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authority, an ‘Olympian figure in a scarlet gown’, reminiscent of Wilfred’s uncle Frederic Chelmsford when Viceroy of India, resplendent in state robes, who seemed to his highly impressionable nephew to be ‘more than human’.¹⁸

      Thesiger was confirmed at Eton College Chapel in November 1926: ‘I had been brought up in a conventional Church of England family. In this sense, I was nominally a Christian. By the time I was confirmed I had found it impossible to believe in the divinity of Christ, or to accept God as a benign, all-powerful Being.’ He accepted that Christian beliefs he had grown up with, and had never questioned, might have been undermined by the traumas he experienced aged only eight or nine: being uprooted from Abyssinia, ‘pitch-forked’ into a school where he was shunned and physically abused, losing the father he adored and worshipped, an ultimate role model who would not be ‘coming back’.

      He said: ‘I didn’t believe that Man was made in God’s image, but that God was made in the image of Man. The words I stood and mouthed at my confirmation service were, by then, already meaningless to me.’¹⁹ Aged thirteen, he had written to his mother: ‘We had two very nice services today and a lovely hymn, “God is working his purpose out, that which shall surely be”,’ whose fatalistic message was chillingly underlined by news that one of the boys had found a man ‘who had committed suicide (hanged himself from a tree down by Cuckoo Weir)’.²⁰ He later told an interviewer how during those services his mind used to wander, picturing the Epiphany ceremony of Timkat in Abyssinia, and the priests in their white robes dancing before the Ark of the Covenant. In another letter to Kathleen he praised the Bishop of Buckingham, who had preached ‘a very clever sermon on the Christian religion’. ‘Do you know,’ he added, ‘that now in Zanzibar stands the Cathedral [where there] was not long ago the slave market and where the altar now stands several years ago was the whipping post.’²¹ Giving a wintry description of his room, he wrote: ‘I am at the moment…roasting chestnuts in front of a blazing fire. It is freezing here. Our milk for tea was frozen and all the trees are covered with frost which makes them look wonderful and very beautiful. I am very warm at nights and if I feel cold [he was troubled by poor circulation for much of his life] can put my dressing gown and great coat on my bed.’²²

      During his first summer term, in 1924, Wilfred’s mother took him with her to London, where they had been invited to tea at Albert Gate by Ras Tafari, the Regent of Abyssinia, shortly before Tafari’s thirty-second birthday. This was the account Thesiger gave in his autobiography in 1987, although in a letter he wrote from Eton in July 1924 he spoke of Tafari ‘[coming] to tea with us’.²³ Tafari Makonnen was born on 23 July 1892. In 1910, five years after his father, Makonnen Walda-Mikael, had died, he was appointed Governor of Harar. In 1917, following the Empress Zauditu’s coronation, he became Abyssinia’s Regent. The Life of My Choice opens with a description of this intimate occasion in 1924, which for the fourteen-year-old Wilfred Thesiger had a defining importance. Two things emerge from his account of the meeting. First, his impressions of Tafari were mainly visual ones; this is understandable, since the conversation between Tafari and Kathleen Thesiger would have involved Wilfred very little. He had plenty of time, therefore, to study Tafari carefully, and take note of his clothing, his appearance, his dignified manners. Second, he attached a particular significance to the meeting because of its ‘defining importance’ for himself. Apart from Ras Tafari’s condolences for Captain Thesiger’s death, and his appreciation for his help at a ‘critical’ period, the only conversation Thesiger recorded took place between him and the Regent. As on other occasions, it seems he relied on his mother’s memory. Almost certainly Kathleen would later have repeated to Wilfred Tafari’s flattering remarks about his father, which he no doubt reworded when he wrote The Life of My Choice.

      According to this account, Ras Tafari received Kathleen and her eldest son in the Abyssinian residence at number 2 Albert Gate, in Knightsbridge. Thesiger wrote: ‘Wearing a black, gold-embroidered silk coat over a finely-woven shamma, he came across the room to greet us, shook hands and with a smile and a gesture invited us to be seated. He was very small but even then to my mind his slight body and lack of height emphasised his distinction, drawing attention to the sensitive and finely moulded face…We spoke in French, the foreign language in which he was fluent.’²⁴ As a girl, Kathleen Thesiger had spent holidays with her mother on the French Riviera, and she spoke French reasonably well. But while Wilfred had received good marks for French at St Aubyn’s, it is unlikely that he could have followed easily, or taken part in, a lengthy conversation about mutual friends or events in Abyssinia such as the 1916 revolution. Thesiger’s generalised remark ‘We spoke in French’ can only have referred to his mother and Ras Tafari. As the Thesigers were leaving, Wilfred seized the opportunity to blurt out how he ‘longed above all to return’ to Abyssinia. Tafari was evidently moved by the boy’s sincerity and passion. His reply – ‘You will always be very welcome. One day you must come as my guest’²⁵ – was more than a polite courtesy, as Thesiger would discover a few years later.

      From Eton, Thesiger wrote to Kathleen: ‘Wasn’t it fun seeing the Ras…send me any cutting you see in the Papers about [him]…Tell me whether it was [a] live elephant, lion or gilt cup Tafari gave us [as a present]…I wonder what Ras Tafari thought of the Bank of England and Houses of Parliament. I saw in the papers that he seldom smiled, which gave him his kingly dem[ean]our but when he came to tea with us he smiled quite a lot. I expect Brian and Dermot will love seeing him.’²⁶ Nowhere did he refer to Tafari’s invitation.

      In another letter, Thesiger confirmed that he had already decided on a career that would get him back to Africa – specifically to Abyssinia. He acknowledged that it was unusual for a boy to have such a clear and definite plan for his future, as well as the determination to achieve it. He later recalled: ‘I’d already decided by the time I was fourteen, earlier perhaps, that I wanted to join the Sudan Political Service. There were several good reasons for this. The Sudan bordered on Abyssinia. I felt that serving there would help me get back to Abyssinia, whereas being somewhere like Nigeria wouldn’t. Besides, I had read books such as Abel Chapman’s Savage Sudan and J.G. Millais’s Far Away up the Nile and I was attracted to the Sudan by the prospects for hunting and getting among tribes that lived on the Nile. It was the hunting and tribes, and being close to Abyssinia, made me feel the Sudan was the right place for me.’²⁷

       EIGHT Shrine of my Youth

      Thesiger spent almost three months in France in 1929: from early May until the end of June he stayed with a French family at Fontainebleau to improve his French, studying with fifteen other boys under a tutor, Commandant Lettauré; and for most of July he was on holiday at Sable d’Or in Brittany, where he often accompanied an elderly Breton and his assistant or mousse, aged thirteen, fishing for lobsters, conger eels and mackerel. The old fisherman, Pierre, had been a pêcheur d’Islande, one of a hardy breed celebrated in Pierre Loti’s famous novel of that name. His stories of ‘the weeks at sea, the gales, the great hauls of fish’, gave Thesiger the idea of working aboard a Hull trawler off Iceland, in 1931, during his long summer vacation from Oxford.¹

      Thesiger went up to Magdalen, ‘perhaps the most beautiful of Oxford colleges’, in the autumn of 1929. Compared with St Aubyn’s and Eton, his four years at Magdalen were fulfilled and happy. The ‘cold bleak English downs’ and the ‘bitterly cold and damp’ Thames Valley stood as wintry metaphors for the two schools, whereas in The Life of My Choice he wrote: ‘My memories of Oxford…are

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