Читать книгу Wilfred Thesiger in Africa - Alexander Maitland, Chris Morton - Страница 10

Every year in January and February, from 1965 to 1969, Thesiger took his mother to Morocco. These journeys gave them as much pleasure as their first visit together there in 1937. Thesiger enjoyed his mother’s company and admired her vitality. In April 1965, he wrote to a friend: ‘My mother and I are back from Morocco where we had a wonderful time seeing nearly every corner of the country that was worth seeing. We covered 6,000 miles, a lot of it in the Sahara, and stayed in 20 different hotels. Not a bad effort on my mother’s part now she is 85!’⁸⁰° To Thesiger’s delight, his mother often said she would have been perfectly happy to spend the night sleeping on the ground beside the car.⁸¹ During 1966 and 1967, Thesiger and his mother took Field-Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (1884–1981) with them on drives round the country near Marrakech. ‘If you had not taken me out so often,’ Auchinleck wrote in 1966 from Casablanca, ‘I should have missed these delightful valleys. I am very grateful and I am very depressed at leaving Marrakech where I was very happy and untroubled. I am NOT looking forward much to England where no one seems to have time to stroll or loaf [as] I have been doing!’⁸²

Thesiger spoke always with affection of Auchinleck, who had been Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East and in 1942 took personal command of the Eighth Army. Indirectly, Thesiger had owed Auchinleck his experiences in the SAS. It had been Auchinleck who first took seriously David Stirling’s proposal that small, highly trained groups dropped behind enemy lines in North Africa could do crucial damage by attacking airfields.⁸³

This background contrasted with an inconsequential yet unexpectedly insightful correspondence from the celebrated soldier to the great explorer. From the Hotel El Mansour Casablanca, Auchileck wrote: ‘We had a very good run down here in our coach, a halt for ten minutes for a glass of beer and two very good rolls full of ham provided by the Maghreb [Hotel in Marrakech]—on YOUR suggestion! … It was a very great privilege and pleasure to meet your mother and yourself–a most interesting and unexpected “bonus” to my tour!’⁸⁴ Who but Auchinleck, Thesiger mused, would have written such a letter? In Morocco, Thesiger took more excellent photographs of kasbahs, landscapes, crowded marketplaces, city squares and castellated towers. Unlike Freya Stark, who would focus her camera on an arch and wait for someone to pass under it–whom she then photographed–Thesiger as often as not seized the ‘magic moment’ almost at random. That he had an instinctive eye for composition is shown again and again by his photographs: a street scene in Marrakech; horsemen at Marrakech encircled by a crowd and with snow-capped mountains in the far distance ; a wide river valley with palm trees and mountains; a hill town seen from across a river; a busy market at Erfoud in the Dades Valley; people in Fez drifting through a magnificently ornate gateway.