Bruce Chatwin Read online

  Mrs Miller was then the most famous actress in the world. The photographer Eve Arnold, who knew them both, says the one person who jostles into her mind whenever she thinks of Bruce Chatwin is Marilyn Monroe. “They have the same blondness. The same giggling delight in themselves. And the same ability to manufacture a persona.”

  Bruce gave himself airs. In his first term at Marlborough, Hugh overheard another boy ask of him: “Is that Lord Chatwin’s brother?” He told another boy the good news that his father had been left a multi-storey car park in someone’s will, and this would mean a source of bottomless income for the family. Charles Chatwin explained the reality: “I was acting for a client, Ralph Pearce, who had built such a car park and I kept my car in it.”

  Bruce’s muse continued to be Noel Coward. In B2’s small common room, he sat at a piano or beside the gramophone in a silk dressing gown. At meetings of the Literary Society he wore a yellow cravat and a carnation in his buttonhole and adopted the theatrical gesture of “characteristically sweeping his long blond hair away from his eyes with an extended palm”.

  Sleeked back with brilliantine, the hair reminded the chaplain’s daughter of Elvis Presley, but Bruce’s superiors in the corps did not approve. He reported back to Hugh how the sergeant at corps camp had admonished him on parade:

  “Come ’ere, you, yer long-haired in-divid-u-el, oo ja fink you are, Oliver Cromwell?”

  “Neoh. Charles the First.”

  In imitation of Coward, he cheered up a C.C.F. session in eight inches of snow with the words: “Gentlemen, I think we shall dress from the left today.”

  Apart from running, corps was the activity he enjoyed least. The Literary Society was more up his street. This met three times a term in “Monkey” Murray’s study. Members read out their own compositions or listened to talks over mulled wine served by Miss Venables, the dining-hall superintendent. Bruce read out poems he had written, including this fateful drama of the boulevard, “The Teddy Boy”:

  When gin was cheap, and sin was rife,

  In bed-clothes grimed and torn

  His mother, aged fourteen, expired

  The moment he was born

  With sunken eyes and boot-lace ties

  With leer and lecherous grin,

  In coffee bars and cinemas

  He bathed himself in sin.

  The crooked prodigal of the earth,

  Depraved and loose in will,

  He cannot help but swear and drink

  And some day come to ill.

  Poor fool! He met his reckoning hour,

  The hour that such must meet.

  He felt a knife cut through his back

  And crumpled to his feet.

  On 25 March 1958, the master R. J. F. Cook, one of whose end-of-term specialities, hugely in demand, was to read out, complete with appropriate voices, the Llanabba chapters of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, gave a paper to the Literary Society on “The Art of Collecting”. He urged members “to collect something throughout their lives”.

  Bruce’s collecting began in earnest after an accident. At the beginning of Michaelmas 1955, he was hit on the head while playing rugby and lost the focus in one eye. Charles immediately brought him home to recuperate. It turned out not to be serious, but problems with Bruce’s eyesight would recur, exacerbated by an incorrectly prescribed pair of bifocals.

  In the Birmingham eye-hospital, he began to enjoy listening to recorded readings of the very classics he had ignored in the classroom. Austen and Dickens were fresher to him on the gramophone than in print. He spent the rest of that term recuperating at Brown’s Green. Margharita was glad to have her elder son to herself again. She helped him with his French (“Mother, you know absolutely nothing!”) and in his flower-arrangement for the Royal Leamington Spa Horticultural Society. His entry, a bowl of flowers and foliage “arranged for effect”, won second prize.

  He used his convalescence to redecorate his bedroom. He painted it dove grey after the farm on Lake Yngaren, filled it with blue furniture, and hung the walls with red and gold fleck material from a Hungarian in Stratford who had assisted in furnishing the Queen Mary.

  His mind wandered naturally from decorating to collecting. His first antique, bought in Burford on one of his journeys back to Marlborough, was a red Venetian vase for a single flower. He gave it to Margharita.

  His early acquisitions were pictures, small bits of furniture, chairs, anything he could carry on his bicycle. A popular source was Pullen’s of Ramsbury, an eight-mile “grid” ride. Old man Pullen did house clearances and piled his barns with attic junk. Bruce bought from him a twelve-foot Piranesi etching of the Antonine Column and a portrait in oils. He told his friend Richard Sturt: “I paid 10s and I believe it to be school of Rembrandt and worth an absolute fortune.” All Sturt could see was a filthy black and “very dingy” canvas.

  In 1957, during the Easter holiday, Sturt accompanied Bruce to Italy. One night in Florence, Bruce came staggering back to their pensione under the weight of a marble table top. “Isn’t it wonderful? I paid 100 lire, but I think it’s Napoleon III and worth £500.”

  “It was the most hideous thing I’d seen,” says Sturt, “the colour of puke. He lugged it bent double across Europe on the train – and he was right.”

  After Florence, Rome disappointed. “Ripped off by taxi-driver,” Bruce wrote in a postcard home. “Went on tour of Rome today with Father O’Flaherty, Richard’s friend, and tomorrow morning, together with several thousand other people, we are going to an audience with the Pope himself. Frankly, except for the Coliseum, the arch of Constantine, and Trajan’s column, the Roman remains are rather dull to compare with the fantastic Medici palaces and the like.”

  That same summer, eschewing the family sailing holiday, he borrowed Charles’s van and drove to the south of France, returning with a cane-seated high chair. It made a pair with his first major furniture acquisition, a grey Louis XVI chair costing £2 10s. Both pieces requiring restoration, he bought a set of wood chisels and stripped them down in the box room.

  In recognition of this passion, Bruce’s parents gave him a book on French furniture. He wrote to thank them, the book reassuring him on several points. “Firstly that it is justifiable to refurbish French furniture completely, and secondly that the two chairs are definitely genuine (though I’m not entirely happy about the table, but anyway good reproductions of a century ago are now nearly as valuable). The second chair really is a rarity, it appears; square-backed Louis XVI bergère chairs with that standard of carving and those spiral legs are very very highly sought after . . .”

  Bruce gave the poet Peter Levi the impression of a wunderkind with a fabulous eye who became the bane of antique dealers in the Marlborough area. Levi says, “A deputation of antique traders got together and discovered it was always the same boy who bought something and promptly sold it on for a hugely increased price, and so they went to the headmaster. Bruce told me this. He knew what something was. ‘Ah ha, but that is an Outer Mongolian coat or a sheep’s eye-warmer from Victorian Patagonia’.”

  Bruce, in his genius for self-promotion, reminded Nash of T. E. Lawrence. “He had this ability to make you believe he was a born aesthete and passionately pursuing the aesthetic life since he was 16. I’m not sure.” Nor is there evidence for a deputation to the Master. So far as is known Bruce’s “collecting” amounted to less than a dozen pieces and was limited by what he could afford, which was not much.

  Hugh Weldon stored Bruce’s “collection” until he had his own study. In Lent 1957, he moved into a ground-floor room in New Court and set about transforming it. “He has gone to earth in his newly acquired and newly-decorated study this term and so I have not seen that much of him,” reported his housemaster, Jack Halliday. Furnished with Bruce’s acquisitions and a brownish chaise longue, the room had mauve curtains and white, lime-striped wallpaper. His study-companion, Michael Cannon, says: “We’d get the porter knocking on the door: ‘Excuse me, sir. I just want t
o show these parents a typical study’.”

  Cannon, also from Birmingham, was a good games-player. Through him, Bruce got to know Raulin Guild. “We were a triumvirate,” says Cannon. Guild became one of Bruce’s best friends. Guild’s sister Ivry says her brother was someone Bruce “would like to have been”. Senior Prefect, captain of games, a friend of Prince William of Gloucester, he was a rare and gifted young man. “He was one of the very few really remarkable people I have known,” Bruce wrote to Ivry after Guild died in 1966. Following a memorial service, at which a plaque was erected at his local church showing a figure resembling Guild, Bruce wrote again to Ivry: “It was as though we were all celebrating the gift of life. I don’t think anyone missed Raulin because he was quite emphatically there in everything we said and did. The sculpture is very beautiful. I think you did very well to commission it.”

  He risked more in a letter written on the same day to another friend: “I had to assist Prince William of Gloucester unveil a memorial plaque to a mutual friend who died, and imagine the shock when we saw the memorial underneath the veil – a sculpture of a boy, naked and beckoning in a Michaelangelesque way with the caption under ‘. . . of all sorts enchantingly beloved.’ Not far from the truth and that was the trouble.”

  In the summer of 1957, “Bolly” Lamb borrowed his best friend’s shotgun and two cartridges and walked to the top of a field where he shot dead the Labrador “Bruce”, and then himself. He was engaged to be married to the Literary Society’s caterer, Miss Venables. A rumour went round that he had gone drunk one night into the dormitory, pulled back the blankets and fondled a boy, whose father had reported him.

  At Marlborough in the early 1950s there was homosexual activity of various kinds and degrees. Unlike the college today, it was an exclusively male society: dances were arranged “against” St Mary’s Calne, not “with”. The only girls to be seen in the place were the darners and menders who came in from the town and were known as the Winks. The term gave rise to jokes about “having 40 Winks”, though in practice, as Ryde says: “Most of us took one look and shuddered.”

  In the majority of cases, what occurred was not innate homosexuality – or its nineteenth-century term, “dissipation”– but rather burgeoning sexuality taking the only oudet available.

  “It would be wrong to suppose we spent our entire time with our hands in each other’s pockets,” says Ryde. “But if homosexuality wasn’t a way of life, it was certainly a way of thought, an integral part of one’s general frame of reference. A scarcely-veiled undercurrent of homoerotism was part of the very air you breathed.” Garnett, who arrived as Master in 1952, was concerned enough about the problem, which he referred to simply as “it”, to call all boys in Senior Houses to a meeting in the Memorial Hall. “He had a lisp so when he said ‘Sit down’ everyone had a good laugh,” says Ewan Harper. “I’m here to talk about “it”,’ he began. He understood ‘it’ went on and ‘it’ was not to go on and anyone caught doing ‘it’ was out.” Even today, Guy Norton remembers his shock at hearing Garnett say, “‘I have no objection to mutual masturbation, but I will not tolerate small boys being led astray by big boys’.”

  In Lent 1954, during Bruce’s second term, Garnett conducted an inquisition. Over a period of many weeks, he personally grilled dozens of boys who were obliged under considerable pressure to tick off on a school list the names of any boys they had had sex with. The boys would be sent for in turn, and so on it went. “It was a dreadful time which left a good many emotional scars,” says Ryde.

  It is now impossible to know the extent to which Bruce was involved. The only accounts we have emanate from Bruce himself. In 1977, he described to a friend in Brazil a homosexual experience with another boy after a rugby match. To Cary Welch, he spoke of going off with a gypsy boy. Welch says, “He didn’t specify what went on, but there was definitely a sexual attraction.”

  No one at Marlborough remembers Bruce’s gypsy boy. The affectation that had started to appear towards the end of his school career was understood to be foppishness rather than a sign of budding homosexuality. Robin Garran, his head of house in B2, says there was “no chit-chat – and I would have known.” Cannon is adamant that nothing went on between Bruce and Raulin Guild, or anyone else. “One or two people used to sleep together out on the Downs; but I swear black and blue that Bruce wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t particularly that way; he wasn’t particularly anything really.” It is much more likely that Bruce was excited by Raulin’s elder sister.

  Bruce met Ivry Guild in his last term. Thirty years later, only weeks before he died, he made a special journey to Munstead to tell Ivry what a crystallising experience had been her arrival in his life. “I never forget that moment. You epitomised everything I thought mattered. You knocked me for six.”

  On Sunday, 20 July 1958, Ivry motored down from London with Emeric Pressburger, the film producer who had written The Red Shoes. Arriving in a huge Bentley, coloured in two shades of greeny-yellow, they caused a sensation. Ivry says, “We turned into the college court and sat looking like a couple of millionaires.” Within seconds the car was surrounded by boys, among them Raulin and Bruce. Ivry, dressed like a 1920s Flapper in a green suede hat, slid out of her leather seat. From the boot of the Bentley she unpacked her gifts. “Emeric had brought a chocolate cake from Madame Prunier, especially ordered for Raulin, and some smoked sturgeon from Czarda in Dean Street, along with fresh horseradish cream.”

  Bruce responded in the manner of Paul Pennyfeather seeing Margot Beste-Chetwynde (pronounced Beast Chained) alight from her Rolls Royce at Llanabba school sports day. “I suddenly represented something he wanted to be a part of,” says Ivry. “I was Bruce’s first taste of London glamour and sophistication.”

  Ivry and Emeric took the two boys out to lunch. In the afternoon Raulin brought his sister to Bruce’s study where they consumed the cake. (“Awfully nice to give us such a wonderful lunch – and the cake!! Oooh!! You really must think I am starved. It’s an absolute beauty,” Raulin wrote the following day.) About Bruce, he had warned Ivry: “This is the most fascinating man with whom I think you’ll have a great deal in common.” As her brother had predicted, she found Bruce “vital and intensely bright”.

  Ivry Guild’s visit may have inspired Bruce’s essay on “Cars & Character”. “You can tell a man’s character from the vehicles he owns and the way in which he drives them,” he wrote. A white Allard showed moral depravity and an addiction to drugs; a Rover exemplified the solid world of solicitors and accountants, and whereas the owner of a black Rolls Royce – “or, just permissibly, a midnight blue or olive green one” – gave clear indication of his or her social respectability, the owner of a red or white one most certainly did not: “Indeed he is probably a property speculator in Birmingham.” And Birmingham, his father’s city, was definitely not what Bruce wanted for himself.

  In his third year at Marlborough, Bruce had planned to try for a place at Oxford. His housemaster hoped that his desire to read Classics at Merton – the college of his grandfather and of Robert Byron – would give him “the stabilising influence and the ambition to be achieved, which I think he has lacked up till now.” But then National Service ended. The university had abruptly to find room for a whole extra generation of students. It meant that Bruce might have to delay coming up for two years. Worried about the financial implications – he had had to borrow from the bank to pay for the fees at Marlborough – Charles failed to encourage Bruce to push for a place at Oxford. “I told him: I’m not keen on paying when you don’t know what to do.” In the absence of a firm purpose, Bruce was unwilling to contradict his father. Charles did nothing to conceal his satisfaction. “When it was decided that I should not go to the University,” joked Bruce in his essay on sailing, “it was the sign for instant celebration and the purchase of a new yacht.”

  If later in his life Bruce regretted that he had not gone to Oxford and blamed his father, at the time he turned the decision to his advantage.
It singled him out. “You’re all so boring,” he told Michael Cannon. “You’re all going to Cambridge. I’m going to do something else.”

  “I remember thinking, it was rather brave,” says Cannon.

  Bruce proposed a stage career. In March 1958, he had directed a successful production of Tons of Money, for which Margharita had supplied the dresses. “I congratulate him on his direction,” wrote his by now desperate housemaster. “The undoubted success he had on the stage in Memorial Hall shows that he is extremely capable at organising other people, while the unsatisfactory reports in this folder show that he is not very capable at organising himself. In the holidays Bruce simply must get to grips with himself, and with his father’s aid, must evolve a plan for his future.”

  Charles Chatwin shrank at the prospect of his son as an actor. He wondered if Bruce might not be interested in a career in the family’s other business: architecture. “He could draw and I felt he had the ability to create buildings.” Here two problems arose. Bruce was no good at maths (“He has been feeling his way very slowly in the realms of Calculus”); and if he was going to study architecture, he insisted on doing so at the Architectural Association in London. Charles would not agree. He had inherited his forebears’ aversion to the capital. “He felt London was dangerous,” says Hugh, denied four years later on the same grounds. “London experience may be a good thing – but not straight from boarding school, living away from home for the first time.”

  Bruce’s second idea was a job in Africa. Marlborough had strong connections with the colonial service. On leaving school, several boys went to work in Northern Rhodesia, including Guild. However, when Bruce proposed his African plan, it was Margharita who objected. In Africa Uncle Humphrey had met his “sad end” and the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya was still fresh. It was “obviously quite unsafe”, she told him.