Bruce Chatwin (70 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
Zazzo showed Bruce his card-indexes, his questionnaires. Some of his findings were exciting. “For example, you have situations whereby identical twins are separated: one is brought up in Germany and is raised as a Nazi and the other one is taken to America and raised as a Jew and they both marry a red-headed girl called Betty and they have an underground workshop and they both collect ship models and have pug dogs.” This, said Bruce, implied not only a telepathetic signalling over long distance, but a strong genetic bias towards behaviour. “Much more interesting to my mind was the fact that when twins are stuck together they will resemble each other very, very little by the end.” The weaker twin, Zazzo revealed, would sometimes be given the opportunity to redress the balance and be six inches taller and shave six months before. “He told me of a story which he had encountered among French country boys in the ‘30s which was exactly the period I was dealing with. He said there was a case whereby the younger twin was first shaving on his own. And he looked in a mirror with a cut throat razor and had the sensation that he was cutting his own brother’s throat, which is of course an incredibly powerful image. It was one that I couldn’t resist using in the book.”
Another coincidence struck Zazzo, that Bruce’s own name Chatwin ended with the syllable ‘“twin”.
Bruce considered various titles for the novel:
Two by Two, The Young Men, Mr and Mr Jones
and
The Vision and The Rock.
If New House Farm inspired the farm which he calls The Vision, the model for the Rock was a grey stone smallholding called Coed Major reached high up on the hillside through a chaos of battered hawthorn bushes. “Before the War, the Barn (as Coed Major was called) was famous for being a place where local farmers could dump their illegitimates. It was a place of wild female energies.”
Two by Two, The Young Men, Mr and Mr Jones
and
The Vision and The Rock.
If New House Farm inspired the farm which he calls The Vision, the model for the Rock was a grey stone smallholding called Coed Major reached high up on the hillside through a chaos of battered hawthorn bushes. “Before the War, the Barn (as Coed Major was called) was famous for being a place where local farmers could dump their illegitimates. It was a place of wild female energies.”
Coed Major was owned by “a great local character” – called Joe Philips, or Joe the Barn. He lived there with a much younger woman, Jean the Barn. Unlike the situation of his first two books, where he parachuted in and out, Bruce forged genuine and empathetic connections with the people of the Black Mountains.
He rode over to Coed Major with Betjeman shortly after their visit to the Howells brothers. On a blowy morning in January, they picked their way through the bright bracken on to the exposed saddle of land. “The dogs howled as we dismounted and a procession of geese and ducks flew off among the wreckage of red tractors and pullets.” Over a rough stone wall a lichenous figure moved through the mud in gun boots.
Joe the Barn was a cheerful man in his eighties. He had sandy eyes in a weather-beaten face and a turned-up nose “like an imp”. A single brown incisor poked from his lower jaw and when he opened his mouth a strange smell came out of it, “the smell of something ancient”. He was a scrap merchant, rumoured to be a sheep thief. “How be you?” he asked Betjeman.
He showed them into the house. One end of the barn had fallen down and the other end blown open. “How they survived the cold I can’t tell,” wrote Bruce. The tables and chairs were covered with the greenish white smears of fowl droppings. A woman was mucking out the first room: “the mysterious Jean”.
Joe shared the Barn with Jean whom he treated as both his wife and daughter, and with his chickens. Jean was about 40, with flashing eyes that caught the sun. She wore a brown jumper, a greasy corduroy hat and a shirt which had been torn and patched together “like a broken spider’s web”. On the table was a bucket of chicken mash – “which I suspect she ate”.
Jean had the Howells’ gentleness. Incredibly shy, her round and pale blue eyes were always cast down. “She would say something and flinch a look at her hands, all covered with fowl droppings but somehow purple.” Her arms, legs and even her back, she said, were covered with sores. When Penelope told her she should see a doctor, Jean replied, wringing her hands: “It’s not for we to go to the doctor.”
She lived for Joe and for her animals. Betjeman asked if she ever ate rabbits or hares. “No, I just let ’em live, let ’em love. Let the hares live, and the rabbits live and the foxes, I won’t harm ’em.”
Joe sat at the oilcloth-covered table and told Bruce he recognised him. “He thinks he saw me before as a little lad in Capel-y-ffin.”
When Bruce returned to the Barn on 17 January he discovered Joe had been taken to Bronllys Hospital with a stroke.
Jean told him how she had got up in the night to put more coal in the fire and found Joe fallen off the settee where he slept. He had caught his head on the box with the chickens in it.
“I hope ’e comes back – we’ve been together all our lives.”
Distraught, she offered Bruce a cup of tea. “Do please. I promised you a cup a tea when you came last week with lady what’s a’t yer call her?” The kettle was found, hung on a hook over the fire. She served Bruce watery tea.
Without Joe, she had to look after the animals on her own. It was hard work, starting at seven to feed his dogs with meal and old bread. She didn’t know how she would manage.
“And now I ’ope he comes back. How I hope so. We was together all our lives like – together.”
Bruce and Betjeman visited Joe in Bronllys Hospital later the same day. They found him thin and frail and clean. “When they scrubbed him all the stuffing went out of him,” wrote Bruce. An eye opened, rolled up. Seeing Betjeman, he said simply: “And ’ows you?”
His left leg was paralysed and he was incontinent. His one thought was for his animals. Whenever Bruce visited, he enquired how they were and added a message for Jean: “Tell ’er to keep on feeding – and you if you go there, chuck ’em a bit of hay and a fist of oats . . . the dogs won’t bite you,” and he pulled his lips so tight that they went back over the yellow incisor and a tear came over the ridges under his eyes. Bruce watched, amazed. “He started to cry whenever the animals were mentioned, but not a shred for Jean.”
Bruce went the next day, walking up through the snow. “Again to see Jean the Barn to tell her how Joe was getting along. She thought last night he’d gone because at three in the morning all the dogs which are kept in rough corrugated iron sheds started howling. The room was so full of smoke that you could hardly see your forearm: the soot from the chimney had fallen into the grate and the fire was belching clouds of blacky-yellow smoke. Outside, a pale gold sunset as the sun went down behind the hill, but inside the filth was indescribable and I smelt all over of coke fumes for four hours or more with eyes smarting that I could hardly read.
“I took her a 28lb bag of rolled oats which she said she needed for the ponies and after humping it on my back for three miles through the drifts was a little exhausted . . . She is determined to stay on in the Barn, even if Joe doesn’t come back [and] says that if she can get through January she can get through. I was quite impressed to find she knows the hour and the day of the month very exactly.”
Bruce took it upon himself to watch out for Jean. He braved the howling dogs and the ammoniacal smells of the chicken droppings to help with odd jobs. He showed more practical skill than Vivian Howells would have imagined likely. A door from the kitchen led directly into a barn so full of muck that the cattle bumped their backs on the roof beams. He dug that out for Jean. He unblocked her chimney. When a ram was lost, he went out with a shovel and scooped away the impacted snow until they found him. He staggered under bundles of bracken through the snowdrifts and helped with the foddering and feeding.
“‘All animals, no matter what it is, you got to feed ’em.’
“‘You too, Jean,’ I said.
“And her face creased up like an old oriental woman and she laughed and laughed.”
Slowly, he won her confidence.
One day after he had brought Jean a cake, Bruce walked into Olive Greenway’s kitchen. “Olive says the talk in Crasswell is that Jean has a fancy-man, ME!” Without doubt, he felt a great bond for her. Jean’s energies and innocence put him in mind of a Celtic wood spirit. She was a convincing argument against Lorenz. “Damn the Marxist interpretation of history. Damn Darwinism and the survival of the fittest.” Here was the example of a woman “who has been made to suffer any kind of indignity and who comes across with a basic standard of behaviour which we as a species can retain.” She was, he wrote, “a heroine of our time”.
Speaking to Bragg about Jean and Joe and the Howells brothers, he said: “I don’t see these people as strange. I wanted to take these people as the centre of a circle and see the rest of our century as somehow abnormal.”
Bruce, in the opinion of his friend Loulou de la Falaise, was a
pique-assiette
, “someone who eats off another’s plate”. He lived in at least seven places while writing
On the Black Hill,
half of these located within miles of the brothers’ farm. His hosts along the border country included Betjeman, Maschler, the Wilkinson family near Clunton and, further south, George and Diana Melly in their tower at Scethrog, “a lovely place to work, the only distraction being a view of a white farmhouse through a slit window”. Bruce made each of his hosts feel they enjoyed a special relationship with him. When Maschler told George Melly that Bruce had written
On the Black Hill
at his cottage there was nearly an argument: “What do you mean?” said an indignant Melly, “he wrote it at
my
house!”
pique-assiette
, “someone who eats off another’s plate”. He lived in at least seven places while writing
On the Black Hill,
half of these located within miles of the brothers’ farm. His hosts along the border country included Betjeman, Maschler, the Wilkinson family near Clunton and, further south, George and Diana Melly in their tower at Scethrog, “a lovely place to work, the only distraction being a view of a white farmhouse through a slit window”. Bruce made each of his hosts feel they enjoyed a special relationship with him. When Maschler told George Melly that Bruce had written
On the Black Hill
at his cottage there was nearly an argument: “What do you mean?” said an indignant Melly, “he wrote it at
my
house!”
How did he progress from sitting next to someone at a dinner party to moving into their house for several months? Diana Melly had first met Bruce in 1973 and not registered him. The rest of the party had gone to hear George Melly play at Ronnie Scott’s, all except Bruce. “To listen to somebody else performing was not for him” – or as Elizabeth’s sister-in-law Carole Chanler phrased it: “It was a question of hiring a band, or Bruce.” Melly came across Bruce next in 1978 when he was borrowing Maschler’s cottage to write
The Viceroy of Ouidah.
John Wells’s wife Teresa was staying at The Tower and telephoned Bruce, who walked over for tea. His attraction for Melly would be more than that of a charming guest who sang for his supper. “It was not just a matter of being entertained by him, or thinking that he was eccentric.” She felt connected to him. “He was very childish and needed looking after,” she says. “That appeals to people. It certainly appealed to me.” In March 1980, Melly had lost her son from an overdose. She was receptive to a letter from Bruce asking if he could come and stay (and also if she could arrange for Francis Wyndham – with whom she was editing Jean Rhys’s letters – to be there too). “For me Bruce filled a bit of the void. I became a mother-figure. He suited the bill at that moment and that’s when we became close friends. He didn’t put himself out to please or entertain. Like a child, he took everything.” One day in July he took her to Tenby. They crawled on their hands and knees to see what stepping stones would have looked like to the twins as small children.
The Viceroy of Ouidah.
John Wells’s wife Teresa was staying at The Tower and telephoned Bruce, who walked over for tea. His attraction for Melly would be more than that of a charming guest who sang for his supper. “It was not just a matter of being entertained by him, or thinking that he was eccentric.” She felt connected to him. “He was very childish and needed looking after,” she says. “That appeals to people. It certainly appealed to me.” In March 1980, Melly had lost her son from an overdose. She was receptive to a letter from Bruce asking if he could come and stay (and also if she could arrange for Francis Wyndham – with whom she was editing Jean Rhys’s letters – to be there too). “For me Bruce filled a bit of the void. I became a mother-figure. He suited the bill at that moment and that’s when we became close friends. He didn’t put himself out to please or entertain. Like a child, he took everything.” One day in July he took her to Tenby. They crawled on their hands and knees to see what stepping stones would have looked like to the twins as small children.
He began actually writing the book in the stable flat at Cwm Hall, the home of Martin and Stella Wilkinson. Bruce turned up at the end of October 1980 in a 2CV with a mountain bike on the roof. The flat, said Stella, “was just austere enough for him to feel comfortable and comfortable enough for him to feel austere”. Above his desk, he pinned a nineteenth-century Methodist print, “The Broad and the Narrow Way”. Haunted by this image, one of the twins, Benjamin Jones, “believed, seriously, the road to Hell was the road to Hereford whereas the road to Heaven led up to the Radnor Hills”.
One day Bruce returned, excited, from a bounding walk on a hill above the farm known also as the Black Hill. He had a title. “I’m going to call it
On the Black Hill
,” he told Martin.
On the Black Hill
,” he told Martin.
In his room over the stables, he fell into a routine. He came to the main house for breakfast at 8.30, made toast, scurried back. “I could hear his brain going clickety-click round the corner and him talking to himself,” says Stella. He worked hard till 9 p.m. when supper was ready. Every now and then he played the great chef. In December 1980, he celebrated the arrival of Stella’s mother Chiquita Astor (whose Argentinian family owned the Monvoisin
gaucho
so admired by Bruce). “He made a turkey stuffed with chocolate and peanut sauce and a mad spice no one’s ever used before or since from Jersey City. Everyone was full of admiration,” says Martin. “Next day on a high because of the success, he decided to go for a
poulet à l’ail
. There was a lot of talk about how the Winter Queen had had it for breakfast. But instead of putting in thirty cloves of garlic, he put in 30 whole garlic. It was completely inedible. There was rather an embarrassing silence about that and he didn’t quite admit he’d got it wrong.”
gaucho
so admired by Bruce). “He made a turkey stuffed with chocolate and peanut sauce and a mad spice no one’s ever used before or since from Jersey City. Everyone was full of admiration,” says Martin. “Next day on a high because of the success, he decided to go for a
poulet à l’ail
. There was a lot of talk about how the Winter Queen had had it for breakfast. But instead of putting in thirty cloves of garlic, he put in 30 whole garlic. It was completely inedible. There was rather an embarrassing silence about that and he didn’t quite admit he’d got it wrong.”
When he put his heart into it, he had the energy to transform any non-event into an event. “He had an incredibly strong character and it penetrated the bricks and the mortar,” says Stella. He changed the atmosphere of a chill February picnic by producing a bottle of 1964 Lafite. “He was in ecstasies, holding up his glass,” says Martin. “And somehow he convinced everyone that it was a warm day and we were having a picnic in summer.”
Much though Stella loved her guest, she deplored his manners. “He was happy to use up your chattel, but couldn’t accept responsibility for the kitchen of life. He lived two winters with me and I saw him for three meals a day and he did not once lift his plate from the kitchen table to the kitchen sink.”
His hosts could pay dearly for his visits. There was not just the telephone bill. While staying with Matthew and Maro Spender in Tuscany, Bruce noticed a roasting spit that Spender had just bought.
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