Bruce Chatwin Read online

  About his accent, Bruce was both self-conscious and unrepentant. “We are what others have made us,” he wrote in his nomad book. “Psychologically I may be a bum, but with a voice like mine, what’s the use? If I had a Cockney or an American accent, it would be a fake. As it is, I am landed with an accent that sounds the biggest fake of all.”

  It was a natural stage voice. “The memory of his performance at the age of 16 as the Mayor in Gogol’s Government Inspector even now produces a glow of pleasure,” was the opinion of a younger boy, Anthony Ellis. A junior English master Alan MacKichan had cast him as the Mayor “because he had natural authority and could cope perfectly happily without my intervention”.

  His most successful role was his first, Mrs Candour in School for Scandal which was performed over three days in November 1954. For Ryde, who played Sir Benjamin Backbite, Bruce’s performance “remains as definitive an interpretation as, say, Edith Evans’s Lady Bracknell”. Under the headline “Chatwin’s Mrs Candour a personal triumph”, the Wiltshire Advertiser concurred. “She swayed and sailed magnificently across the stage, indeed, on occasions it was difficult to realise that a boy was taking the part . . .”

  Ted Spreckley, who taught Bruce English, was one of perhaps two masters who discerned his interior cast of mind. “That boy’s got something,” he told Charles. “When I give boys free reading they read Neville Shute. Bruce will read Edith Sitwell and ask me what an ornamental hermit is.” The Edith Sitwell was Planet and Glow-Worm, an anthology arranged as a common-place book and recommended to Bruce by an old lady in Marlborough’s White Horse Bookshop. He would base The Songlines on its structure.

  The other master was Hugh de Weltden Weldon, who taught Bruce Latin from 1956. “He was the only person who caught my imagination,” Bruce told Elizabeth. “I couldn’t have survived Marlborough without him.”

  Weldon arrived a year before Bruce. School lore holds that when he met the long-jawed Master for his interview, he mistook him for the butler and handed him his hat and gloves. Tall, effete, amusing, with a Hitlerite lock of black hair across one eye, Weldon was an enigma. Nicknamed “The Cat” for his secretive manner, he had the menacing air of a Gatsby. There was rumour of a broken marriage and many recall the frisson that enveloped the class when he explained that he never travelled without a Beretta (“Always aim for the fleshy parts”). “He would tell everyone with great relish that he’d lost a ball during the war,” says David Nash, who would work with Bruce at Sotheby’s and was best man at his wedding.

  Feline, with a smart precise voice, Weldon gave the impression of a raffish bon viveur. He drove a pre-war Rolls Royce and bought his shoes at Lobb and alone of the staff taught in his gown because it kept the chalk dust off his tailor-made suits. After Cambridge, where he had been known as “The Queen of Christ’s”, he had worked as a wine merchant and was sometimes to be seen crossing the court to his rooms carrying two or three bottles of the finest vintage. A superb cook, he hosted elaborate dinner parties behind his damask-covered door, this only to be entered after hearing the cry of “’trez!” He collected first editions of Robert Graves, was scholarly on country houses, for which he had compiled an extensive card index, and had written an unpublished biography of Apollo.

  “He was absolutely Bruce’s cup of tea,” says Nash.

  Weldon was not pedagogic, attacked all stuffiness, and was rooted refreshingly in the outside world. “I trust he is corrupt. I like my priests corrupt,” he said of a new chaplain. He once got two boys drunk on a glass of water, suggesting it was gin. Latin seldom occupied more than half the lesson. The topics then discussed covered everything from university life to the latest films and the possible effect of nuclear explosions on the weather. “He encouraged us to question accepted attitudes and opened intellectual doors where the existence of doors had never been suspected,” says Ryde

  Weldon had no time for the mere poseur, but was quick to perceive and nurture genuine originality. “He treated Bruce as an equal and that had a great effect on Bruce,” says Hugh. Marking Bruce 6= out of 13 in Roman History, Weldon wrote: “He has a smooth and elegant style but is still too fond of the byways of historical accident. He would much sooner write an intimate memoir of Julius Caesar than a factual account of his Gallic wars. But then who would not? Unfortunately the examiners demand fact.”

  From Weldon, Bruce learnt about cooking, fine wine and texts not on the curriculum – among them Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana.

  Charles Chatwin had been stationed at Scapa Flow when the banana boat carrying Robert Byron to Egypt was torpedoed off the north coast of Scotland. In a short life – he was 35 – Byron had travelled to Russia, China and Tibet. The Road to Oxiana was a candid account of a journey made in 1933 through Persia and Afghanistan in search of Seljuk tombs – tall, cylindrical mausolea whose existence was known to Byron only through some “inadequate photographs”. Bruce put his descriptions of Islamic architecture “at least in the front rank as Ruskin” and raised the book “to the status of ‘sacred text’, and thus beyond criticism”.

  The effect on Chatwin of The Road to Oxiana was comparable to the effect of Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta on T. E. Lawrence. Each wrote an introduction to his favourite text. “It was my bible,” said Bruce.

  Bruce set about imitating his hero, who had written the book in a house on the Downs just outside Marlborough. He aped Byron’s dislike of Rembrandt, of Shakespeare “(Hamlet – That emotional hoax,” wrote Byron). He “slavishly” copied Byron’s prose style and itinerary. “Because I felt the death of Robert Byron so keenly, I sought out his friends and pestered them for their reminiscences.” In the opinion of James Lees-Milne, the two would have got on. “Robert would have delighted in Chatwin, whom by the laws of nature he should have survived to know. He would have been amused by his self-sufficiency, his panache and charm, and have admired his splendid presence.” Different from Bruce in that he was not physically attractive – “his oval face with long disdainful nose recalled a Queen Victoria in her middle-aged widowhood” – Byron shared elements of Bruce’s personality, among them an “absolute and positive conviction” that he was right, a revulsion for the common-place, and a low threshold of boredom.

  Bruce’s modest performance in the classroom was no handicap. “The only thing that mattered was how good you were at games,” says Nash. Bruce’s record undermines his claim that he loathed organised games. He captained his house rugby team, hunted with the school beagles, took pride in swimming the fastest breaststroke and was a member of the school sailing team, the Longshoremen.

  Only in “sweats” – cross-country runs on the Downs – was his discomfort blatant. “When he went running,” says one contemporary, Ewan Harper, “his legs went sideways instead of straight and one never imagined he would get anywhere. The idea that he would walk the world as he did, nothing suggested that.”

  But the “sweats” did bring him this consolation: they opened up his mind to the barren surrounding countryside. They led him along chalk ridges pierced by solitary thorn trees, to the burial barrows of Silbury, sights which had fired another Marlburian, Louis MacNeice:

  . . . here in the first

  Inhabited heights of chalk I could feel my mind

  Crumble and dry like a fossil sponge, I could feel

  My body curl like a foetus and the rind

  Of a barrow harden round me to reveal

  Millennia hence some inkling of the ways

  Of man before he invented plough or wheel.

  Like MacNeice before him, Bruce took advantage of his freedom to explore the area’s neolithic sites. Devil’s Den and Merlin’s Mound lay within easy reach of his bicycle or “grid”, as did the Horse’s Eye at Uffington; and further afield, the circles of Avebury and Stonehenge, where on Midsummer Mornings a small but determined group cycled to watch the sun rise over the helestone.

  A regular destination in his first year was Silbury Hill, five miles away. One summer’s day he and Ni
ck Spicer cycled to this “place of unexplained mystery” and the largest man-made earthwork in Europe. Spicer says, “As we climbed the hill, Bruce talked excitedly about a Golden King buried there.” With a glass jar they trapped some lizards. “We caught three or four, brought them back, and kept them in the common room by the radiator. It was something we had in common: the understanding of mysteries, the collecting of things to be examined in glass jars.”

  The neolithic Long Barrow at West Kennet was another mysterious site. In 1954, the archaeologist Stuart Piggott came to excavate it, uncovering two vaults leading off the burial chamber. Piggott, who would eventually encourage Bruce to read archaeology at Edinburgh, had a connection with Marlborough through the school’s head of biology. In Bruce’s second year, Piggott sought the assistance of 30 Marlburians to shift the flint rubble at the Long Barrow. Bruce was probably among this group and present at the lecture Piggott delivered that summer to the Archaeological Society.

  Officially, Bruce needed permission to ride beyond a ten-mile radius, but it was never refused. At the end of his second term, he and Philip Howard, his boxing partner at Old Hall, cycled 95 miles home.

  Bruce’s wanderlust was not shared by many of his schoolmates. Nash remembered how boys in his house took pride in the fact they had never left England. “One housemaster’s son was proud that he had never left Wiltshire.”

  Nevertheless, there was a tradition of mountaineers at Marlborough College: Geoffrey Winthrop Young in the 1890s, Edward Garnett Kempson in the 1920s. In Bruce’s first year, the Master announced an unequalled achievement for the school: the successful scaling of Mount Everest by an expedition led by Col Hunt and containing two other Old Marlburians. Bruce was at a lecture with slides showing their frozen faces and the wind-shredded remains of a Swiss tent, “forming a very vivid impression of rivers rushing with snowmelt, bamboo bridges, forests of rhododendrons, Sherpa villages and yaks.”

  Bruce told the BBC: “I always had an idea that abroad was where I belonged.” A book he bought at this time was Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Inland Voyage in which a coachman speaks of his desire to travel. “How he longed to be somewhere else, and see the round world before he went into the grave. Poor cage bird! Do I not remember the time when I myself haunted the station, to watch train after train carry its complement of free men into the night, and read the names of distant places on the time-bills with indescribable longings?”

  Until he was 14, Bruce’s experience of abroad consisted in family sailing holidays to France. Then at the end of his first year at Marlborough, he was offered the chance to spend the summer in Sweden with a Swedish boy of his own age.

  The Bratt family contacted Charles through a friend. Would Bruce like to stay the summer at their lake-house south of Stockholm and teach English to their son, Thomas?

  In June, Margharita saw him off at Tilbury on the S.S. Patricia with a box of liqueur chocolates for Mrs Bratt. He shared a cabin with a young man who was hoping to become a monk and who said his prayers through the night in Latin. “And another who I think was a Polish Jew who snored all night,” he wrote. “What with snoring and Latin I did not get much sleep.” On landing he was searched for contraband cigarettes by a Swedish customs officer who mistook him for a Frenchman.

  Lennart Bratt’s family was well known in Sweden. His father Ivan, a physician, had initiated a programme to control Swedish drinking habits. The Bratt “system”, in place for 40 years, rationed alcohol consumption to four litres a month. Bruce’s destination had been used by Ivan Bratt as his summer resort.

  Bruce spent nearly two months at the farm of Lundby Gard on the edge of Lake Yngaren. The farm was remote. He wrote to Margharita: “There is not a shop for miles and everything has to be ordered, so my £10 may come back unmolested.” The estate comprised several houses around a white flagpole and seemed more like a village than a farm. Built in the early nineteenth century, the pine houses were painted blood red with iron oxide from the copper mine mixed with water. One day Bruce would paint his own house near Nettlebed with the same Swedish oxide. “It’s a pity I didn’t bring my camera because it is so beautiful a country.” He responded to the northern architecture: the clean lines of the roofs, like upturned hulls, the clear, simple colours decorating the woodwork and the scrubbed pine floors of the interiors. “I understood his sense of colour when I visited Sweden,” says Elizabeth. “Pale grey and pale green and ochre, not primary colours. You can see it in all his flats.”

  Bruce and Thomas shared a room which had not long before been used as a gaol. Bruce wrote, “I had expected Thomas to be fair-haired etc, but he has jet black hair and dark skin which makes him look like an Italian.” Bruce’s task seemed simple enough: to talk to him in English. They ate meals of pike, perch and Ryvita; they visited Viking graves under the ash trees; they sailed in the square-rigged dinghy, “Terna”. But to Mrs Bratt’s dismay, they did not get on. She says, “I tried in every way to make them do things together. I even hired a canoe. Such a mistake!” The two boys paddled the canoe 15 miles without exchanging a word.

  According to Bruce, Thomas was interested only in gramophone records and detective novels. According to Thomas’s younger brother Peter, the fault lay with Bruce. “I remember an extremely dull boy running around with a net,” says Peter Bratt. “It’s a strange thing, a boy of 14 mostly interested in collecting butterflies and putting needles through them. We thought it was disgusting. It occurred to us to put a snake in his bed, a black and yellow snake, but they can bite and my mother would have been angry. Just to tease him, we put nettles in his bed, but he never complained. He never said anything. We were a bit disappointed.”

  Having nothing in common with the boys, Bruce sought the company of their great-uncle, Percivald.

  In many respects, Percivald Bratt filled the space left by Bruce’s grandfather Sam, who had died a year before in a London hospital. Percivald had trained to be a dentist, but his nerves failed him and he had spent the greater part of his salaried life as an actuary. “Work is the hell of your life,” he said – a refrain taken up by Bruce, who described employers as “professional time-wasters”.

  Percivald never dressed before three. He wore a monocle, a brown Manchester-tweed suit like Sam, and carried a watch on a gold chain. Most of the time, he read. He had no academic qualification, but he was a man of wide erudition and his tastes ranged from the poetry of Karl Feldt to the Spectator, which arrived each week. He kept his books upstairs, in a glass cabinet on legs. He made Bruce read Duff Cooper’s biography of Talleyrand and Chekhov in Constance Garnett’s translation.

  Cut off from time and space, Percivald was old-fashioned, quiet-voiced and fanatically tidy. He was always combing the gravel outside his gate in the Bratt “village” and once after Thomas marked his walls with greasy hands, he changed the wallpaper. He loved porcelain and he owned twelve plates from the time of Charles XII, the Warrior King. When his daughter dropped one of them, he talked about it every day for three weeks until Great Aunt Eva just smashed them all. After that no one mentioned plates.

  Partial to acting, Percivald’s idea of charades was to perform The Panama Canal.

  Soon Bruce was spending all his afternoons with Percivald, drinking tea out of gold cups (which Percivald claimed had been rescued from a sunken boat in the Atlantic) and learning the secrets of Swedish chandeliers (the Swedes were the only people who understand about chandeliers, said Percivald, because they understood about ice). One afternoon, Bruce was permitted to handle Percivald’s wooden casket with mother-of-pearl inlay. Percivald had bought this in North Africa as a young man. Once, in a fit of intense depression, he had abandoned his wife and his comfortable life and travelled into the Sahara, filling the casket with fine sand. No one was allowed to touch it, but on occasions he would open the box to sift its contents. Ten years later, under similar stress, Bruce would take a similar journey into the desert.

  For Thomas Bratt, the summer exchange had been a wash-out – the
following year, instead of staying with Bruce at Brown’s Green he opted for another family in the Isle of Wight – but for Bruce it was a turning point. “He came back years older,” said his mother, whom he had bought a simple white porcelain dish. “That summer opened his eyes to abroad.” Hugh remembered his brother arriving home with “the MAD, MAD eyes of a nineteenth-century explorer”.

  Bruce returned to Marlborough more confident of his tastes. Peter Medawar’s Memoir of a Thinking Radish presents a clue to his evolving personality and anxiety.

  Medawar, at Marlborough in the 1920s, diagnosed the English disease “snobismus . . . the irresistibly exigent impulsion to appear before the world as somewhat grander and more important in point of family, schooling, wealth, friends and worldly distinction than one really is . . .”

  Every public schoolboy has to cope with other people’s perception of his privilege, which can easily be understood as snobbery. Bruce was a pin-pricker of cant; at the same time, he was susceptible to snobismus. In his fourth year, he was elected Secretary of the Shakespeare Society. “It is fearfully select and membership is only by invitation,” he wrote in the school magazine. “To ask openly is taboo.” Bruce’s ambitions revealed themselves in the Society’s correspondence, including “our most treasured possession – a letter, on pink note-paper, from Mrs Arthur Miller, regretting that she was unable to address us.”