Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer. Alexander Maitland

child Thesiger had ruled over his younger brothers, even using them as punchbags after he learnt to box. The ‘fagging’ system at Eton encouraged his thuggish behaviour, which was tolerated only by friends who realised that he had a gentler side, which he kept hidden for fear of diluting his macho image. It was characteristic of him, from his mid-twenties onward, that he would choose ‘retainers’ younger than himself, over whom he exerted an authority reinforced by the difference between their ages, as well as by his dominating personality and his position or status – for example, as an Assistant District Commissioner in the Sudan, and in Syria an army major ranked as second-in-command of the Druze Legion. In contrast, Thesiger’s relationships with his older followers were seldom as close or as meaningful. The same applied to his young companions in Arabia and Iraq after they became middle-aged and, in due course, elderly men. Thesiger reflected: ‘I don’t know why it was. They were just different. We had travelled together in the desert and shared the hardships and danger of that life. When I saw them again, thirty years later, they lived in houses with radios and instead of riding camels they drove about in cars. The youngsters I remembered had grey beards. They seemed pleased to see me again, and I was pleased to see them; but something had gone…the feeling of intimacy, and a sense of the hardships that once bound us together.’¹⁸

      At the Legation, Thesiger’s parents encouraged the children to play with pet animals, including a tame antelope, two dogs and a ‘toto’ monkey his mother named Moses. Kathleen wrote: ‘Altho’ we kept [Moses] chained to his box at times, we very often let him go and then he would rush away and climb to the nearest tree top, only to jump unexpectedly from a high branch on to my shoulder with unerring aim. Every official in the Legation loved my Moses and he was so small that they could carry him about in their pockets. He was accorded the freedom of the drawing room [in the new Legation] and I must confess that I still have many books in torn bindings [which] tell the tale.’¹⁹

      Thesiger remembered Moses and the tiny antelope wistfully, with an amused affection. He commented in My Kenya Days: ‘My father kept no dogs in the Legation,’²⁰ but this was a lapse of memory. Later he remembered: ‘Our first dog in Addis Ababa was called Jock. The next dog had to be got rid of because Hugh Dodds [one of Wilfred Gilbert’s Consuls] thought it was dangerous. This was about 1916…As a child, I was afraid of nothing but spiders…When we were at The Milebrook, the first dog I owned was a golden cocker spaniel, and it died of distemper. I had only had the dog for about a year.’²¹

      In The Life of My Choice Thesiger pictured his childhood at Addis Ababa against a background of Abyssinia in turmoil. This was the chaotic legacy of the Emperor Menelik’s paralysing illness and his heir Lij Yasu’s blood-lust, incompetence and apostasy of Islam. The turbulent decade from 1910 to 1919 gave the early years of Thesiger’s life story romance and power, and enhanced the significance of his childhood as a crucial influence upon ‘everything that followed’.²² As a small boy he was no doubt aware of events he described seventy years later in The Life of My Choice, however remote and incomprehensible they must have appeared at the time. In reality his life at Addis Ababa had little to do with the Legation’s surroundings – except for its landscapes, including the hills (Entoto, Wochercher and Fantali) and the plain where Billy and Brian rode their ponies and went on camping trips every year with their parents. On these memorable outings Mary Buckle, a children’s nurse from Abingdon in Oxfordshire, accompanied the family. Mary, known to everyone as ‘Minna’, had been engaged in 1911 to look after Brian. Thesiger wrote in 1987: ‘She was eighteen and had never been out of England, yet she unhesitatingly set off for a remote and savage country in Africa. She gave us unfailing devotion and became an essential part of our family.’²³ Just as he idealised his father and mother, Thesiger idealised Minna, whom he admired as brave, selfless and indispensable. He wrote affectionately in The Life of My Choice: ‘Now, after more than seventy years, she is still my cherished friend and confidante, the one person left with shared memories of those far-off days.’²⁴ This statement was literally true. Thesiger, a confirmed bachelor, respected strong-willed, practical women, mother figures whose common sense and devotion tempered their undisputed authority. Thesiger’s occasional travelling companion and close friend Lady Egremont later remembered visiting Minna with him at Witney in Oxfordshire. She watched as he smoothed his hair and straightened his tie, ‘like a twelve-year-old schoolboy on his best behaviour’,²⁵ as they waited for Minna to open her front door.

      Every morning after breakfast, Billy and Brian would find their ponies saddled and waiting with Habta Wold, the Legation syce (the servant who looked after the horses), who usually accompanied them. The boys had learnt to ride by the time they were four. They rode most mornings, and sometimes again in the afternoon. On a steep hillside five hundred feet above the Legation there was a grotto cut into the rock. From there Billy and Brian had tremendous views, to the north over Salale province and the Blue Nile gorges, southward to the far-off Arussi mountains. There, one day, Billy would follow in his father’s footsteps and hunt the mountain nyala, a majestic antelope with lyre-shaped horns. Aged four, he had been photographed with a fine nyala trophy head.

      After their morning ride Billy and Brian did schoolwork, which consisted of reading, writing and arithmetic; sometimes they drilled with the Legation’s guard. After lunch they rode again or tried to shoot birds in the garden with their ‘Daisy’ airguns. Thesiger wrote: ‘Had it not been for the First World War I might have been sent to school in England, separated indefinitely from my parents, as was the fate of so many English children whose fathers served in India or elsewhere in the East. I must have had some lessons at the Legation, though I have no recollection of them, for I learnt to read and write.’²⁶ The idea of very small children being sent away to school did not appeal to Thesiger, who spoke out strongly against it; but he approved of preparatory boarding schools and, of course, segregated public schools, for older children.

      Because he was so obviously fond of children – and, indeed, very good with little girls and boys – he was often asked why he had never married and had a family of his own. In his autobiography, the phrase The Life of My Choice, selected for the book’s title, occurs in a paragraph where Thesiger affirms his attitudes to marriage and other ‘commonly accepted pleasures of life’. He wrote: ‘I have never set much store by them. I hardly care what I eat, provided it suffices, and I care not at all for wine or spirits. When I was fourteen someone gave me a glass of beer, and I thought it so unpleasant I have never touched beer again. As for cigarettes, I dislike even being in a room where people are smoking. Sex has been of no great consequence to me, and the celibacy of desert life left me untroubled. Marriage would certainly have been a crippling handicap. I have therefore been able to lead the life of my choice with no sense of deprivation.’²⁷ He later added: ‘The Life of My Choice was the right title for the book I wrote about myself. It gave you everything. I had lived as I wanted, gone where I wanted, when I wanted. I travelled among peoples that interested me. My companions were those individuals I wanted to have with me.’²⁸

      Thesiger’s impossible dream had been to preserve the near-idyllic life he had known as a boy in Abyssinia. He viewed change dismally, as a threat to the tribal peoples he admired, and to himself as a self-confessed traditionalist and romantic who ‘cherished the past, felt out of step with the present and dreaded the future’.²⁹ Such a reactionary outlook had been doomed from the start, and Thesiger knew it. And, of course, without a sword of Damocles hanging over it, the life he dreamt of would have been spared the impending threat of corrosive change, perhaps of annihilation – a fate later exemplified by the destruction of the marshes in southern Iraq. He took an aggressive pride in being the