According to Thesiger, his father’s sudden death had come as a ‘devastating shock’ to his mother.24 Although to an extent Kathleen must have been prepared for the worst, she had now, not yet forty, been left a widow, with no home of her own, no income, and four children between the ages of four and nine to care for. Thesiger said: ‘When my mother told me my father had died I felt sad, but this feeling didn’t last for more than a few weeks. It doesn’t when you are very young. In contrast when I heard the news that my first spaniel had died, I was grief-stricken. About four days [another time Thesiger said ‘a fortnight’] before my father died, a strange thing happened. I dreamt that he had died. I remember how distressed I felt [after] I had woken up. I never mentioned this to my mother, nor have I ever mentioned it to anybody else since then, but this strange coincidence always remained in my mind.’25
The sudden death of Thesiger’s father was the third crisis in his young life in less than a year. He was still disorientated and homesick after leaving Abyssinia. The enormous contrast between the freedom of his early upbringing at the Legation, with few lessons and endless opportunities for riding and shooting, and the crowded, regimented world of St Aubyn’s made his preparatory school seem like a prison. As if exile in England and the confinement of school were not enough, his father’s death robbed him of a parent, friend and role model. He had become very close to Wilfred Gilbert while at Addis Ababa, whereas Kathleen had been a remoter figure whose attention was focused mainly on her husband. As a boy he had known nothing about Wilfred Gilbert’s failing health, about which his mother must have felt increasingly anxious. No doubt his parents had been careful to hide any concern from their young children. Although he always insisted that after a few weeks he ceased grieving for his father, besides anxiety for his mother, Thesiger felt his father’s loss more keenly than he would admit. He showed deeply affectionate concern for Kathleen, writing to her as ‘My Precious Little Mummy’ and assuring her, ‘I will be good to you in the holidays.’26 Typically, he never referred to Wilfred Gilbert’s death in his letters, unlike Brian, who was more inclined to disclose his feelings, writing to his mother on 30 January 1921: ‘It is tomoro [sic] one year since Daddy left us.’27
The death of Wilfred Gilbert had another, unforeseen result, which was first revealed in Timothy Green’s profile of Thesiger published in 1970. Despite the favourable impression R.C.V. Lang had made on Billy’s parents, and the reassuring letters he wrote, according to Thesiger, St Aubyn’s headmaster was ‘a sadist, and after my father’s death both Brian and I were among his victims’.28 Thesiger went on: ‘The school motto was “Quit you like men: be strong”, an exhortation not without relevance to some of us boys. [This was a motto quoted often by the mother of Jim Corbett, whose books, including Maneaters of Kumaon, were among Thesiger’s favourites.] He beat me on a number of occasions, often for some trivial offence. Sent up to the dormitory, I had to kneel naked by the side of my bed. I remember crying out for the first time, “It hurts!” and Lang saying grimly, “It’s meant to.” For two or three days after each beating, I was called to his study so that he could see I was healing properly.’29
Such was Thesiger’s version of Lang’s beatings in The Life of My Choice. He had written in an earlier work, Desert, Marsh and Mountain, how ‘on the slightest excuse, such as making a noise in the passage or not putting our shoes away properly, he beat us with a whip with a red lash. I carried the marks for years. These early beatings certainly hardened me, so that later at Eton, where I was beaten repeatedly and deservedly, I regarded the conventional “tannings” and even the occasional birchings almost as a joke.’30 The young Billy dreaded Lang’s brutal beatings, and another punishment ‘more suited to the Foreign Legion than to an English preparatory school’: in hot weather, being forced by the drill-sergeant to run round and round the asphalt yard. To one writer, Thesiger described Lang as ‘a homosexual sadist who flogged me with a steel shafted riding whip until I bled all over the place’. His interviewer wrote: ‘He carried the marks of the beatings for more than ten years.’31 Lang’s thrashings were exceptionally vicious even by the extreme standards of that period, when caning and birching were regarded as normal punishment. Whipping a naked boy of nine or ten until he bled was the action of a pervert and a sadist. No less perverted or sadistic was Lang’s habit of summoning to his room boys he had thrashed, ordering them to undress, and examining the wounds he had inflicted to make sure they were healing.
Although Thesiger claimed that neither he nor his brother ever told their mother about these beatings,32 Brian had written to Kathleen, ‘You will be sorry to hear I had a canning [sic] on Friday, 3 strokes [with] a bamboo cane’;33 and again, ‘I had a caning for not doing some corections [sic]. Mr Lang gave it to me with a stick like your swichy [sic].’34 By ‘swichy’ Brian could have meant a thin cane, but more likely he meant a long tapering riding whip, or switch, like the steel-shafted whip with a blood-red lash Thesiger described to an enquirer in 1969. In his eighties, Thesiger disclosed further shocking information which supported his claim that Lang was a ‘homosexual sadist’. Once again, Thesiger (but apparently not Brian) had been among Lang’s carefully chosen victims.
In a letter to Captain Thesiger in December 1919, Lang had shown an optimistic concern for Wilfred, writing: ‘Billy has made a very good start and has quite settled down to the spirit of the school, and I do not think we shall have any trouble with him. As you know, I was afraid at the beginning that he might kick against the discipline, but since he has been excellent…He is quick tempered and that makes it harder for him, but he controls himself well.’35 This certainly conflicted with Thesiger’s bitter memory of his rejection by other boys, of lonely nights when he lay in bed picturing the Legation’s garden and surrounding hills, and his furious attack on Lucas. By ‘discipline’ Lang presumably meant St Aubyn’s unfamiliar regime. Writing to Kathleen Thesiger on 20 March 1920, two months after Wilfred Gilbert’s death, Lang assured her: ‘I will do all I can for your boys, especially now. They have the making of fine characters…[Billy] will probably want careful treatment to train him to be master of himself, and that is where a Father will be missed: but I think I know his good points and his failings and I promise you that I will do my very best to start him on the right path in life.’36 In a letter written a few months later, Lang was more explicit: ‘[Billy] is working better than he was earlier in the term, and his behaviour is certainly much better: it has done him good to know that there is always a last resource!’37 Lang described Billy as ‘very backward’.38 He wrote: ‘I have report of each of them every day from their form-masters, and they know that if it is not good, they will get punished. They are like a good many other boys, who are inclined to let their attention wander from their work, and have to be kept up to the mark: they are certainly getting plenty of discipline…Wilfred…has lost that attitude of being “against authority”…Brian occasionally gets fits of obstinacy.’39
Such candid letters did not hide the fact that Billy and Brian were punished, though of course Lang gave no details. His letters indicated that he was a strict disciplinarian, but gave no hint of other sinister motives, which possibly had as much to do with Lang himself realising that he had strayed from ‘the right path in life’ as his