In Praise of Savagery (22 page)

It didn’t work out quite that way.

It began with Laputa.

In September 1994, quite suddenly, the young man fell ill and then died, aged just thirty-two.

Lawi, meanwhile, had grown ever more insistent in his need for money. He needed it, he said, for various necessary things, but these things somehow never seemed to materialise, no matter how much money he was given to buy them with. And he began to drink heavily.

And Kibiriti, with his wives in other towns, now had children of his own to raise, and, though he spent as much time with Thesiger as he could, his life was such that he was frequently busy elsewhere.

Thesiger returned to London, to his empty flat in Tite Street, and stayed there, alone, considering what to do next.

In April 1995, seven months after Laputa’s death, Mr Bhola telephoned from his garage in Maralal to say that Lawi had suffered a stroke, brought on by his drinking, and had died.

A short while later Mr Bhola himself died.

Thesiger did not return.

And, meanwhile, his eyesight had begun to deteriorate. He had always been a great reader and had collected many books over the years, but now he found it increasingly slow and frustrating to attempt to read.

In November that year, he was knighted at Buckingham Palace by His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales; but around that time his right hand began to shake so much that he found it hard to write. The doctors diagnosed him as suffering the first stages of Parkinson’s disease.

His eyesight, now, had become so bad that his books were of no further use to him, and he gave them all away, so that his flat, once so full of them, now had, instead, row upon row of empty shelves.

A short while later he moved from this flat to an old people’s home in Coulsdon in Surrey, run by the Friends of the Elderly,
where he was given a room overlooking the lawn.

In 2001 he began to be treated for Alzheimer’s as well as Parkinson’s.

He began to lose his memory, and the shaking of his hands, which had been kept largely under control through drugs, began to return. He began, also, to dribble. This caused him great distress.

As the months went by, his eyesight began to deteriorate still further, so that he found it difficult even to tell the time. He also began, at this time, to experience hallucinations. The building across the lawn from his window would appear to expand and contract, while men in uniforms came out on horses, and carriages with people in them moved across in front of the building.

Realising that the time that was left to him was short and growing ever shorter, he became exceedingly anxious that the things that he had done, the things that he had seen, and the things that he had thought and said, should be set down and recorded against the time when he would no longer be there to bear witness to them.

Others realised the way things were going, too.

An Italian friend and benefactor went out to Maralal, and, finding Kibiriti there, arranged for him to travel down to Nairobi and, for the first time in his life, to board an aeroplane, bound for London.

They did not tell Thesiger about this.

The first he knew of it was when a nurse knocked at the door to his room and led the younger man in to where he sat, in his armchair by the open window.

At first the old man could not, with his poor eyesight, make out who his visitor was.

‘Wilfred,’ he said, ‘It is me, Kibiriti.’

‘Kibiriti!’ he cried. ‘I would know that voice anywhere.’

He pulled himself to his feet and the two men embraced.

Kibiriti could not but notice how much older and how much weaker and more frail the old man had become.

They went out onto the lawn, Thesiger walking with two carved African sticks and Kibiriti with his arms around his shoulders to steady him.

At length the nurses came to take him back to his room.

He needed to rest, they said.

‘Leave us,’ he replied. ‘These were my happy days.’

They stayed in the garden for most of the day.

Thesiger said that he would like to go back to Maralal to die.

‘I miss it all, Kibiriti,’ he said.

He remained in the home.

In the spring of 2003 he suffered a fall, after which he was confined to bed for a month, and then moved to a nursing wing where he received a greater level of care and observation.

On Sunday, 17th August, just before lunch, he fell again and, sometime later, was taken to hospital in Croydon where he was found to have fractured his femur. He was kept in hospital there for seven days, and though he was mostly conscious, he seemed, at times, to be seeing from his bed a world other than the one that others around him saw.

Of someone standing by his bed, he demanded, ‘What is your tribe?’

At another time he cried out, ‘For God’s sake, let me go.’

On Sunday, 24th August 2003, at just after five minutes past four in the afternoon, he died.

He was ninety-three years old.

From the house it is a short walk to the roadside turning where the lane heads off across the land. It dips gently down, at first, between laid hedges and fields, and then it levels, crossing two bridges.

The first bridge passes over the waters of the shallow river, its wide banks grass-edged on either side.

The second, more substantial bridge, crosses a single-track railway.

The lane rises again after this, but steeply this time, so that you have to lean forwards into the slope to ascend the hillside.

At length you reach the lychgate of the small stone church of Saint Michael and All Angels, with its squat wooden bell-tower, and the path between the gravestones worn deep by the passing of generations.

‘By the path of duty and sacrifice,’ says the plaque at the gate, ‘these passed out of sight.’

And below this the names of local men, killed in wars in foreign lands, and below these names the words.

‘Our dead through whom we live,’

At this place the road ends.

From its end, three dirt tracks lead off across the hill’s shoulder. One leads to the left, one to the right and a third diagonally upwards.

The upper track takes you first through a wood, the trees arching up and over and enclosing, tunnel-like; and the soft, damp earth deadening the sounds of your footsteps.

There comes a point where you leave the track and double back on yourself, joining a green path, narrower and less distinct, that leads more steeply upwards, through thickets where the trees give way to gorse and bramble that grab at you as you pass, and the rabbits, startled, scatter at your approach, and there are the garbled cries of pheasants taking to the air.

Then, quite suddenly you are out: out into the open air and above the treeline, on the edge of a broad expanse of rough hill-pasture, sheep-country, which you must cross before climbing again as the hill rises once more towards the ridge that marks its summit.

And the whole land is spread out around you, and the green hills and valleys surrounding.

The house is in sight once more, far below.

It was here, on this high hill, that Wilfred Thesiger’s ashes were taken and scattered, above The Milebrook, his family home.

And down below, down in the valley, between the railway and the road, the River Teme meanders on its tree-lined course through fields and farms to join the River Severn in Worcestershire; and flows, from there, down to the sea.

For my account of Wilfred Thesiger’s Danakil expedition I have leant heavily on his diaries of the time, published as
The Danakil Diary: Journeys Through Abyssinia, 1930–34
. I have also drawn from his autobiography,
The Life of My Choice,
as well as various biographies—in particular Michael Asher’s
Thesiger
.

For Thesiger’s last years and death I am indebted to Alexander Maitland’s biography,
Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer
.

I would also like to thank Mr Frank Gardner, himself a regular visitor to the flat in Tite Street as a young man, for buying me a cup of coffee in the BBC canteen and sparing the time to sit with me and share reminiscences.

He, like me, hadn’t known who on earth Thesiger was when first he met him. The first he knew of him was when his mother caught sight of the man on a bus, and went up and invited herself and her son to tea with him.

Mum!
he said, much put out.
Why do we have to go and have tea with that man? He looks like a headmaster.

No,
said his mother.
You don’t understand. He’s a legend.

And indeed he was, and indeed he is.

And there was the time, years later, when Gardner filmed him for the BBC, in Dubai, in the desert, in the extreme humidity and
the 110-degree heat, and Thesiger climbed to the top of a sand-dune, at the age of nearly ninety, in his three-piece tweed suit, and refused even to unbutton his waistcoat, still fuming from the decadence and indignity of having to travel in an air-conditioned car, which he thought an abomination.

And, later still, when he had all but lost his sight, standing at the open door of his flat, and the bookcases all empty behind him and their contents stacked in cardboard boxes all around, waiting to be given away.

But these are someone else’s stories, and not mine.

But the point is this, I think. The point is this. Wilfred Thesiger was a man who made a difference. And for those of us whose lives he touched, things will never be quite the same again.

About the Size of It

How to Live Dangerously