T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 492

To Hogarth Rex Ingram wrote me from Nice. He is all right: has a complete copy. Pike sent him an incomplete as well, the surplus. 7.VII.27 I'm writing to Eliot about the idea of stopping the English sale of the (Seven Pillars, a deleted) Revolt. He will probably show you, or send you my letter. The alternative to stopping it is a With the Seven Pillars at £400 my complete story is quite safe. Nobody will ever see it. Most of the owners I hear from are in- suring it, or sending it to their bank or strong rooms. In fact copies that do come into the market will go to the States, where my fancy price of 20000 dollars for a complete edition artificial- ly keeps up the pride of possessing a copy. All this means £400 is too high. I'd be glad to see it drop to £150 or so. There are no Doughty letters at Clouds Hill. I cleared all Writers papers out of the house there on my last visit. It is now let, for 12/- a week, to ten tenants who take a floor of it each, for week-ending. You never saw Clouds Hill, I think? A tiny brick cottage, with old tiled roof, very high pitched. It stands in a thicket of laurel and rhododendron, with oak trees and a huge ilex stretching arms over its roof. "Rent" free for the cottage dates from pre-campagnes days, and the trees drip great pailfuls on the roof for hours after each storm. They patter across the tiles like the first notes of the 7th. Symphony. Only two rooms, the upstairs, of the cottage, are habitable. They have three-foot walls, and nine-foot roofs, all open. A great deal of oak and chestnut, on show: but a chalky ceiling in one room had to be is ... which we groaned to bring it to an ancient colour. My sole Hazzan ... paid the repair-bill, and left something over for furnishing. I wish I were within reach of that cottage now. This place is dismal: no bright sun, and no heat: only a cloud of sand-filmed paleness of sunlight, and con- stant salty breezes from the seven-miles distant sea. An East- bourne, in fact. I think that war period must have tuned me to fit real heat: for here I am always chilled and snatching colds. Of course it may be partly the change from Cranwell, where I worked hard, in the hangar and on my Seven Pillars, and rode hard on Boanerges in any spare daylight. Here we have only 5 hours work a day, on a dawn ... week; and my spare time exhausts itself in wandering slowly about camp or aerodrome. I haven't been outside the camp yet, and probably won't, for I got a letter from Trenchard lately which gives me back the full he used to come when Revolt has died away, say in the spring of 1930. Robert Graves' book Will put people off the legend of me, and if there is not a cheap reprint in 1929 Revolt will be old history by then. It might