T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 225

To Mrs. Fontena, "Ancamoen", Brading, I.o.w. 13 Birmingham St Southampton 17.V.34 Yes, I'm tired. So would you be if you had been thinking for months how to better so vague and intractable a thing as a boat. The mere driving them at 30 m.p.h. into the wind and spray is work. No matter. On March 12 next my service ends .... and Claude Hill is a hushed green place, noisy with birds only, and fertile only with weeds. There are 1200 books there (not first editions, but "all" read once at least, and worth reading again) and 400 gramophone records. "No books before 1850 and no music since" I say at rash moments; but it isn't true. Yet they are in the main recent books and old music. Gays was no trouble; but I don't like to be thought snobby to my "friends" friends. Had I been in Hythe I would have done anything I could. Of course you'll see how it is; the office girls are thrilled at the thought of me, the modest hero, dodging the vulgar pressmen and busybody. So they make a game of mystifying strangers who ask after me. I had been in Wolverhampton for weeks, probably, when he came -- but they wouldn't let on. Bother their silly kindly impudence! E.A. is, as you say, not negligible; but this fit of his is out of balance. I hope he may get out of it without shock or hurt. His last letter was sensible. I destroyed the poem, regretfully. It had a tart beauty, like a pickled walnut. Hooray, I have no aged aunts. You must, some fine season next year, slip over to the mainland by some steamer, warning me to pick you up on the back of my motor-bike -- Bournemouth, Lulworth, Swanage, Weymouth, some such place -- and whirl you off to my cottage: it is like well-water tasteless, yet satisfying to me. I'm sorry about Violet Clifton. I admired her public act of worship towards her husband. She was not a snit. I thought .... but he definitely was. A typically ouabrous and cracking ass of an Englishman. I found it rather admirable that she never saw through him. Poor! That's