ful housewife, a woman of character and keen intelligence, with iron
decision and charming, when she wished.

The father's family seemed unconscious of his sons, even when
after his death recognition of their achievement might have done
honour to the name. The five brothers, accordingly, were brought
up to be self-sufficient, and were sufficient till the war struck away
two and left in their sequence gaps in age that were overwide for
sympathy to cross. Then their loneliness seemed to rankle, sometimes.
To friends who wondered aloud how he could endure the company
of the barrack-room and its bareness T.E. might retort, almost fiercely,
that he had gone back to his boyhood class and was at home. "The
fellows" were his--but this declaration of birthright seemed to strain
the truth.

Once when I remarked this he replied--"not perhaps as much as
you feel. I can be on terms with scholars, or writing people, or
painters or politicians; but equally I am happy with bus conductors,
fitters or plain workmen: anybody with a trade or calling. And all
such classes are at home with me, though I fancy none would call me
'one of them.' Perhaps my upbringing and adventures--and way of
thinking--have bereft me of class. Only the leisured make me un-
comfortable, as I cannot play or pass time."

His first eight years were wandering-- Scotland, the Isle of Man,
Brittany, the Channel Islands, Hampshire. Eventually, the family's
migrations brought them to Oxford, for reasons of education. T.E.
arrived there with a child's lip-knowledge of French, and a fund of
book learning. He had learnt his letters through hearing his eldest
brother taught them, and in his fourth year was reading newspapers
and books. Latin at six, through private tuition, and then at eight
began his attendance at the City of Oxford School, a day-school small
in numbers and low in fees. The fees he made lower for himself from
the age of twelve upwards, by winning scholarships in a series that
covered his tuition till he had taken his degree at the University.

"School," he said later, "was an irrelevant and time-wasting
nuisance, which I hated and contemned." Here he shared the ex-
perience of most men of original minds. His career was yet another
example of the truth that self-education is the only form of education.
Formal lessons were small beer against his private reading, which
had already ranged relatively far and wide in the three languages he

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