Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  It was in the improbable arena of boxing that he shone. On 18 March 1951, Bruce wrote home: “I boxed in the ring on Monday against a tough. I won 5–3. I am in the final for the Junior Cup. I have got a very good chance.”

  The “tough” was Philip Howard, who before stepping through the ropes had agreed a pact with Bruce that they would try to avoid hitting each other while appearing to do their best. “One of us hit the other on the nose very early on, and after that it was fireworks,” says Howard.

  The ordeal took place in Hall, before the whole school, and Boss made the boys strip to their waists while matron stood by to mop their bloody noses between rounds. Savouring the physicality of the contest, Boss wrote that Bruce proved “a hard, relentless hitter and gives the impression of immense solidity”.

  In the boxing ring, Bruce’s “do or die spirit” was good for Boss to see, never more so than in the “magnificent” final against Butler-Madden, written up by Boss in the school magazine. “It looked as if the power and weight of Chatwin would prove superior. The first round bore this out. Butler-Madden was in great trouble. Then came the transformation in the second round – Butler-Madden decided to go all out and go all out he did. He proved to have the superior stamina and Chatwin had had enough by the end. This was one of the finest performances seen in Junior Cup battles.”

  “Dear Mummy Please could you get me a box of marbles because I have not got any. ‘Love you pieces’ Bruce.”

  Bruce’s letters from Old Hall give a narrow but valuable glimpse of his school life. The week’s highlight was the Saturday film in Hall. An early cinematic experience was The God of Creation, showing the handiwork of the Lord at high speed: a rose hurtling into bloom, a magnified survey of the Milky Way and the life history of a caterpillar in a very few seconds. Most of the films were adventure stories. “We had a film called I know where I’m going, it was about a girl that went to mary a man in Scotland, and she was going to catch a boat it was a very rough sea, they nerly got washed up on to the beach when the got caught in a werlpool.”

  Travellers were invited to give lantern lectures. In Bruce’s first term the nephew of the explorer Cherry Kearton gave a talk on the African veld illustrated with photographs of man-eating lions taken at “suicidal proximity”, and Captain Jopp, in a lecture entitled “High Adventure”, showed slides of his “thrilling flight” around the Matterhorn.

  On Sunday nights in winter, Boss invited boys to sit before a log fire in his drawing room while he read aloud from Jamaica Inn, Beau Geste and The Prisoner of Zenda.

  Bruce was less interested in fiction than in true adventure stories.

  “Dear Mummy and Daddy Please could you get me a Romany Book, called Out with Romany by Medow and Stream. Because I want it for a friend of mines birthday. Yesterday 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. 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 a book called The Open Road. 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”

  A storyteller is most influenced by the kind of stories he first thrills to. Bruce’s first books, bought at Hudson’s bookshop in Birmingham with 10s 6d tokens, were about sailing round the world: Sopranino, Blue Waters and Shoals, The Venturesome Voyages of Captain Voss. Because of Old Hall’s connection with the explorer Shackleton – his father had been a pupil – the library was stocked with Joshua Slocum, Richard Henry Dann, Jack London, Lucas Bridges.

  – “I have just got a book out of the senior library called We didn’t mean to go to sea which tells you how to sail a 5-ton cutter. I hope I will learn something from it.”

  — “I took a very interesting book out of the library called Heroes of the South Pole.

  – “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.”

  His mental world was dominated by South Sea islands and deserts. His favourite writers were “the odd ones, the Victorian ones”. The Rev. Skertchley, who had travelled among the Amazons of Dahomey (“one of the surrealist books of all time”); Henri de Monfried’s Hashish; Blaise Cendrars. He also scanned the Times atlas. “Some children obviously play with toys, some children play with computer games and I played at a very, very early age with an adas. It was the only thing that interested me, to go to X and Y and Z, to see it all.” He considered the schoolroom atlas as “sort of one’s back door” and in the Old Hall library he pored over the wind chart to decide that Patagonia was the safest place to hide in event of a cobalt bomb.

  Lastly, there was the hobbies room. “Conjouring has taken itself in the school and I am very interested in it. I am making some tricks myself.”

  Bruce had been brought up by Margharita, Gaggie and his great-aunts to be someone special. At the end of his first term he was welcomed back to Brown’s Green according to his specific instructions. The greeting he demanded was similar to that of a sailor returning from the war: chocolate mousse and a banner of towels above the shale drive, painted with the words “Welcome home, Bruce!”

  At school this Little Prince behaviour did not command sympathy. John Thorneycroft thought him boastful and self-important. On at least four occasions Boss had to caution his parents against a manner which tended to prejudice others against him. “I am sure he is straight and dependable. But he is not popular at the moment with his fellows & appears to be regarded as conceited.”

  He annoyed masters, too. “On Monday I had the wacking, 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’.”

  Despite his prowess in the ring, Bruce was not one of Boss’s favourites, but Fee-Smith did try to help him locate and cultivate his strengths. Not being shy, Bruce was summoned to talk with parents. “I was awfully embarassed yesterday, some weomen and one man sat on our bench while we were watching the match. I had to entertain them.” Boss also encouraged him on to the stage.

  Acting was the activity Bruce enjoyed most at Old Hall. “He was a damned good actor,” says Thorneycroft, still able to remember Bruce’s Orsino. Bruce’s first stage role, in December 1949, was a highwayman in A. P. Herbert’s Fat King Melon and Princess Caraway. The reviewer called him “a good-looking chap”. The following year, Boss asked him to play the part of Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “The play is going on quite well now. Boss has put a lot of imagination in it. I think that if acted properly it will be very nice.” The play was performed on 14 December 1950. “Perhaps pride of place should go to Bottom the Weaver,” wrote the reviewer. “A very young member of the cast this one, who had a lot to do and did it with great gusto. Ass’s head or no ass’s head you did well, ‘sweet bully Bottom’ . . .” In December 1951, he played the love-lorn Orsino in Twelfth Night (“to excellent results”); in December 1952, a wicked uncle in Babes in the Wood (“and what a nasty uncle to have!”) and in March 1953 he was Baptista in Taming of the Shrew. “For a boy to play the part of a doddering old man is always difficult, but Chatwin played Baptista’s part so convincingly as to make it appear easy.”

  The highlight in the Old Hall calendar was Guy Fawkes Night.

  Bruce always wrote about this in his letters (“Yesterday the fireworks were absolutly wizzard. There were 130 rockets, 14 cathrine weels, 4 christal fountains and a lot more”). However, on 5 November 1951, weeks after the defeat of Clement Attlee’s Labour government, there occurred what Hugh Chatwin describes as “a big shock” in his brother’s life. Boss celebrated the Labour defeat by changing Guy Fawkes into Atdee – and, together with an effigy of Mrs Attlee, he tossed him o
nto the bonfire.

  The spectacle of Mrs Attlee’s blazing pumpkin hat deeply distressed the eleven-year-old Bruce. Crying at the memory of it, he told Margharita: “Mummy, how could he do-o-o this?” Hugh believes that Fee-Smith’s subversion of Guy Fawkes Night marked Bruce’s moral awakening. “He realised that he thought differently from people around him.”

  Neither Bache nor Thorneycroft remember Attlee being burned. Nor did Bruce make any mention of it in his Sunday letter. “I enjoyed the fireworks last night. They made a very good display indeed.”

  In the summer of 1953 Bruce passed his Common Entrance into Marlborough. In his final address, Boss exhorted Bruce to “hold on to the lovely things in life”, and issued this warning: “It is most important to make a good start: if you start the wrong way it becomes difficult to get back on the right road again. A man who was travelling one spring time in the North of Canada when the frost was breaking up and the roads were well nigh impassable saw this notice at a cross-road: ‘Take care which rut you choose: you will be in it for the next 25 miles’.”

  Apart from his performances in the school play, Bruce’s five years at Old Hall passed largely unnoticed in the school annals. “If you were to say, ‘This is the boy who is going to be Bruce Chatwin’,” says Bache, “I would have said: ‘No, I don’t think so’.”

  VII

  The English Schoolboy

  . . . he finds difficulty in remembering facts and only

  the bizarre or trifling really appeals to him.

  —Roman history report for Michaelmas, 1956

  IN SEPTEMBER 1953, AFTER A SAILING HOLIDAY ON THE HAMBLE river, Bruce’s parents drove him in their old black Rover to begin his first term at Marlborough College.

  Charles had considered Winchester, but it was “out of pocket reach”. For an annual fee of £291, he could, however, afford Marlborough College: it is unlikely that “he had to sell a Stradivarius to pay the school fees”, as Bruce was overheard claiming 20 years later. Further in Marlborough’s favour, there was a family connection. Charles’s uncle, Parson Tom Royds, had been there. He claimed the cooking had ruined his health.

  Founded in 1843 for the education of the sons of poor clergy, Marlborough retained a strain of militant Anglicanism that filtered into the boys and expressed itself on the playing fields. Bruce participated in the 1956 Army Cadet Corps camp with boys of the Catholic school Stonyhurst, after which one parent complained to the Master: “Although the boys from Stonyhurst do not mind if rolls of lavatory paper are thrown at them and they are called ‘Papist bastards’, it makes a very bad name for Marlborough.”

  Five more years of institutionalised life, with Chapel every day, compulsory games and a regime of tireless jocularity would leave a mark on Bruce as difficult to forget as the smells: the cheap disinfectant, the burned toast, the monkey-cage reek of the changing rooms. If the experience did not damage Bruce, it made him impregnable.

  * * *

  Bruce said he was “mostly ignored” in his five years at Marlborough and that the obsession with Ciceronian prose and its composition almost put him off the written word for life. “They made the classics incredibly uninteresting and English literature was left out completely,” he claimed. “We never read Jane Austen or Dickens, and I haven’t read them even now.” But he did write an essay in the Classical Lower Sixth on Pride and Prejudice. “Jane Austen was a comedian; her outlook was always humorous. And even when she penetrates into one of her characters with knife-edged clearness, she always does so with a smile on her lips.”

  Whatever he decided in retrospect, at the time Bruce did not regard his time at public school as disagreeable. As with his prep school, he joined in everything, from beagling to the cadet force camp. Elizabeth Chatwin says, “he seemed to enjoy it, but not really to want to admit it.”

  He was fortunate to spend his first year in Priory. The pleasant out-of-College junior house with two acres of grounds sloping down to the Kennet was situated in the middle of town. Miss Bachelor was Priory’s “Dame” or matron, smallish with a pronounced bosom that was discovered to be inflatable. In due course it was pricked. No one ever identified the culprit. “But one day during breakfast half of it slowly went down,” says Bruce’s friend Nick Spicer. “Froggy” Cornwall was Priory’s housemaster, “the lineal descendant of the landlady”, as another master put it. It was said Froggy had once been brilliant at something, but whatever that was no one could recollect. He taught divinity with not much brio and when a friend of Bruce’s wrote that without evil the idea of good would be meaningless Froggy added in the margin: “Oh dear! I suppose you are right. But I don’t like to think of its being so.” But he was a compassionate man and sensitive enough to realise how much secret unhappiness a place like Marlborough could breed. His report for Bruce at the end of his first term read: “He is somewhat dreamy and vague about the place & he might try to be less so – for our benefit.”

  Conditions were no less spartan than at Old Hall. The boys in Priory slept in beds separated from each other by a tiny locker just large enough for brush, comb, handkerchief, a couple of books and a little box for collar studs. Boys had to bring their own blanket. At night the windows had to be open and on very cold nights Bruce would pile onto his bed his dressing gown, overcoat, and lovat tweed jacket. “We looked like a row of paupers,” said one boy.

  Twice a week he took a bath, jumping into someone else’s water.

  The routine of Bruce’s life can be seen in his first letter home, one of two to survive: “I am thoroughly enjoying myself here and I am settling down well . . . I have made several friends already. I get on very well with Edwards. I have made friends also with a boy called Ghalib, whose father is a Turk. The food in Priory is excellent . . . Don’t bother to send on the cycle-clips as we have to cycle in shorts. I dont know what the master’s name is yet and he is always called the master . . . My bicycle has proved invaluable as we have to clear out of the house for one hour every day and we have 3 half holidays a week. Please will you send me some books because for an hour in the evening we have to read. I have seen all the other ex Old Hall boys except Hanlam . . . Most boys here play the trombone. But I don’t think I will have enough time.”

  In his second year, Bruce moved into B2, a senior in-College house designed by the architect who had built Strangeways Prison. B2, after Priory, came as a bit of a shock: a stone building with a darkly painted central well and railings to stop boys throwing themselves over. Perhaps the most dismaying discovery for the 13 new boys was The Woods, a vast tiled block of 30 doorless toilets.

  Bruce’s preferred image of himself at Marlborough is recorded by Redmond O’Hanlon, a student at the college several years later. O’Hanlon remembers as a ten-year-old hearing his elder brother Tim talk in riveting terms about a boy at school. “There were Roman emperors – who did mysterious things to women and horses and dogs – and there was Chatwin, who knew all there was to know except Latin and Greek. So handsome that the classics master never bothered him, he sat quietly at the back of the classroom and read French novelists whose characters had habits that were almost as exciting as those of the Roman emperors: if you did Chatwin’s prose translations for him, he’d tell you all about it, whole stories. In fact, Chatwin was a bit like an emperor himself, Tim said, except that he was tall and blond and really more like a Visigoth – he was the only man in the sixth form who wasn’t worried about exams, who never gave university entrance a thought. He wouldn’t do a syllabus; you never caught him swotting Cicero in the Memorial Library. Oh no – he read books that no one else had ever heard of, that’s what he did.”

  Bruce might have enjoyed this version of himself, but Tim O’Hanlon, who sat next to him for a year in the Classical Lower Sixth, can recall no such character. The Chatwin he does remember was someone unremarkable. “We never expected to hear from him again.” Richard Sturt, who spent an Easter holiday travelling with Bruce to Rome, says: “I don’t remember him ever achieving any distinction a
t all.”

  “I was hopeless at school, a real idiot, bottom of every class, I was also innumerate,” Bruce told Australian radio. “It was a classic education to produce a dumb-bell.”

  At Marlborough, his academic work can be summed up by the Master, Tommy Garnett, whose succinct report for Lent 1954 read: “Curiously patchy.” There are complaints of his disorderly mental processes, his vagueness and bewilderment, his resignation, his insouciance to everything. “His answers often contain considerable material, but the important point is missed.” Nor did he impress his mathematics master. Nor his biology master – “I have failed to capture his interest”. In the opinion of his classics master “Bolly” Lamb, “he must learn not to need to be the driver.”

  Caught reading Flaubert under his desk by the master who taught him Latin composition, A. F. Elliott, Bruce said: “Once you’ve been with Caesar into one of his battles, the rest are all much the same.”

  Bruce’s talents remained submerged for his first two years. Nick Spicer says, “It’s difficult to know how Bruce’s specialness could have manifested itself at Marlborough because he had a subterranean habit of thinking and that would not have been recognised. If there is such a thing as a clubbable loner, that was him.”

  The extent to which he merged into the background was observed by an older boy, Peter Ryde. Not until Ryde read his obituary did he identify Bruce with the Chatwin he had known as “Charles”. “We didn’t use Christian names much, but in those days when we did he was always Charles. What he couldn’t stand was being called Charlie, because Charlie Chatwin was uncomfortably close to Charlie Chaplin. I could not even have told you what the B stood for.” (The only “Bruce” Ryde knew at Marlborough was the Labrador belonging to “Bolly” Lamb). He says: “I do remember that I thought of him as someone who was biding his time.”

  Bruce and Ryde were members of a group that called itself The Estate Agents, formed for the benefit of committed games-haters who were allowed to spend their afternoons doing practical things like building walls, felling trees and making ash paths to the gym. “He seemed entirely self-possessed, very much his own person and with his own agenda, which he did not necessarily choose to reveal. He was competent, efficient and tireless – a good person to have as a partner. I have a vivid memory of the two of us, billhooks in hand, hacking a pathway through a vast tangle of blackthorn for four or five afternoons and subsequently burning the cleared brushwood in a huge bonfire. It was Charles’s determination rather than mine that carried us through. But quite the most memorable feature was his voice, pitched low for his age, and with a most unusual timbre – a bit like one of those brassy middle-aged women with an impossibly deep suntan and too many bangles.”