The Melt: Aircraftman Shaw's Last Winter

Please note

This tale is narrated in 1935 by a number of voices. There is language here we should not wish to see return. It is language I remember from well into the 1980s, so let us not get too complacent. Especially not in 2020.

Ivor Randle

Foreword: T.E. Lawrence – the bones of a life

In the final quarter of the 19th century, in Ireland, Anglo-Irish gentleman Thomas Chapman created a scandal when he deserted his wife and daughters for the children’s governess, Sarah Junner. In Ireland, Wales and England over the following years, the couple raised five sons. Passionate and devoted, Thomas and Sarah were nonetheless always wary and on guard, always ready to move to another place to escape exposure of their real identities. They pretended to be a married couple, using the name Lawrence, the maiden name of Sarah’s mother. All of the sons were affected by the lurking shame as much as they were by living in a family full of love and laughter.

The second son, Thomas Edward Lawrence, born in Wales, grew up reading the great mediaeval romantic tales in a variety of languages – and playing rough games with his brothers. Receiving the education of an Edwardian gentleman, after university Thomas travelled the Middle East on archaeological studies and digs, perfecting his Arabic along with his understanding of the desert peoples. He mixed also with the international intellectuals who bustled about the region, many searching for lost civilisations in the sands, forming lifelong relationships, some more significant to his life than others.

––––––––

When the Great War began, Lawrence found himself – along with quite a few others – drafted as an officer on General Allenby’s staff, fighting a guerrilla war in the desert against Turkey’s colossal Ottoman Empire. T.E. Lawrence’s particular task was uniting Arabs against the Turks that had ruled in the area for generations. Besides occasional command of British troops and more occasional borrowing of Rolls-Royce cars – converted for military use – and their crews, Lawrence travelled the deserts mostly by camel, living among the Bedouin and leading them in raids to cut the Turks’ railway lines with explosives and to ambush scouting parties. His bare feet put him among his fellow braves, while his trademark white robes set him apart from all individual tribes.

American journalist Lowell Thomas picked up Lawrence’s story and made his own fortune with lecture tours reciting heroic tales of the English gentleman defeating the Ottoman horde with a Colt pistol (a gift from himself) and a few Arab retainers. It was Lowell Thomas who created the name Lawrence of Arabia.

––––––––

After the war, Lawrence became enmeshed in the politics of Europe’s carving up of the Middle East. He lost his fight for an Arabia divided along existing tribal lines and ruled by Arabs on the same basis. The governments of Europe created the Arabian Peninsula much as it is today, with straight borders that cut across history and invite rivalry and bloodshed. Even the prominence in the region of the House of Saud, from which family Lawrence supported the charismatic Faisl as a potential leader, was not brought about in the way Lawrence would have had it done.

––––––––

Lawrence’s fame as a hero of the British Empire did not fade, bringing him into regular contact and communication with many leading figures of the day, including royalty (side note: Edward VIII, when he was Prince of Wales, was known by his proper name of David...)  Lawrence sought refuge from fame first – and very briefly – in the RAF, then in the Tank Corps, both under the name Ross, then the RAF again for a more successful time with the name Shaw. All of these stints in the most modern sections of the British armed forces were at basic ranks, as a private in the Tank Corps and A/C (aircraftman, ground crew – a plonk) in the RAF. In the RAF, Aircraftman Shaw was involved in many technical projects, including dirigibles (the preference for fixed wing aircraft over balloons was not a done deal until into the 1930s) and was instrumental in developing the high speed rescue boats that would save so many lives during and after World War II. At Bridlington he worked on the development of a target boat for training naval gun crews. It is perhaps ironic that it was the powerful friends Lawrence’s fame brought him who pulled the strings required for his change of identity and ability to hide from that fame: and like his family throughout his childhood, when his real name was discovered, it was time to move on.

––––––––

Early in 1935, after finishing his final posting in Bridlington, Yorkshire, as A/C Shaw, Lawrence retired to Clouds Hill, his cottage and refuge in the woods in Dorset. He died after a motorcycle crash on a wet road in Dorset later that year.

The Melt: Aircraftman Shaw’s Last Winter

It is 1935. I am cold and wet.

This secret

Take a secret from me. The most mundane statistics I hold close. Ask me if I take sugar with my tea and I will pause to recall if you have asked before and the answer I chose to give that time. When I offer a secret, grasp it. It is treasure. Worthless, pitiful cheap in all practical measure. But rhodium rare.

––––––––

My acts, my count in war, are not secrets. Those are mere equations for calculation and comparison. A reckoning of odds in which the Woodbine drawing old soaks of academic study and military lore, in tweed jackets or braided crisp tunics, predict and dissect the outcomes of confrontations. Meanwhile, far beyond their crusted windows, fate uncurls itself and decisions made around a singing fire raise a shabby tribe to divinity and strangle a just nation in the wet, screaming moments of its first breath.

––––––––

My heart is no secret, bears no secret. It is an empty tomb whose outer walls, in more languages than Rosetta’s stone, make plain the void within. And still men chip and push at the rock held fast upon the entrance. Frightful ladies who consider themselves Of Society offer salves of their knowing flesh; and manly Bathshebas in workmen’s overalls and severe hair stand beside me, stiff and bold, posing for cameras that are not present.

My heart, that tomb. Built with no great resilience and emptied fully, raked out with the thoroughness of the crematorium keeper. By means of a tinkling laugh over tea and a tray of cakes.

––––––––

The secret, the true ranging secret I offer to you, is this telling of one short instance in my life. Those academics will not know of it, the romanticists will never be privy to it.

What if it were it to be gathered, this running slew of my rememberings, dropped and scattered now amid the dark damp trees? Were it collected, collated and committed to linear numbered pages, then I would wish those pages into the fires where we planned and schemed to gain what we knew was ice in the sun. Call those fires, now residing in a dusty cottage grate a mile from where I lie, to take it all in their searing embrace. To blacken. To have been ashes. And in ashes contain me truly as my words never shall.

––––––––

First I will give you a moment in the desert. It is my letter of confidence, without which I am some uninteresting stranger you have happened upon. I have chosen the moment to give you and it is a moment not recorded elsewhere. It has no special merit, but my only true heroism is a blunt refusal to bore you with repetition.

––––––––

1918. Our adversary, the Great Turk, was in retreat. Retreat is a brutal war of its own, a war upon honour, sobriety and planning. An enemy in retreat is not a victory, it is an infection. To not follow and harry them as they run is a retreat of your own, contracted from them like a bacterium. To charge their rearguard, to flank them and cut in at their fleeing column induces that same chaotic rush to movement as burns in them; it is impossible to plan and exhausting to maintain. When your enemy is in retreat their disorder becomes your disorder, or else their cowardice you mirror with your own inactivity. You are infected. Retreat is a contagion that rages across both armies and benefits neither, until finally one or the other falls, spent of life, upon the dirt.

––––––––

We came to a village, my troupe of Arab fighters and me, a village substantial and hewn from stone. Smoke dappled the dead who lay strewn around, caressed the living who moved among the dead. Lined along the street-side wall of the longest house were the few stragglers of the enemy force, too slow to leave, not through being debauched on destruction and rape and slaughter, but through being the weak and the ill that would slow their fellows in their panicked run to the sea. They had been left so that the Arab might unleash vengeance in slow, shredding death. What cheap novellas would call a lingering death - but it is the killer who lingers, and I would not have us linger. I was in the rage of my enemy’s retreat and I would shatter myself upon their disintegrating ranks before I let them think they had the safety of a precious minute to close their eyes in respite.

Divide their heads I said, with a careless gesture of separating my hands.

As I walked the length of that wall, I heard at every third pace the crack of the Ross rifle behind me, a gift for my band from an American.

––––––––

Allow me an indulgence, and a service to yourself. Let me look around this scene and find for you a better guide, spare myself the dull repetition – ever the coward as I am – of something I have experienced in full flesh and shades of memory. Give you a precious minute of respite by a fire and hearing a tale.

There is a man who sits and watches us. We are moving across his view and therefore we draw his one good eye. His flesh is the colour of English toffee and the consistency of American fudge. It sits upon his face in folds demarked by tracks of deep shadow. The long stick he holds speaks of many straight lines walked between wells, and the ease with which he emerges from the grey sand says his bottom and the Earth we live on have had many, many hours of amiable association. Such a man will tell.

Father of Men. Dear. Continue for me, if you would.

––––––––

The Turks had lived peacefully in our village, though they’d sent our young men away to work elsewhere. When the fighting