The two brothers had been inseparable since they were small children. As Thesiger never tired of repeating, everything connected with his early childhood at Addis Ababa was vitally important to him. His first nine years, he firmly believed, influenced the whole of his life. He had enshrined those halcyon days and years, obliterating from his memory anything that might have tarnished their unalloyed perfection. Nothing he remembered of his upbringing in Abyssinia was less than idyllic. To achieve this, Thesiger needed to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to do so fairly ruthlessly. Like everyone, he saw as much as he wanted to see, and turned a blind eye to anything he preferred to ignore. But he tended to carry this normal self-protective process to an extreme. He came very close on occasions to reinventing his early boyhood years in order to harmonise them with the idealised, almost mythical, decade which inspired his extraordinary adult life as a world-famous explorer and traveller. Everything that Thesiger said or wrote about his early life was true. But he did not always tell the whole story, and the fascinating detail he chose to reveal was viewed through a rose-tinted lens, from his determinedly self-orientated, exclusive and sometimes quixotic perspective. Thesiger’s father, his mother, his younger brothers, his nurse Susannah, his ‘cherished confidante’ Minna Buckle, the Legation servants and staff, his father’s Consuls scattered across the length and breadth of Abyssinia, even animals and birds in the garden and the hills round his home, became indispensable cast members in this childhood drama. When he left Abyssinia in 1919, the first chapter in his life had closed. In a real sense, as well as metaphorically, his selective memories of those years were sealed off and preserved forever, embalmed and perfectly incorruptible.
The person closest to Wilfred in age, who shared these experiences, was his brother Brian. While Brian had featured in many of the juvenile episodes recorded in The Life of My Choice and Desert, Marsh and Mountain, Thesiger erased him from other events, including adventures with his father such as the viceregal tiger-shoot at Jaipur, at which both boys had been present. Thesiger said: ‘The books I wrote described my life and the things I’d done. When we were children, Brian and I went everywhere together…almost everything we did then, we did together…We were together at St Aubyn’s…later at Eton, and at Oxford…It’s true, we were very close, and yet Brian was so different from me. He wasn’t affected by our life in Abyssinia in the same way I was…He was always wasting his time, chasing about after girls.’24 Thesiger’s mother and father had hoped for a daughter, yet his mother told a visitor, years afterwards: ‘If I’d had a daughter, I’d have drowned it at birth!’25 Kathleen had been joking, of course, unlike T.E. Lawrence’s mother when she made her jealous remark: ‘We could never be bothered with girls in our house.’26
During his fourth year at Oxford, Thesiger spent more and more time with his brother Dermot, who was by then an undergraduate at Magdalen. He wrote: ‘Roddy did not go up to Oxford until the year after I had left. Dermot and I had been together at Eton but then Dermot was one of the Lower boys who came when I shouted “Boy”. Now we were grown up and the difference in our ages was immaterial.’27 Dermot was tall, slender and handsome. His memories of Abyssinia were at best very vague. Travelling abroad did not appeal to him – he used to say he never wanted to go further than Dover. Highly intelligent and witty, Dermot followed in his great-grandfather the first Lord Chelmsford’s footsteps and was called to the Bar after he left Oxford. Like his great-grandfather he had his heart set on a political career: ‘his dream [was] to become Prime Minister’.28
Thesiger sometimes took Dermot with him to tea at Elsfield Manor, John Buchan’s house near Oxford. Buchan was President of the university’s Exploration Club, and Wilfred wrote to him in 1931 asking for advice. He had read Buchan’s novels as a boy, starting with Prester John at St Aubyn’s. In 1969 he remembered: ‘I became a passionate John Buchanite, I read every one [of his books] as it came out and I tried to emulate his style. I never tire of his books and I can read them now with pleasure at every moment.’29 Twenty years later, Thesiger’s opinion of Buchan’s writing was still high, but more critical: ‘Reading The Thirty-Nine Steps again, I enjoyed it. But it does feel dated. I don’t mean the story and the settings, but the writing – just a bit.’30 When he described John Buchan, Thesiger might have been describing his own father: ‘I can still picture him as I knew him, his sensitive ascetic face etched with lines of pain but lit by his innate kindliness, his lean body in comfortable country tweeds. Although a man of many and varied accomplishments, he remained a countryman at heart.’31 Thesiger’s uncle, Frederic Chelmsford, had been cast in a similar mould as ‘a patrician in the Roman tradition, cultured, erudite, civilised’.32 Chelmsford was a keen fisherman and shot who spent his summers at Otterburn and Wark, in Northumberland, whose ‘wild black moors’ his brother Wilfred Gilbert had celebrated in verse. Thesiger recalled the thrill of catching a fifteen-pound salmon there, in a racing river swollen by torrential rain. He wrote in 1987: ‘No excitement in my life has ever quite equalled the tense fifteen minutes during which I was connected to that fish.’33 This was an apt metaphor for Thesiger’s relationships with his younger companions. Much of the excitement and interest lay in the first contact and his gaining absolute control.
During his years at Oxford, Thesiger often discussed his plans to explore the Awash river with his mother, his brothers, friends and relatives, including John Buchan and his uncle Lord Chelmsford. In April 1933 his uncle collapsed and died, like Wilfred’s father and grandfather, of a sudden heart attack. Since he had first stayed at Otterburn at the age of seventeen, Thesiger’s feelings of alarm and awe in his uncle’s presence had gradually been replaced by increasing affection. Chelmsford became a father figure, and when he died Wilfred felt ‘a sense of desolation’.34 He wrote: ‘My uncle intended to contribute to the cost of my Danakil expedition. In The Life of My Choice, I said my aunt insisted I should receive the sum he had meant to give me. This, in fact, wasn’t quite right. Aunt Francie was well-off, but she was – you know – very careful, and she only gave me half of the money that Uncle Fred had promised to give me.’35 Thesiger partly funded the expense of the Awash expedition by selling some gold rings which Haile Selassie’s son and heir, the Crown Prince Asfa Wossen, had given him during a visit to London. The rings made £400. The President of Magdalen, George Gordon, donated £50 on behalf of the college. Thesiger also received a grant of £125 from the Royal Geographical Society; and another of £250 from the Linnean Society’s Percy Sladen Memorial Trust. The British Museum of Natural History in South Kensington promised to buy any suitable specimens of birds and mammals he had collected, and from various firms he acquired provisions, cartridges, medicines and supplies of film, either at a discount or free of charge. Definitions of the purpose of the expedition altered, it appears, according to the sponsor’s agenda. A letter from Dr S.A. Neave, Assistant Director of the Imperial Institute of Entomology, stated that Thesiger was ‘undertaking a zoological expedition to Abyssinia…His primary object will be to collect material for the British Museum (Natural History), and he also hopes that he may be able to obtain data for this Institute, which is officially recognised by all countries in Africa as the international centre for receiving and coordinating information respecting migratory locusts.’36 Predating by more than a decade Thesiger’s famous investigations of locust outbreak-centres in Arabia, Dr Neave observed that in the Danakil country beyond the end of the Awash river, ‘it is possible that breeding areas of the desert locust…or other migratory species occur there’.37