Читать книгу Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer - Alexander Maitland - Страница 12

Wilfred Gilbert and Kathleen Thesiger, their four children and Mary Buckle (now twenty-seven) arrived back in England in May 1919. To Billy especially England seemed a foreign land, which he remembered only indistinctly from his second visit in 1914 when he was little more than a baby. In his seventies, he said: ‘I had imagined England was like India. I was very disappointed when my father told me that, in England, there were none of the animals or birds I knew. No hyenas, no oryx, no kites. I thought it sounded a deadly, deadly dull country to live in.’¹ Thesiger often quoted his writing in conversation, and presumably phrases that originated in his conversations found their way into his books. In his autobiography he had written that, as a child, ‘I thought what a dull place [England] must be.’²

Since the former rectory Captain Thesiger had bought at Beachley in 1911 had been requisitioned by the navy, the family spent the summer in Ireland. They stayed with Kathleen’s relatives at Burgage, before moving to Ballynoe, a rented house fourteen miles from Burgage on the River Slaney. Wilfred Gilbert wrote: ‘there is good fishing…also rough shooting. The house is very well kept with pretty gardens.’³ Billy shot his first rabbit at the Dyke on the Burgage estate. At Ballynoe he went ferreting. Later that year, at Okehampton on Dartmoor, ‘much to his joy’,⁴ he shot his first running rabbit, with a double-barrelled Purdey .410 shotgun he and Brian had been given in 1918 by Wilfred Gilbert’s brother Percy. (Wilfred Gilbert had brought the gun back with him from England to Addis Ababa, where the boys used it to shoot pigeons that perched on the roof of the Italian Legation.) Billy enjoyed watching his father paint, or fish for salmon in the Slaney. He ‘became enthusiastic’ when Wilfred Gilbert ‘tried to teach [him] to sketch’⁵ and thought the boy’s first efforts showed promise.

Friends came to stay, including Billy’s godmother Mrs Curre, and Hugh Dodds who had served under Wilfred Gilbert as a Consul in Abyssinia. At Burgage, Wilfred Gilbert had to ‘stay in bed for breakfast and rest after lunch and in general [take life] very easily’. He continued to rest at Ballynoe, untroubled except by a shortage of water from the well due to an unusually dry summer.⁶ His posting after Addis Ababa as Consul-General in New York had to be delayed until his health improved. In a ‘private letter’ the Foreign Office had proposed to raise Wilfred Gilbert’s allowances, making his official income £5000 a year, enough to pay for ‘a good deal of entertaining’ and ‘to keep a motor car’, which he emphasised would be ‘essential’. He wrote, ‘Kathleen is quite pleased with the idea of New York now that I am to keep my rank and the pay is to be increased. It is not yet decided how we shall manage affairs but probably I may go out first while she stays over the boys’ first holidays [from school] and would then come on with the babies.’⁷ Everything depended, however, upon a significant improvement in Captain Thesiger’s health.

In September the family visited Dublin to buy school uniforms for Billy and Brian, and to enable Wilfred Gilbert to consult a heart specialist, who found him ‘perfectly sound and with very low blood pressure’. Wilfred Gilbert wrote: ‘I suppose [this] accounts for the breathlessness and general slackness and he says I must take things quietly. I have I think put on nearly a stone in weight which is probably to the good but it is a long and tiresome business getting fit again…Dr Moorhead…said there was nothing wrong with me organically but that the heart muscles are weak and blood pressure still very low and he added that it would take some time to get over the general strain. He had seen many younger men from the War in the same state and found that it usually took about a year to put right…It is no use trying to go to New York until I am really fit as I should only break up and…might then get a dilation of the heart, whereas if [I] wait and get fit now there won’t be the smallest chance of anything.’⁸

After leaving Ireland, Wilfred Gilbert and Kathleen arranged to stay with Geoffrey and Olive Archer at Horsham in Sussex, then to spend a month or six weeks in Brighton, ‘having a perfectly quiet time’, until Wilfred Gilbert had recovered enough to take up his consular posting in New York. But any hopes of starting work were finally dashed by the Archers’ doctor, who confirmed that Wilfred Gilbert must rest for a year, or risk damaging his heart. Wilfred Gilbert wrote: ‘All the doctors say the same thing so one must accept it. I have told the [Foreign Office] I will come and see them.’⁹ The Thesigers rented rooms with sea views at number 4 Marine Parade in Brighton, a few minutes’ walk from the beach. Kathleen’s mother, who kept a flat nearby, became a frequent visitor.

In September 1919 Billy and Brian began their first term as boarders at St Aubyn’s, a preparatory school in the village of Rottingdean, three miles along the coast, due east from Brighton. Their parents had visited the school, where some of Wilfred Gilbert’s relatives had been educated, and met R.C.V. Lang, the new headmaster. Thesiger said: ‘My father and mother were evidently impressed by him and this convinced them we should go there. I remember my father took us to Eton about that time. I asked him: “Is this where I am going?”, and he replied, “Yes, one day.” We saw boys rowing on the river and I remember the boats banged into one another and one of the boys hurt his hand.’¹⁰

In those days St Aubyn’s ‘Sunday’ uniform, worn by boys travelling to the school and on special occasions, consisted of a three-piece worsted suit and a bowler hat. In these adult clothes Billy and Brian looked very odd indeed. Boys of their age certainly looked, and no doubt felt, more comfortable in the more practical everyday uniform, consisting of grey shorts and a matching grey jersey. When Thesiger visited the school sixty years later, he wrote: ‘Time seemed to have stood still. The boys wore the same grey shorts and jerseys; the band was practising, marching and countermarching on the playing field. I attended morning chapel and neither the seating nor the service had altered.’¹¹

Until the 1970s, during visits to London Thesiger still wore a three-piece suit and a bowler hat, clothes more appropriate for a civil servant than a desert explorer. More to the point, these old-fashioned clothes made him increasingly conspicuous, something he disliked, and claimed he had always avoided. In A Reed Shaken by the Wind, Gavin Maxwell described Thesiger as he first saw him in London in 1954: ‘He was very unlike the preconceived theories I had held about his appearance…The bowler hat, the hard collar and black shoes, the never-opened umbrella, all these were a surprise to me.’¹² Thesiger’s response was very reasonable, though predictably tart: ‘When I’m in London I put on a dark suit and I know I’m wearing the right clothes for lunch at The Travellers, or for going out somewhere in the evening. I use an umbrella like a walking-stick and, besides, it’s useful if it rains…I admit, I gave up wearing a bowler because no one else wore one. As for not looking like an explorer: I’d be very interested to know just what an explorer is supposed to look like. Surely I’m not expected to turn up at my club wearing shorts and a bush shirt!’¹³ Thesiger did concede, however, that Maxwell’s description worked as a literary device by creating a contrast between his appearance in two different worlds: England and the Iraqi marshes.

On his first day at St Aubyn’s, Thesiger tells us that he went round shouting, ‘Has anyone seen Brian?’ instead of ‘Thesiger Minor’. He added: ‘I was not allowed to forget this appalling solecism.’¹⁴ His upbringing in Abyssinia had left him quite unprepared for the busy communal life of an English private school. Yet he maintained: ‘You would be quite wrong saying I was desperately unhappy at St Aubyn’s. It was more a feeling of being isolated. They did gang up on me rather…at night in the dormitory. I don’t mean in a physical sense. I could take care of myself that way. It was being out of it all, being isolated. You were only by yourself at night after you went to bed, and getting yourself up in the morning. There were always people, boys, in your room. It’s probably true that I was used to sleeping by myself at Addis Ababa…at St Aubyn’s I didn’t like sleeping in a dorm with the others.’¹⁵ ‘My father and mother used to visit us at weekends. Not every weekend, of course, but pretty frequently. They’d watch us playing games and so on, and we rather wished that they wouldn’t.’¹⁶

Soon after the brothers first arrived, they had been questioned about their parents and their home life. Thesiger wrote: ‘At first I was a friendly, forthcoming little boy, very ready to talk, perhaps to boast about journeys I had made and things I had seen. My stories, however, were greeted with disbelief and derision, and I felt increasingly rejected.’¹⁷ (He remembered boys exclaiming: ‘Have you heard what Thesiger Major says? He says he was in the trenches in the War.’¹⁸) ‘As a result I withdrew into myself, treated overtures of friendship with mistrust, and was easily provoked. I made few friends, but once I adapted to this life I do not think I was particularly unhappy. I could comfort myself, especially at night, by recalling the sights and scenery of Abyssinia, far more real to me than the cold bleak English downs behind the school.’¹⁹ Billy grew quarrelsome and aggressive. He fought in the gymnasium with a boy named Lucas, grasping him by the throat until he sank down unconscious: ‘This did not increase my popularity.’²⁰ While he remembered being thrashed for various minor offences at St Aubyn’s – and later, at Eton, being caned or birched for idleness – his attack on Lucas apparently went unpunished.

Thesiger’s cousin, the actor Ernest Thesiger, described his own very similar experiences at a private school in his 1927 autobiography, Practically True. Like Wilfred, being outspoken was a major cause of Ernest’s problems. Unlike Wilfred, he was bullied. Ernest wrote: ‘I had never been a particularly happy child. At my private school I had been bullied by my contemporaries and disliked by my masters, both, probably, for the same reason, namely that I possessed a somewhat unbridled tongue combined with an uncomfortable knack of finding out people’s weak spots. This does not make for popularity, and should be held in check by those not physically strong enough to protect themselves.’ Ernest added: ‘To be unusual or unconventional was the one sin not forgiven by the British schoolboy.’²¹

In the conventional atmosphere of St Aubyn’s, Wilfred’s boastful repetition of strange events in his unusual childhood, and his almost complete ignorance of established rules of schoolboy behaviour, and of games like football or cricket, earned him a reputation as ‘a liar and a freak’. While other boys thought him weird, to the staff he seemed quaint, sometimes unexpectedly amusing. A letter from E.M. Lang, the headmaster’s sister, gives a taste of the boy’s precociously waspish humour: ‘Wilfred was too funny at dinner the other day. Miss Edwards told one of the boys not to shout so. She then left them for a few minutes and heard Wilfred say to the same boy, “Oh, do shut up. You make as much noise as the Queen of Abyssinia!”’²²

From December to early January 1920 the Thesigers took what was destined to be their last holiday together as a whole family, at Dartmoor House, near Okehampton in Devon. At Brighton on 31 January 1920, two months short of his forty-ninth birthday, Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger collapsed from a heart attack while he was shaving, and died, cradled in Kathleen’s arms. His last words were: ‘It’s all right, my dear.’²³

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 missionary desire to guide wayward small boys along it. Whipping boys until they bled may have been for Lang an ‘externalised’ form of self-chastisement that expurgated his sense of guilt for his perverted sexual desires, yet was still viewed by him as a justifiable punishment.

In a sense he was right in describing Thesiger as ‘backward’. But Billy’s letters, littered with mis-spellings, were often amusing and, like his father’s, well-observed and always deeply felt. For instance, describing to Katheen St Aubyn’s school ‘maxagean’ (magazine), he wrote: ‘It allso says about the charwoman [a play on ‘chameleon’], and how they have a pretective colouration of dirt which is a very true statement, and allso how they have a prehensile tongue. This is allso very true, because they are always jabering all the time. You ought to come and see us play rugar. It is my favourit game because if you are collared you can hit the person away and can do practicly what ever you like.’⁴⁰

As well as looking after her brother, E.M. Lang (who like Lang had never married) supervised the welfare of St Aubyn’s boys. It is just conceivable that she did not know her brother viciously abused certain children. Lang, presumably, never discussed the subject with her; and laundrymaids, who washed the boys’ bloodstained underclothes and pyjamas, no doubt felt it wise to keep such damning evidence to themselves. Possibly for effect, Thesiger claimed he did not resent Lang’s beatings; and he even went as far as to suggest that they prepared him for the many hardships he endured years afterwards as an explorer and traveller. Before making further disclosures about Lang, Thesiger said: ‘Obviously, at the time, I had no idea that he was homosexual. After all, I was a boy of just nine or ten…It wasn’t just Lang telling me to get undressed, and kneel down naked by my bed while he thrashed me. It was the way he examined us afterwards in his study. Once or twice he came into the bathroom and said: “You’ve been playing with yourself, boy, let me look at you.” He made me stand up in the bath and examined me pretty thoroughly.’ Thesiger added: ‘I am sure he only beat or tampered with boys like myself, and another boy, whose fathers had died.’⁴¹ He denied being upset by Lang examining and touching him: ‘In fact I was playing with myself on those occasions. All small boys do this sort of thing. I just felt embarrassed being caught at it by the headmaster.’⁴² Thesiger also confirmed that when Lang touched him, he had not resisted. This is not really surprising, since Lang was a large, ‘imposing’ man who not only symbolised ultimate authority, but also enforced it. As headmaster, in those days he had commanded unquestioning respect. Besides, Lang was not the sort of individual many small boys would have thought of contradicting.

The beatings ended after ‘about three years’ when Arnold Hodson, who had been a Consul in southern Abyssinia, visited the Thesigers in Radnorshire during the school holidays. ‘One evening he said jokingly, “I don’t suppose you get beaten at school nowadays, not like we were in my time.” Neither Brian nor I had told our mother about these beatings but now, incensed, I pulled up my shorts and showed him some half-healed scars. Years later I learnt that Hodson went down to Sussex and told the headmaster that if he beat either of us again he would have him taken to court.’⁴³

In his late sixties, Thesiger gave a less dramatic, more plausible, version of the story. According to this, Hodson glimpsed the scars when he took Billy and Brian to the seashore. In both versions, the outcome is the same. ‘Repetitions of this savagery were at last halted by a friend of the family, who took Wilfred to the beach and noticed the marks. When they returned to the school on the Sunday evening, the friend sought out the headmaster and warned him that if he ever touched the boy again he would be faced with prosecution.’⁴⁴

It may seem strange to modern parents that Kathleen Thesiger, apparently knowing that Lang beat her sons, never saw their scars and so had no idea how severe the beatings were. A former pupil of St Aubyn’s, who boarded there soon after Billy and Brian, commented: ‘We never told our parents about being beaten.’ He confessed he was afraid of Lang, who despite Hodson’s warning went on thrashing boys as mercilessly as before. When Thesiger visited St Aubyn’s in May 1981, he found that after sixty years ‘the school had hardly changed in outward appearance; what was profoundly different was the relationship of headmaster and boys. Between them I sensed affection, confidence and trust.’⁴⁵

Contrary to Thesiger’s statement that ‘I certainly learnt next to nothing at St Aubyn’s,’ according to school reports he achieved moderately good marks. In July 1922 he was placed fourth out of ten boys in the Lower Remove, ahead of the Campbells, twins who he complained had ‘dominated’ him. Having known almost nothing about football, he enjoyed ‘soccer or rugger’. Later, at Oxford, he insisted he ‘loathed’ cricket, yet in January 1942, proposed by his cousin the 2nd Viscount Chelmsford, he became a member of the MCC.⁴⁶

Lang had warned Kathleen that public school entrance examinations were becoming harder and more competitive. Billy (now known as Wilfred) failed the examination for Eton, but after two terms at a crammer he passed at his second attempt, ‘a whole form from the bottom of the school’. When Wilfred left St Aubyn’s for Eton in 1923, Brian was taken away and sent for a year to Dermot and Roderic’s preparatory school, Beaudesert House at Minchinhampton, near Stroud in Gloucestershire, where Mary Buckle’s presence as a matron gave the children support and homely reassurance.

In 1920 Kathleen and her two youngest sons moved from Brighton in search of a permanent home elsewhere. Kathleen lodged for some months with friends and family at Horsham in West Sussex, at Roughton in Norfolk, with her brother Ashmead in Hatfield, and at various addresses in London. Thesiger wrote: ‘When a kind and affluent sister-inlaw offered to buy her a house in the suburbs of London, she asked, “What will my boys do there?” The reply was, “We’ll get them bicycles and they can learn to ride them.”’⁴⁷ The affluent, kindly, but misdirected sister-in-law had been Percy Thesiger’s wife Katherine. Kathleen did not accept her offer, but Katie and Percy gave crucial assistance later, when Wilfred and Brian went to Eton, paying the boys’ school fees until their grandmother, Lady Chelmsford, died in 1926. Lady Chelmsford had inherited a large sum of money in 1905, when her husband died. She left Kathleen a comfortable legacy: an annuity of £400 to Wilfred, and an income to each of his three younger brothers.

In 1920 Kathleen rented Titley House, a dilapidated, remote farmhouse at Titley in Herefordshire, and in 1921 she leased The Milebrook, a six-bedroom house in the Teme Valley, Radnorshire (now Powys), which gave her and her sons a home for more than twenty years. Wilfred ‘identified [himself] completely’ with The Milebrook, which became as important to him as the Legation at Addis Ababa. From 1922 until 1933 he kept a detailed diary of life there during his holidays from school and university, with careful notes describing the bird and animal life of the country around the house. The diary’s three volumes were bound expensively in leather, and each secured with a brass lock and key. In England, as at Addis Ababa, Wilfred took charge of his brothers and minuted their activities in his diary. On 8 August 1922 he wrote: ‘A rabbit was seen in the fruit bushes by WP Thesiger esq. BP Thesiger esq was also present but failed to see it. A Council was immediately held and steps were taken, all holes drains and burrows blocked up. One large hole was found by pond under the tall tree. A Hunt will be held before Saturday.’⁴⁸ His entry on 26 August the same year gave a hint of things to come: ‘Took tea up Stowe [Hill]. Mr Hodson, Miss Handbury, Mrs W Thesiger, Miss Buckle, W Thesiger esq, BP Thesiger esq, D[V] Thesiger, RMD Thesiger (names of members of the expedition). Climbed the rocks (Stowe).’⁴⁹