Thesiger’s father and mother were supremely important figures during his early childhood, and took pride of place in his idealised (and romanticised) memories of those halcyon days. He wrote of his father: ‘Inevitably at Addis Ababa he was busy for most of the day, writing his despatches, interviewing people or visiting his colleagues in the other Legations…it was perhaps in the camp where we went each year from the Legation for an eagerly awaited ten days that I remember him most vividly. I can picture him now, a tall lean figure in a helmet, smoking his pipe as he watched the horses being saddled or inspected them while they were being fed; I can see him cleaning his rifle in the verandah of his tent, or sitting chatting with my mother by the fire in the evening.’31
The camp’s setting was remote, perfect: ‘an enchanted spot, tucked away in the Entoto hills. A stream tumbled down the cliff opposite our tents, then flowed away through a jumble of rocks among a grove of trees. Here were all sorts of birds: top-heavy hornbills, touracos with crimson wings, brilliant bee-eaters, sunbirds, paradise flycatchers, hoopoes, golden weaver birds and many others. My father knew them all and taught me their names. Vultures nested in the cliffs and circled in slow spirals above the camp. I used to watch them through his field glasses, and the baboons that processed along the cliff tops, the babies clinging to their mothers’ backs. At night we sometimes heard their frenzied barking when a leopard disturbed them. Several times I went up the valley with my father in the evening and sat with him behind a rock, hoping he would get a shot at the leopard. I remember once a large white-tailed mongoose scuttled past within a few feet of us.’32
Thesiger’s lifelong interest in ornithology dated from visits to this ‘enchanted’ enclave among the hills. As a boy he continued to shoot birds, and went on shooting them for sport and scientific study; but from then on he began to see and to recognise birds not as mere targets, but as living things that were fascinating as well as beautiful. The juvenile diaries he kept in Wales and Scotland between 1922 and 1933 contain detailed observations on local birdlife. During his Danakil expedition in 1933-34, Thesiger shot and preserved no fewer than 872 bird specimens, comprising 192 species, and three sub-species new to science which were named after him.
The chubby, smiling baby grew up as an extremely good-looking if rather sombre child who, his father noted, seemed very shy in the company of adults other than his parents.33 As a boy of six he had thick brown hair tinted with his mother’s auburn, and large, expressive eyes. His mouth, like Kathleen’s, was wide, with small, slightly uneven teeth shielded by a long upper lip (like Wilfred Gilbert’s) which were hardly seen except when he was speaking energetically or laughing. In those days his nose was long and quite straight. Only after being broken three times did it acquire the misshapen, craggy character that led his oldest friend, John Verney, to describe him as ‘a splendid pinnacle knocked off the top of a Dolomite’34 Although they went about protected from the hot sun by large sola topees, Billy and Brian must have had permanent tans which no doubt set them apart as creatures secretly to be envied by the pale-skinned little boys at their English preparatory school. The healthy outdoor life they led made the brothers fit and strong, with muscular arms and legs, and without an ounce of spare flesh on their lean brown bodies.
The Emperor designate, Lij Yasu, was one of three Abyssinian boys who, then and later, played roles of varying significance in Thesiger’s life. The other two were Asfa Wossen, the baby son of Ras Tafari, Abyssinia’s Regent after 1916 and the country’s future Emperor; and a nameless child, nine or ten years old, who had fought with Tafari’s army at Sagale. Abyssinia’s political chaos worsened from 1911 when Lij Yasu, aided by Menelik’s commander-in-chief Fitaurari Habta Giorgis, seized the palace and took control of the country. Lij Yasu was never crowned. This had been impossible during his grandfather’s lifetime, and after Menelik’s death in December 1913 a prophecy stating that if he were crowned he would die may have discouraged him. Lij Yasu meanwhile embraced Islam, and lived for long periods with the warlike Danakil (or Afar) tribes, hunting and raiding villages for provisions. An arrogant, cruel youth, he took pleasure in watching executions and floggings. To satisfy his blood-lust he massacred Shanqalla Negroes on the Abyssinia–Sudan border, and slaughtered three hundred Danakil, including women and children, in Captain Thesiger’s opinion ‘simply because he liked the sight of blood’.35 Besides these atrocities Lij Yasu was rumoured to have himself killed and castrated a page at Menelik’s palace; and according to one of his officers, when a girl refused to have sex with him, Lij Yasu sliced off her breasts after watching her being gang-raped by his soldiers.
The Life of My Choice – described by Thesiger as ‘a fragment’ of autobiography36 – tends to bury its subject under an avalanche of impersonal details. Though absorbing, these details are far more comprehensive than the often meagre infill of Thesiger’s life history requires. As well as exploiting its historical context to the full, Thesiger used the wealth of factual information about his life to produce a ‘treasure galleon’ of a book, written ‘with much distinction and honesty’,37 yet offering few noteworthy revelations about its author. Nowhere in The Life of My Choice is this more apparent than in the opening chapters, describing Thesiger’s background and his early upbringing in Abyssinia and England.
In 1913–14 Thesiger’s father trekked from Addis Ababa to Nairobi to discuss with the Governor of British East Africa (later Kenya) border issues created by Abyssinian slavers, ivory raiders and the large populations of Boran and Galla tribesmen who migrated to East Africa from Abyssinia after Menelik had conquered their territory. Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger noted in 1911 that the Abyssinians had occupied the Turkana territory in British East Africa and Karamoja in Uganda, although the Abyssinian frontier established in 1907 lay to the north of these territories. In his teens Thesiger was fascinated by books such as Major H. Rayne’s The Ivory Raiders (a fourteenth-birthday present) and Henry Darley’s Slaves and Ivory, which provided an exciting background to his father’s mission. As a boy of three and a half, however, he remembered only vaguely the journey with his parents and Brian to the Awash station, the next railhead that replaced Dire Dawa until the Chemin de Fer Franco-Ethiopien’s line from Jibuti had progressed as far as Addis Ababa, its ultimate destination. Almost fifty years later he wrote in Arabian Sands that his attraction to ‘the deserts of the East’ might lie ‘in vague recollections of camel herds at waterholes; in the smell of dust and of acacias under a hot sun; in the chorus of hyenas and jackals in the darkness round the camp fire’. Such ‘dim memories’38 as these derived from this and other journeys with his parents. They suggest that even as a child Thesiger was unusually observant and receptive to the sights, scents and sounds of the African bush and of the Abyssinian highlands where he lived for almost nine incomparably happy years. In 1914 Kathleen, who was pregnant once again, returned to England, and by the time Wilfred Gilbert joined her there at the end of March, the Thesigers’ third son, Dermot Vigors, had been born.
On his way to Nairobi Captain Thesiger wrote to Billy and Brian in London from camps at Laisamis and the Uaso Nyiro river, places which the younger Wilfred would often visit during his travels in Kenya. He treasured his father’s letters, written in pencil on coarse grey paper, illustrated with lively drawings of giraffes, lion and warthogs. Wilfred Gilbert may have got the idea of illustrating his stories with thumbnail sketches of big game from Sir Percy Fitzpatrick’s South African classic Jock