Bruce Chatwin Read online

  She was a giggler, but her vivacity camouflaged a nervous side. She used to talk to herself. “The first sign of madness,” she would say dismissively when caught by her children. Robert Erskine once found Bruce on top of a double-decker bus having so fierce a discussion with himself that he did not dare to interrupt.

  Charles and Margharita married on 28 September 1938, at Ranmoor Church in Sheffield. At the wedding, there was a sense that the shy and socially awkward groom had been rescued by this vivacious woman. A Chatwin cousin told Margharita: “You caught him in the nick of time.”

  The Chatwins honeymooned west of Cannes and moved, on their return to Birmingham, into “Namura”, a rented semi-detached in Barnt Green, backing onto the railway station. They could not afford a home of their own: Margharita, when she transferred her account from London to Birmingham, had ten pence in credit, the whole of her wealth.

  The picture of family life anticipated by Charles may be seen in his present to Margharita that Christmas: Mrs Beeton’s Household Management. Charles, sharing Mr Beeton’s every expectation, was anxious soon to start a family. “War was imminent. We’d been married a year. ‘Let’s have a child,’ I said.”

  In the summer of 1939, they departed on a short touring holiday of Wales. Bruce was conceived in a hotel south of Aberystwyth. “Then the war came and our lives were broken up,” said Charles.

  On the outbreak of war, Margharita announced to Barbara, Charles’s sister: “I shan’t be able to do any war work. I’m going to have a baby.” She was eight months pregnant when Charles, who had joined the R.N.V.R., received his papers ordering him to Chatham where he would spend a year square-bashing, digging trenches and learning elementary pilotage.

  Without Charles, a nerviness set in which could only be remedied by moving. Margharita’s greatest fear was to have soldiers billeted on her, so without consulting anyone she gave up the lease on “Namura” and went to stay with her parents near Sheffield, and there she gave birth to Bruce on the evening of 13 May 1940, in the Shearwood Road Nursing Home.

  Bruce was born at 8.30 p.m., at the end of a hot day. “I don’t remember it ever raining on Bruce’s birthday,” said Margharita, whose superstitious nature matched her mother’s.

  She remembered “not a particularly easy birth, but an incredibly beautiful child”. Her son had the Chatwin blue eyes, the high forehead and long nose of the Turnells, and a big head. One of the myths he elaborated for himself was Bruce the Baby: he would tell friends that he was so golden, blue and pink he was selected in a competition in 1942 to be the baby on the Glaxo food tin. He retained an exemplary sense of his own uniqueness. Aged 40, while watching a children’s nativity play in Wales, he so identified with the angel who appeared to Mary that he was moved to write on the programme: “I am that Star.”

  Margharita never divulged to him the comment made by the maternity nurse: “He’s so beautiful. He’s almost too beautiful to live.”

  He was christened on 16 June at St John the Baptist, Dronfield. The Reverend Richards had fallen asleep and had to be fetched by John Turnell. The two of them ran, shoulder to shoulder, through the church’s swing doors and in a hasty service he was baptised Charles Bruce. His mother had chosen Charles, after her husband. Her husband, then tramping about a square in Brighton, had chosen Bruce, after some remote Scottish ancestors.

  A swaying nipple and a shower of gold. These, Bruce claimed, were the first images of a nomad child on coming into the world. What were his? Probably, a mildewed wall in Quoit Green House, Dronfield, the latest of his grandparents’ lodgings.

  Margharita and her baby left Quoit Green House after a few weeks. In Birmingham, Charles’s mother Isobel Chatwin, worried by the danger of enemy bombardment, put pressure on her daughter-in-law to look for a safer place. Margharita found furnished rooms on the seafront at Filey, a resort on the Yorkshire coast where she had spent her holidays. There, Gaggie insisted on joining her. Sam was reluctant to lose his hard-won position as a quantity surveyor and stayed in Dronfield. In any case, “he was told there wasn’t room,” said Margharita.

  31, The Crescent, the setting of Bruce’s first conscious memories, was a ground-floor flat facing the beach. “I watched the convoys of grey ships as they passed to and fro along the horizon. Beyond the sea, I was told, lay Germany. My father was away at sea, fighting the Germans.”

  In their ground-floor flat, Gaggie conferred on Bruce the affection she had withheld from Sam. She fed her grandson halibut oil laced with orange. She toasted bread for him on a gas fire in the bedroom and played with him on the sand.

  In that confined space Gaggie’s temperament led to friction. “My mother was one of those awful pram-rockers,” said Margharita, who liked to carry her baby. She was annoyed by Gaggie’s insistence on rocking the pram every time Bruce shouted. They had their first row. Bruce heard a cry, soon familiar: “the carriage door closing – we’re off!”

  For the next five years – a period of “fantastic homelessness” – Bruce was “passed around like a tea-urn”. “All my early recollections are of travelling – from great aunts to friends to rented flats . . . the most dismal boarding-house kind of lodging. The whole idea of going somewhere else was always exciting.”

  Bruce’s experience was not unique: everybody was on the move at that time, letting their houses, having guests in, avoiding the bombs. But once his mother started moving she could not stop. Anxious not to settle, and on the run from her domineering mother, Margharita shuttled with her son back and forth, on the railways of wartime England, between Filey and a dozen addresses in Birmingham, Stratford, Baslow, Buxton, Leamington Spa. Hugh says: “She was the one who instigated the moves. She was the gypsy.”

  “All this frenzied agitation of the times communicated itself to me,” Bruce wrote in The Songlines. “The hiss of steam on a fogbound station; the double clu-clunk of carriage doors closing; the drone of aircraft, the searchlights, the sirens; the sound of a mouth-organ along a platform of sleeping soldiers.”

  Home was a suitcase: a roll-up canvas holdall, with bags at both ends, and a solid black Revelation trunk known as the Rev-Robe. The trunk opened up like a wardrobe and Bruce had use of two of the drawers – for his clothes and his Mickey Mouse gas mask. “I knew that once the bombs began to fall, I could curl up inside the Rev-Robe and be safe.” But those to whom he spoke of the Rev-Robe noticed real pain. “Quite definitely a scar,” he wrote in his notebook about the effect of those homeless years.

  The chief influences in his early life were women and elderly cousins. Most of his wartime addresses belonged to great-uncles, great-aunts and grandparents. The time spent in their company encouraged his sympathy for old people.

  In Stratford, he stayed with Charles’s spinster aunts, Grace and Jane. Like Clovis in Saki, Bruce caricatured them a little too colourfully. Grace, the more extrovert, takes credit for first smelling out his tall stories. She kept chickens and owned a fat spaniel that farted and so did she. “Don’t poof, Amber. Amber, do stop that!” She was deaf and carried a black box, covered in leather, an aid she held in front of her so Bruce was puzzled where to address his remarks. Bruce said she had lost her lover in the Great War, in which she had been a nurse, and never looked at a man again. No one else had heard of Aunt Grace’s soldier lover. Grace said, “I’m afraid Bruce doesn’t know whether he’s telling the truth or not.”

  He liked walking around Stratford with Grace. In a little tweed coat and velvet collar he appointed himself guardian of Shakespeare’s tomb. “Long before I could read, Aunt Gracey had taught me to recite the words engraved on the tomb-slab:

  Bleste be ye man yt spares these stones

  And curst be he yt moves my bones.

  Only once did he see his great-aunt angry, one summer evening in 1944 when he peed in the bath. “If you ever do that again, Boney will get you.” To make the threat more vivid she drew a bicorn hat on legs: Bonaparte, the Beast with which she had been disciplined as a child.

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p; Aunt Jane, the elder and wittier sister, was a thin-faced artist. As a young woman she had lived on Capri. Her room was littered with not very good watercolours: turbaned Indians, churches, sailing boats and almost naked men with exiguous turquoise slips. Bruce called her Miss Catharine Tuke in On the Black Hill. “The canvas that fascinated Benjamin showed a beautiful young man, naked against a blue sky, pierced through and through with arrows, and smiling.”

  She was still painting at 84 and knew the names of all the English rugby players. Once Bruce learned to read, Jane became his favourite. “She was a tireless reader of modern fiction. Later, she would tell me that American writers wrote better, cleaner English than the English themselves. One day she looked up from her book and said ‘What a wonderful word arse is!’ – and for the first time I heard the name Ernest Hemingway.”

  The first writer Bruce met was his great-uncle. Philip Chatwin lived in modest gentility in Leamington Spa, a moustached teetotaller with spectacles on the end of a long, narrow nose. Once at Cowes, a doctor’s wife mistook him for Nansen, the Norwegian explorer, and it was only with difficulty that he could convince her otherwise. Philip was an architect, with a passion to repair old buildings. Scarcely a church in Warwickshire had not benefited from his restoring hand. Bruce wrote, “My old great-uncle was the architect in charge of the Beauchamp chapel which is where I got my feeling for history.” In the school holidays Philip would show Bruce his excavations, for example at Weoley Casde. Among the items he had dug up were the mouthpiece of a trumpet and a wooden pissoir.

  Philip was renowned for his academic leanings, for his patronage of archaeological societies, for his fussy collection of material important to public archives. He was also an obsessive genealogist. He kept careful notes on the Chatwin ancestors and Bruce always wanted to see him at the end of term. He became a surrogate grandfather from whom Bruce would learn his family history. “I must go and see Great Uncle Philip because I like talking to him.”

  III

  The Cabinet

  According to Aboriginal theory, the ancestor first called out his own name and this gave rise to the most sacred and secret couplet or couplets of his song. Then he named the place where he had originated, the trees or rocks growing near his home, the animals sporting about nearby, any strangers who came to visit him and so forth . . .

  —Theodor Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia

  DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, THE YOUNG BRUCE WAS OFTEN with his paternal grandmother in a south-western suburb of Birmingham. The house, 198 West Heath Road, had bow windows with stained-glass motifs, and a long lawn down to fields and the stacks of the Austin Motors factory.

  Isobel Chatwin was a stoical character with undeniable presence. “She was a big lady,” said Irene Neal, who cleaned house. “When I hung her bloomers on the line they used to come down to the ground.” She filled a chair especially made for her and in later years had to be lifted out of bed.

  Isobel had been a film censor, a prominent Conservative activist and, since 1932, a Justice of the Peace. When war broke out, she was vested with the power of execution in the event of a German invasion.

  By the time her grandson came to stay, Isobel had been a widow ten years. She smelt of Mornay Carnation soap and, though enormous, she dressed well. In winter, she wore woolly two-pieces; in summer, pure silk dresses with large cuffs.

  “Like a duchess, she was,” Irene Neal remembers.

  One day Isobel brought a stubby lad into the kitchen. “This is my grandson, Bruce.”

  Irene Neal replied: “He looks a proper little Bruce, Mrs Chatwin. A little toughie.” The four-year-old boy wore short trousers and a tweed jacket. “If I’d known he was going to die as a young man, I’d have given him a big kiss.”

  * * *

  While Irene was cleaning the house, Bruce would chase Isobel’s huge cat, Monty, round the elm tree in the garden or under the kitchen stove. But his greater pleasure, to be enjoyed when his grandmother occupied the magistrate’s bench, was to steal into the dining room and gaze into her cabinet.

  The cabinet was a wedding present, a solid piece of Victorian mahogany. The top half lifted off and consisted of three shelves behind glass doors that locked. Brass-handled drawers made up the base, also locking. Isobel had made her wedding present into “the family museum”. Behind the panes, she arranged little odds and ends handed down over generations from her late husband’s family, the Chatwins, and from her family, the Milwards. To each a narrative was attached.

  In Isobel’s absence, Bruce admired these objects through his reflection. Once he was old enough, he was permitted to play with them on the carpet. He wrote in his unpublished nomad book: “The mother gives her child ‘things’ to play with, handle and name; these things are the contents of his environment and the very stuff of his or her intelligence.”

  His grandmother’s cabinet was a sort of Narnia. He reached through it into a fantastical world of lions, unicorns and ice queens where he would make his home.

  Two snippets of red and green plaid; the first worn by Thomas Arbuthnot at the Battle of Sheriffmuir, 1715; the second worn by Bonnie Prince Charlie in Edinburgh, 1745.

  Bruce’s grandfather Leslie Chatwin was a “tubby fusspot” who was “mad keen” on his Scottish relations. From ancestors in the ’15 and ’45 rebellions Bruce inherited his love of king-makers and collaborators, and his Christian name.

  A distant cousin was the Thomas Arbuthnot who proclaimed Bonnie Prince Charlie the rightful King of Scotland and England on the steps of the Mercat Cross. Bruce warmed to Thomas’s resourceful daughter, Isabella. She had distracted one of the English redcoats looking for her brother, and once her brother had escaped (dressed as a servant girl), married the pursuer.

  All his life Bruce made a show of pricking against his Christian name, complaining it was something you would only call a dog or an Australian. In fact, he owed it to the surname of Isabella’s son-in-law, Alexander Bruce, a tax collector.

  Determined Jacobites, the Bruces inherited Bonnie Prince Charlie’s plaid in the distressing shape of two pairs of bedroom slippers. “Disliking the desecration,” they had taken the shoes to pieces, preserving each fragment as if a relic of the true cross.

  They were also fond of porcelain. On the cabinet’s three shelves were remnants of a fine collection, these known as “Bruce china”.

  Richter’s Anchor Blocks.

  Following the instructions on the box, Bruce assembled the brightly coloured bricks, the Victorian equivalent of Lego, into “a miniature crib”, “an entrance to an Armenian cemetery” and “a lighthouse with candle”.

  Bruce at Marlborough flirted with the idea of joining the family architectural business, but his mathematics was not good enough. These toys belonged to his great-grandfather Julius Alfred Chatwin, a restless, energetic entrepreneur who had founded the firm with his name.

  The Chatwins blossomed under Julius Alfred, known as “Timmy”. Well-mentioned in Pevsner, he grew up to be a prolific architect of churches, fire stations and banks. In 1851, after erecting an arena for the Birmingham Cattle Show in steel, brick and glass, he travelled to London to serve an apprenticeship with Sir Charles Barry. He designed details for Barry’s House of Lords and was able to observe Queen Victoria open the new building from a hole in a roofbeam.

  Julius Alfred was outward-looking, one of the few Chatwins who did not restrict himself to Birmingham, and he was blessed with a draughtsman’s memory. Once in a pea-soup fog he guided a crowd to safety by placing his hands against the closest wall and feeling his way along the street until he recognised, on the facade of a gentleman’s club, some of Barry’s mouldings. Bruce would enact a similar rescue operation on his honeymoon. “There’s an awful lot of Bruce in Julius Alfred,” says Hugh.

  After four years with Barry, Julius Alfred returned home to start his own practice. Working within convention, he built ably in a variety of styles: Gothic for churches, Renaissance for almshouses, Italianate for banks. His 80
Lloyds banks, constructed mainly in the shape of small palazzos, included the head office in London, the first commercial building in the capital to have electric light.

  His best-known work was the baroque chancel of Birmingham Cathedral, with a window by Burne-Jones. The donor, Miss Wilkes, rebelled against the presence of oxen at her stained-glass crèche. “I wish ‘The Nativity of Our Lord’,” she said, “not a Cattle Show.”

  He never completed his most interesting commission. In 1880, a maharajah asked him to design a Glass Palace. Everything was to be made out of richly cut glass – glass walls, glass stairs, glass columns, surrounded by glass terraces and fountains, and open to view. Erected on a nickel-plated frame the palace was to cost more than £100,000. Then, on the day his council met to approve the project, the Maharajah went riding and his horse took an ominous fall. He interpreted this as a sign to cancel the commission.

  Julius Alfred Chatwin was also Vice-President of the Birmingham Society of Artists. He was interested in art, provided it did not cost much, and crammed his large mansion in Edgbaston with a collection of pictures. Although he had become wealthy, after his marriage he had resolved never to spend more than £5 on a painting. The single exception was a dish of flesh-tinted peaches by Etty. He owned a painted Antwerp cabinet, earmarked for Bruce, a Guarneri violin, and a collection of 30 David Coxes which he had partly inherited from his father and of which “not half a dozen” were genuine. At the Society’s annual dinner, “almost always one of Chatwin’s Coxes came up for criticism.”

  White porcelain christening mug with the gold inscription:

  Leslie Boughton Chatwin, 13 August 1871.

  Julius Alfred’s eldest son was Bruce’s grandfather. Leslie Chatwin was an overworked lawyer whose heart was in the theatre and the sea. A pipe-smoking Edwardian, he had an untidy handlebar moustache and a sense of humour which was not everyone’s cup of tea. People liked to hear him reading in Northfield Church, of which he was churchwarden. He had a good voice and his father’s memory. On stage, he could recite the whole of Kipling’s Just So story about a dog.