T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 546

COPY. A.C.T. SHAW. Room - 225 R.A.F. Drigh Road, Karachi, India. 10 - VIII - 27. Dear Islam, Last week and this week your two very good letters came to me. It is most kind of you. Will comment on the second:- No. I enlisted before there was any question of a de luxe edition of whatever my real name is. This was owed to another debt, not of my making, but of my inheriting. That was cosmic justice. That I had no share in making just what I had no share in spending. That was a long tie: six per. I ran right out of money in April 1922, and went along with great difficulty till August, when I remustered let me into the Royal Air Force. My capital then was fifteen bob, and I'd been haltered for years. I've signed for twelve years: and should be discharged in 1936. My de-luxe edition was financed by a banker friend of mine, to whom I had security of its original pictures, its subscriptions, and the title deeds of some land I have in Essex. (Annual value of land - £30 a year, which mostly goes in rates: - total value £1000 or more. As building land - I do not want it built over). Total cost of the Seven Pillars was £13,400 of which £2,800 was covered as above. Balance of £7000 has been met by the sale of Revolt in the Desert through Doran and Sons. The whole liability is now discharged, and I owe nobody anything. Yes, I hate the East. It holds bad memories for me: and I am old enough to grudge my spending more years away from England where only I feel at home. This is my fifteenth year abroad. Yet I had to ask the R.A.F. to put me on foreign draft, since the personal publicity unavoidable in connection with the sale of "Revolt in the Desert" would have rendered my life intolerable and my presence a cursed nuisance to my C.O. in any aero in England. I am exiled: that is before: until the rum of my service has died down in the Press. The R.A.F. will let me come here in 1937: and it will not be safe for me to return before. So actually I'd be no better off as a free agent. In England I found life in the R.A.F. not at all bad, after I got used to the rather bare conditions, and the excessive number of rules. This foreign spell is ended, and I get home again, I shall be quite happy. Revolt in the Desert has sold enormously, and made me a small fortune. I expected a deed by which its first receipts paid off my 390