Bruce Chatwin Read online

  His love of embellishment was noticed by David Lea, his Birmingham friend, who, one summer, stayed overnight at Brown’s Green. “Bruce’s parents had gone out. We were sleeping upstairs when we heard the sound of the door opening downstairs, and very quietly someone coming in. Bruce said: ‘I don’t think there’s been a murder here for years.’ He crept to the banister in his pyjamas and looked over. Mrs Eden, the home-help, had forgotten something. It was a moment of real fright.” Lea presumed a murder had taken place. It had, but somewhere else.

  On 8 December 1949, when Bruce was nine, his uncle Humphrey was murdered by his cook-boy in West Africa. Humphrey Chatwin was 46. One of the first students at Pangbourne Naval College, he had worked – like Charles Milward – for the New Zealand Shipping Company. In 1946, he was appointed pilot in the Marine Branch of the Gold Coast Railway. He lived with his wife and young daughter in Takoradi harbour where, in Chatwin tradition, they sailed a twelve-foot dinghy with a sliding gunter rig. The staff included Loggart Wadedai, a Nigerian known locally as “the boy who never smiled”.

  Humphrey had already experienced a premonition about Loggart. While on leave in the summer of 1949, he showed Charles and Margharita a photograph of his staff. He pointed at his cook-boy, one of whose duties was to prepare meals on a stove Humphrey had constructed from old aircraft parts. “I don’t trust that one.”

  On his return to the Gold Coast, Humphrey dismissed Loggart for refusing to clean the brassware. Leaving the house, Loggart was caught lifting Humphrey’s silver. Told to open his bag, he stabbed Humphrey.

  “Bruce’s version,” says Hugh, “is that the man was so angry at being dismissed that he came back at the dead of night to monogram Uncle Humphrey between the shoulder blades.”

  News of the tragedy was slow to reach Birmingham. Isobel Chatwin read about it in the paper over breakfast. “She was in such an upset state,” says Irene Neal. At the death of her favourite son, Isobel’s health declined.

  For a while it looked as if Bruce and Hugh might gain a sister, Humphrey’s daughter Philippa. Charles offered to adopt her. “I wrote saying there’s a gap in our family and we very much would like to have had a daughter.” Eventually, it was decided that Philippa would live with relations in New Zealand.

  Charles and Margharita never talked of the tragedy, yet it affected their sons. “If I had nightmares,” says Hugh, “it was about getting a knife stuck in me. Black Africa was something to conquer. When I left school, I went to Africa to purge that fright.” Nor could Bruce forget his uncle’s “sad end in Africa”. He knew about Humphrey from the things kept in Isobel’s cabinet. He had played on the carpet with his cowrie shells, used on the Gold Coast as coins, and tried on his witch doctor’s silver bracelet and the seed necklace from Takoradi. But the strongest link with his murdered uncle was the large black trunk that arrived at Brown’s Green containing Humphrey’s possessions.

  The trunk became the boys’ acting box and was stored in the “box room” with the bacon. Into it went Robert Milward’s robe from Emir Faisal; Leslie Chatwin’s Shakespeare costumes; Isobel Chatwin’s enormous crinolines from the 1890s; and several evening dresses, embroidered in silk and satin, which had belonged to Aunts Gracey and Jane. Also, some cast-off bonnets courtesy of Margharita.

  If sailing was Charles’s one indulgence, dressing up was Margharita’s. “Whatever else was needed, mother could still have her dresses,” says Hugh. She cut some herself, as Gaggie had taught her, from patterns in English and French magazines. For others, she went to a dress-maker in Leamington Spa whose most elaborate creation was a ball-gown in primrose satin with flounced sleeves and a whalebone corset. Copied from a black and white photograph in a biography of Gertie Lawrence, this was so voluminous that when she wore it for the first time to a hunt ball, Bruce and Hugh had to turn their mother upside down to fit the whole confection in the back of the car.

  Bruce involved himself in Margharita’s pleasure. “You can say she was Gertie to Bruce’s Noel,” says Hugh. Bruce knelt beside his mother while she turned the pages of her Queen, her Tatler, her L’Officiel, admiring the colour, line and cut of dresses. (His first articles for the Sunday Times would be interviews with French fashion designers of this period.) “I love it when Bruce comes back,” Margharita told Pat Barber, his housemaster at Marlborough. “Whenever I go shopping for clothes he’s very good at advising me about what I should get.”

  Not having daughters, Margharita enthused him with her idea of female glamour. She enrolled him in Miss Jepson’s dance classes in a room off the Hagley Road, where he learned to dance waltzes and quicksteps – and “to hold a woman properly”. Twenty years later, Bruce spoke of all these things while walking with James Lees-Milne. “He was,” wrote Lees-Milne in his diary, “his mother’s darling. He saw his father only during his rare leaves from the [Navy], and when he appeared in the home Bruce resented his intrusion. His mother, an unwise woman, doted, even dressed him up in her clothes for fun when he was a child of six.”

  Margharita denied that she had ever decked Bruce in her clothes, except for school plays, but Bruce enjoyed creating this fiction in On the Black Hill: “One drizzly morning, the house was unusually quiet and when Mary heard the creak of a floorboard overhead, she went upstairs. Opening the door of her bedroom, she saw her favourite son, up to his armpits in her green velvet skirt, her wedding hat half-covering his face. ‘Psst! For heaven’s sake,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t let your father see you!’”

  Whether or not Charles approved of his son dressing up in female clothes, he did encourage a full use of the acting box for charades. He believed, like Leslie, that amateur dramatics were good for children. The brothers took turns to appear downstairs before family and guests. Unable to wear Harding Milward’s court suit, Bruce squeezed into Aunt Gracey’s evening dress, in a curly ginger wig and long-drop marcasite earrings. Disguised as a length of brick in the Wall Suit from his grandfather’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he would recite: “Oh wall, oh wall, oh sweet beloved wall, wherefore thy chink?” His attraction to explorers like Burkhardt and Burton, who passed themselves off as Arabs, began in his parents’ drawing room where he elevated Robert Milward’s robe into the “golden headdress” of T. E. Lawrence, and was very cross when it got lost. In these improbable attires, he and Hugh sung the words of Jack Buchanan and Noel Coward, taken from records they had bought in Birmingham. “He impersonated Coward perfectly,” says David Lea. “It was him doing his thing.”

  After the false start at Stirling Road (the house was later demolished in a slum clearance programme), Charles had succeeded in giving his children a country childhood, an environment where they could find and develop their calling. Hugh followed his father into a profession, living a settled existence, but Bruce fixed his eyes elsewhere. He abandoned the pastoral and chased the excitement that he imagined had driven his globe-trotting uncle to Africa. Bruce was ten when Humphrey’s trunk appeared at Brown’s Green. In the same year, 1950, he put his hand down a rabbit hole and extracted a piece of iridescent glass which he was convinced was Roman. It gave him the idea of starting his own collection along the lines of Isobel’s family museum. For his tenth birthday he made it plain that nothing would be more acceptable than a miniaturised version of his grandmother’s cabinet. After a tour of junk shops, the family settled on a glass-fronted specimen-cabinet with a tiny padlock, bought in Moseley for 10s.

  “When we’d finished playing with our Dinky toys, sometimes we’d look at Bruce’s collection,” says Hugh. “He’d open it up when he’d found something new to say about the objects.” The collection consisted of odds and ends: glass ornaments of a dachshund and a kangaroo acquired in the Bull Ring; a miniature set of blacksmith’s tools; a wooden saucer from Norway dated 1945, a fragment of meteorite. But the prize exhibit was the piece of “brontosaurus” given to him by Isobel. (Bruce claimed that this was thrown away when she died in 1953, but according to Hugh and Charles, it was lost in 1961 when the
Chatwins moved to Stratford.)

  Too large to fit in the cabinet was “Mr Johnson”, a four-inch figurine in the shape of a Toby jug fat man. Mr Johnson did not come from the Bull Ring, but was a gift from Sam and lived on Bruce’s bedroom shelf. Bruce, before his death, requested the porcelain statuette be lodged in the Bodleian Library, along with 41 boxes of papers and notebooks.

  Mr Johnson is a portly gentleman in a Homburg and long green coat, and in his right hand he holds a lavender-coloured Gladstone bag. Curling in brown script around his base are the words: I am starting for a long journey.

  VI

  I Know Where I’m Going

  The sad thing was, we never saw him very much after school. He disappeared out of our lives.

  —Margharita Chatwin

  AT THE END OF APRIL 1948, BRUCE WAS SENT AWAY TO OLD Hall School in Shropshire. After completing one week, he sat down to write to his parents. His first surviving letter shows him alert to the miraculous and the forbidden.

  “Old Hall, Wellington, 2 May

  “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 come 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”

  He would spend the next ten years at boarding school: a fifth of his life. A public school education gave him his accent, his manners and his Englishness. In Bruce’s case, the experience of being cooped up between the age of seven and 18 meant that he would never sit still for long.

  Old Hall, a former coaching inn set in 25 acres, had been transformed in the mid-nineteenth century into a preparatory school for the sons of the professional classes of the Midlands. It was the personal fiefdom of Paul Denman Fee-Smith, a stocky and energetic bachelor with a swarthy complexion who dressed in bold checks. Once a shipping clerk, he had bought the school with a bank loan in 1926. He advertised it as “The Best Preparatory School in England” and there was rumoured to be a waiting list – although when Charles Chatwin enquired what standard was expected of Bruce, the reply came: “If he could read, that would be marvellous.”

  Fee-Smith was the son of an impecunious clergyman and one of four brothers known as Fee, Fi, Fo and Fum. He was a man of rigorous Christian beliefs. He took a cold bath every morning and used the cane freely for bad work or talking after lights out. To the boys he was known as “Boss”.

  Boss was everywhere. “Totally all pervasive,” says John Thorneycroft, a contemporary of Bruce. Boss produced the school plays, coached games, operated the film projector, read the lesson in chapel and every Guy Fawkes Night was a spectral figure letting off fireworks.

  Britain having won the war, Boss saw himself training a new generation for Empire. “Still in my time, four years after Bruce,” says Hugh, “we were the chosen, the leaders who would rebuild the empire in the wake of Scott of the Antarctic, Winston Churchill, Sir Edmund Hillary.” Bruce’s stamp collection was drawn exclusively from the British colonies.

  The Ford van which carried the pigswill from Birmingham also took Bruce to Old Hall. For five years, he shuttled with his school trunk from Shropshire to Brown’s Green through the outskirts of Wolverhampton. Most children felt homesick in their first term. Brown’s Green had fostered Bruce’s self-sufficiency. He was content, even cheerful.

  “Dear Mummy, This is only a short letter to ask you if you could get me some rubber bands ‘Love you pieces’.” The regime was spartan, but homely. With five others Bruce shared a wooden-floored dormitory overlooking the Arcle woods, some flowering cherry trees and a pond where on summer evenings he floated his model boat “Lobster”, a white and green sailing boat, 18 inches long, which had belonged to his late uncle Humphrey.

  He wore a maroon and grey uniform, with a cap and blazer. At the end of each fortnight Boss summarised his class’s achievements before the school. Each boy was awarded plus or minus marks, according to whether he rose or fell below his personal ability standard. And a “Black” for discipline.

  One of the few friends Bruce kept from Old Hall was Andrew Bache, whose father made weighing-machines in West Bromwich. Bache met him on their first day. “He had very fair hair, cut short, and a head too big for its body – almost a perfect square in all directions, like an Oxo cube.” Everyone remarked on this huge head.

  In the adult Bruce, many people thought they saw a schoolboy. Charles Bruce Chatwin the schoolboy left virtually no impression at all. To most of his school friends and masters, he was an unexceptional student who, though articulate, did not distinguish himself. He was not sporty. He was not academic. He was not naughty. Making a certain amount of noise, he earned the nickname “Chatty”. He did not much care if his marks were good, or if he scored a try on the rugby pitch. He was pleasing himself and in pleasing himself he was quietly banging in the rungs of his independence.

  “He could do pretty well if interested,” said Charles. “If he wasn’t interested, he’d do damn badly.” In Lent 1951, he won the form prize. But he was often “inclined to be inattentive”. He would be a haphazard speller all his life. Inconsistency was a regular complaint; also irresponsibility. “I came second in the term order. I didn’t want to be first as it is to much of a fag.” Boss noted Bruce’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!”

  After assembly, and twice on Sundays, the boys trooped into a small chapel where they sang hymns to a hand-pumped organ. In Bruce’s first term, Boss arranged for a gramophone company to record the choir singing “I waited for the Lord”, but the recording was marred by sparrows. Bruce was not in the choir: “He has very little vocal ability,” reported Miss Davies, his Welsh singing teacher. Nevertheless, he was exercised by the scale with which she used to stretch his ranges, sung to the words “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?” To Hugh, this was just chord practice. “But Bruce would go on thinking. Why do the nations so furiously rage together? And he wouldn’t let it go. He’d give it 25 per cent extra and he always did that.”

  Organised High Anglican religion was an essential underpinning in Boss’s preparation for Empire. “Mr Fee Smith gave a very good sermon this morning,” Bruce wrote on Sunday, 6 March 1949. In spite of his motto, “Christianity cannot be taught: it can only be caught,” Boss enjoyed preaching. Miracles were his favourite topic. Wearing white ecclesiastical regalia with cope and coloured shawl, he advised the boys about their prospects for Heaven, if they were good, and about the sure fires of Hell, if they were not. Boss introduced Bruce to Bunyan’s pilgrim and to Jeremy Taylor’s sermons, whom Bruce would say was “the only seventeenth-century English writer worth reading”. Just before Bruce’s confirmation, on 24 November 1952, Boss transfixed a group of boys with his true story of someone who on the point of death saw the face of God, survived, and came back to describe his vision.

  Fee-Smith invited Bruce to enter a world of absolute values, black and white, without moral ambiguity. With his “melodious singing voice” and child-like views of the Bible, Bruce’s headmaster is recalled in the character of the preacher Gomer Davies in On the Black Hill: “In a low liturgical voice, he began, ‘I see your sins as cat’s eyes in the night . . . ’.” It was Davies who would give to the twins’ father, Amos, the colour print of “The Broad and the Narrow Path”: depicting, on the left side, “The Way to Perdition” – smart people “drinking, dancing, gambling, going to theatres”; and on the right, “The Way to Salvation” – people going to Church.

  The 108 pupils were taught by a dozen or so masters, a lot of them shell-shocked. After the war, the shortage of well-trained teachers explained the presence of some characters who would have found a comfortable billet in Evelyn Waugh’s Llanabba. Divinity was taught by an especially nervous ex-officer who stammered, French by a master who had lost his ear. He always looked the o
ther way in photographs and during Assembly would sit at the back with his lost ear to the wall. Then there was the Captain Grimes figure who would mark your book “and his hand would be fiddling with your bottom”. Boss was also known to enjoy a tickle. “There were a number of activities going on which were pretty odd,” says Thorneycroft. “He’d make us swim in an open-air pool, for instance, and we were not allowed to wear our trunks until we’d passed the test. I never could get the rationale behind that.”

  Lunch was eaten at 1.05, off a trolley wheeled by small, fierce Annie from the Black Country. A little farm in the grounds provided vegetables, milk from eight cows, and eggs. Food rationing continued until 1954 and it was drummed into the boys how lucky they were. But the diet was austere: a pat of margarine; boiled potatoes; fried fish that came off the bone in chunks. “The top was all right,” says Bache, “but if you turned it over and looked at the bottom, it was quite awful.” And for pudding, chocolate pudding with a thick skin.

  On Monday, Tuesday and Friday afternoon Bruce played games. “He was at a disadvantage because sport was not his thing,” says Bache. “Playing soccer he’d be likely to kick you and not the ball.” Boss observed: “He does not show very much aptitude for football . . . but his swimming has improved.” In his last year Bruce played for the rugby fifteen, where he operated “as a clumsy but hard-working forward, full of determination”.