Bruce Chatwin (14 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
VII
The English Schoolboy
. . . he finds difficulty in remembering facts and only
the bizarre or trifling really appeals to him.
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.
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.”
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.”
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 at 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.”
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.”
About his accent, Bruce was both self-conscious and unrepentant. “We are what others have made us,” he wrote in his nomad book. “Psychologically I may be a bum, but with a voice like mine, what’s the use? If I had a Cockney or an American accent, it would be a fake. As it is, I am landed with an accent that sounds the biggest fake of all.”
It was a natural stage voice. “The memory of his performance at the age of 16 as the Mayor in Gogol’s
Government Inspector
even now produces a glow of pleasure,” was the opinion of a younger boy, Anthony Ellis. A junior English master Alan MacKichan had cast him as the Mayor “because he had natural authority and could cope perfectly happily without my intervention”.
Government Inspector
even now produces a glow of pleasure,” was the opinion of a younger boy, Anthony Ellis. A junior English master Alan MacKichan had cast him as the Mayor “because he had natural authority and could cope perfectly happily without my intervention”.
His most successful role was his first, Mrs Candour in
School for Scandal
which was performed over three days in November 1954. For Ryde, who played Sir Benjamin Backbite, Bruce’s performance “remains as definitive an interpretation as, say, Edith Evans’s Lady Bracknell”. Under the headline “Chatwin’s Mrs Candour a personal triumph”, the
Wiltshire Advertiser
concurred. “She swayed and sailed magnificently across the stage, indeed, on occasions it was difficult to realise that a boy was taking the part . . .”
School for Scandal
which was performed over three days in November 1954. For Ryde, who played Sir Benjamin Backbite, Bruce’s performance “remains as definitive an interpretation as, say, Edith Evans’s Lady Bracknell”. Under the headline “Chatwin’s Mrs Candour a personal triumph”, the
Wiltshire Advertiser
concurred. “She swayed and sailed magnificently across the stage, indeed, on occasions it was difficult to realise that a boy was taking the part . . .”
Ted Spreckley, who taught Bruce English, was one of perhaps two masters who discerned his interior cast of mind. “That boy’s got something,” he told Charles. “When I give boys free reading they read Neville Shute. Bruce will read Edith Sitwell and ask me what an ornamental hermit is.” The Edith Sitwell was
Planet and Glow-Worm
, an anthology arranged as a common-place book and recommended to Bruce by an old lady in Marlborough’s White Horse Bookshop. He would base
The Songlines
on its structure.
Planet and Glow-Worm
, an anthology arranged as a common-place book and recommended to Bruce by an old lady in Marlborough’s White Horse Bookshop. He would base
The Songlines
on its structure.
The other master was Hugh de Weltden Weldon, who taught Bruce Latin from 1956. “He was the only person who caught my imagination,” Bruce told Elizabeth. “I couldn’t have survived Marlborough without him.”
Weldon arrived a year before Bruce. School lore holds that when he met the long-jawed Master for his interview, he mistook him for the butler and handed him his hat and gloves. Tall, effete, amusing, with a Hitlerite lock of black hair across one eye, Weldon was an enigma. Nicknamed “The Cat” for his secretive manner, he had the menacing air of a Gatsby. There was rumour of a broken marriage and many recall the frisson that enveloped the class when he explained that he never travelled without a Beretta (“Always aim for the fleshy parts”). “He would tell everyone with great relish that he’d lost a ball during the war,” says David Nash, who would work with Bruce at Sotheby’s and was best man at his wedding.
Feline, with a smart precise voice, Weldon gave the impression of a raffish
bon viveur.
He drove a pre-war Rolls Royce and bought his shoes at Lobb and alone of the staff taught in his gown because it kept the chalk dust off his tailor-made suits. After Cambridge, where he had been known as “The Queen of Christ’s”, he had worked as a wine merchant and was sometimes to be seen crossing the court to his rooms carrying two or three bottles of the finest vintage. A superb cook, he hosted elaborate dinner parties behind his damask-covered door, this only to be entered after hearing the cry of “’
trez
!” He collected first editions of Robert Graves, was scholarly on country houses, for which he had compiled an extensive card index, and had written an unpublished biography of Apollo.
bon viveur.
He drove a pre-war Rolls Royce and bought his shoes at Lobb and alone of the staff taught in his gown because it kept the chalk dust off his tailor-made suits. After Cambridge, where he had been known as “The Queen of Christ’s”, he had worked as a wine merchant and was sometimes to be seen crossing the court to his rooms carrying two or three bottles of the finest vintage. A superb cook, he hosted elaborate dinner parties behind his damask-covered door, this only to be entered after hearing the cry of “’
trez
!” He collected first editions of Robert Graves, was scholarly on country houses, for which he had compiled an extensive card index, and had written an unpublished biography of Apollo.
“He was absolutely Bruce’s cup of tea,” says Nash.
Weldon was not pedagogic, attacked all stuffiness, and was rooted refreshingly in the outside world. “I trust he is corrupt. I like my priests corrupt,” he said of a new chaplain. He once got two boys drunk on a glass of water, suggesting it was gin. Latin seldom occupied more than half the lesson. The topics then discussed covered everything from university life to the latest films and the possible effect of nuclear explosions on the weather. “He encouraged us to question accepted attitudes and opened intellectual doors where the existence of doors had never been suspected,” says Ryde
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