Bruce Chatwin (5 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
II
“Let’s Have a Child,” I Said
Do you know, my dear, that “Chatwin” is Old English for “spiralling ascent”?
—BC to his wife
BRUCE CHATWIN CAME FROM A MIDDLE
-
CLASS FAMILY WITHOUT
pretensions, but in his imagination – and sometimes in his behaviour – he was exalted, a young prince. In July 1968, he accompanied Stuart Piggott, his professor of archaeology at Edinburgh, to Moscow. “He really is splendid & resourceful & gloriously autocratic,” Piggott noted in his journal. “When on the train an inspector speaking German asked if we were
Erste Klasse
Bruce said haughtily, ‘Of course we are! Look at us!’ He was under the impression that the man had asked if we were
aristocrats
!”
-
CLASS FAMILY WITHOUT
pretensions, but in his imagination – and sometimes in his behaviour – he was exalted, a young prince. In July 1968, he accompanied Stuart Piggott, his professor of archaeology at Edinburgh, to Moscow. “He really is splendid & resourceful & gloriously autocratic,” Piggott noted in his journal. “When on the train an inspector speaking German asked if we were
Erste Klasse
Bruce said haughtily, ‘Of course we are! Look at us!’ He was under the impression that the man had asked if we were
aristocrats
!”
The impulse to recreate himself was present from an early age. “On the Yorkshire Moors aged three or four, I remember my grandmother shouting to my mother over the field: ‘Be careful! Be careful! The gypsies will take him.’ And seeing a whole line, just over the hedge, of gypsy caravans moving up a lane and then a gypsy boy, very brown, on a piebald pony stripped to the waist riding by and being envious in some way or another.”
To be stolen by gypsies was a better fate than to be Bruce Chatwin from Birmingham. In one of the five schools he attended before he was eight, he told pupils he was an orphan.
In Australia, the man on whom he had based the hero of
The Songlines
– that is to say the closest he came to using the device of an alter ego – tried to find out about Chatwin. “Bruce was not the sort of person who liked talking about himself. If you wanted to ask him what he thought about something or what he knew, you could never shut him up. But if you wanted to find out about where he came from and about his family, somehow the subject drifted on to something else and before you knew it he was drawing out information from you. He didn’t say anything to give you a handle on his inner personal life.” He talked sparingly, if at all, of his ancestry or his family. “For most of his life he wanted us to think him so unique that he didn’t actually have parents,” says Jonathan Hope. Some people supposed that he was hiding his family away. A German aristocrat, one of Bruce’s lovers in the 1970s, said: “A middle-class conventional morality haunted him. He had a chip on his shoulder about his background, a critical way of dismissing the years before.”
The Songlines
– that is to say the closest he came to using the device of an alter ego – tried to find out about Chatwin. “Bruce was not the sort of person who liked talking about himself. If you wanted to ask him what he thought about something or what he knew, you could never shut him up. But if you wanted to find out about where he came from and about his family, somehow the subject drifted on to something else and before you knew it he was drawing out information from you. He didn’t say anything to give you a handle on his inner personal life.” He talked sparingly, if at all, of his ancestry or his family. “For most of his life he wanted us to think him so unique that he didn’t actually have parents,” says Jonathan Hope. Some people supposed that he was hiding his family away. A German aristocrat, one of Bruce’s lovers in the 1970s, said: “A middle-class conventional morality haunted him. He had a chip on his shoulder about his background, a critical way of dismissing the years before.”
From what he has written and said to friends, he was not ashamed so much as protective of his parents. Hard-working, honest and straightforward, they laboured after the Second World War to put behind them the mistakes and humiliations of their forebears and to build a new life. But as secrets gnaw so Bruce would have absorbed the unspoken. “We were taught at Marlborough,” says his brother Hugh, “that the sins of the fathers are wrought upon the sons even unto the third and fourth generations.” He was, in a sense, a grandchild of shame.
* * *
In one of many attempts to make sense of a book on nomads, which dogged him for 20 years and which he never published, Bruce wrote: “This book is written in answer to a need to explain my own restlessness – coupled with a morbid preoccupation with roots.” From his mother, he derived his restlessness; from his father, an appetite for genealogy.
The Chatwins had a firm sense of their place. They were honourable sitters and servers: lawyers, architects, button-makers, builders who stayed put. If they strayed it was to bring back and to make Birmingham better.
The name Chatwin is a variant spelling of Chetwynde and derives from a hill in Shropshire once owned by Lady Godiva. Bruce Chatwin’s passion for provenance led him to believe that his name came from the Anglo-Saxon Chettewynde and that it meant “a winding path” or “a spiralling ascent”. But he referred only to the suffix,
windan.
Chette is harder to fix. It might stem from
Catta
, a nickname for cat; or from
Caté,
“a chatterer”. Chatwin most probably meant “Chatterer’s Corner”.
windan.
Chette is harder to fix. It might stem from
Catta
, a nickname for cat; or from
Caté,
“a chatterer”. Chatwin most probably meant “Chatterer’s Corner”.
There is a portrait of the first recorded Chetwynde in the Bayeux Tapestry, a tall, beaming spear-holder. He was so tall that the designer had to squeeze his name Turald beside his sword-belt, instead of over his head. Turald was a Norman from Rouen who served with William the Conqueror. His spoil would be part of Lady Godiva’s manor.
The Domesday Book has Chetwynde as a demesne of 300 acres with a priest, a mill and two eel fisheries and values the manor at 50 shillings. Turald, who owned 13 properties in Shropshire, treated it as waste ground. It is from this giant Norman, who took the name de Chetwynde, that the Chatwins most likely descend.
The Chetwyndes were knights, mill-owners and sharp-eyed businessmen. About one of them, George I, lately arrived from Hanover, complained: “This is a strange country. The first morning after my arrival in St James’, I looked out of my window and saw a park with walks and a canal, which they told me was mine. The next day Lord Chetwynde, the Ranger of the Park, sent me a brace of fine carp out of my canal and I was told I must give five guineas to Lord Chetwynde’s servant for bringing me my own carp out of my own canal in my own park.”
Bruce inherited the Chetwynde acumen. He was ruthlessly protective of his interests. “My trouble is that, under a somewhat bland mask, I am from my Sotheby’s days a rather hard-nosed business pro,” he wrote to his literary agent in 1987. “Not for nothing did I once draw up a new form of draft contract, revolutionary in its day, which ultimately gave the art auction business a new flexibility.”
Little is known about the Chatwin branch until the nineteenth century, despite efforts to elevate them higher by Bruce’s great-uncle Philip, a leading force behind the Birmingham Archaeological Society. They were probably groomsmen to the Chetwyndes who came into the Black Country looking for work. The first known Chatwin, who died in 1810, was a builder from Halesowen, five miles west of Birmingham. The second was a button-manufacturer who patented a method of making cloth buttons which, for the first time, would have no metal visible. A century on, Bruce’s father Charles – John Chatwin’s great-great-grandson – remained a connoisseur of hand-stitched garments. After dancing with a friend’s wife at the Pytchley Hunt Ball, Charles Chatwin ran his fingers down the back buttons of her dress. “Mmm, I don’t suppose you made
those
yourself.”
those
yourself.”
Bruce was conscious of his Birmingham background and minded being put down by public school boys. One night near Faizabad he was stung into argument by the poet and Jesuit priest Peter Levi. “Peter was scorning Birmingham and aroused me to a certain sense of fury.” He took pride in the captains of industry in his ancestry. References to Birmingham run through his books and in certain company he would talk in a Birmingham accent. But he was aware, like his forebears, of the difference between middle class and gentry. Because of their regional accent, Victorian industrialists once they had money would often rather go to Vienna, even to southern Chile, than risk being disdained as provincial in London.
What was true of Bruce’s distant cousin Charles Milward, who settled in Patagonia, was true of him. “The extraordinary thing about Milward is that he could never shake off Birmingham,” Bruce wrote to his parents from Punta Arenas, where Milward had built himself a house in the image of his father’s rectory.
Nor would Bruce in all his travels shake off the influence of his father, a wise old sailor and a sound lawyer for whom everything had to be right.
Charles Chatwin’s earliest memory was of George V’s coronation in 1911. Aged three, he stood on the corner of Maas Road and waved a Union Jack. He remembered a man wearing a leopard-skin beating a drum.
He was a robust child who suffered from a form of epilepsy,
petit mal
, and was educated at home until he could be trusted not to have seizures in public. His Edwardian history came straight from his mother’s leather-bound copies of
Punch.
As an adult, he would describe his favourite cartoon, which depicted the problem of taking life head on. A man asks George, the gardener:
Why do you always pull the barrow instead of pushing it?
petit mal
, and was educated at home until he could be trusted not to have seizures in public. His Edwardian history came straight from his mother’s leather-bound copies of
Punch.
As an adult, he would describe his favourite cartoon, which depicted the problem of taking life head on. A man asks George, the gardener:
Why do you always pull the barrow instead of pushing it?
George:
Because I hate the very sight of it.
Because I hate the very sight of it.
“That made me laugh.”
He grew up to be a big, socially awkward, decent man and bossy as some shy people are. He had apple red cheeks and sharp, bridge-deck eyes which remained blue all his life. “They are the eyes of a man who has never known the meaning of dishonesty,” wrote Bruce, who inherited their colour. “They have never tempted him to anything mean or shoddy.”
Bruce’s father was a doer, not a dreamer. He had a photographic memory and could assimilate information quickly. “I never read novels,” he said. “I prefer law reports.” His two enthusiasms were amateur dramatics and mucking about in boats at Barnt Green reservoir and on the south coast. He fell into the Law, his father’s profession, because there was little money to train him as a doctor, which he would have preferred. In 1933 his father died young and Charles became sole practitioner of Messrs. Gem & Co. at 2 Bennetts’ Hill, Birmingham.
He channelled his healing compassion into his legal practice, winning respect as a fair-minded solicitor who specialised in family law from cradle to grave: land, inheritance, wills and settlements. “As a lawyer, I did not want to know what happened to bring about a divorce, but I felt sorry for both.” He sorted out people’s businesses and did his best to keep his clients away from litigation. “If you don’t want to go to court, go to Charles Chatwin,” clients said to each other. Not having an academic background, he laboriously wrote his contracts in longhand. “A lot of his work was holding hands with old ladies after they’d been burgled,” says Guy Norton, son of the senior partner. “Charles was very good at that.” He was a President of the West Midlands Rent Assessment Panel and sat on boards of the Children’s Hospital and the Commercial Union. “I am,” he said, “a very pink conservative.”
Favourite among Charles’s clients were the Quakers and Unitarians who had helped make Birmingham the Second City, “the City of a Thousand Trades”. He was influenced by their uprightness, their nonconformity, their ethos of interdependence – for instance, the sharing of capital assets. His good friend was the Quaker lawyer, George Barrow, who worked next door at Wragge & Co. They talked boats incessantly. In 1934, together they bought for £130 a six-ton gaff cutter,
Noctiluca,
named after the marine life which cause the sea’s phosphorescence. In the same year, they took down the wall between their offices to allow them to communicate more easily. Charles amalgamated his practice with Wragge & Co., as one of five partners, on a salary of £600.
Noctiluca,
named after the marine life which cause the sea’s phosphorescence. In the same year, they took down the wall between their offices to allow them to communicate more easily. Charles amalgamated his practice with Wragge & Co., as one of five partners, on a salary of £600.
Barrow remembers his partner as a tolerant man, patient, always on to the latest gadget. “He didn’t lose his wool. He was expansive, but never about personal affairs.” To Patrick Lawrence – also of Wragge & Co. and another co-owner of Charles’s boats – Charles Chatwin gave the impression of an inward, Pickwickian figure. “Charles was one of the most sensible men I’ve ever met. If there was some scandal, he’d quietly not let the file go outside his office. In the nicest possible way, he swept that sort of thing under the carpet. He wasn’t surprised by human frailty, but he was going to make sure he didn’t have it himself.”
One day Barrow telegraphed from London:
COMING HOME. BRINGING LUNATIC.
The Master of Lunacy had agreed that Barrow’s client, “a lunatic so found by inquisition”, might be committed to Charles’s custody while Barrow was on holiday. The young man, who had run off with a nurse and married her, stayed with the Chatwins at West Heath Road, where he turned out to be adept at cards. “Mrs Chatwin,” says Barrow, “was delighted to have him as a bridge player.”
COMING HOME. BRINGING LUNATIC.
The Master of Lunacy had agreed that Barrow’s client, “a lunatic so found by inquisition”, might be committed to Charles’s custody while Barrow was on holiday. The young man, who had run off with a nurse and married her, stayed with the Chatwins at West Heath Road, where he turned out to be adept at cards. “Mrs Chatwin,” says Barrow, “was delighted to have him as a bridge player.”
Unmarried in his late twenties, Charles lived at home with his widowed mother, Isobel. He rolled his own cigarettes and wore a dark blue suit, dressing as his partner recalls “one down from a city solicitor, one up from a country solicitor”. He was strong, prudent, common-sensical – and impeccable. “From the rest of us, he would come in for some ‘heavy-duty’ teasing for being stolid, forbearing and virtuous,” says Hugh, his youngest son. “Two more different and complementary people than Charles and my mother Margharita are hard to imagine.”
Charles was on a train to London to attend a party when he first set eyes on Margharita, a young woman with long legs and brown eyes. “Brown eyes are naughty eyes,” she would tell the infant Bruce on her knee.
Charles was too shy to introduce himself, but on returning to Birmingham he told his mother about “the jolly nice girl” he had seen. Two weeks later he walked into the drawing room and was astonished to find her talking to his mother. Margharita Turnell had been offered a job with the local MP, Ronald Cardand, and was in need of lodgings. Isobel Chatwin, who led the Woman’s Branch of the King’s Norton Conservatives, insisted she stay with the Chatwins. “Hands off, this one’s mine,” Charles said to his brother Anthony, who had a way with the girls.
One evening three months later, Charles drove her in his Austin 10 to Far Forest and proposed. He was 30. She was 26.
“Mother never liked to talk about the past,” says Hugh. “A lot of pain there. Not a rejoicing thing.”
Margharita Turnell came from Sheffield. “You can tell people from Sheffield by the way they look at knives,” she said. One of her father’s jobs had been in cutlery. The Turnells were sheet-metal workers, railway guards, corn merchants. Bad luck and disappointment clung to them, their history one of spiralling descent. At school Margharita was nicknamed Toenail or Turnip.
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