Aldington and T.E. Lawrence

A Work in Progress 
3

Richard Aldington published his book debunking T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, in 1955, a year after my father died, when I was ten.  I had a job delivering newspapers in the morning then and already an avid reader of Atticus in the Daily Mirror and familiar with the headlines on the front pages of the Daily Mail, The Sketch, and The Telegraph.  If anybody took The Times, it would have been Dr. Bronowski, a notable customer on my Camberwell, South London route who lived where Knatchbull Road intersected McDowall Road and whose address was the first delivery on my route.

I went to the newsagents early each morning to pick up the stack of newspapers I'd carry in a sack slung from on my shoulder.  Sometimes, I'd wait while the newsagent finished assembling my deliveries, marking the address on each newspaper and I'd have time to read the headlines on the papers for sale spread out on the counter. Aldington’s revelations were headline news.  The dead hero Lawrence of Arabia was a legend.  Schoolboys my age knew of him.  Winston Churchill was one of his biggest admirers.  Aldington pulled Lawrence off his pedestal and among other revelations exposed him as a likely homosexual, at a time, 1955, when homosexuality could be cause for imprisonment.  This generated much newspaper commentary but also aired the topic of homosexuality, something I'd been unaware of until that morning my mother got into a discussion about the news about Lawrence with our next-door neighbor and abruptly changed the subject when our neighbor, a French lady, said that she didn't think homosexuality should be a crime.  My ten-year old ears perked up.  I already had a vague notion to beware of men hanging about near public toilets. Was that what it was called?  Once, when I was smaller, I’d gone into a public toilet in a public park and a man had wanted to help me undo my zip.  

When in my teenage years I started reading the literary pages and came across mention of Aldington as a poet, I remembered his name because of that controversy.  H.D. was not in vogue in those days.  That she and Aldington had once been passionate lovers totally escaped me.  I was already desperately in love with a girl who lived in a house that took the Daily Sketch.  And I had discovered T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and suddenly realized I would write poetry.

When Glenn Hughes gave his lecture in 1958, after the April release of Ezra Pound, I was almost fourteen, working a paper round I'd taken over from Philip, my older brother.   He was three years older than I and he had preceded me at school where I had many of the same teachers.  His name was on the Honors Board.  Our father had been a soldier.  We had his regimental book on the history of his regiment.  He'd written inside the flyleaf a very short history of his jobs before joining the Army.  He'd once been fired from a factory in Dagenham for fighting.  Besides his book there was a sharpshooter's medal from Bisley.  There were boars’ tusks and brass trays brought back from India where he'd once served.  He'd been at Dunkirk.  All we knew of the war was that he'd been in the rearguard and that he'd come home from France on a sailboat.  My brother was conceived after Dunkirk.  Then my father fought in North Africa where he was blown up by a mine in Tunisia, lost the sight of an eye and had to wear a special boot on his left foot thereafter.

I remember walking beside my father one morning.  I was five or six years old.  It's the only time I remember walking with him.  He was easy to keep up with.  He had been in the Royal Fusiliers (City of London) Regiment.  He may have had a walking stick.  I remember him telling me to keep on his left side where he could see me as we crossed the road.  We were going to the lock-up garage that he had just rented in preparation for buying a car before he learned his injuries denied him a driving license.  He'd been on the garage waiting list for ages.  We already had a motorcycle with a sidecar.  That was kept in a railed-off archway under the railway lines near Camberwell Green.  When the Southern Rail trains passed overhead there was a terrific rumbling sound.  I saw a big rat there once.  The rented garage was closer about a half mile from where we lived.  There were several bombsites from the war, where houses had been demolished, along the way.  

Our route took us past an Army barracks.   The main gate was some way from the busy main road.  A detachment of soldiers marching in rows suddenly came into sight going towards the barracks.  They were marching in the road carrying a flag.  Not the Union Jack but a regimental flag.  My father stopped as the soldiers passed, faced the road and stood to attention, taking off his hat as the flag passed by.  Other people just kept on walking.  An officer appreciated my father's gesture.  He called out something like:

  "Thank you, sir.  It's good to see someone showing respect."

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

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