Bruce Chatwin (10 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
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.”
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
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.
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.”
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.
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?
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?
Charles’s sister Barbara liked to boast that the Chatwins “did things – as opposed to the Milwards who sat behind high hedges and pondered their wealth”. Charles had an adventurous elder brother who had emigrated to West Africa where he worked for the Gold Coast Railway. Humphrey Chatwin was Bruce’s godfather and the favourite of the family. He was four years older than Charles, the same gap that separated Bruce from Hugh, and a romantic figure whose bold action Charles now sought to emulate by getting his family out of Birmingham. Though only twelve miles away, the relocation proved as life-altering as Humphrey’s to Takoradi.
The family moved to Brown’s Green in April 1947 during a famously long frost. There were 27 burst pipes and the snow was hedge-high. “Bruce was thrilled to bits,” said his mother. His bedroom window looked out over the pigsties and his immediate delight was to sit perched on the window-sill, taking in the scene and waggling his legs. Several times Margharita, heart in mouth, feared to attract his attention lest he fall.
Brown’s Green became a safe haven after the horrors of war. Charles turned his eleven-acre holding into a small working farm much like “The Vision” in
On the Black Hill.
A Birmingham lawyer during the week, at weekends he invented himself as a food-producer with encouragement from the Ministry of Agriculture. He was allowed to set off farming losses against tax on his legal fees. He could afford a handyman, Mr Hayward, a home-help, Mrs Eden, and one reliable vehicle.
On the Black Hill.
A Birmingham lawyer during the week, at weekends he invented himself as a food-producer with encouragement from the Ministry of Agriculture. He was allowed to set off farming losses against tax on his legal fees. He could afford a handyman, Mr Hayward, a home-help, Mrs Eden, and one reliable vehicle.
In 1949, short-circuiting the waiting list for a new car, Charles exchanged the Lanchester for a grey Ford delivery van, fitting it with removable wooden Spitfire seats for back passengers. With this all-purpose workhorse, he was able to visit clients, take the children on excursions and collect feed stuff for his livestock. The evil-smelling swill, known as “Tottenham Pudding”, came in huge aluminium tubs to feed an eventual tally of 37 pigs. He also kept geese, ducks and 200 chickens. Covered in fluff, with her hair done up in a washerwoman’s scarf, Margharita butchered and plucked the fowl. Engaged in a daily and productive occupation, she slowly rid herself of panic-attacks.
“We were brought up as country children, tied to the rhythm of the seasons,” says Hugh. “The neighbouring tenants and labourers, who were rooted in ‘proper’ farming, became our main friends; mutually supportive at harvest time, during outbreaks of foot-and-mouth and fowl pest.”
As Charles had hoped, the clean air and wholesome food improved the health of his wife and son. Thirty-five years later, Bruce conjured a bucolic picture of life at Brown’s Green in
On the Black Hill.
Many of the characters, names and incidents appear as they were in his childhood and are taken directly from his family and neighbours. Bickerton, a wayward Milward cousin, becomes Reggie Bickerton, who perishes of alcoholism in Kenya; Bruce’s grandfather Sam becomes Sam the Wheeler, with his sad clown’s face and his porcelain statuette of a chubby-cheeked gentleman; the twins Lewis and Benjamin, in their physical resemblance and behaviour, become Bruce and Hugh.
On the Black Hill.
Many of the characters, names and incidents appear as they were in his childhood and are taken directly from his family and neighbours. Bickerton, a wayward Milward cousin, becomes Reggie Bickerton, who perishes of alcoholism in Kenya; Bruce’s grandfather Sam becomes Sam the Wheeler, with his sad clown’s face and his porcelain statuette of a chubby-cheeked gentleman; the twins Lewis and Benjamin, in their physical resemblance and behaviour, become Bruce and Hugh.
“A special flavour of our childhood,” says Hugh, “is that while we enjoyed romping in Lewis and Benjamin’s rural playground – damming the infant River Alne with pebbles, pausing to wave at the passengers in passing puffer-trains so that they would be bound to wave back – we were also rejoicing in a much better time than we had known, had heard about, had witnessed at Birmingham’s bomb sites. We knew that everything was getting better.”
On sunny days, the boys helped Mr Hayward with his farming chores: they collected and scrubbed the eggs before they went off to the packing station, mixed the chicken mash, constructed wire pens for the ducks, fetched the milk from Kemp’s Farm half a mile away, drove the large black sows, Charlotte and Louise, to be served at Hemming’s Farm up the road and when Charles was away rode the pigs around the farm yard, holding them by the handle-bar ears and trying to stay on. “We mourned the ones that had to go off to be baconed,” says Hugh. “They came home in canvas bags to hang in the box room.”
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