In Praise of Savagery (21 page)

He looked down at us, kicking the heels of his stout brown shoes against the wood as he counted out the coins into the palm of his hand and placed them down on the counter by his side.

‘They say that I shouldn’t do this sort of thing at my age. But I tell them: I’m eighty years old and if I can’t do it now, then when can I ever? You tell me that, I say, you just tell me.’

We drank our drinks then and there, in the shop; being forbidden by the shop-owner to take our drinks outside, on account of there being a refundable deposit with the wholesaler on the bottles.

He had us tell him about our journey, as we drank, and he laughed when we told him about our meal of swollen fish, and again at our confusion over sheep and goats. Although, he said, he did not generally do so, as he was well known to have no sense of humour.

‘Twice in one day is more than enough. They’ll think I’m ill or something. But do you know how you tell the difference, eh? Between a sheep and a goat? Shall I tell you? Well, if the tail goes up, then it’s a goat. And if it goes down, it’s a sheep. That’s how you tell. That’s how I’ve always done it, and it works every time.’

We told him also about our constant thirst, and our endless discussions, while we walked, about lemonade, and what else we would drink, one day.

‘Here’s a trick for you,’ he said. ‘It’s something the Bedu taught me. If you have no water, and no prospect of getting any, then you should put a little salt in the palm of your hand, like so, and then you lick it. That will help keep the thirst away.’

He caught sight of the camera slung around my neck.

‘That’s not one of those automatic things, is it?’

It was a rather large and clunky East German device, with a shutter that had a recoil to it which, I swear, was almost like a rifle.

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s manual. Or else if you want you can have it half-automatic—see this dial here: you can set the aperture and it will do the shutter-speed for you.’

‘Hmm … well, it’s good you can use your own settings. I can’t bear those fully automatic ones, the ones that do everything for you. You may as well not be there if you’re going to do that. Put the thing on a rock and come back later when it’s taken the pictures for you, you may as well. What film are you using, by the way?’

‘A mixture. But I’ve got black and white in it now. Ilford 100ASA.’

‘That’s good,’ he said, ‘I’ve always preferred black and white to colour. It gives room to the imagination. It’s the same with painting—I’d have a sketch over an oil-painting any day.’

He quizzed Andy on
Arabian Sands
again, and then asked Frazer and myself about our own reading. Frazer had been reading
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
by Eric Newby—who, as it happened, had come across Thesiger on his travels in the 1950s, and who, with his companion, had been castigated by him for sleeping on an air-bed instead of on the rocky ground. ‘God,’ he’d said, ‘you must be a couple of pansies.’

I said that I’d been reading
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
.

‘Who?’ he said.

‘
Huckleberry Finn,’
I said. ‘You know. By Mark Twain.’

‘Never heard of him,’ he said.

Nor was he particularly interested in hearing about him.

He was not a great admirer of the Americans, he said.

He never had been, not even at the best of times. But it was Suez, I think, that put the tin lid on it.

It was in the Fifties. He was in Arabia at the time, just across the way, as it were, when the Egyptians decided to flex their muscles by taking control of the Suez Canal.

This caused havoc with the cargo ships passing between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, and so the old colonial powers, Britain and France, joined together with Israel to invade and set the waterway free, and they looked to America to back them up.

America had its own fish to fry, though, and was busy with the Cold War, and consequently was having none of it. More than this, the Americans pressured the European allies into a humiliating climbdown.

This loss of territory and loss of face to a former colony marked the beginning of the final winding-down of the British Empire,
and kicked off four decades of flag-lowering to the sounds of bugles playing the ‘Last Post’, which culminated in the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese.

It marked the end of Thesiger’s time in Arabia, too: in the shifting political climate he was forced to leave; and he wasn’t overly happy about that.

It marked something of a crisis in my own family, besides, though I had not yet been born. My father had not long left the army. He and my mother were living in my grandmother’s rented two-bedroom bungalow, along with his uncle, and he was called up again and shipped out; and then, when it all went wrong, he was sent back home again. One of the first things he did when he got back was to go to the council offices to see how his longstanding application for a home of his own was doing.

‘Now,’ said the clerk, consulting his ledger, ‘you were nearly at the top of the list, weren’t you? Last time you came in.’

‘That’s right.’

‘But it says here that you left the borough.’

‘I was called up. For Suez.’

‘Which means, when you look at it, that you’ve been living elsewhere.’

‘Well, yes …’

‘And if you’ve been living elsewhere, then what that means is you’ve got to start at the bottom of the list again.’

‘What?’

‘Well, you can’t just come back in now, can you? In front of all the people who’ve been waiting here all along.’

‘I was called up to risk my
life
for people like you.’

‘Well,’ said the clerk, ‘there it is.’

How much the novels of Mark Twain have to do with any of this I don’t know. Not a lot, I should imagine.

We changed the subject.

We spent much of that day together, talking about travel—or rather listening to him telling us about his travels, or else we sat outside Mr Bhola’s garage watching the people of Maralal.

I took a photograph of him sitting there, leaning on his stick, with Frazer and Andy sitting on either side of him.

A party of Samburu
moran
with spears and ochred hair stopped a little way from where we sat.

‘These Samburu,’ he said, pointing with his stick, ‘and all the other tribes of their kind—the Turkana, the Rendille, the Masai—they’re
Nilotic
, the word is.’ He told us how, it is believed, these tribes all made their way down the Nile centuries ago—or maybe even millennia; and how the language they speak comes from a family you can still hear today in some parts of Egypt. Over to the west there were the Luo and the Dinka, and they were Nilotic, too. And incidentally, he said, the Turkana: those clay-covered caps they wear on the back of their heads contain not only their own hair drawn back into a bun, but also the hair of their fathers, grandfathers and ancestors as well.

And suchlike things.

He stayed with us for much of the day.

He was glad of our company, he said.

And besides, he said, there was no one at home.

There was, he said, no great pleasure to be had in sitting alone in an empty room at his age.

Lawi Leboyare was the eldest of Thesiger’s ‘sons’.

He was a man of some importance in Maralal, and had a house which had electricity in it; and which, in addition to electricity, had both a television and a video-recorder. He also owned a smart motor-car, despite Kibirit’s best efforts to wreck it; and he had a great many cattle, and people to look after them, as well as a number of wives from the more sought-after and fashionable parts of the region.

Behind them all, in no little part, was the same generosity that had once brought me my cheque for 300 pounds and my injunction not to tell others.

It was to his house that we were invited for dinner on the night before our departure. Kibiriti and Laputa, his ‘brothers’, were invited, too, and Thesiger was there both as guest of honour and, in a manner of speaking, as the evening’s entertainment; for after a large and hearty meal of goat stew, served up with boiled vegetables and chapattis, the lights were turned off, the television tuned on and a video-cassette removed from its box and placed into the slot of the machine. Then, to the strains of Vivaldi’s Flute Concerto and over a background of spear-carrying Samburu
moran
running in slow-motion, the opening titles rolled, and there began
The Last Explorer
, a documentary, recorded from British television, about Thesiger’s life and times.

I do not know who had recorded it or who brought it out to this place.

It was a strange experience, that evening.

Partly it was strange on account of having the real thing in the room with us, commenting loudly on the commentary while it was commenting on him (‘Nonsense! I never said that. You’ll vouch for me, won’t you, Lawi?’).

It was also strange on account of the television authorities in the UK having just decided to allow the advertising of sanitary towels and tampons, as a result of which the entire industry seemed to have collectively come to the decision that the best way to exercise their new freedom and show all their product-demonstration shots of blue liquid being poured from laboratory flasks and then absorbed and locked in with a special new double action, was to blow the whole year’s budget in one go and show them all, repeatedly, in every single ad-break in the Wilfred Thesiger documentary.

Or so it seemed.

Later that night, when the evening was over and we were about to make our way back to our hut for the last time, we parted with handshakes and with many thanks for the great kindness that had been shown to us.

‘You will come again?’ he said. ‘Next time you can take donkeys and go to the forest.’

We never did.

I don’t know why.

I always intended to, and, looking back on it now, and given my time again, I would have.

But I did not.

Life, I think: life gets in the way, sometimes, and then before you know it, it’s all gone.

The bus came before dawn, pulling up right outside the hut where we slept.

It had been rerouted, that day, especially for us.

Kibiriti helped us load our things on board, and waved goodbye.

And then we were off, back across the wide open land.

To Nairobi. To a city of two and a half million people and growing, where the modern world has brought with it an airport, and cars and buses, and offices and shops, and electric lighting in the streets at night. And where it has also brought with it the opportunity for a population explosion of extraordinary proportions, in which unprecedented numbers of people are able to live out their lives at ever-greater densities while their income levels plummet, and while their living-conditions deteriorate to an extent which, before the advent of industrialisation and modern medicine, would have been unthinkable and unsustainable.

In the Nairobi shanty-town of Kibera, once a forest settlement in which plots were awarded to Nubian soldiers in reward for their service in the First World War, upwards of a million people now live in shacks made of mud, boxes, polythene sheets and corrugated iron. Many draw their water from the choleric Nairobi dam and dispose of their bodily waste by tying it up it in plastic bags which they fling from the windows of their shacks to land wherever they will. There is little work to go around there, and what little there is pays next to nothing. There are always plenty of others desperate to do the job for the money, however small, if you turn your nose up at it. There is little else to do, apart from passing the time getting
drunk on
changaa
, a potent illicit brew of around 50 per cent pure alcohol, which, for more ‘kick’ and for a semblance of greater potency, is often spiked with methanol. Or jet-fuel. Or battery-acid. Besides the
changaa
, and to a large extent because of it, there is crime and there is disease in the shanty-town, and people die, and die young. But they are born in greater numbers still, and for every one who leaves the world before his time there are two who come into it. A full half of the population there now are children—and still the population grows, though the place is now already more crowded than almost anywhere else on earth.

And from Nairobi, to London. To a city where rivers that once flowed through tree-lined fields now lie buried in iron pipes beneath the streets of workday traffic and where railway stations are built over them. To a city where many live in houses where, instead of spending ten minutes washing the dishes after eating your meal, you can spend just five minutes scraping them off and loading them into a special machine, and then drop a tablet into a holder inside the door, and then close the door and switch the machine on, and wait a couple of hours while the machine washes the dishes, and then after that you just need to spend five more minutes unloading the machine and putting the dishes away. And while the machine’s doing your washing-up for you, you can do other things, or you can do nothing, just as you wish.

In the country where I live there were once wolves in the mountains.

There are none there now.

It was not long after the end of the film in Lawi’s house that the conversation came around to the subject of death, for some reason. I don’t recall quite why, now, or what had led to it: my memory slips a little, twenty years on.

‘When I go,’ Thesiger said, ‘I don’t want some clergyman muttering mumbo-jumbo over me.’

He looked around him.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’d rather be left out for the jackals. But
they
won’t hear of it, though.’

He motioned to Lawi, Laputa and Kibiriti.

‘So as a compromise they’ve agreed to bury me in the garden here.’

The three ‘sons’ looked at each other and grinned.

‘He is a very big man, this Wilfred,’ said Lawi. ‘He will need much digging.’

But he always thought, back then, that this is what would happen, in the end: he would end his days there in Maralal, and his three boys would bury him.