The Mint
by T.E. Lawrence
1955

Thomas Edward Lawrence is best known as "Lawrence of Arabia." His other, more famous book - about his time in the Middle East during the First World War - was Seven Pillars of Wisdom. David Lean and Peter O'Toole brought that period of his life to film in "Lawrence of Arabia," one of the most famous films ever made. But Lawrence himself found that being famous, you were pursued and hounded in your home country to do more great things. His rather unusual choice to avoid these pressures was to enroll in the Royal Air Force in 1922, under a false name ("John Hulme Ross," the original book was published with the author name "A/c Ross"), at the age of 33 or 34. Several copies of Seven Pillars of Wisdom are available through Toronto Public Library, but the copy of The Mint I received is the last circulating copy. There are two reference copies at Toronto Reference Library.

I cannot explain the title of the book, as Lawrence never mentions the term in the text. My best guess is that the time he details in training "mints" new airmen. The full title of the reference copy of the book is The Mint, A Day-book of the R.A.F. Depot Between August and December 1922 although that extra text appears nowhere on the edition I read.

The language Lawrence uses in writing this book is very of its time. It varies between proper 1922 English and highly time-and-place-specific slang. He uses words like "oolite" (a form of limestone) and "refulgent" ("shining brightly") that are proper English, but which no one uses or knows in 2023. And he's fine with including all the crudest expressions of military men - although good luck translating the slang they invented in their barracks into modern English. "Blanket drill" is slang for "masturbation," which I managed to translate because there was a fair bit of context. Many of the other terms he uses without explanation or even context.

An example of his writing (and thought processes): "The moon looked on, while I fitted words to what we saw. My vacant eyesight normally sees little: so when anything does get through the mind's preoccupation, at once I try to fix its form in phrases. Tonight I was fortunate, for one end of my beat turned by the alarm-lamp of the fire-station. I used its glow-light to note down the word or group of words which my mind and boots had hammered out on the patrol."

The writing is very episodic: he usually wrote in the evenings, and the many short chapters are each an event or observation during his time in the Air Force.

As I mentioned, Lawrence would have been 33 or 34 when he joined up - quite old compared to the other recruits. A couple other things that really stood out to me were his height and his malaria. Presumably he contracted malaria in the Middle East: he doesn't bother to mention it until about half way through the book, but occasionally when they worked the recruits particularly hard on a given day, it would cause a recurrence of the disease and he'd be left shaking and sweating in fever for hours after. Lawrence never mentions his height directly, but again from context it's fairly clear he's a not particularly tall - I'd put him at 5'5" or 5'6", although I have no grounds for that (there was almost certainly a minimum height at the recruiting centre, but I don't know what that was at the time in the U.K.). I mention this because Peter O'Toole who played him in "Lawrence of Arabia" was 6'2" (O'Toole was the right age, but the wrong height). You may think "that's not important," but I think it is: having a commanding presence as Lawrence apparently did in the Middle East is somewhat easier if you also have commanding height. And conversely it's a bit harder if you don't have the height. (Although I'm living proof that being 6'2" doesn't necessarily give you a commanding presence.)

In one of the last chapters, he gives us three or four pages on the pleasures of riding "Boanerges" (go look the name up - it says something about the man, although he barely mentions religion in the rest of the book), his Brough Superior motorcycle. It's a bit depressing knowing that he died in 1935 as a result of a motorcycle accident - but not too surprising when he proudly mentions hitting 100 miles per hour on British back roads.

One final thing the book convinced me of: the military, and military recruits everywhere, in any century, are always exactly the same. Although Lawrence himself thought his training here was different from his wartime service - I would argue the differences were A) yes, it was wartime so they got you into service faster, and B) his age and life experience - he changed a lot more than the military did.

I chose to read this book partly because I have a long-standing interest in flying (the book turns out to have nothing to do with that), and in part because I found it so extraordinary that someone so famous should choose to decline all public honours and retreat into an anonymous private life - particularly such a difficult one, although he did appear to be happy with it in the end. I found Lawrence's writing style more "unusual" than "good," and this hasn't inspired me to read Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It was interesting and worth reading though, if you're interested in the British military of the period or Lawrence himself.