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Eric Newby and Wilfred Thesiger in the Hindu Kush
Fellow traveller Eric Newby recalls his encounters with the great Wilfred Thesiger
- Eric Newby
- The Guardian, Wednesday 27 August 2003 18.23 BST
In the Empty Quarter ... Thesiger said he was happiest when he 'had no communication with the outside world'
I am a complete amateur compared with Wilfred Thesiger. He spent all his life travelling while I spent 20 years of my life in the rag trade. My travels were short-period ones, in and out. He'd done it all, but he still went on. A marvellous man.
He was very imposing. Huge, like a gigantic schoolboy, he used to wear these fantastic elegant tweed suits which he'd worn at Eton. He was an Etonian to the last.
I once met him in Piccadilly outside the Ritz, just by chance. He was wearing a bowler hat, and a stiff white collar and a double-breasted waistcoast. He looked almost dandyish. He had asked me to come to Ethiopia with him, and my wife, who was with me, said she wanted to come too. "Yes," said Thesiger, "I don't mind taking you. I believe there's a slave market where we're going."
He didn't really like women terribly. He had one or two special ones whom he got on with well. But he would have consigned my wife to this slave market I'm sure if he'd had the opportunity.
And he disliked Evelyn Waugh intensely. Waugh had written his parody Black Mischief based on experiences in Ethiopia and made fun of Thesiger's father, who was a minister in Addis Ababa. Later Waugh had asked to accompany Thesiger into the Danakil country. He later told me: "If we'd gone in there together, only one of us would have come back." I'm sure he meant it.
My first meeting with Thesiger was in the Hindu Kush. We came down into a junction in the Panjshir river. We'd been travelling all day, and all night, crossing a very wild pass. "Look," said Hugh, my companion, "it must be Thesiger."
Thesiger's horses lurched to a standstill on the execrable track. They were deep-loaded with great wooden presses, marked "British Museum", and black tin trunks.
The party consisted of two villainous-looking tribesmen dressed like royal mourners in long overcoats reaching to the ankles; a shivering Tajik cook, to whom some strange mutation had given bright red hair, unsuitably dressed for central Asia in crippling pointed brown shoes and natty socks supported by suspenders, but no trousers; the interpreter, a gloomy-looking middle-class Afghan in a coma of fatigue, wearing dark glasses, a double-breasted lounge suit and an American hat with stitching all over it; and Thesiger himself, a great, long-striding crag of a man, with an outcrop for a nose and bushy eyebrows, 45 years old and as hard as nails, in an old tweed jacket, a pair of thin grey cotton trousers, rope-soled Persian slippers and a woollen cap comforter.
"Turn round," he said, "you'll stay the night with us. We're going to kill some chickens."
We tried to explain that we had to get to Kabul but our men, who professed to understand no English but were reluctant to pass through the gorges at night, had already turned the horses and were making for the collection of miserable hovels that was the nearest village.
Soon we were sitting under some mulberry trees, surrounded by the entire population, with all Thesiger's belongings piled up behind us."Can't speak a word of the language," he said cheerfully. "Know a lot of the Koran by heart but not a word of Persian. Still, it's not really necessary. Here, you," he shouted at the cook, who had only entered his service the day before and had never seen another Englishman. "Make some green tea and a lot of chicken and rice - three chickens." After two hours the chickens arrived; they were like elastic, only the rice and gravy were delicious. Famished, we wrestled with the bones in the darkness.
"England's going to pot," said Thesiger, as Hugh and I lay smoking the interpreter's king-size cigarettes, the first for a fortnight. "Look at this shirt, I've only had it three years, now it's splitting. Same with tailors; Gull and Croke made me a pair of whipcord trousers to go to the Atlas Mountains. Sixteen guineas - wore a hole in them in a fortnight. Bought half a dozen shotguns to give to my headmen, well-known make, 20 guineas apiece, absolute rubbish."
The ground was like iron with sharp rocks sticking up out of it. We started to blow up our air beds. "God, you must be a couple of pansies," said Thesiger.
