Читать книгу Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer - Alexander Maitland - Страница 17

For twenty-three-year-old Wilfred Thesiger, the Danakil expedition had been a life-defining experience. Even more than his month hunting big game along the Awash in 1930, the journey through Bahdu and Aussa to the Red Sea coast realised Thesiger’s boyhood dream of adventure. Above all, it proved that the life of ‘savagery and colour’ he had longed to lead was attainable.

The successful Danakil expedition helped to bolster Thesiger’s still fragile self-esteem, which had been almost totally destroyed at St Aubyn’s and only superficially restored at Eton. His almost undefeated record as a boxing Blue, and his near-mythogenic status as a guest of the Abyssinian Emperor who hunted alone among the Danakil, had helped to rebuild Thesiger’s self-confidence at Oxford. He had found himself admired and liked, enviably sought after by Robin Campbell, the ‘golden youth’ who exemplified what Thesiger called Oxford’s ‘decadent’ era.¹ But for the rest of his life he found it difficult to trust completely more than a handful of people outside his immediate family circle. Even those who eventually did win his trust (or as much trust as he felt he could bestow) often discovered that Thesiger seemed continually to be preparing himself for the inevitable disappointment of being let down. He enjoyed many friendships over the years, but had few close friends. Deep down, Thesiger believed that even the best of friendships could not possibly last.² His instinctive mistrust and chronic wariness, he claimed, had resulted from being treated as a liar and a misfit at St Aubyn’s.³ No doubt this was true. Moreover, he had been uprooted from his home in Abyssinia and its ‘extraordinary freedom’. This was replaced by the friendless, unfamiliar, brutal regime of his preparatory school (although in his autobiography he claimed he was not ‘particularly unhappy’ at St Aubyn’s⁴). As a result he felt deprived, disorientated and lonely. Not least, he was affected by the tragedy of his father’s sudden death. Again and again, he emphasised that he had very soon got over this, adding: ‘children are like that’,⁵ but (like the death of his spaniel) it taught him an unforgettable lesson: that all things come to an end. From then on Thesiger had become wary of ‘overtures of friendship’,⁶ and instinctively mistrustful. If and when he decided to trust someone, he set almost unattainably high standards of commitment on their part. He described those he trusted as ‘identifying completely’ with him, yet almost never did he identify with someone else, except in general terms with tribal peoples. In a futile gesture, he took from friendships as much as he could; he was edgy and frustrated with those he could not control or steer.

Once he remarked: ‘I suppose I’ve spent my life searching for permanence.’⁷ As a child, as a youth, Thesiger filled this void by imagining big game hunting adventures among wild tribes, in which he emulated or even surpassed his father’s life and achievements. The 1933-34 Danakil expedition not only brought his boyhood dreams alive, it fired his ambition to ‘win distinction as an explorer and a traveller’.⁸ Thesiger was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society on 12 November 1934, the same day as his lecture; on 24 November the RGS acknowledged his payment of £45, the fee for life membership.

Before leaving Oxford in 1933 Thesiger had applied to join the Sudan Political Service, and had been advised by their agent that he need not attend an interview until he returned to England the following year. Four articles he wrote about his Danakil expedition were published daily by The Times between 31 July and 3 August 1934. A fortnight after the articles appeared, Thesiger was interviewed by the Sudan Political Service’s Board, at Buckingham Gate. He said later: ‘I think the dangerous journey I had just done at the age of only twenty-three, and the articles in The Times, helped to get me accepted. There again, even if I hadn’t explored the Awash or written anything at all, they would probably still have taken me. A member of the Board did ask me why I wanted to join the Service, and I very nearly said, “Because I want to shoot a lion.” It was on the tip of my tongue. He was a self-important little man and I could hardly resist the temptation to provoke him. I’m sure the other members of the Board would have approved of that reply, but he certainly wouldn’t. Anyhow, I stopped myself just in time and gave him a rather dull answer that seemed to satisfy him. I’ve no longer any recollection of what it was I actually said.’⁹ All his life Thesiger took himself and his activities very seriously, and tended to prefer people who did the same. He always made a clear distinction between those who were serious about themselves and their work, and others who were merely sententious or pedantic. Thesiger remembered that the name of the member of the Board who asked him why he wanted to join the Service was Hall.¹⁰ This may or may not have been correct: it is possible that Thesiger associated him with Julian Hall, his fag master at Eton, whom he regarded as pompous, and had disliked intensely ever since Hall had caned him for forgetfulness on an evening when he was due to box for the school. He was knocked out in the second round – the only time this ever happened at Eton or Oxford. Thesiger blamed Hall for his defeat, and sixty years later he still felt bitter, writing: ‘I never forgave Hall.’¹¹ At Jibuti, three months before the Board’s interview, Thesiger had been reprimanded by the Governor, Chapon-Baissac, for bringing Abyssinian soldiers into his territory and for not handing over his weapons at Dikil. He may have been reminded of this ‘corpulent, pompous, short-tempered little man’¹² when he felt tempted to provoke his interviewer at the Sudan Agency, whose arrogant manner threatened to bring out the worst in Thesiger, perhaps to test him.

The Sudan Political Service had been founded by Evelyn Baring, the first Earl of Cromer, British Consul-General in Egypt and author of a two-volume study of modern Egypt, who controlled the Egyptian government from 1883 to 1907. In 1877 Muhammad Ali’s grandson, the ruler of Egypt, had appointed General Gordon as Governor-General of the Sudan. After Gordon was killed by the Mahdi’s dervishes at Khartoum in 1885, the Mahdi’s Caliph ruled for thirteen years until he was defeated by Kitchener, and the Sudan was reconquered by Britain. In 1930, after a lengthy tour of the Sudan, the writer Odette Keun commented: ‘The success of the Sudan experiment is due to the quality of its British civil administrators…The little body of alien men that governs this country has alone made it what it is. But how this body of men manages to be so indisputably first-rate is a mystery which I cannot solve. They are all drawn from British Universities. They are all appointed when they are very young. The Commissioners of the Sudan who examine them personally in England make a point of knowing their athletic record, and their physique is taken into consideration. (Many of these Civil Servants were rowing Blues in their time, or well-known cricketers or football-players.) Their moral reputation is investigated.’ Keun added the measured caveat: ‘Still, such enquiries are at best only precautionary measures and involve no guarantee that the candidates will turn out well.’¹³ She outlined some of the responsibilities and tasks facing any young recruit, such as Wilfred Thesiger, when he arrived in the Sudan:

His governing of [the Sudanese] includes the dispensing of justice – and to be just he has not only to assimilate a hitherto unheard-of legal code, but to understand impulses and mainsprings of emotions which he cannot possibly feel himself, and motives of behaviour and conceptions of morality which have nothing to do with his own experience. He is obliged to learn a very difficult language in a very short time, often with no other instructor than a text-book…He is forced to turn his hand…to every sort of…work that crops up in lonely far-away understaffed places…He has to be well-groomed and dignified in his person pour l’exemple; cheerful and helpful in the society of his equals, who sum him up with great quickness and acumen; unselfish professionally – not out for personal kudos, but falling readily into teamwork – tenacious to overcome obstacles, stoical to resist the material discomforts and dangers of the climate and the special colonial temptations of drink, drugs and bodily neglect; sexually austere (that is to say, continent, when he is unmarried, for some nine months out of twelve – until his leave comes – for there are no free unattached women of his own kind established in the Sudan and the English social code, poles apart from the Latin, vetoes liaisons with native women pitilessly). In short [the new recruit] has to become one of an order of Samurai. And he becomes one of these Samurai!¹⁴

Many of the issues raised by Odette Keun had a particular significance for Wilfred Thesiger. His powerful physique had been developed and tested as a boxing Blue at Oxford, and again during his Danakil expedition. His determination to join the Sudan Political Service, however, was not matched by a determination to acquire classical Arabic. He became fluent years later in Arabia, but among the tribes in Darfur he had great difficulty in making himself understood. As for his tastes and lifestyle: unlike either his parents or brothers, he had never smoked, and he drank little. From his teens he had empathised with ‘races other than [his] own’. He took his code of personal discipline and moral integrity from his father, his ultimate role model, whose memory he treasured.

All his life Thesiger took infinite care to dress in exactly ‘the right clothes for the occasion’.¹⁵ At Kutum in Northern Darfur, where he was posted, he wore khaki-coloured knee-length woollen stockings his mother had ordered at his request from Fortnum & Mason.¹⁶ His khaki uniforms were made in London by well-known military tailors; the Khartoum firm of Abdi Awad tailored his elegant cream cotton three-piece suits.

According to his autobiography, Thesiger had felt ‘untroubled’ by living for long periods of time without a sexual relationship. Although sexual liaisons with native women were frowned upon, they were not unknown. Thesiger remembered: ‘Once, in the Nuer country, I walked into a hut and trod on the DC [Wedderburn-Maxwell] who was on the floor with a woman. Apart from my intrusion, he wasn’t very pleased that I’d trampled on his bottom.’¹⁷ Some writers have asserted Thesiger was ‘asexual’, which is untrue. He himself wrote: ‘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.’ This published statement was a modified version of an earlier draft: ‘For me sex has never been of any consequence, a diverting but trivial pleasure. Marriage would have been a crippling handicap in my life, a bond I could never have tolerated, the same demanding fem[ale] morning, noon and night.¹⁸

Judging by his remarks, Thesiger (like van Gogh) regarded sex as a necessary function of personal ‘hygiene’. He never talked about physical sex as an expression of love, or even of affection. His attitude to sex was perfunctory, immature and selfish. He firmly declared that he had no sexual relationships during his years in the Sudan, suggesting instead that he had channelled his sexual energy into other ‘diverting’, physically demanding pleasures such as hunting dangerous game and arduous desert journeys by camel across Northern Darfur and the Sahara. Sex, for Thesiger, was something one dealt with, rather than enjoyed. Once, when asked if he thought T.E. Lawrence had been actively homosexual, he replied: ‘I don’t know. But if he was, and it bothered him, he should have slept with half a dozen of ‘em and got the damned thing out of his system.’¹⁹ In a revealing memo, he defined his view of women as remote functionaries rather than objects of desire: ‘I have lived among men in a society in which women did not intrude. They stayed [on the] other side of the curtain, busy with household tasks.’²⁰ He wrote approvingly of Mrs Dupuis, who joined her husband, Darfur’s Governor, at a tribal gathering in 1935: ‘In this male society she was never obtrusive.’²¹

Colonel Sandford had been right in assuming that Thesiger’s heart was not set on the Sudan Political Service, insofar as Thesiger viewed the Service as a means to an end, rather than a long-term career. His choked-back retort to the Board’s interviewer – that his reason for wanting to join was to shoot lion – was over-simplistic, yet very near the truth. Thesiger’s lack of interest in administrative duties, his addiction to travel and his passion for big game hunting, culminating in a dangerous, gladiatorial obsession with hunting lion, did not pass unnoticed either by his peers or by his superiors. The Sudan’s Civil Secretary from 1939 to 1945, Douglas Newbold, wrote to Thesiger’s District Commissioner, Guy Moore, in May 1939: ‘Your picture of WT is very accurate. He now realises he is a misfit, but a misfit only in a Government and owing to excess of certain ancient virtues and not because of any vices – a brave, awkward, attractive creature.’²²

Before he left for the Sudan, Thesiger should have completed an Arabic language course at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. But he neglected this, and instead worked on his maps and diaries, preparing his autumn paper on the Awash for the Royal Geographical Society. He also wrote the introduction and field notes for a thirty-three-page report on ‘Birds from Danakil, Abyssinia’, published by the British Ornithological Union’s journal The Ibis in October 1935. He ‘always regretted this missed opportunity to become proficient in classical Arabic’.²³

While Thesiger was busy planning his 1933 Danakil expedition, Kathleen had helped him by contacting influential people on his behalf. Now, even before he had left England, he met one of the Sudan’s Governors, who made it his business to find out where Thesiger had been posted and, having done so, arranged for him to be relocated to an area that catered to his adventurous spirit and his passion for big game hunting and travel. Thesiger wrote: ‘When I reported to the Civil Secretary’s Office, the day after my arrival in Khartoum, I was delighted to learn that I had been posted to Kutum in Northern Darfur, generally regarded as one of the three most coveted districts in the Northern Sudan. I learnt later that I owed this posting to Charles Dupuis, Governor of Darfur, whom I had met at a friend’s house in Wales shortly after I had been selected for the Service.’²⁴ Describing Dupuis, Thesiger might have been describing his father: ‘a lean, weathered man of forty-nine, attentive, courteous and unassuming’.²⁵ Although he implied in his autobiography that he had met Dupuis by chance, it is probable that Thesiger or his mother contrived this important invitation by their neighbour Mrs J.M. Gibson-Watt, at whose home Dupuis was staying. (Ironically, Mrs Gibson-Watt’s late husband was a great-grandson of James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, who helped to pave the way for the Industrial Revolution. Watt’s invention prefaced two centuries of technological progress and social reformation which the romantic, traditionalist Wilfred Thesiger utterly deplored.)