Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin Read online

  The business of love affairs is not prominent. Chatwin is often at his most intimate with those encountered fleetingly in faraway places. ‘You do not find pining lovers among the Gipsies,’ he wrote in a notebook. ‘Romantic love is played down as to be almost non-existent.’ Any letters he may have written to Donald Richards or Jasper Conran have not come to light, if, indeed they ever existed (‘He never wrote to me,’ says Conran); those to Andrew Batey were destroyed in a flood in the Napa Valley.

  Missing as well are letters to Penelope Betjeman, Werner Herzog, David Nash, Robin Lane Fox, Gita Mehta, Redmond O’Hanlon, David Sulzberger; and from the archives of Sotheby’s and the Sunday Times magazine during the years of Chatwin’s employment there.

  Incorporated in the footnotes are Elizabeth Chatwin’s comments on the text. These are intended to have the effect of an ongoing conversation. The poet Matthew Prior put it well in ‘A Better Answer to Chloe Jealous’:No matter what beauties I saw in my way;

  They were but my visits; but thou art my home.

  In order to include as many letters as possible and to avoid repetition, we have pruned, sometimes heavily; all cuts are marked by ellipses. On the occasions when Chatwin wrote the same version of events to several people, we have chosen the fullest or most interesting. At other times – notably in descriptions of Penelope Betjeman’s death, the house that Chatwin rented in India while finishing The Songlines, and his illness – we have included different versions in order to show that these are not duplications so much as demonstrations of the way his elaborating mind worked. In one case a single word was deleted to avoid causing distress to someone still alive. Casting Chatwin in a good or bad light has not swayed us. We have attempted to follow the advice of Isaiah Berlin, who wrote in a letter: ‘we have all far more to gain than to lose by the publication of even indiscreet documents, which always emerge one day and then do more harm than if they were published openly, candidly and quickly.’ Our choice has been determined by whether the material is interesting or illuminating. Obvious errors have been corrected; punctuation, addresses and spelling regularised – although we have retained his school misspellings. Dating the letters, even when they bear a date, has not always been easy. Chatwin was uncertain even of his wife’s birthday; several letters are marked not only with the wrong month, but the wrong year.

  If Bruce Chatwin were to have written an autobiography to what extent would it be this? Had he yet been alive, how much of this volume would he have left out, or rewritten? These questions have been everpresent during our preparation of Under the Sun. The answers lie, inevitably, in the same realm as his unwritten books. But a fascinating version of his life is here, from the first Sunday at Old Hall School in Shropshire when he sat down after Chapel to write to his parents.

  NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE

  CHAPTER ONE

  SCHOOLDAYS: 1948-58

  Bruce Chatwin was conceived in a hotel south of Aberystwyth and born on 13 May 1940 in the Shearwood Road Nursing Home in Sheffield. His father Charles Chatwin was a Birmingham lawyer; he was away at sea in the Navy when Bruce was born. His mother, Margharita Turnell, the daughter of a clerk for a Sheffield knifemanufacturer, brought him up in the homes of great-uncles, great-aunts and grandparents. He had a younger brother Hugh, born on 1 July 1944.

  For Chatwin’s first six years, mother and son were everything to each other as they fled from the noise of war. The carpet-bombing of Coventry in November 1940, in one night flattening the city centre, frightened Margharita into giving up – without telling her husband – the small house which Charles had rented for them in Barnt Green; Birmingham’s Austin Motor works, making Hawker Hurricanes, lay over the railway line on the direct flight path of Luftwaffe navigators. Her memory of the awesome orange glow in the night sky continued to haunt Margharita long after she bolted north. She had panic attacks. She would talk to herself and shout out, hunting for her absent husband, ‘Charles! Charles!’ ‘What is it, mummy?’ ‘Oh, nothing, darling. Nothing. It’s all right.’ As they shuttled on the train between a dozen dwelling-places, including poky lodgings in Baslow and Filey, Chatwin’s duty was to be the brave little boy looking after his distressed mother: aunts and uncles told him so.

  When Charles returned from the war, the family moved first back to Birmingham, taking a lease on a house in Stirling Road which had been used by the army as a brothel; then, in April 1947, to Brown’s Green Farm twelve miles south of Birmingham, a ‘fairly derelict’ smallholding with eleven acres, for rent at £98 per annum. A lawyer during the week, at weekends Charles invented himself as a food-producer, keeping an eventual tally of pigs, geese, ducks and 200 chickens. ‘We were brought up as country children, tied to the rhythm of the seasons,’ says Hugh.

  At the end of April 1948 Chatwin went away to Old Hall School in Shropshire. His first surviving letter was written after attending one of three Sunday services in Chapel. He was seven years old and would spend the next decade at boarding school.

  Old Hall School, a fifteenth-century manor house set in 25 acres, was a preparatory school for 108 sons of the factory-owning and professional and commercial classes of the Midlands, and the personal fiefdom of Paul Denman Fee-Smith, a stocky and energetic bachelor who advertised it as ‘The Best Preparatory School in England.’ Fee-Smith was a man of rigorous Anglo-Catholic beliefs whose conduct of three Chapel services on Sunday was in full priestly regalia of cassock, surplice and cope. Stories of the Prodigal Son, Daniel and the Lion and the Conversion of Saul were favourite readings. To the boys, he was known as ‘Boss’. Boss’s penchant for vestments and his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Bible were to leave an indelible mark upon Chatwin.

  At Old Hall School Chatwin wore a maroon and grey cap and blazer. He played games on Monday, Tuesday and Friday afternoons, and distinguished himself in boxing and acting. He was still known at this stage as Charles Bruce Chatwin; although through making a certain amount of noise he earned the nickname ‘Chatty’.

  Boss noted Chatwin’s restlessness in his first report: ‘He is rather a careless worker & his attention soon wanders. He is still very young & hardly out of the egocentric stage; his behaviour is childish & very noisy at times!’ To Hugh, his elder brother’s behaviour was easily explained. ‘From my perspective, Bruce was escaping from the trauma of war by playing out parts of his own devising, by telling stories good enough to deserve being the centre of attention.’

  Spelling was never Chatwin’s strong point. Like most pupils, he filled his weekly letters home using formulas; beginning each, as taught, with ‘I hope you are all well,’ reaching the bottom of the page with resumés of films, orders for books, for balsa wood models of houses and farms, or reports on his flu – his health was frail even at this stage; and ending with a separate line for each word.

  Dressing up, acting, religion – already he displayed what W. G. Sebald would call ‘the art of transformation that comes naturally to him, a sense of being always on stage, an instinct for the gesture that would make an effect on the audience, for the bizarre and the scandalous, the terrible and the wonderful, all these were undoubtedly prerequisites of Chatwin’s ability to write’.

  To Charles and Margharita Chatwin

  The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 2 May [1948]

  Dear Mummy and Daddy,

  It is a lovely school. We had a lovely film called The Ghost Train. It was all about a train the came into the station every year at midnight and if any one looked at it they wold die. I am in the second form.

  With love from

  Bruce

  The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 31 October [1948]

  Dear Mummy and daddy,

  I got on very well with the aroplane kit, but it flew into a fir tree and got torn. It was going very well until it did that. We played Packwood Haugh yesterday, and it was a draw. I was eighth in form this week. Latin is getting on very well. I have got a plus for history. In Maths I am tenth. Aunt Gracie1 sent me a postcard of Lo
ndon Towr bridge. Thank you very much for sending my stamps and my cigerett cards. Boxing is getting very well. I have got to have some extra boxing. Please could I have some more stamped onvelopes because I am writing so many letters. And will you send me Swallows and Amazons.

  With love from Bruce

  The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 29 February [1949]

  Dear Mummy and Daddy,

  Please could you get me a Romany Book, called Out with Romany by Medow and Stream2 Because I want it for a friend of mines birthday. Yesturday we had a lantern lecture on a man’s uncle who went to Africa to exploring and he took a lot of photographs on big game, and natives.3 In my book Wild Life there are two photographs. One of some Rock Rabbits, and another of a jackel. It was very nice. I hope you are well. Please will you send me a book called The Open Road.4 Tell Hugh it wont be long till I come home. Please will you save these stamps till I come home. When you see Aunt Gracie next tell her I send my love.

  ‘Love you pieces’

  Bruce

  The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 13 March, Sunday [1949]

  Dear Mummy and daddy,

  I hope you are all well. I wrote to Uncle Humphry and Auntie Peggey yesterday.5 I like the sound of Brig6 very much. Tell Hugh it won’t be long till I come home. Thank you for the addresses. Yesturday, IVa gave a Variety Show. There was a quiz. Someone had to go up on the stage and they were asked two questions. I went up and I was asked, what was the oldest structure in England, and, what was the wing-span of a helicopter, and then I had to be dressed up as a baby. Purce was nanney. I had to have a dummy and a rattle. I was in pram. On Thursday it was Mr Fee Smith’s birthday. We had a Tresure Hunt and afterwards in the evening we some films. There were two cartoons, one was called Andy Panda in Nuttywood Cavern and the other one was called The Pecquiler Penguins.

  Love you pieces

  Bruce XXXX

  Another one was ‘For those in Peril’.7

  The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 4 May 1949

  Dear Mummy,

  This is only a short letter to ask you if you could get me some rubber bands.

  Love you peices

  Bruce

  The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 6 November [1949] Dear Mummy and Daddy,

  I hope you are all well. Yesturday the fireworks were absoutly wizard. There were 130 rockets, 14 cathrine weels, 4 christal fountains and a lot more. Have you heard, about the Poenix firework company. Sombody put gun-powder in some false fireworks, and there was a terrific explosion at Okengates, and all the panes of the windows in the district came out, and a girl of 17 was wounded. We had a lot, so we tied them up in a parcel and threw them in the boating pond. Half term reports are coming next time. On Wednesday, we had a match against Abberly Hall. We won 2 – 1. We had a Remberance Service to day in chapel.

  Bruce

  Whether Chatwin was always so buoyant at Old Hall School as his letters home suggest is thrown into doubt by a short story he wrote towards the end of his life which paints a less than ‘wizard’ picture of Bonfire Night and of school life in general.

  On a wall in Chapel, a brass plaque commemorated a boy who had died at Old Hall School on 9 September 1923, aged ten. Hugh says: ‘In my time, no matron ever refuted the oft-repeated boys’ tale that Tommy Woodhouse died of constipation – the result of a silly, rule-breaking dare.’ This became the genesis for Chatwin’s virtually last finished piece of creative writing. ‘The Seventh Day’ features a nervous, skinny, religious boy – clearly based on Chatwin – eight years old, with thick fair hair, who hates going back to boarding school, so much so that he makes himself sick. He is teased by other boys about his constipation (‘He wished they’d stop laughing whenever he had hard times on the pot. The lavatories had no doors.’). He is teased about his father’s car (‘It was not a car but a grey Ford van. It had windows cut in the back and Spitfire seats to sit on. Sometimes the van smelled of pigswill.’). He is teased for his perceived self-sufficiency. ‘He hated school because no one would leave him alone. Because he was so skinny he hated being tickled by the headmaster. He hated the boy who stole his marbles and he hated the boy who pinned him on his bed and rubbed his chest with his hairbrush. At night, after lights out, the others whispered their plans for the future. They would have wives and children. He hid under the bed sheet and saw himself as the last man left on earth after the Bomb went off. He saw himself in white cloth walking over a charred landscape . . .’

  The boy also hates Guy Fawkes Night. ‘The Guys had pumpkins cut into faces. One Guy was Mr Attlee with a scarecrow hat and a witch’s broom. Mr Attlee had Hitler’s moustache. He hated the masters for working up the boys. He went off into the dark and cried for Mrs Attlee.’

  This last experience probably followed the defeat of Clement Attlee’s Labour Government by Winston Churchill’s Conservatives in October 1951. To it, Chatwin attributed the fact that ‘never, even in my capitalist phase, was I able to vote Conservative’.

  Hugh says: ‘There were two sides to Bruce’s early life. There was his ability to relate to adults and their world, and to reflect back the joy they expressed in their hope for his generation of War Babies; and then there was the private business of being a small boy who had not been brought up with other children, who found himself confined in a very strict, highly disciplined, seminary-like institution. Old Hall could be a frightening place.’

  The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | [1949]

  Dear Mummy and Daddy,

  I hope you are all well. The Rocket-a-Copter is going most beautifully. It goes about 100 feet high. It got caught in a mulberry tree. One of the boys climbed up and got it down. All the wings have broken but I have mended it again. I am making another model village for Hugh . . . At the end of term I am doing a play called Fat King Melon8. I am going to be a Highwayman,

  Bruce

  The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 29 January [1950]

  Dear Mummy & Daddy,

  I am in bed with flu. My temperature has been 103 but is now normal. I have nearly finished The Georgian Mansion. It is a bit dull but very nice. We had a film Arthur Askey in ‘I Thank Thee’. It was extremely funny. I have been doing a terrific wooden jig-saw puzzle of the ‘Queen Mary.’ It has 400 pieces. I am sorry my writing is not very good.

  With

  Love

  From

  Bruce

  The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 4 February [1950]

  Dear Mummy and daddy,

  I hope you are both well . . . I have completely recovered from my flu. Thank you very much for sending me the Meccano Magizine and the Chilrens Newspaper. Please don’t send me any comics when I am ill they bore me. A boy’s magazine such as Boy’s Own would be much more appreciated.

  Your affectionate son,

  Bruce

  The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire [autumn 1950]

  Dear Mummy & Daddy,

  Boss hopes to put on a Midsummer Night’s Dream at the end of term and he has asked me to play the part of Billy Bottom. We had a Will Hay film on Tuesday called ‘Boys will be boys.’ We have not played soccer yet because of the rain. Please could you send me a tube of balsa cement, two + ⅛th of an inch square strips of balsa wood. And a piece of balsa wood 3˝ x ½˝ x 2ʹ because we are making a model of Mevagissy Harbour.9

  Love

  Bruce

  The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 3 October 1950

  Dear Mummy & daddy,

  I hope you are all well . . . We have had snow here. It is thawing but it is extremely hot . . . I came 10th in maths exam with 38 marks. I came 4th in Scripture with 52 marks. In History I came 3rd with 54 marks. The play is getting on all right now. We are going to watch a Midsummer Dream which is on television today. Mr Fee Smith has hired a large 15˝ screen set. We had a nice service in chapel to-day as it is Advent Sunday. My model speedboat is completed, so please could you send
some blue and silver dope and two paint brushes. You will get it at the Model Aerodrome. On Monday I had the wacking10, for refusing to give a chit in which was not true. I was beating the master (Mr Poole) in an argument. He knew he was losing so he said ‘Well, it’s too late now I have reported you to Mr Fee Smith, and he told me to write you out a chit, he told me.’

  with love

  from

  Bruce

  The Old Hall School | Wellington | Shropshire | 10 December 1950