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in quickly and made friends with other boys, among them Harry Phillimore, Ronnie Chance and Desmond Parsons, who like himself were boarders at McNeile’s House.

      He drew parallels, and very clear distinctions, between St Aubyn’s and Eton. Among the seventy boarders at St Aubyn’s he had been lonely, but he was almost never alone. At Eton he had his own room, with his own carpets, furniture, books and framed drawings by Jock of the Bushveld’s illustrator Edmund Caldwell, bought by Kathleen. His room gave him the ‘inestimable sense of privacy’ he had known at the Legation.¹ At St Aubyn’s, Billy and Brian had each had a little garden with crocuses, daffodils and strawberries.² Their gardens were their private domain, with which they identified. Wilfred’s room at Eton likewise meant more to him than privacy: ‘The privacy idea of Eton meant a sense of ownership. It was my room, with my pictures. I always get these words wrong. When I said “privacy” in the book, I meant “ownership”, something that belonged to me.’³ He always felt that the life of Eton could not be understood by outsiders. ‘I wrote about Eton in The Life of My Choice for people like Val [ffrench Blake] who had been there and who knew what it meant to me. Those who hadn’t been to Eton would simply skim over this…If you took an afternoon off and went down there, you’d get an impression of St Aubyn’s or even of Magdalen and Oxford. But Eton is different. It would take longer to get to know. And anyone who hadn’t been to a public school, even…couldn’t begin to understand what the life there is like.’⁴

      In The Life of My Choice, he wrote: ‘I have many memories of Eton: services in College Chapel, especially in winter when the lights were lit…the Field Game on winter afternoons while mist crept across the grounds; the lamps on the High Street and crowds of boys hurrying back to their houses before “lockup”.’⁵ Here again, Thesiger’s Eton images were of lamplight and winter. Late in life he looked back on the school with a romantic nostalgia that tempered his harsher memories. As a scholar, he was ‘barely moderate’, ‘just good enough at games to become Captain of Games in an athletically undistinguished house’.⁶ This qualified him as a member of the ‘Library’, a house prefect. The Library was among the Eton traditions for which he acquired ‘lasting respect…and veneration’.⁷ At Eton, he wrote in his late seventies, ‘I learnt responsibility, the decencies of life, and standards of civilised behaviour’⁸ – virtues people usually acquire at home.

      Despite the improving atmosphere of Eton, Thesiger’s masters and fellow pupils thought him ‘boorish’. When Brian joined him at the school, the brothers were shunned as ‘a couple of thugs’. Wilfred’s friend Val ffrench Blake recalled: ‘People gave them a wide berth. Wilfred had a gentler side and he could be very nice when you got to know him.’⁹ Thesiger’s thuggish reputation had been earned by his behaviour in and out of the classroom, and by his ‘murderous’ proficiency as a boxer. He was notorious for his powerful knockout punch, which once broke an opponent’s jaw; his boxing attainments won him respect but not friendship.

      At Eton, as at St Aubyn’s, Thesiger was lonely and given to daydreaming about Abyssinia, where he was determined to return and live like one of his father’s Consuls, hunting big game and travelling among wild tribes. He admitted freely: ‘My experiences at Eton should have been far richer than they were. However, I remained wary of strangers and I lacked self-confidence. It wasn’t being thrashed and fondled by Lang that harmed me at St Aubyn’s. It was being rejected by the other boys. Being shunned by them as a liar and made to feel an oddity like some exotic specimen in a zoo. I never got over it – I mean, properly – and this sense of rejection and of being somehow different affected me for the rest of my life.’¹⁰ Thesiger said that he neither disliked nor resented R.C.V. Lang; indeed, he said that he felt elated and proud when Lang ‘patted my head and told me I had done well’.¹¹ Yet he despised his Classics tutor at Eton, ‘Cob’ Bevan, who never laid a hand on him, whose only failing was being a bore.¹²

      In Addis Ababa as a child, Thesiger had been at the centre of his world, an absolutely secure world which revolved around him. St Aubyn’s destroyed not only his precious self-esteem but his all-important sense of belonging. From then onwards he sought and strived continually for acceptance, an essential ingredient of life he could no longer take for granted as he had in the past, but felt he had to ‘win’.

      Of the friendships Thesiger made at Eton, that with Val ffrench Blake was one of the most significant. Three years his junior, ffrench Blake was intelligent and practical, a gifted musician with a precocious mastery of classics. Thesiger struggled with Latin, which his Classics tutor, C.O. Bevan, ‘a stolid red-faced clergyman without wit or humour…made [him] loathe’. He wrote that ‘as a result of his tuition Latin verse remained incomprehensible to me. Bored stiff by him, I paid little attention: he retaliated by having me birched for idleness on three occasions, but these attempts to drive Latin into me from the wrong end proved equally unproductive.’¹³ In a school report Bevan commented: ‘He writes unintelligible English and then eats it.’¹⁴ This apparently referred to Thesiger’s curious habit of chewing bits of paper.

      Val ffrench Blake helped Thesiger with Latin, and became invaluable to him. It was this image of ffrench Blake as a round-faced, studious boy of fourteen that Thesiger ‘carried with [him]’ for years. It remained: overlaid by images of fourteen-year-old Idris Daud, his Sudanese gunbearer; of sixteen-year-old Bedu, Salim bin Kabina and Salim bin Ghabaisha; of Amara bin Thuqub, a Marsh Arab in his mid-teens from south Iraq.

      By now Thesiger had already developed a bitter hatred of ‘mechanical transport’, such as cars and aeroplanes, which he saw as a threat to the remote tribal worlds he planned to explore. While contemporaries at Eton found speed exhilarating and longed to own powerful cars, Wilfred immersed himself in books about African big game hunting and travel, or reread old favourites, including John Buchan’s novel Prester John, which he said later had been given to him by Brian at St Aubyn’s.¹⁵ Some letters to his mother contained wish lists of the books he longed for as presents for birthdays or for Christmas. In February 1924 he wrote telling her: ‘Mr McNeile lent me The Ivory Raiders by Major Rayne. It is very good and quite true. It is all about the Abyssinian Raids into Kenya Colony.’¹⁶ A list of ‘African Books owned by W Thesiger’ included The Ivory Raiders and the 1790 first edition of Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, which he bought for ten shillings at a shop in Eton. He had inherited some of his father’s books, among them Major P.H.G. Powell-Cotton’s A Sporting Trip Through Abyssinia and In Unknown Africa, and African Nature Notes and Reminiscences by the famous hunter Frederick Courteney Selous. Of the fifty titles he collected while at Eton, one of the most influential was T.E. Lawrence’s Revolt in the Desert, a popular abridgement of Lawrence’s privately printed Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In September 1935, a few months after he had first arrived in the Sudan, his mother sent him a copy of the first ‘trade edition’ of Seven Pillars, and in 1964 he was able to buy from the antiquarian book dealer Maggs Bros a magnificent copy of the rare 1926 subscribers’ edition.

      The Eton masters Thesiger remembered were C.A. Alington DD, the headmaster; Thesiger’s housemaster, A.M. McNeile, known to his forty-seven boarders and other boys as ‘Archie’; George Lyttelton, ‘whose published letters to Rupert Hart-Davis have given pleasure to many’,¹⁷

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