Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare Page A

shared Sunquest , a beamy 40-footer with a flush teak deck, built for sailing round the world. She was kept at Bursledon on the Hamble where they spent every third weekend. In a essay he wrote at Marlborough, Bruce caricatured the family outing: “Once a year there comes a morning when my father, instead of sauntering down to breakfast with a customary frown, bounces downstairs, eats five times more breakfast than usual, and capers about as if he were 20. The reason for this outburst is a visit to the most important member of the family, the yacht. Through his veins surges the blood of Drake and Hawkins; bowler hat gives way to yachting cap, and his thoughts run far above his bevy of secretaries and Mrs A. ’s will.
    “My mother also transforms herself from the wife of a respectable lawyer, and chairman of all sorts of philanthropic committees, into a pirate’s spouse. She dresses to the part with tight black trousers, canvas shoes and a massive blue sweater, a savage scarf tied round her head in true piratical fashion, and a pair of earrings that would have delighted Captain Kidd. This uniform has become de rigueur for all yachtswomen from Bembridge to Salcombe and has even appeared in Vogue .
    “My brother adopts the urchin look, jeans and a terrible piece of headgear with a bobble on it. Only myself and the dog are upset. I loathe going to sea . . .”
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    Sunquest was a rare luxury. There was no money spare. The war, his determination to be good and not to be observed doing anything but good, had reinforced Charles’s correctness. Because of the Milward scandal, he went out of his way never to be thought grasping. This extended to not paying himself properly. To neighbours like the James children it appeared that he struggled a bit. “The idea got through to us that they weren’t nearly as well off as some of our friends.”
    At home he found himself without his ship’s company and the object of ribbing by his wife, sons and father-in-law. Sam, enjoying his second childhood, set no sort of example, cheating at cards and encouraging the boys to lapse into a full Yorkshire dialect. “Let’s say ‘fower’ till daddy comes.” The house was full of laughter, often aimed at Charles’s virtue. Once, he came home to discover Margharita and Bruce giggling uncontrollably after Bruce had said of a woman in Tanworth Church: “A woman with a bottom like that can do anything .”
    Bruce himself never tolerated being teased. According to Elizabeth, “If you teased him he took it personally, as if you didn’t like him. He always took everything you said seriously.” Combined with occasional laspes into gullibility, this made him a natural target for teasers such as Jonathan Hope. “I told him, quoting a line from In Patagonia : ‘When you laugh like that your mouth unfurls like a red flag.’ Bruce threw his napkin at me. ‘Stop it!’”
    Friends and relations were always commenting on how the genes were apportioned between the children. The father’s fair hair and blue eyes went to Bruce, along with the mother’s temperament. Her brown eyes and dark hair passed to Hugh, and the father’s dogged pragmatism.
    Where Margharita was instinctive, going straight to the point without knowing how she arrived there, Charles was rational to the point of pedantry. He had the Milward bossiness, an answer to how everyone should behave, and he had the knack of annoying Margharita by asking: “What’s the other side of the story?” She once rebelled, flinging an enamel jug against the kitchen wall. “Why do you always address me like a public meeting?”
    In spite of their different temperaments, the marriage worked. For the most part, Margharita was compliant. She busied herself in farm work or mending her husband’s shirts, his suits. If she felt cut off, she never said so. She liked a gossip with her friends in the Women’s Institute, afterwards entreating: “Don’t tell Charles I told you.” They were