Contents lists
Updated June 2012
T. E. Lawrence to R. V. Buxton
[Karachi]
10.5.28.
Karachi has been bad, lately: and I have asked Sir Geoffrey Salmond to take me away to some squadron up-country. It's not our Section Officers who are concerned. I like the puzzled honesty of F/Lt. Angell, my immediate C.O.: and he is very decent to me. But higher up they panic, apparently, over my mere existence in their camp.
Moving is no fun. For nearly a month the new camp gapes at me, expecting me to belie my ordinary shape by doing something extraordinary: and I grow red all over, and my spine trickles damply. I know it is silly: but people's eye-sight tickles one's skin nearly as perceptibly as their fingers or their breath would tickle. And scrutiny at such defencelessly close-quarters as our barrack-life imposes, hurts a good deal.
Also the beginning again from the bottom to make onself a nest in people's estimation is tiring. And I have to leave behind my books, and the electric bath-heater which I've been able to rig up out of local material and ingenuity. It was a good bath-heater: gave me 14 gallons of bath-hot water in a half-hour, for the cost of a unit of electric current. I have had two baths every day this financial year. Hot water is very near Heaven. You know Karachi is a chilly place. [90 lines omitted]
| Source: | DG 607 |
| Checked: | dn/ |
| Last revised: | 14 January 2006 |
T. E. Lawrence chronology
1888 16 August: born at Tremadoc, Wales
1896-1907: City of Oxford High School for Boys
1907-9: Jesus College, Oxford, B.A., 1st Class Hons, 1909
1910-14: Magdalen College, Oxford (Senior Demy), while working at the British Museum's excavations at Carchemish
1915-16: Military Intelligence Dept, Cairo
1916-18: Liaison Officer with the Arab Revolt
1919: Attended the Paris Peace Conference
1919-22: wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1921-2: Adviser on Arab Affairs to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office
1922 August: Enlisted in the Ranks of the RAF
1923 January: discharged from the RAF
1923 March: enlisted in the Tank Corps
1923: translated a French novel, The Forest Giant
1924-6: prepared the subscribers' abridgement of Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1927-8: stationed at Karachi, then Miranshah
1927 March: Revolt in the Desert, an abridgement of Seven Pillars, published
1928: completed The Mint, began translating Homer's Odyssey
1929-33: stationed at Plymouth
1931: started working on RAF boats
1932: his translation of the Odyssey published
1933-5: attached to MAEE, Felixstowe
1935 February: retired from the RAF
1935 19 May: died from injuries received in a motor-cycle crash on 13 May
1935 21 May: buried at Moreton, Dorset