In Praise of Savagery

This was a man, you’ll understand, who had killed—who had personally killed, as it were—so many people, over the years, that he’d lost count. Or rather, a man who’d killed so many people that he’d not even bothered to keep count in the first place. Not that he’d have been able to keep count, as it happens, even if he’d wanted to, what with the darkness, and the adrenaline-rush, and the pandemonium and the screaming, and the roar of the engines and all, and who could blame him for not keeping, for not being able to keep, an accurate tally?

Not me, I’m sure.

‘What we did, you see,’ he said, ‘what we did was to park the Jeep. Park it behind a sand-dune or under some trees or bushes or scrub, if we found some, and then we’d cover it up with branches. Camouflage it, you understand. And then we’d wait.’

He eyed up my glass.

I’d not drunk anything yet.

‘Cheers,’ I said.

There was a sword hanging on the wall.

It was a golden sword, a great curved thing, sheathed in heavy gold, all carved and tooled and etched about, and encrusted with rubies and sapphires, and it hung from an elaborately wrought
chain beside the fireplace. It was a bit of a monster, if the truth be told; like something that you’d see the pot-bellied genie carrying in an over-the-top am-dram production of
Ali Baba
, tucked into the sash holding up his pantaloons. And it is, I suppose, possible—just possible—that it was simply that: a theatrical prop, all gilt and paste, something that he’d picked up from a fancy-dress-hire shop on a whim, perhaps, as an amusing
quelque-chose
. Somehow I doubt it, though. He really wasn’t the type.

I took a big sip from the glass.

‘Delicious,’ I said.

And, indeed, it would have been delicious, if I’d actually liked sherry in any shape or form. It would have been more than delicious, even, if I’d liked thick, dark ‘cooking sherry’ of the kind that your grandmother, perhaps, used to serve up to your parents at Christmas. But I didn’t, as it happens, and don’t, and never have.

It’s not just sherry, either, but alcohol generally.

I don’t know what it is about it, or about me, but I’ve never been able to get on with any of it. I just don’t like the taste of it, I suppose. Sweet drinks I can sort of take, in small doses, liqueurs and the like, and advocaat; but even then I find myself wishing I’d had a glass of Coke or something, after a few sips.

‘I’ve never been a great lover of Jeeps,’ he continued, ‘or any motor-car for that matter. The internal combustion engine has driven all of the silence out of the world.’

A clock ticked on the mantelpiece.

‘It has brought nothing but noise and misery and dissatisfaction,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t drive when I joined the Unit—did you know that? Couldn’t drive at all. Didn’t know where to put the key to start the engine. Didn’t even know which way to turn a spanner to unscrew a wheel-nut. That amused the others no end. Now, with an animal—with a horse, say, or with a camel—well,
you know where you are with them; and at least when they go wrong you can always eat them, if all else fails. But motorcars, no—they’ve never been my thing. But in the desert, when we found a camp we’d park our car, and hide it, and we’d wait until it got dark. And then we’d watch the lights in the tents until they went out, and we’d give them time to get off to sleep properly. Then, when it was all quiet, we’d jump into the car—me in the back with the machine-gun, driver up front, and we’d drive right through the middle of their camp and I’d blast away at the tents on both sides, and we’d be off before they knew what hit them.’

Shelley Court, Tite Street, Chelsea. The London home of Major Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger, KBE, DSO, honorary fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and holder of the Star of Ethiopia (Third Class).

He was a mountain of a man, Thesiger, even then, for all his eighty years, in his antique tweed three-piece suit with his pocket-watch on a chain and his handmade shoes; and he was a man who, in his lifetime, had done and seen extraordinary things.

In the dying days of the age when there were still blank spaces on the world’s maps, and when there were still places from which no traveller had ever returned, he had set off into unexplored lands and crossed the territories of savage and murderous tribes, against all advice and in defiance of all reasonable expectation of survival, and yet he had lived to tell the tale.

In the years of war, he had led the small battalion that captured the Italian garrison of Agibar and all its 2,500 troops; and later, with the SAS in the Western Desert, when almost all of his unit had been captured or killed, he had gone in pursuit of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, tanks and all, and had narrowly escaped being captured by the Field-Marshal himself.

In the years after, when others went back to their lives and families, he had sought out wild and comfortless places, living
and travelling with the Bedouin of Arabia, with whom he crossed the ‘uncrossable’ sands of the
Rub’ al Khali,
or Empty Quarter, hovering on the brink of death from lack of food and water.

And there was more besides.

Shelley Court lay at the end of a row of black iron railings, where four stone steps led me up from Tite Street to the heavy black-painted door of the red-brick mansion block, where I pressed a button and announced myself into the intercom, and heard, a few seconds later, the electric buzz as the lock clicked open.

Inside, I found myself in a small, bare hallway—little more than a stairwell, with a rattling wire-cage lift with a concertina-door running up the middle.

I took the stairs.

He was waiting at the top for me.

I tried not to look out of breath.

‘Mr Cairns?’

He gave me a crushing handshake.

‘So pleased to see you. Do come in.’

The flat was crammed with books. Books filled the shelves, were stacked on chairs and tables, stood in piles on the floor. And on the wall hung a painting of himself—himself as a much younger man. And although much had changed in the intervening sixty years, the deterioration that comes to us all, in time, it was still the same man looking out—still the same strong jaw, the same distinctive, misshapen nose, broken twice in the days when he boxed for Oxford, and the eyes—the same, same eyes.

He turned.

‘Did you go to Eton?’

‘No, sir, I didn’t.’

I didn’t, as it happens. And I didn’t think he would have been too familiar with the various comprehensive establishments of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, where I did go to
school, so I didn’t elucidate further.

‘Do take a seat. You can move those books onto the table there.’

I did.

‘Now, can I get you a drink? A glass of sherry, perhaps?’

‘Yes, sir, a sherry would be perfect.’

He left the room, and came back into it holding a heavy brown bottle and a glass—a single, large glass—and he placed them on the small table between us, and sat down in his chair. He still had on his jacket, brown herringbone tweed with worn leather buttons, although it was warm indoors; he reached into his breastpocket and pulled out a blue-and-white spotted handkerchief, with which he wiped the dust from the sherry bottle before uncorking it. Then with a steady hand—surprisingly steady, given his age—he poured out the sherry, and kept on pouring, until the glass was more or less full to the brim. It was, as I say, a large glass, and it held about half a pint, or thereabouts, and he slid it across the table towards me.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’re very kind.’

He nodded.

‘I hope you don’t mind if I don’t join you,’ he said. ‘You see, I can’t bear the stuff.’

Nor could he ever.

Once, out hunting in the English countryside as a young man, he was handed a flask, from which he had his first taste of beer.

‘It was revolting,’ he said, ‘I spat it into a hedge.’

And that, pretty much, was that, as far as his relationship with drink went.

I remember little of the detail now of what followed, except for disjointed snatches of conversation and images of long ago and far away. A young man’s journey into a forbidden kingdom, on a quest to find the unknown destination of a distant river. A
midnight meeting in a forest clearing with a savage potentate and his armed warriors, and the glint of curved daggers in the moon’s pale light. The burning heat of desert sands. Wave upon wave of armed and bloodied hosts screaming out their victorious deeds before an emperor’s throne. A great feast celebrating the killing of four unknown men—shot in the back and from a distance, for all anyone knew—and the young killer all shy and manful, he said, as praise was heaped upon him, like an athlete at Oxford being awarded his Blue for cricket.