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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,

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