LITMIR.BIZ

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most vividly in my memory.’¹⁷

      Describing the tiger shoot in a letter to his mother written on 12 March 1918, Wilfred Gilbert commented: ‘This went wrong unluckily as the tiger stopped in front of the wrong machan at 50 yards and then came to mine and showed just his head out of the grass at 130 yards. It was no good shooting at that and I only got a moving shot at the same distance, hitting him but not badly. He gave a roar and went on and everyone fired without effect. We followed up on elephants and found blood tracks but unluckily he got clean away. The Maharajah [of Jaipur] promised me another but the beat was a failure and he broke back through the line and we never got a glimpse of him. The same happened with a panther drive which was doubly bad luck.’¹⁸

      The Maharajah’s shikaris had located a sambhur stag in the nearby hills, and after a ‘good climb’ Wilfred Gilbert saw through his binoculars the sambhur’s horns and one ear ‘twitching to keep off the flies’; the rest of the animal was hidden by grass and scrub. Risking a shot from two hundred yards, across a ravine, Wilfred Gilbert wrote: ‘I had to guess where his chest would be…and dropped him stone dead. This bucked us up a bit…but it was very hard that the only shot I missed at Jaipur was the tiger.’¹⁹ ‘Billy and Brian…had the time of their lives. They came blackbuck shooting in bullock carts. I got 3 quite good heads [Thesiger remembered only two]; pigsticking also when they and Mary [Buckle] followed us on elephant.’²⁰ Nowhere, however, did he mention Billy being with him on the machan, tense, motionless, waiting for his father to shoot a tiger.

      In view of the fact that Thesiger’s recollections, which even as late as 1987 were so vividly detailed, so precise, were yet different from his father’s, it seems he may have combined a vaguer memory of Wilfred Gilbert’s stories with his own much more recent sightings of tiger at Bandhavgarh, Bhopal, in 1983 and 1984. When Thesiger saw these tigers he was writing The Life of My Choice, and was able therefore to describe a (perhaps partly imagined) scene from his childhood as clearly as if it had only just occurred.

      The ‘opulence and splendour’ of Jaipur’s court seemed to equal if not surpass the viceregal splendours of Delhi. To Thesiger as a boy what mattered was ‘the all-important hunting’; he admitted he was too young to appreciate the gorgeously ornate palaces, the Maharajah’s courtiers in sumptuous robes. Far more appealing to Billy and Brian was the return crossing from Aden to Jibuti on board HMS Juno after their voyage by P&O liner from Bombay. A Marine band played and the captain fired one of the ship’s guns ‘after [the children] had been given cotton wool to stuff in [their] ears’.²¹

      Six months later, Captain Thesiger was recalled to London by the Foreign Office to report on Abyssinia. He returned to Addis Ababa in December 1918 via Paris, Rome, Taranto and Cairo. The worldwide epidemic of Spanish influenza that claimed more victims than the war itself had struck Cairo, causing many deaths. At Jibuti, Wilfred Gilbert found letters from Addis Ababa. He wrote: ‘Poor Kathleen must have had an awfully anxious time. 4 doctors out of 6 dead, besides a lot of other Europeans and some 13-20,000 Abyssinians. They died like flies and at last ceased even to bury their dead. Billy, Roddy, Dermot and Mary had had it and the compound [was] all down so that they had at times practically no servants.’²² Thesiger wrote in 1987: ‘Ras Tafari sickened. His detractors might well ponder what would have happened to the country had he died.’²³ Thesiger remembered his mother had been reading to him A Sporting Trip Through Abyssinia by Major P.H.G. Powell-Cotton. ‘We had got to where Powell-Cotton was at Gondar, trying to shoot a buffalo, and his servant came running down the hill and frightened the buffalo away. My mother thought I looked a bit flushed. She took my temperature and she popped me into bed.’²⁴

      By the end of the year, Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger’s duties at Addis Ababa had come to an end. In April 1919 the family travelled together to England for the last time. For Billy, their final exodus from Abyssinia was bewildering; more than a sad occasion, it had been totally incredible: ‘Until almost the last day I could not believe that we were really leaving Abyssinia for good, that we should not be coming back.’²⁵

       SIX The Cold, Bleak English Downs

      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

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