T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 258

To Mr. Albert Hall, Birmingham, (late A/c. R.A.F.) Osone Hotel Bridlington 1.9.35 Dear Brum Back again, and the photos here. Thank you very much for them. I call them pretty good. We are as fundamental, as I'm Winston sides, a local "the s.p. who has just caught you in the Bricklayers' Arms. Anyhow there can't be any row hereafter if I ... shortarse, and there is bad as that, I had no idea I was so tall and thin and hard looking. If you see the damsel who took them, please thank her from me for painting my face so smooth. She has done us both good. For you aren't (in real life) much more of a butterfly ... than myself. Ask your wife for her candid opinion of us as beauty chorus. How did Aston Villa do tomorrow ? I'd hoped to send you some tool-money, but the luck is still dead out. Wait a bit, before you get anything. Please. It might be another fortnight before publication, send me my credits. It is not easy to arrange that sort of thing by post, when you don't know the pay bloke you are waiting ... Meanwhile I've been having a dust-up with the Chief Constable of your town. Mrs. Jennings (may) kept on writing me letters, calling me Jim and begging me to go back to her and all would be forgiven. I answered the first one, ... that I wasn't her Jim and didn't know her from Eve, but she went on writing about there's next, from a place called King's Heath. So finally after about two years of it, I wrote to your Chief Copper and asked if as a favour he'd send an officer to ask her to abate her nuisance. I asked him to do it gently, because I thought the poor woman was mad.