. When the three-year-old Arnie conceived a terror of the statues in the Ashmolean Museum, Lawrence carved a face on a stone and made him smash it with a hammer to exorcize his fears. The strategy was not only effective – for Arnie later became Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge, and wrote a celebrated book on classical sculpture – but it also displayed as astonishing degree of empathy. Arnie believed that this special facility Lawrence had for seeing through the eyes of others stemmed from an inner lack of confidence, and described how he would take on the characteristics of anyone he had just seen or was about to see. Paradoxically, this shape-shifting responsiveness was one of Lawrence’s great strengths, and the quality which would later set him apart from the rigid, authoritarian generals of the war as a truly great, if unconventional leader.