T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 668

CH 9/3 And A.C.B. Shaw Room 2 2 1 3 De La Warr Road Bexhill Sussex 10. viii. 57 Dear Ashen Last week and this week your two very good letters came to me. It is most kind of you. I'll comment on the second:- No. I enlisted before there was any question of a de luxe edition of my war-book. My "patrimony" was spent over another dish, not of my making, but of my inheriting. Not the '... jinx' as some think; it had no share in making just what what line-had no share in spending; that has been a long now. I ran right out of money in April 1942, and went sick. Struggling on in difficulty till August, when Trenchard ... me into the Royal Air Forces Hospital. Even that fifteen pounds, I'd been half-fed for weeks. I've signed for twelve years; and should be discharged in 1960. My de-luxe edition was financed by a banker friend of mine, to whom I gave security of the principal pictures, the subscriptions, and the title deeds of some land I have in ..., "Annual" return of about £50 a year, which mostly goes in rates; Capital Value '7,000 of more. As building land, I do not want it built over). Total cost of the Seven Pillars was £18,000; of which £8,000 was covered as above. Balance of £7,000 has been met by the sale of Revolt in the Desert, Doran and Cape. The whole liability is now discharged, by (word crossed out) owe nobody anything. Yes, I hate the Last. 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. Yet for my fifteenth year abroad, Yet I had to ask the R.A.F. to put me on "further since the personal publicity unavoidable in connection with the sale, etc. there, is the last thing a mould have rendered my life intolerable, and my presence a cursed nuisance to anybody, in any camp in England. I am exiled, therefore, until the war or Censorship dictates to the R.A.F. The R.A.F. will not go home in 1960: and it will not be safe for me to return before. So actually I'd be no better off as a free Agent.