Contents lists
Updated June 2012
T. E. Lawrence to Flight Lieutenant H. Norrington
Clouds Hill,
Moreton,
Dorset
20. IV. 35.
Dear N.,
In retirement there are no ranks... we are all 'have-beens' together: however you will not come to it for some years. For myself, I prefer work.
The cottage has become quiet, now: except for a beastly tit, which flutters up and down one window-pane for six hours a day. First I thought he was a bird-pressman, trying to get a story: then a narcissist, admiring his figure in the glass. Now I think he is just mad, and know him to be a nuisance. If he goes on into next week I shall open the window some day and wring his silly neck.
My time passes between swearing at him, cutting brushwood, and inventing odd jobs. No letter-writing any more, except under extreme need, and no duty. A queer lapse into uselessness, after that long-drawn series of jobs that made up my life.
Please remember me to Lorna and to Mrs N. I went to Hythe lately and scrounged a lot more screws. There was a dinghy for test, tell her!
On Wednesday I hope to meet B.G. there.
Bother that bird: he taps too regularly, and distracts me.
Yours ever
T.E.S.
| Source: | DG 868 |
| Checked: | jw/ |
| Last revised: | 7 February 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