Some readers may be aware of the type of adventure story for children that was popular in the middle of the last century. Set in a distant colony, surrounded by veritable hordes of color and dress not found in the home counties, a tall, invariably blond and clean-shaven British military guy, dressed in khaki uniform, pith helmet, puttees and boots, chased heroic adventures through thick and thin, he brought criminals to justice and discovered waterfalls or rivers that were then unknown to the residents of Surbiton. His name was probably Carruthers, if he was an officer, or maybe Jenkins in the unlikely event that the lower social classes could beget a hero. This really was fiction, of course, but after reading an autobiography titled The Life of My Choice, one wonders if such stories could have been based on the life of Wilfred Thesiger.
He was the last of the knight scouts and gained fame for his crossing of the empty Arabian desert quarter and his time among the Arabs of the swamps of the Tigris-Euphrates delta. But in The Life of My Choice, Wilfred Thesiger largely ignores these great achievements, mainly because their details have already been covered in previous books. So in this volume, we follow Thesiger in different countries, throughout the years that he spent in relative obscurity.
He was raised in Abyssinia, where his father was a British ambassador, and it is the landscape, politics, history and people of Abyssinia-Ethiopia that form the backbone of this highly readable and informative autobiography. Travel the length and breadth of this varied terrain, encountering hordes of people, rubbing shoulders with emperors and aristocracy, naked bearer employees, and clearly feeling at home, not once suggesting that you might lose your innate English upper crust. and visible from the outside.
Of course, they sent it to Eton. Of course he went to Oxford. Of course a blue boxing won. Is there any other way to live? One wonders, reading the rest of his exploits, if he could have shot swans in the Thames. But his heart never had anything to do with English society. His dreams have always been to trudge through Africa with a camel or a donkey. The refectory of plums and custard would surely have seemed strange to someone who regularly ate from a common pot with their fingers, sitting on the hardened earth under the stars.
One aspect of Thesiger that never ceased to amaze throughout the book is that he never seemed to have a career. He was always doing something, he was always busy with fairly official activities, but his status was often negotiable at best. And so he takes us on a journey to examine first-hand the struggle for the Ethiopian throne, the Italian invasion and occupation of Abyssinia, and their eventual liberation. We are in the court of Emperor Haile Selassie, or Ras Tafari, as Theisger often calls him. We’re in the bush shooting big game and various smaller things too, along with an occasional human being. So we are operating in Sudan and Egypt in WWII. In fact, we are all over the place, but on the way we usually sleep outside under the stars, eating little and most of the time avoiding most forms of formal social contact.
Throughout the book it is the contrast between the life of this explorer and the social origins of man that provides an energy that seems to motivate him. Thesiger always seems to get away from something, drawn by an apparent simplicity that he sees in a life that is directly related to nature and landscape. One wonders if he ever knew compatriots as equals. Take, for example, his almost fleeting comment about a relative: “Uncle Fred was an austere and impressive figure, whom some people found intimidating. Until I was seventeen … I thought of him as the rather alarming head of the family. Then unexpectedly, he invited Brian and me to stay in Northumberland, where he had taken a grouse moor for the summer … “Apparently it was just the moor, and not the whole county.
And now, as we read about the exploits of this pith-helmeted anachronism, we recall how much certain attitudes have changed. Of a university professor, for example, he writes: “A messy man, with frequent egg stains on his vest, always brought his smelly puppy and did not tolerate any women in his class.” Of Evelyn Waugh, Thesiger admits that he “disapproved of (Waugh’s) gray suede shoes, his loose bow tie, and the excessive width of his pants.” But in those he traveled among, he apparently tolerated just about anything he encountered, usually offering little judgment or even comment. He thus describes some practices associated with adultery and extramarital sexual relations: “begetting a child with an unmarried woman was a serious crime: the offender became an outcast and, if the girl died in childbirth, they killed him: the child was always buried alive. “
You come across people who consider killing men, specifically men, to be part of their right of passage into adulthood. And to prove that they have killed someone, they take a trophy from the corpse which they then present as proof of their act. How, imagine, could he prove that he had killed a man? Imagine no more, and Thesiger describes the still existing, albeit rather dry, practice and evidence with an almost simplistic detachment.
Thesiger is also prone to occasional changes of expression. We learn, for example, from a man named Cox, “known for his ability to be silent in a dozen languages.” But we also note that Thesiger rarely seems to generate sympathy with his English peers. And anything else that seems to shoot. It gets lyrical about wildlife and then shoots it. Attitudes have really changed in the last seventy years.
And it is perhaps these changes that make The Life Of My Choice such an engaging read. Today this is a stranger life than most of the spinal-helmeted fiction. It is not just another era; it could well be another universe. But this is also a story from our own time, a story whose long-term consequences are still unfolding in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East. Through Thesiger’s eyes, aspects of both areas, now largely ignored, can still be seen clearly.