Bruce Chatwin (6 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
Turnell means “hill overgrown with thorn bushes”. The English Turnells were Huguenot emigrants. Margharita’s family traced themselves to an argumentative mercer from Tickhill, on the outskirts of Sheffield.
Margharita’s grandfather Sam Turnell had been a commercial traveller in the wine trade who sailed to Australia for his health and died on the journey. Sam’s wife was born in scandalous circumstances to a young heiress who became pregnant by the music master and ran away with him to Ecclesfield, where he scraped a living as the church organist. Sam’s brother, William, was a railway guard who was crushed to death between the buffers at Penistone.
Bruce’s grandfather, Margharita’s father, was also named Sam. On his marriage certificate he called himself an architect, but most likely he was helping out his architect brother, Ernest. As a young man, Sam liked to tap-dance and ride a tram to the moors to shoot grouse. He looked good on a hard polished floor, or in bowler hat and breeches galloping a horse across the sands. His favourite phrase was “Watcha cocky”; his keenest hobby, to draw meticulous plans of houses that were never built.
By the time Bruce knew him, Sam Turnell was a thin, melancholy man with a nose he would say had been broken by a cricket ball and a face that went on forever. He had brushy brows and long narrow hands that he kept thrust into the pockets of his tweed suit, to hide the nails he bit. He wore this suit, buttoned with a single button and a narrow black tie, even to the beach. “Sam had the face of a sad clown,” wrote Chatwin in
On the Black Hill
. “Nets of red string covered his eyeballs and his eyelids seemed to rustle as he blinked. The presence of an attractive woman drove him to acts of reckless flirtation.”
On the Black Hill
. “Nets of red string covered his eyeballs and his eyelids seemed to rustle as he blinked. The presence of an attractive woman drove him to acts of reckless flirtation.”
“I adored him,” wrote Bruce. “He was a great walker and I preferred to walk with him over the Yorkshire Moors rather than play with children my own age.”
More often than not, Sam Turnell walked to escape his wife, a headstrong, superstitious woman who had been raised in Aberdeen, in a middle-class Scottish household with a buder. Mary Mathieson’s father had married and lost two fortunes and she was supposed to have had relatives in the Indian army. This partly explained, to Bruce, her dark tan. Somewhere in her Highland past there was also a story of gypsies.
Bruce’s grandmother had plenty of Romany temperament. “I like to think she
was
a gypsy,” wrote Bruce, “a changeling perhaps or a castaway left at the Manse.” She wore gold earrings, collected brass and took pride in her wonderful legs that she would show off at the least provocation. An effigy of a black cat was important to her and the correct hanging of a horseshoe. “An addict of the Ouija board and horoscopes, she was also given to any kind of gambling. Her husband lost his last penny in the slump, so she ‘made do’ betting on the horses”. Once she invested a pound on “Grackle” in the Grand National and the horse came in at 33–1. A later bet of six shillings each way financed her son’s engagement ring.
was
a gypsy,” wrote Bruce, “a changeling perhaps or a castaway left at the Manse.” She wore gold earrings, collected brass and took pride in her wonderful legs that she would show off at the least provocation. An effigy of a black cat was important to her and the correct hanging of a horseshoe. “An addict of the Ouija board and horoscopes, she was also given to any kind of gambling. Her husband lost his last penny in the slump, so she ‘made do’ betting on the horses”. Once she invested a pound on “Grackle” in the Grand National and the horse came in at 33–1. A later bet of six shillings each way financed her son’s engagement ring.
Bruce knew his grandmother as “Gaggie”. Forty years later, in the back-lands of Brazil, he would find her gypsy double under a jackfruit tree.
Gaggie had arrived in Sheffield, after her father’s death, to keep house for her brother, a doctor practising in Broomhill. When her brother married, she rowed with his wife and never spoke to either again. Desperate for somewhere to live she moved in with Sam Turnell, the tap-dancing “architect”, who lived next door.
They married in October 1911. Sam was 38, Mary 27. Her inheritance enabled them to settle in an elegant house in Broomhill. Bruce’s mother, the eldest of their three children, was born in February, 1912. Known to her family as “Margie”, Margharita was named after Sam’s favourite flower.
Sam was now working for Jonas & Colver, the knife manufacturers. He rose to become a manager. “Then, evidently, he did something wrong,” says his son, John Turnell. The firm despatched him on a mysterious mission to South America.
In 1927 he lost his job altogether. Margharita was at home when he came in and told her: “The steel works have gone bust.” He remained unemployed until the mid-1930s, living off his wife’s capital, but Gaggie’s money ran out and the Turnells moved from their pillar-fronted house into smaller and smaller lodgings, finally settling in 136 Sandygate Road, a semi-detached with a green-painted dining room, three ducks flying up the wall and a fine view over the Rivelin valley across the hen-house roof.
“They had friends when they had money, and then they didn’t have so many,” says John Turnell. Possessions were sold. It became difficult to keep up appearances. Gaggie felt Sandygate Road demeaned her and hated it. Then, in about 1935, Sam found a job as a quantity surveyor for a firm making metal windows. (Bruce, casting him in rosier lights, claimed he sold stained glass). Sam worked for Mellowes until he retired, but the pay was meagre. He was living a cut above the breadline with a wife and three children. The only supplementary source of income was that brought in by Gaggie from the horses. She regretted having married him. They fought continually. Slowly, the marriage unravelled. “Sam, you’re useless, Sam!” Gaggie would snap in a thickening Scots accent.
To escape Sandygate Road, Sam walked the moors. He took John with him and later Bruce. They walked past the Three Merry Lads pub, past Red Mires dam, past Ashopton – now under water – and back along Manchester Road. All day, sometimes 20 miles a day, said John, who complained it put him off walking. “We all wanted to escape home.”
The experience of walking the moors with his grandfather would germinate Bruce’s theory of walking and his conviction that the human frame is designed for a day’s march. “When people start talking of man’s inhumanity to man it means they haven’t actually walked far enough.”
Bruce’s mother was 14 when Sam lost his job at Jonas & Colver. Gaggie, to remove Margharita from the house, sent her to Dieppe to stay for six months with the parents of her French governess. She returned home speaking French, with a taste for French magazines and clothes. Unable to afford new dresses, Gaggie, from cut-outs and curtains, taught Margharita how to design her own. Margharita said: “We were brought up poor as church mice, but Gaggie
always
made sure we were properly turned out.”
always
made sure we were properly turned out.”
Margharita sought refuge from the grime of Sheffield in parties and matinées. Hugh ascribes his brother’s appetite for the exotic to their mother’s passion for European fashion and American films. She loved going with her sister Kay to the cinema, identifying with the heroines. Her favourite film was
Gone With the Wind.
She confided to Hugh, whom she took to see it, that Scarlett’s predicament, sitting in a house with no money and taking down the green velvet curtains to cut into a dress, was similar to her own situation in Sandygate Road. Both of her siblings would later work in films; Kay as a continuity girl, John as an actor, and afterwards as a cost controller at Denham Studios. “If you’ve got good eyesight, and are quick, and know where to look, you’ll see me in the farewell speech of
Goodbye Mr Chips
.”
Gone With the Wind.
She confided to Hugh, whom she took to see it, that Scarlett’s predicament, sitting in a house with no money and taking down the green velvet curtains to cut into a dress, was similar to her own situation in Sandygate Road. Both of her siblings would later work in films; Kay as a continuity girl, John as an actor, and afterwards as a cost controller at Denham Studios. “If you’ve got good eyesight, and are quick, and know where to look, you’ll see me in the farewell speech of
Goodbye Mr Chips
.”
For Margharita, the most accessible theatre was Sheffield’s political stage. She worked as an assistant for the local Conservatives, looking after old ladies and organising whist drives in Sheffield, Blackpool and Wales. In 1934, aged 21, she moved to London, sharing with Kay a one-bedroom flat in Great Portland Street. She canvassed the Paddington ward for Conservative Central Office, until the chief agent sacked her “for giggling at the policy”.
In the winter of 1937, Margharita caught the train to Birmingham with a recommendation to join the team of Ronald Cardand, MP, brother of a young romantic novelist, Barbara. She was coming back from her interview when Charles Chatwin boarded the train.
Bruce liked to think of his mother as glamorous. In
On the Black Hill
he cast her as Jo Lambert: “a strange, long-legged woman, with scarlet lips and nails, and sunglasses set in wedges of white Bakelite . . . She had always been famous for her taste and her ability to ‘make do’ on a shoe-string.” He detected in her lively brown eyes “suggestions of Southern ancestry” and told friends that Margharita had been a cabaret performer. If ever she danced, it was probably to perform demure turns as part of her fund-raising activities for the Conservative Party.
On the Black Hill
he cast her as Jo Lambert: “a strange, long-legged woman, with scarlet lips and nails, and sunglasses set in wedges of white Bakelite . . . She had always been famous for her taste and her ability to ‘make do’ on a shoe-string.” He detected in her lively brown eyes “suggestions of Southern ancestry” and told friends that Margharita had been a cabaret performer. If ever she danced, it was probably to perform demure turns as part of her fund-raising activities for the Conservative Party.
To Hugh, their mother was “morally very correct, with a bit of Scarlett O’Hara trying to burst out”. Sensitive to her lack of formal education, she played at not being bright, but she could think fast, “flirt with the best” and was always looking at the funny side of people.
She was a giggler, but her vivacity camouflaged a nervous side. She used to talk to herself. “The first sign of madness,” she would say dismissively when caught by her children. Robert Erskine once found Bruce on top of a double-decker bus having so fierce a discussion with himself that he did not dare to interrupt.
Charles and Margharita married on 28 September 1938, at Ranmoor Church in Sheffield. At the wedding, there was a sense that the shy and socially awkward groom had been rescued by this vivacious woman. A Chatwin cousin told Margharita: “You caught him in the nick of time.”
The Chatwins honeymooned west of Cannes and moved, on their return to Birmingham, into “Namura”, a rented semi-detached in Barnt Green, backing onto the railway station. They could not afford a home of their own: Margharita, when she transferred her account from London to Birmingham, had ten pence in credit, the whole of her wealth.
The picture of family life anticipated by Charles may be seen in his present to Margharita that Christmas: Mrs Beeton’s
Household Management
. Charles, sharing Mr Beeton’s every expectation, was anxious soon to start a family. “War was imminent. We’d been married a year. ‘Let’s have a child,’ I said.”
Household Management
. Charles, sharing Mr Beeton’s every expectation, was anxious soon to start a family. “War was imminent. We’d been married a year. ‘Let’s have a child,’ I said.”
In the summer of 1939, they departed on a short touring holiday of Wales. Bruce was conceived in a hotel south of Aberystwyth. “Then the war came and our lives were broken up,” said Charles.
On the outbreak of war, Margharita announced to Barbara, Charles’s sister: “I shan’t be able to do any war work. I’m going to have a baby.” She was eight months pregnant when Charles, who had joined the R.N.V.R., received his papers ordering him to Chatham where he would spend a year square-bashing, digging trenches and learning elementary pilotage.
Without Charles, a nerviness set in which could only be remedied by moving. Margharita’s greatest fear was to have soldiers billeted on her, so without consulting anyone she gave up the lease on “Namura” and went to stay with her parents near Sheffield, and there she gave birth to Bruce on the evening of 13 May 1940, in the Shearwood Road Nursing Home.
Bruce was born at 8.30 p.m., at the end of a hot day. “I don’t remember it ever raining on Bruce’s birthday,” said Margharita, whose superstitious nature matched her mother’s.
She remembered “not a particularly easy birth, but an incredibly beautiful child”. Her son had the Chatwin blue eyes, the high forehead and long nose of the Turnells, and a big head. One of the myths he elaborated for himself was Bruce the Baby: he would tell friends that he was so golden, blue and pink he was selected in a competition in 1942 to be the baby on the Glaxo food tin. He retained an exemplary sense of his own uniqueness. Aged 40, while watching a children’s nativity play in Wales, he so identified with the angel who appeared to Mary that he was moved to write on the programme: “I am that Star.”
Margharita never divulged to him the comment made by the maternity nurse: “He’s so beautiful. He’s almost too beautiful to live.”
He was christened on 16 June at St John the Baptist, Dronfield. The Reverend Richards had fallen asleep and had to be fetched by John Turnell. The two of them ran, shoulder to shoulder, through the church’s swing doors and in a hasty service he was baptised Charles Bruce. His mother had chosen Charles, after her husband. Her husband, then tramping about a square in Brighton, had chosen Bruce, after some remote Scottish ancestors.
A swaying nipple and a shower of gold. These, Bruce claimed, were the first images of a nomad child on coming into the world. What were his? Probably, a mildewed wall in Quoit Green House, Dronfield, the latest of his grandparents’ lodgings.
Margharita and her baby left Quoit Green House after a few weeks. In Birmingham, Charles’s mother Isobel Chatwin, worried by the danger of enemy bombardment, put pressure on her daughter-in-law to look for a safer place. Margharita found furnished rooms on the seafront at Filey, a resort on the Yorkshire coast where she had spent her holidays. There, Gaggie insisted on joining her. Sam was reluctant to lose his hard-won position as a quantity surveyor and stayed in Dronfield. In any case, “he was told there wasn’t room,” said Margharita.
31, The Crescent, the setting of Bruce’s first conscious memories, was a ground-floor flat facing the beach. “I watched the convoys of grey ships as they passed to and fro along the horizon. Beyond the sea, I was told, lay Germany. My father was away at sea, fighting the Germans.”
In their ground-floor flat, Gaggie conferred on Bruce the affection she had withheld from Sam. She fed her grandson halibut oil laced with orange. She toasted bread for him on a gas fire in the bedroom and played with him on the sand.
In that confined space Gaggie’s temperament led to friction. “My mother was one of those awful pram-rockers,” said Margharita, who liked to carry her baby. She was annoyed by Gaggie’s insistence on rocking the pram every time Bruce shouted. They had their first row. Bruce heard a cry, soon familiar: “the carriage door closing – we’re off!”
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