Bruce Chatwin Read online

  Charles’s sister Barbara liked to boast that the Chatwins “did things – as opposed to the Milwards who sat behind high hedges and pondered their wealth”. Charles had an adventurous elder brother who had emigrated to West Africa where he worked for the Gold Coast Railway. Humphrey Chatwin was Bruce’s godfather and the favourite of the family. He was four years older than Charles, the same gap that separated Bruce from Hugh, and a romantic figure whose bold action Charles now sought to emulate by getting his family out of Birmingham. Though only twelve miles away, the relocation proved as life-altering as Humphrey’s to Takoradi.

  The family moved to Brown’s Green in April 1947 during a famously long frost. There were 27 burst pipes and the snow was hedge-high. “Bruce was thrilled to bits,” said his mother. His bedroom window looked out over the pigsties and his immediate delight was to sit perched on the window-sill, taking in the scene and waggling his legs. Several times Margharita, heart in mouth, feared to attract his attention lest he fall.

  Brown’s Green became a safe haven after the horrors of war. Charles turned his eleven-acre holding into a small working farm much like “The Vision” in On the Black Hill. A Birmingham lawyer during the week, at weekends he invented himself as a food-producer with encouragement from the Ministry of Agriculture. He was allowed to set off farming losses against tax on his legal fees. He could afford a handyman, Mr Hayward, a home-help, Mrs Eden, and one reliable vehicle.

  In 1949, short-circuiting the waiting list for a new car, Charles exchanged the Lanchester for a grey Ford delivery van, fitting it with removable wooden Spitfire seats for back passengers. With this all-purpose workhorse, he was able to visit clients, take the children on excursions and collect feed stuff for his livestock. The evil-smelling swill, known as “Tottenham Pudding”, came in huge aluminium tubs to feed an eventual tally of 37 pigs. He also kept geese, ducks and 200 chickens. Covered in fluff, with her hair done up in a washerwoman’s scarf, Margharita butchered and plucked the fowl. Engaged in a daily and productive occupation, she slowly rid herself of panic-attacks.

  “We were brought up as country children, tied to the rhythm of the seasons,” says Hugh. “The neighbouring tenants and labourers, who were rooted in ‘proper’ farming, became our main friends; mutually supportive at harvest time, during outbreaks of foot-and-mouth and fowl pest.”

  As Charles had hoped, the clean air and wholesome food improved the health of his wife and son. Thirty-five years later, Bruce conjured a bucolic picture of life at Brown’s Green in On the Black Hill. Many of the characters, names and incidents appear as they were in his childhood and are taken directly from his family and neighbours. Bickerton, a wayward Milward cousin, becomes Reggie Bickerton, who perishes of alcoholism in Kenya; Bruce’s grandfather Sam becomes Sam the Wheeler, with his sad clown’s face and his porcelain statuette of a chubby-cheeked gentleman; the twins Lewis and Benjamin, in their physical resemblance and behaviour, become Bruce and Hugh.

  “A special flavour of our childhood,” says Hugh, “is that while we enjoyed romping in Lewis and Benjamin’s rural playground – damming the infant River Alne with pebbles, pausing to wave at the passengers in passing puffer-trains so that they would be bound to wave back – we were also rejoicing in a much better time than we had known, had heard about, had witnessed at Birmingham’s bomb sites. We knew that everything was getting better.”

  On sunny days, the boys helped Mr Hayward with his farming chores: they collected and scrubbed the eggs before they went off to the packing station, mixed the chicken mash, constructed wire pens for the ducks, fetched the milk from Kemp’s Farm half a mile away, drove the large black sows, Charlotte and Louise, to be served at Hemming’s Farm up the road and when Charles was away rode the pigs around the farm yard, holding them by the handle-bar ears and trying to stay on. “We mourned the ones that had to go off to be baconed,” says Hugh. “They came home in canvas bags to hang in the box room.”

  As soon as they were old enough the boys joined in local field sports. They went ferreting in the hedge rows and learned to handle guns. Bruce was not squeamish. He shot wood pigeon from his window and chased the chickens with a bow and arrow. David Lea, who had known him at Garry House School, visited Brown’s Green during the harvest rabbit shoot. “I remember the powerful smell of inside-of-rabbit.”

  And on the wet days? “We sat at the kitchen window and raced raindrops,” says Hugh. “Or collected and played with Dinky toys on the kitchen table, getting under Mother’s feet on her endless round of cooking and baking.” Margharita took pleasure in spoiling her husband and boys. “My chaps,” she called them.

  Space to accommodate her parents had been Margharita’s consideration in moving to the country. Sam and Gaggie had run out of money and both were heading for a Poorhouse end. They came to stay, in rote, as a last stepping stone before nursing homes in Leamington Spa. In 1950, Bruce’s grandfather, no longer able to endure life with Gaggie, fled from their rented semi in Ickenham and turned up on the Chatwins’ doorstep. “Old Sam had come to live at the Vision and slipped into a second childhood. He wore a moleskin waistcoat, a floppy black cap and went around everywhere with a blackthorn stick.” Bruce and Hugh loved to go on walks with him down the Mile Drive from Umberslade Hall to Tanworth, some of which are vividly recalled in the novel. ‘“It’s our path!’ they’d shout, if they happened to meet a party of hikers. The sight of a bootprint in the mud was enough to put them in a towering rage – and they’d try to rub it out with a stick.”

  They met few people. Five or six cars passed a day and Bruce would hide with Hugh in the grass and throw gravel at them. Hugh was known as “The Squeaker”, or “Queekie”, always wanting to catch up. “It was more like growing up with an uncle than a brother.”

  The farm was Bruce’s world until he was 14. “Brown’s Green taught us how to think independently,” says Hugh. “As soon as we had bicycles we had freedom.” With Hugh, Bruce delivered the parish magazine on the ten-mile round circuit to Henley-in-Arden. There they indulged in ice-cream before Bruce dragged Hugh up the Roman settlement at Beaudesert. Aged ten, he had no fear about making expeditions to the flea-market in Birmingham’s Bull Ring to buy caged birds or goldfish. “If we came home with a Java sparrow,” Hugh says, “it was because we’d inspected the atlas first to find out where Java was. From there we’d move to Woolworth’s, to buy little nuts, bolts and screws for the sleek balsa wood catamarans which Bruce created to his own design. Then on to the stamp shop in Needless Alley; then onto the H.M.V. record shop where we would listen to 78s of Noel Coward and Fats Waller. At some stage we would go to the cartoon theatre and take in our view of the world via Movietone News.”

  The Ford van gave Charles and his family freedom to travel beyond Birmingham. On summer weekends, the family’s social life revolved around the reservoir at Barnt Green Sailing Club. Bruce handled a square-nosed pram dinghy with skill, but was not at all happy at sea. In 1948, for their first holiday, he went coastal cruising on the five-ton Ripple out of Torquay. He promptly felt sick. “He longed for death and for the waves to wash over him,” says Hugh. “I went below and taunted him. ‘Up and down, up and down.’ I had a cast-iron stomach and I could get my own back at him for being four years older, at last.”

  There was no avoiding the sailing. By 1952, the Chatwins shared Sunquest, a beamy 40-footer with a flush teak deck, built for sailing round the world. She was kept at Bursledon on the Hamble where they spent every third weekend. In a essay he wrote at Marlborough, Bruce caricatured the family outing: “Once a year there comes a morning when my father, instead of sauntering down to breakfast with a customary frown, bounces downstairs, eats five times more breakfast than usual, and capers about as if he were 20. The reason for this outburst is a visit to the most important member of the family, the yacht. Through his veins surges the blood of Drake and Hawkins; bowler hat gives way to yachting cap, and his thoughts run far above his bevy of secretaries and Mrs A. ’s will.

  �
�My mother also transforms herself from the wife of a respectable lawyer, and chairman of all sorts of philanthropic committees, into a pirate’s spouse. She dresses to the part with tight black trousers, canvas shoes and a massive blue sweater, a savage scarf tied round her head in true piratical fashion, and a pair of earrings that would have delighted Captain Kidd. This uniform has become de rigueur for all yachtswomen from Bembridge to Salcombe and has even appeared in Vogue.

  “My brother adopts the urchin look, jeans and a terrible piece of headgear with a bobble on it. Only myself and the dog are upset. I loathe going to sea . . .”

  * * *

  Sunquest was a rare luxury. There was no money spare. The war, his determination to be good and not to be observed doing anything but good, had reinforced Charles’s correctness. Because of the Milward scandal, he went out of his way never to be thought grasping. This extended to not paying himself properly. To neighbours like the James children it appeared that he struggled a bit. “The idea got through to us that they weren’t nearly as well off as some of our friends.”

  At home he found himself without his ship’s company and the object of ribbing by his wife, sons and father-in-law. Sam, enjoying his second childhood, set no sort of example, cheating at cards and encouraging the boys to lapse into a full Yorkshire dialect. “Let’s say ‘fower’ till daddy comes.” The house was full of laughter, often aimed at Charles’s virtue. Once, he came home to discover Margharita and Bruce giggling uncontrollably after Bruce had said of a woman in Tanworth Church: “A woman with a bottom like that can do anything.”

  Bruce himself never tolerated being teased. According to Elizabeth, “If you teased him he took it personally, as if you didn’t like him. He always took everything you said seriously.” Combined with occasional laspes into gullibility, this made him a natural target for teasers such as Jonathan Hope. “I told him, quoting a line from In Patagonia: ‘When you laugh like that your mouth unfurls like a red flag.’ Bruce threw his napkin at me. ‘Stop it!’”

  Friends and relations were always commenting on how the genes were apportioned between the children. The father’s fair hair and blue eyes went to Bruce, along with the mother’s temperament. Her brown eyes and dark hair passed to Hugh, and the father’s dogged pragmatism.

  Where Margharita was instinctive, going straight to the point without knowing how she arrived there, Charles was rational to the point of pedantry. He had the Milward bossiness, an answer to how everyone should behave, and he had the knack of annoying Margharita by asking: “What’s the other side of the story?” She once rebelled, flinging an enamel jug against the kitchen wall. “Why do you always address me like a public meeting?”

  In spite of their different temperaments, the marriage worked. For the most part, Margharita was compliant. She busied herself in farm work or mending her husband’s shirts, his suits. If she felt cut off, she never said so. She liked a gossip with her friends in the Women’s Institute, afterwards entreating: “Don’t tell Charles I told you.” They were liked and trusted as a couple. There was only one serious argument played out before the children. “Mother,” says Hugh, “was adamant that what was in one’s blood formed character that would not change. Father was the opposite. He believed that if people’s environment could be improved then they could be persuaded to behave better.” Bruce constantly resurrected their argument in his work. All his questing, Hugh believes, can be distilled into a single question: Do we have a capacity to behave better towards our neighbours than we do? Hugh sees this question lurking behind the puzzled look in Bruce’s early photographs. “Don’t frown,” Margharita would tell him.

  Physically, Bruce was almost identical to Charles. He was called Charles at school, and frequently this was how he signed himself. But the relationship was more respectful than close. Even if Charles was not a controlling figure, Bruce never wanted to disappoint his father. “His whole childhood was governed by not letting Charles down,” says Elizabeth. “He would say: ‘I don’t want my father to think badly of me’.” As a result, they kept a Victorian distance. “That Bruce did not unbotde his emotions was a Father-influence,” says Hugh. “It was a matter of personal responsibility to keep them in check.”

  Bruce, after he left home, moved between extolling his father’s virtues from a distance and recoiling from his way of life. He lived always conscious of his character: his above-board honesty, his “absolute fairness and tireless, unostentatious work for others”. But he did not share the same aspiration: “Imagine the horror of being stuck in your father’s creation,” he wrote in his notebook in Patagonia. And yet he admired Charles his ability to be happy. Years later in Africa, Bruce had this dream of his parents: “Margharita in her blue dress with the orange and green cummerbund and Charles in tails, dancing in the moonlight. I felt that, in their way, they are the most romantic couple on earth.”

  Charles treated Bruce from the start as a small adult with no baby talk. He passed on to him a habit of precision and self-expression honed from the legal trade: at the end of each day he would expect Bruce to describe his. “If Bruce had been to a tea-party,” Charles said, “I would ask him to tell me properly where he’d been, who he’d met, what their names were, because I thought it was important he should become articulate.”

  He directed Bruce to answer the telephone, taught him to throw his words out and not to mumble. “I was keen for him to talk. Once he started, he never stopped.”

  Bruce grew not only articulate, but adept at covering his tracks. “He would always give an answer,” says Elizabeth. “I taxed him on it: ‘Why do you do that?’ ‘Oh well, better to give you an answer.’ He wanted to shut me up.”

  Apparent to the whole family was Bruce’s phenomenal memory. By the time he was seven, said Margharita, he would chant the whole of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” in his bath.

  In the 1970s, Meriel McCooey, fashion editor of the Sunday Times magazine, asked Bruce: “Where do you think it all began?”

  “I’ll tell you exactly,” said Bruce. “I was two years old. My parents were running for a train and dropped me on my head. After that I was a genius.”

  Genius was a word he got hold of early. Aged seven, he told Hugh: “Erasmus says it is possible to be a great genius and a complete fool.” Hugh replied: “Then you, Bruce, must be a great genius.” Charles was doubtful. “A genius to me is someone who has a rather one-track mind and that was exactly what he hadn’t got. Unusual is the right word.”

  Charles linked Bruce in his mind to another remarkably precocious young boy. In the 1920s Charles had met the Daily Telegraph’s theatre critic W. A. Darlington. On Leslie Chatwin’s invitation to judge a night of one-act plays, Darlington had stayed in West Heath Road and impressed Charles with the story of his father, the son of a poor yeoman farmer from Cheshire with a startling gift for languages. At the age of eight he would lean over the bridge on the Montgomery Canal and talk in Welsh to the bargemen. He picked up Romany from tramping miles after gypsy caravans and spoke Xhosa. In Russia, he visited Tolstoy whose wife chatted to him for ten minutes without having the least notion that he was not Russian. Bruce, said Charles, possessed something of the older Darlington’s photographic recall.

  Hugh was also conscious of his brother’s talent. “I used to watch him amaze the adults. He’d mug it up. He could absorb any piece of information and then try and make a connection with it – and when it couldn’t all fit together, he’d make up the rest of it. For me, he’d wear a sign on his forehead: ‘Don’t disturb. I am thinking. When I am ready to talk to you, I’ll do so.’ Then he’d come out with his stories, fully prepared.”

  Hugh reckoned that “60 per cent” of the content of his brother’s stories was true, the rest embellishment. “It was the story that counted and Bruce was a witness to the story. ‘Come on, Bruce, surely it didn’t happen like that,’ we’d say. And it hadn’t. But something had happened. We would all look at each other and coax him to continue: ‘Yes, and then . . . ?”’


  “When Bruce told you a fact,” said Charles, “you could rely on it. When he told you an opinion, that was different. He had a pretty vivid imagination. As a child, he had an imaginary friend, Tommy, who talked to him a lot and to whom he would tell stories.”

  In the summer of 1947, Bruce was already testing his more hair-raising stories on pupils at Innisfree House, a private kindergarten catering for children from the R.A.F. station in Wythall. His teacher was Mrs Clifton, her name unchanged in On the Black Hill, where she is described as “a buxom woman with milky skin and hair the colour of lemon peel”. Mrs Clifton, who taught him elocution, is responsible for the first written estimation of Bruce. “Fluent – too much emphasis on some words,” she wrote in her first report, placing him eighth out of 16. Her comment the following term was, “Good memory – rather monotonous tone.” He was generally “careless” and in arithmetic “below standard”, while achieving “very good preliminary work” in literature.

  Never more than an average pupil at Innisfree, he was by his own account only interested in journeys and maps. “I was a tremendous fabulist.” In one story he had “absolutely nothing” to do with England. “I startled the class by pointing dramatically at the White Sea on the classroom atlas, and held their attention with a confident revelation. My parents were not my parents at all. I was a Russian orphan. I described in graphic detail my escape across the frontier to safety. Dead of winter, sledges, panting huskies and black pine trees. Guns of the soldiers blazed on the frozen river. Blood in the snow. I was the only survivor. So brave. One little girl sobbed and burst into tears. The headmistress suggested to my mother I might see a psychiatrist.”