Bruce Chatwin (13 page)

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Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs

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After assembly, and twice on Sundays, the boys trooped into a small chapel where they sang hymns to a hand-pumped organ. In Bruce’s first term, Boss arranged for a gramophone company to record the choir singing “I waited for the Lord”, but the recording was marred by sparrows. Bruce was not in the choir: “He has very little vocal ability,” reported Miss Davies, his Welsh singing teacher. Nevertheless, he was exercised by the scale with which she used to stretch his ranges, sung to the words “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?” To Hugh, this was just chord practice. “But Bruce would go on thinking. Why
do
the nations so furiously rage together? And he wouldn’t let it go. He’d give it 25 per cent extra and he always did that.”
Organised High Anglican religion was an essential underpinning in Boss’s preparation for Empire. “Mr Fee Smith gave a very good sermon this morning,” Bruce wrote on Sunday, 6 March 1949. In spite of his motto, “Christianity cannot be taught: it can only be caught,” Boss enjoyed preaching. Miracles were his favourite topic. Wearing white ecclesiastical regalia with cope and coloured shawl, he advised the boys about their prospects for Heaven, if they were good, and about the sure fires of Hell, if they were not. Boss introduced Bruce to Bunyan’s pilgrim and to Jeremy Taylor’s sermons, whom Bruce would say was “the only seventeenth-century English writer worth reading”. Just before Bruce’s confirmation, on 24 November 1952, Boss transfixed a group of boys with his true story of someone who on the point of death saw the face of God, survived, and came back to describe his vision.
Fee-Smith invited Bruce to enter a world of absolute values, black and white, without moral ambiguity. With his “melodious singing voice” and child-like views of the Bible, Bruce’s headmaster is recalled in the character of the preacher Gomer Davies in
On the Black Hill
: “In a low liturgical voice, he began, ‘I see your sins as cat’s eyes in the night . . . ’.” It was Davies who would give to the twins’ father, Amos, the colour print of “The Broad and the Narrow Path”: depicting, on the left side, “The Way to Perdition” – smart people “drinking, dancing, gambling, going to theatres”; and on the right, “The Way to Salvation” – people going to Church.
The 108 pupils were taught by a dozen or so masters, a lot of them shell-shocked. After the war, the shortage of well-trained teachers explained the presence of some characters who would have found a comfortable billet in Evelyn Waugh’s Llanabba. Divinity was taught by an especially nervous ex-officer who stammered, French by a master who had lost his ear. He always looked the other way in photographs and during Assembly would sit at the back with his lost ear to the wall. Then there was the Captain Grimes figure who would mark your book “and his hand would be fiddling with your bottom”. Boss was also known to enjoy a tickle. “There were a number of activities going on which were pretty odd,” says Thorneycroft. “He’d make us swim in an open-air pool, for instance, and we were not allowed to wear our trunks until we’d passed the test. I never could get the rationale behind that.”
Lunch was eaten at 1.05, off a trolley wheeled by small, fierce Annie from the Black Country. A little farm in the grounds provided vegetables, milk from eight cows, and eggs. Food rationing continued until 1954 and it was drummed into the boys how lucky they were. But the diet was austere: a pat of margarine; boiled potatoes; fried fish that came off the bone in chunks. “The top was all right,” says Bache, “but if you turned it over and looked at the bottom, it was quite awful.” And for pudding, chocolate pudding with a thick skin.
On Monday, Tuesday and Friday afternoon Bruce played games. “He was at a disadvantage because sport was not his thing,” says Bache. “Playing soccer he’d be likely to kick you and not the ball.” Boss observed: “He does not show very much aptitude for football . . . but his swimming has improved.” In his last year Bruce played for the rugby fifteen, where he operated “as a clumsy but hard-working forward, full of determination”.
It was in the improbable arena of boxing that he shone. On 18 March 1951, Bruce wrote home: “I boxed in the ring on Monday against a tough. I won 5–3. I am in the final for the Junior Cup. I have got a very good chance.”
The “tough” was Philip Howard, who before stepping through the ropes had agreed a pact with Bruce that they would try to avoid hitting each other while appearing to do their best. “One of us hit the other on the nose very early on, and after that it was fireworks,” says Howard.
The ordeal took place in Hall, before the whole school, and Boss made the boys strip to their waists while matron stood by to mop their bloody noses between rounds. Savouring the physicality of the contest, Boss wrote that Bruce proved “a hard, relentless hitter and gives the impression of immense solidity”.
In the boxing ring, Bruce’s “do or die spirit” was good for Boss to see, never more so than in the “magnificent” final against Butler-Madden, written up by Boss in the school magazine. “It looked as if the power and weight of Chatwin would prove superior. The first round bore this out. Butler-Madden was in great trouble. Then came the transformation in the second round – Butler-Madden decided to go all out and go all out he did. He proved to have the superior stamina and Chatwin had had enough by the end. This was one of the finest performances seen in Junior Cup battles.”
“Dear Mummy Please could you get me a box of marbles because I have not got any. ‘Love you pieces’ Bruce.”
Bruce’s letters from Old Hall give a narrow but valuable glimpse of his school life. The week’s highlight was the Saturday film in Hall. An early cinematic experience was
The God of Creation,
showing the handiwork of the Lord at high speed: a rose hurtling into bloom, a magnified survey of the Milky Way and the life history of a caterpillar in a very few seconds. Most of the films were adventure stories. “We had a film called I know where I’m going, it was about a girl that went to mary a man in Scotland, and she was going to catch a boat it was a very rough sea, they nerly got washed up on to the beach when the got caught in a werlpool.”
Travellers were invited to give lantern lectures. In Bruce’s first term the nephew of the explorer Cherry Kearton gave a talk on the African veld illustrated with photographs of man-eating lions taken at “suicidal proximity”, and Captain Jopp, in a lecture entitled “High Adventure”, showed slides of his “thrilling flight” around the Matterhorn.
On Sunday nights in winter, Boss invited boys to sit before a log fire in his drawing room while he read aloud from
Jamaica Inn, Beau Geste
and
The Prisoner of Zenda.
Bruce was less interested in fiction than in true adventure stories.
“Dear Mummy and Daddy Please could you get me a Romany Book, called
Out with Romany by Medow and Stream.
Because I want it for a friend of mines birthday. Yesterday we had a lantern lecture on a man’s uncle who went to Africa to exploring and he took a lot of photographs on big game and natives. In my book
Wild Life
there are two photographs. One of some Rock rabbits, and another of a jackel. It was very nice. I hope you are well. Please will you send a book called
The Open Road.
Tell Hugh it wont be long till I come home. Please will you save these stamps till I come home. When you see Aunt Gracie next tell her I send my love. ‘Love you pieces’ Bruce”
A storyteller is most influenced by the kind of stories he first thrills to. Bruce’s first books, bought at Hudson’s bookshop in Birmingham with 10s 6d tokens, were about sailing round the world:
Sopranino, Blue Waters and Shoals, The Venturesome Voyages of Captain Voss.
Because of Old Hall’s connection with the explorer Shackleton – his father had been a pupil – the library was stocked with Joshua Slocum, Richard Henry Dann, Jack London, Lucas Bridges.
– “I have just got a book out of the senior library called
We didn’t mean to go to sea
which tells you how to sail a 5-ton cutter. I hope I will learn something from it.”
— “I took a very interesting book out of the library called
Heroes of the South Pole.
– “Please don’t send me any comics when I am ill. They bore me. A boy’s magazine such as
Boy’s Own
would be much more appreciated. Your affectionate son, Bruce.”
His mental world was dominated by South Sea islands and deserts. His favourite writers were “the odd ones, the Victorian ones”. The Rev. Skertchley, who had travelled among the Amazons of Dahomey (“one of the surrealist books of all time”); Henri de Monfried’s
Hashish
; Blaise Cendrars. He also scanned the
Times
atlas. “Some children obviously play with toys, some children play with computer games and I played at a very, very early age with an adas. It was the only thing that interested me, to go to X and Y and Z, to see it all.” He considered the schoolroom atlas as “sort of one’s back door” and in the Old Hall library he pored over the wind chart to decide that Patagonia was the safest place to hide in event of a cobalt bomb.
Lastly, there was the hobbies room. “Conjouring has taken itself in the school and I am very interested in it. I am making some tricks myself.”
Bruce had been brought up by Margharita, Gaggie and his great-aunts to be someone special. At the end of his first term he was welcomed back to Brown’s Green according to his specific instructions. The greeting he demanded was similar to that of a sailor returning from the war: chocolate mousse and a banner of towels above the shale drive, painted with the words “Welcome home, Bruce!”
At school this Little Prince behaviour did not command sympathy. John Thorneycroft thought him boastful and self-important. On at least four occasions Boss had to caution his parents against a manner which tended to prejudice others against him. “I am sure he is straight and dependable. But he is not popular at the moment with his fellows & appears to be regarded as conceited.”
He annoyed masters, too. “On Monday I had the wacking, for refusing to give a chit in, which was not true. I was beating the master (Mr Poole) in an argument. He knew he was losing so he said ‘Well, it’s too late now I have reported you to Mr Fee Smith, and he told me to write you out a chit’.”
Despite his prowess in the ring, Bruce was not one of Boss’s favourites, but Fee-Smith did try to help him locate and cultivate his strengths. Not being shy, Bruce was summoned to talk with parents. “I was awfully embarassed yesterday, some weomen and one man sat on our bench while we were watching the match. I had to entertain them.” Boss also encouraged him on to the stage.
Acting was the activity Bruce enjoyed most at Old Hall. “He was a damned good actor,” says Thorneycroft, still able to remember Bruce’s Orsino. Bruce’s first stage role, in December 1949, was a highwayman in A. P. Herbert’s
Fat King Melon and Princess Caraway.
The reviewer called him “a good-looking chap”. The following year, Boss asked him to play the part of Bottom in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“The play is going on quite well now. Boss has put a lot of imagination in it. I think that if acted properly it will be very nice.” The play was performed on 14 December 1950. “Perhaps pride of place should go to Bottom the Weaver,” wrote the reviewer. “A very young member of the cast this one, who had a lot to do and did it with great gusto. Ass’s head or no ass’s head you did well, ‘sweet bully Bottom’ . . .” In December 1951, he played the love-lorn Orsino in
Twelfth Night
(“to excellent results”); in December 1952, a wicked uncle in
Babes in the Wood
(“and what a nasty uncle to have!”) and in March 1953 he was Baptista in
Taming of the Shrew.
“For a boy to play the part of a doddering old man is always difficult, but Chatwin played Baptista’s part so convincingly as to make it appear easy.”
The highlight in the Old Hall calendar was Guy Fawkes Night.
Bruce always wrote about this in his letters (“Yesterday the fireworks were absolutly wizzard. There were 130 rockets, 14 cathrine weels, 4 christal fountains and a lot more”). However, on 5 November 1951, weeks after the defeat of Clement Attlee’s Labour government, there occurred what Hugh Chatwin describes as “a big shock” in his brother’s life. Boss celebrated the Labour defeat by changing Guy Fawkes into Atdee – and, together with an effigy of Mrs Attlee, he tossed him onto the bonfire.
The spectacle of Mrs Attlee’s blazing pumpkin hat deeply distressed the eleven-year-old Bruce. Crying at the memory of it, he told Margharita: “Mummy, how could he do-o-o this?” Hugh believes that Fee-Smith’s subversion of Guy Fawkes Night marked Bruce’s moral awakening. “He realised that he thought differently from people around him.”
Neither Bache nor Thorneycroft remember Attlee being burned. Nor did Bruce make any mention of it in his Sunday letter. “I enjoyed the fireworks last night. They made a very good display indeed.”
In the summer of 1953 Bruce passed his Common Entrance into Marlborough. In his final address, Boss exhorted Bruce to “hold on to the lovely things in life”, and issued this warning: “It is most important to make a good start: if you start the wrong way it becomes difficult to get back on the right road again. A man who was travelling one spring time in the North of Canada when the frost was breaking up and the roads were well nigh impassable saw this notice at a cross-road: ‘Take care which rut you choose: you will be in it for the next 25 miles’.”
Apart from his performances in the school play, Bruce’s five years at Old Hall passed largely unnoticed in the school annals. “If you were to say, ‘This is the boy who is going to be Bruce Chatwin’,” says Bache, “I would have said: ‘No, I don’t think so’.”

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