Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Most travel writers colonise a territory. Bruce kept moving. Each of his books explores a different part of the world. They cooked in his head a long time, but the cabinet was his departure point. It was a centre of order, a larder for his daydreams, and the objects in it his toys, his routes to knowledge. Charlie Milward’s hairy remnant belongs to In Patagonia; Uncle Humphrey’s seed necklace to The Viceroy of Ouidah; Leslie’s christening mug and the “Bruce china” to Utz; the Victorian walker’s compass and pocket sundial to The Songlines.

  “I’d polish the cabinet so it came up really lovely,” says Irene, the cleaning lady. “It must have held raptures for him.”

  IV

  War Baby

  To Freud we owe the insight that the character of the human adult is already formed for better or worse between the ages of 3 and 5.

  —BC, notebooks

  “BRUCE WAS A RAY OF SUNSHINE FROM THE DAY HE WAS BORN,” said Margharita. Reluctant to put down roots while Charles was away at sea, she threw her energies into her son. He was a typical war baby, coddled by an anxious mother, fussed over by a team of elderly, mostly female relatives for whom he was the hope of the tribe. For four years, until his father’s return and the birth of his brother Hugh, Bruce was the uncontested man of the house.

  Margharita was by nature highly-strung. Her nerves frayed with a husband at sea. Frightened by images of Charles being Stuka-bombed in the North Adantic, she would shout out “Charles! Charles!” and talk as if he were in earshot. Bruce would come running to ask what was the matter.

  “Nothing, darling.”

  She retreated into herself. “I hated news. I became a hermit, a complete and utter escapist.” She avoided war work, anything that might risk exposing her to bad news. “I was always doing something else when the news was read.” When John Amery was hanged, she did not want to know the details. When Aunt Grace suggested she take a job at a Royal Label factory down the road, she dug in her heels: her job was to look after Bruce until Charles came back.

  Mother and son were extremely close. She read to him every night. His favourite book was The Flower Fairies. By the age of three he knew the names by heart. She said, “Once I threw out some flowers and Bruce found one which wasn’t quite dead. ‘Mummy, you mustn’t do that. It’s beautiful and still alive.’ I felt very humble.” They paid homage to that early bond throughout his life, signing letters to each other: “Love you pieces”.

  Then in the spring of 1943, the tenuous idyll they had created was ruptured when Bruce’s father came back for a month’s leave. This was the first of half a dozen visits he would make while serving in the Navy. Writing in his thirties, Bruce described the effect of this turmoil: “desperate attempts on my part to escape, if not mythically, by the invention of mythical paradise.”

  Margharita had not seen her husband for two years. Charles had sailed in April 1941 on the new light cruiser Euryalus. Margharita took Bruce to Chatham to wave him off, but they were not allowed to be on the quay.

  After a stint in Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, the Euryalus was despatched to protect the Malta convoys and joined the Eastern Mediterranean Fleet in Alexandria. Charles’s attitude was: “I’m in this blooming war and until it’s over I’m going to regard it as a job to be done.” The “chaps” went ashore for nightlife, but not Charles. On alternate nights he kept watch beside the ASDIC, scanning the horizon for torpedo bombers. It was his sharp eyes that first spotted the trail of enemy smoke off the Libyan coast, prior to the battle of Sirte that put the Italian fleet out of the war.

  People who served with him remarked on his bravery. He rose through the ranks quickly, one of the youngest in the R.N.V.R. to get captaincy. Switched to a minesweeper, he operated out of Malta as a watch-keeping officer until, just outside Valletta harbour, a mine ripped a 20-foot hole in the hull. In the spring of 1943, his ship limped into Sheerness, from where he telegraphed Margharita in Filey urging her to come to London.

  Margharita left Bruce behind with Gaggie and joined Charles in the Carlton Hotel. They reached Filey a few days later. Charles, preparing for their first proper meeting, gave his son an olive-wood camel from Port Said. He joked to Bruce: “I bought this ship of the desert in case we had to escape from Rommel.”

  Bruce was wary of this man who had previously existed in a photograph beside his mother’s bed, “gazing squarely at the camera from under the patent leather peak of his naval officer’s cap”. Bruce kissed this face before going to bed. Even so, he felt Charles’s features “didn’t quite belong”.

  In What Am I Doing Here, Bruce wrote about his first memory of his father, aged three: “He took us bicycling near Flamborough Head, the grey Yorkshire headland that Rimbaud may have seen from a brig and put into his prose-poem ‘Promontaire’.

  “He rigged up an improvised saddle for me on his crossbar, with stirrups of purple electric wire. I pointed to a squashed brown thing on the road.

  “‘What’s that, daddy?’

  “‘I don’t know.’

  “He did not want me to see something dead.

  “‘Well, it looks to me like a piece of hedgehog’.”

  Charles detected a guardedness in his son. “He was quite polite, but he didn’t recognise me. It was slighdy: ‘Who’s that man who’s come to live with us?’” Bruce felt more fury than he let his father see. In Filey, he contended, his father “found a family rather united against him. My grandmother, mother and I formed a little nucleus: I tried to pretend he was that man, he wasn’t my father.”

  Charles walked him to Filey Brig, played with him on the sand, and after a month he was gone.

  This stay was unusually long. In five years, father and son saw each other on snatched visits during Charles’s standard 48-hour leaves. At the height of the U-boat war he arrived in Cardiff harbour in command of his own ship. In January 1944, Bruce and Margharita travelled by railway to Port Talbot and had lunch aboard H.M.S. Cynthia. Charles had brought the minesweeper all the way from Seattle.

  Once on board, Bruce stood on the bridge and yelled down the intercom. He later wrote: “The place I liked most was my father’s cabin – a calm, functional space painted a calm pale grey; the bunk was covered in black oilcloth and, on a shelf, there was a photograph of me.” Ever since then “the rooms which have really appealed to my imagination have been ship’s cabins, log cabins, monk’s cells . . .”

  Charles had promised to bring Bruce a banana, but somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico the bunch rotted. Instead, he gave his son a huge conch from the Mona Straits. Bruce wrote, “He said you could hear the wind and the waves of the Caribbean Sea if you put your ear up close. I decided that my shell was a woman and we called her Mona . . .”

  Just at the point when the stranger was changing shape into his father, he would set off again. For Bruce to watch Charles depart during the war was a source of confusion and pain. Alone once more with a downcast and apprehensive Margharita, he steeled himself. Thirty-six years later he would sit in a train beside the Tagus, after separating from a lover, and write in his notebook: “Now moved to tears for one of the only times in my life.” Then he added: “My father always to be departing.”

  In the summer of 1943 until the following spring, Bruce attended a kindergarten in Filey. The Bluebird School cost three and a half guineas a term and faced the sea. “The house and garden are delightfully situated and there is an excellent air-raid shelter.” Bruce found it hard to conceal his boredom. Once he was sent in disgrace to a spare room and when Margharita asked what he had been doing that day, he replied: “Spitting out of the window.” Miss Taylor, the headmistress, told Margharita: “This child is different from the others.”

  In Birmingham, Bruce’s Aunt Barbara discovered his habit of setting off down a track to see where it led. On Lickey Hill, she waited while he wandered out of sight. “There’s a pig up there and it goes honk, honk, honk,” he informed her, and he performed a snuffle with his nose. “He noticed everything,” said Margharita, who was struck
by her son’s turn of phrase. Seeing snow for the first time in Birmingham, he pointed: “Look, Mummy. God spitting.” Another time, he asked, “If I poke a hole in the sky, will God drop it?”

  He preferred the company of older people. They interested him and he got on well with them. “Are you a very old lady?” he asked Mrs Nunwick in Filey. He had few friends of his own age. Billeted in Barnt Green with the James family, Margharita witnessed the distress of five-year-old John James. “I was in the kitchen and suddenly this little boy ran in and said: ‘That bloody Bruce!’ I don’t know what he had done.”

  Nor, today, can John recall. John’s sister, Susan, remembers “an isolated little boy with a large head in comparison to the rest of his body, self-contained in the world – and very close to Margharita.”

  The birth of his brother on 1 July 1944 destroyed the “tight nucleus” Bruce had known with his mother.

  The new baby placed more demands on Margharita. Bruce wrote in his nomad book of how “the arrival of a new-born brother or sister in his mother’s arms provokes his jealousy and works towards later tensions . . . nomad history is wracked with the quarrels of brothers.” Like most elder brothers, he felt “a slight trauma of rejection”. When he had a runny nose and a lot of phlegm, he would say matter-of-factly to Hugh: “You got the better milk.” It was during this period that some aspect of him locked, remained a child. A number of his friends, people who went on happily being his eternal hosts, saw in him someone who wanted others to take care of him. “He always sought father and mother figures,” says Diana Melly, who would look after the adult Bruce in Wales. His pathological need to embroider dates from Hugh’s birth. After the classic shock of the new arrival he had to pout more, be more charming, to keep his position.

  Bruce wasted no time in establishing who was king of the castle. He claimed that the first word he heard Hugh pronounce was “Bruce”. In October, he hijacked Hugh’s christening ceremony. Hugh says, “I remember Bruce as a child saying he was christened on Shakespeare’s grave. That was nonsense. It was borrowed from the fact that I was christened at the font of Holy Trinity, Stratford. By extension, he was being re-christened in order to assume the Bard’s muse.”

  Soon after Hugh was born and before Charles came back, Margharita moved the boys to the pokiest lodging of all, “a small and hideous cottage” which had once been a café. Here, on the moors behind the Derbyshire village of Baslow, Bruce found – after his grandmother’s cabinet – his second compass point. Ignoring his brother, he explored the surrounding countryside with his grandfather, Sam.

  Forty years later, he revisited Baslow, intending to introduce his nomad book with an account of their walks. He found the bungalow transformed back into “The Cottage Café”, with fake pine panelling, squeeze-me ketchup containers. The fireplace had been bricked in and the room glowed in the light of red lampshades.

  Bruce, retracing his steps, was led as by a gunpowder trail to his childhood. “This is the room where I bent over my brother in his cot and he pulled at my nose and said my name months before he uttered another word. The small triangle of grass once seemed interminable to me. The hill behind the house where I raced the James children. My grandmother in the kitchen. Sound of laughter.” He wanted to know how they had all fitted in.

  His favourite walk led up onto the moors, through some woods, to a bald outcrop of weathered rock known as the Eagle Stone. This stone he understood to be “a pivotal point” in his life. Encouraged by Sam, he used to clamber on its sheer sides, run his hands over the graffiti covering its base. “Sam said there was an old ‘un buried there. Or else it was a horse’s grave, or a place where the Pharisees danced. His father had once seen the fairies – ‘Them as ’ad wings like dragonflies’ – but he could never remember where . . .”

  Once in the Sudanese desert, Bruce would stumble on an almost identical rock. “I became convinced I had discovered an archaeological curiosity of the greatest importance. The experts obdurately expressed their lack of interest. And it was a long time before I realised that my will to believe its significance was coloured by emotional involvement over which I had little control.”

  The walk to the Eagle Stone shaped the pattern of Bruce’s future explorations. If collecting was one impulse, walking was the other. “My subsequent travels, imaginary or real, are of course relatively unimportant. But I would say at the outset that I value my ambivalence highly. I avoid head-on collisions, and attack surreptitiously or just walk out. I accumulate things rapidly and with financial success, then suddenly dispose of them in an ill-tempered and impulsive way. I have never felt any real attachment to a home and fail to produce the normal emotive response when the word is mentioned – except when travelling . . .”

  V

  From Brothel to Piggery

  These restricted horizons merely inflamed Lewis’s passion for geography.

  He would pester visitors on “them savages in Afriky”.

  —On the Black Hill

  A PROPER FAMILY REQUIRED A PROPER HOUSE. ON LEAVE IN 1945, Charles Chatwin learned through Wragge & Co. of an eviction order on a plain terraced house “on the wrong side of the Hagley Road” in Birmingham. A police spy had confirmed to the landlord that the house in Stirling Road was being used to entertain the army. The house was a brothel.

  Charles acted swiftly, taking a two-year lease and agreeing to buy the upstairs wardrobes from the Madame, “a straighforward elderly lady, not particularly pleased at being turned out”. For several months, American soldiers would ring up Margharita and ask for “Effie”.

  Charles returned to Cynthia, leaving his wife and sons to settle in on their own. Bruce said: “My bedroom window looked out on a Satanic mills landscape, with factories belching smoke and a black sky. The curtains had a fearful pattern of orange flames and like many children I had terrible dreams of the Bomb, of wandering through that blackened landscape with my hair on fire.”

  The Bomb, like Boney, grew into a vivid spectre.

  Enrolled at Garry House nursery school in Fountain Road, Bruce was terrorised by the headmistress, a punctual and religious spinster who gave lectures on “nuclear attacks and fireballs”. In between lessons, he beat drums and cymbals, made toys out of cardboard and played in the garden in good weather.

  Charles still had Channel minesweeping duties, though the war in Europe was over. He towed a noisy “toad box” to set off acoustic mines. “I had a feeling it was suitable to a lawyer, a regular performance.” His last naval operation, which earned him the D.S.C., was to sweep the Oslo Fjord and carry the Crown Prince of Norway back to his kingdom. He spent V.J. Day in an Antwerp hospital with jaundice, and on recovery eagerly accepted his “free pass to civilian life”: a de-mob suit, hat, raincoat and a pair of walking shoes.

  Bruce accepted the prospect of his father’s return without fanfare. “One day my mother came upstairs with a newspaper in her hands saying, ‘Wonderful news! Your father’s coming home,’ but I could only feel sick, looking at the mushroom cloud we’d all learnt about – Hiroshima had been bombed, it had finally happened.”

  Stirling Road – and Birmingham by implication – was forever associated in Bruce’s mind with Hiroshima and freezing winters. The rooms were dreary and lacked central heating. “The house absorbed the damp like a sponge,” Bruce wrote in On the Black Hill. “Mouldy rings disfigured the whitewash and the wallpaper bulged.” He caught bronchitis and for two winters coughed up green phlegm. In later life, he returned to Birmingham only once. In 1980, he caught the train to Moor Street and from the window took in the Industrial Revolution housing; the slates, as though covered in coal dust; the puddles on top of the flat roofs. “The absolute hideousness,” he wrote in his notebook. For Bruce, Birmingham was always a place to leave.

  Like many young couples after the war, the Chatwins had to learn how to be a family for the first time. Mrs Beeton had no advice on coping with the war’s aftermath: the shortages, the rationing and the receiving home of a husband you
barely knew.

  For himself, Charles picked up with his clients easily at Wragge & Co., but the situation in Stirling Road worried him. Bruce was in “bronchial misery” and a depressed Margharita was unable to shake off glandular fever. Common sense urged him to move house, but how and where? “My father,” says Hugh, “was 95 per cent predictable and serious. Then all of a sudden he could do something wild.”

  As if in answer to a prayer, Charles’s senior partner alerted him to a smallholding in the countryside twelve miles south of Birmingham. Brown’s Green Farm had been carved out of the 5,000 acre Umberslade Estate to house old Mrs Muntz, who had died. The five-bedroomed turn-of-the-century dower house stood empty at the end of a long shale drive with two ponds, a kitchen garden, a staff cottage, paddocks and a ten-acre field. The land on either side had been laid out as a shooting estate within tenanted farmland that had hardly been touched since the Great War. Visible through dark Scots pines was the spire of Tanworth Church, recently restored by Uncle Philip.

  The house itself was “fairly derelict”. The pebbledash had been painted 30 years before with tallow fat and whitewash, and the walls were patchy and grey. The property was for rent at £98 per annum on a repairing lease and the tenant would have to put in electricity.

  Charles had no capital for a farming venture: all that he had was tied up in the goodwill of his law firm. “Ordinarily, a country life doesn’t come to Birmingham people until after you’ve made your money,” he argued to himself. “But can I turn the whole thing round?” He discussed with Margharita the sacrifices they would have to make. Husband and wife had been brought up in different steel towns. Country life was unlike anything they had experienced. The problem with Brown’s Green was its isolation. As Margharita pointed out, there were no immediate neighbours, no shops, no buses to get around. Once they left their drive, all journeys had to be by car – and Charles’s first car after the war was a “temperamental old Lanchester”. There were no convenient state schools, so the boys would have to be sent to boarding school. And the tuberculosis scare? People were warning that the change of milk – straight from the cow instead of bottled and pasteurised – could take the children off. But Charles spelled out the logic: fresh air, fresh food on the table and a fresh start for each member of the Chatwin family. Why not go for it?