LITMIR.BIZ

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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

       SEVEN Eton: Lasting Respect and Veneration

      Thesiger’s first term at Eton began in September 1923. In The Life of My Choice he devoted several pages to describing Eton: the layout of buildings;

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