Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare

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.”
    As soon as they were old enough the boys joined in local field sports. They went ferreting in the hedge rows and learned to handle guns. Bruce was not squeamish. He shot wood pigeon from his window and chased the chickens with a bow and arrow. David Lea, who had known him at Garry House School, visited Brown’s Green during the harvest rabbit shoot. “I remember the powerful smell of inside-of-rabbit.”
    And on the wet days? “We sat at the kitchen window and raced raindrops,” says Hugh. “Or collected and played with Dinky toys on the kitchen table, getting under Mother’s feet on her endless round of cooking and baking.” Margharita took pleasure in spoiling her husband and boys. “My chaps,” she called them.
    Space to accommodate her parents had been Margharita’s consideration in moving to the country. Sam and Gaggie had run out of money and both were heading for a Poorhouse end. They came to stay, in rote, as a last stepping stone before nursing homes in Leamington Spa. In 1950, Bruce’s grandfather, no longer able to endure life with Gaggie, fled from their rented semi in Ickenham and turned up on the Chatwins’ doorstep. “Old Sam had come to live at the Vision and slipped into a second childhood. He wore a moleskin waistcoat, a floppy black cap and went around everywhere with a blackthorn stick.” Bruce and Hugh loved to go on walks with him down the Mile Drive from Umberslade Hall to Tanworth, some of which are vividly recalled in the novel. ‘“It’s our path!’ they’d shout, if they happened to meet a party of hikers. The sight of a bootprint in the mud was enough to put them in a towering rage – and they’d try to rub it out with a stick.”
    They met few people. Five or six cars passed a day and Bruce would hide with Hugh in the grass and throw gravel at them. Hugh was known as “The Squeaker”, or “Queekie”, always wanting to catch up. “It was more like growing up with an uncle than a brother.”
    The farm was Bruce’s world until he was 14. “Brown’s Green taught us how to think independently,” says Hugh. “As soon as we had bicycles we had freedom.” With Hugh, Bruce delivered the parish magazine on the ten-mile round circuit to Henley-in-Arden. There they indulged in ice-cream before Bruce dragged Hugh up the Roman settlement at Beaudesert. Aged ten, he had no fear about making expeditions to the flea-market in Birmingham’s Bull Ring to buy caged birds or goldfish. “If we came home with a Java sparrow,” Hugh says, “it was because we’d inspected the atlas first to find out where Java was. From there we’d move to Woolworth’s, to buy little nuts, bolts and screws for the sleek balsa wood catamarans which Bruce created to his own design. Then on to the stamp shop in Needless Alley; then onto the H.M.V. record shop where we would listen to 78s of Noel Coward and Fats Waller. At some stage we would go to the cartoon theatre and take in our view of the world via Movietone News.”
    The Ford van gave Charles and his family freedom to travel beyond Birmingham. On summer weekends, the family’s social life revolved around the reservoir at Barnt Green Sailing Club. Bruce handled a square-nosed pram dinghy with skill, but was not at all happy at sea. In 1948, for their first holiday, he went coastal cruising on the five-ton Ripple out of Torquay. He promptly felt sick. “He longed for death and for the waves to wash over him,” says Hugh. “I went below and taunted him. ‘Up and down, up and down.’ I had a cast-iron stomach and I could get my own back at him for being four years older, at last.”
    There was no avoiding the sailing. By 1952, the Chatwins