Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare Page B

liked and trusted as a couple. There was only one serious argument played out before the children. “Mother,” says Hugh, “was adamant that what was in one’s blood formed character that would not change. Father was the opposite. He believed that if people’s environment could be improved then they could be persuaded to behave better.” Bruce constantly resurrected their argument in his work. All his questing, Hugh believes, can be distilled into a single question: Do we have a capacity to behave better towards our neighbours than we do? Hugh sees this question lurking behind the puzzled look in Bruce’s early photographs. “Don’t frown,” Margharita would tell him.
    Physically, Bruce was almost identical to Charles. He was called Charles at school, and frequently this was how he signed himself. But the relationship was more respectful than close. Even if Charles was not a controlling figure, Bruce never wanted to disappoint his father. “His whole childhood was governed by not letting Charles down,” says Elizabeth. “He would say: ‘I don’t want my father to think badly of me’.” As a result, they kept a Victorian distance. “That Bruce did not unbotde his emotions was a Father-influence,” says Hugh. “It was a matter of personal responsibility to keep them in check.”
    Bruce, after he left home, moved between extolling his father’s virtues from a distance and recoiling from his way of life. He lived always conscious of his character: his above-board honesty, his “absolute fairness and tireless, unostentatious work for others”. But he did not share the same aspiration: “Imagine the horror of being stuck in your father’s creation,” he wrote in his notebook in Patagonia. And yet he admired Charles his ability to be happy. Years later in Africa, Bruce had this dream of his parents: “Margharita in her blue dress with the orange and green cummerbund and Charles in tails, dancing in the moonlight. I felt that, in their way, they are the most romantic couple on earth.”
    Charles treated Bruce from the start as a small adult with no baby talk. He passed on to him a habit of precision and self-expression honed from the legal trade: at the end of each day he would expect Bruce to describe his. “If Bruce had been to a tea-party,” Charles said, “I would ask him to tell me properly where he’d been, who he’d met, what their names were, because I thought it was important he should become articulate.”
    He directed Bruce to answer the telephone, taught him to throw his words out and not to mumble. “I was keen for him to talk. Once he started, he never stopped.”
    Bruce grew not only articulate, but adept at covering his tracks. “He would always give an answer,” says Elizabeth. “I taxed him on it: ‘Why do you do that?’ ‘Oh well, better to give you an answer.’ He wanted to shut me up.”
    Apparent to the whole family was Bruce’s phenomenal memory. By the time he was seven, said Margharita, he would chant the whole of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” in his bath.
    In the 1970s, Meriel McCooey, fashion editor of the Sunday Times magazine, asked Bruce: “Where do you think it all began?”
    “I’ll tell you exactly,” said Bruce. “I was two years old. My parents were running for a train and dropped me on my head. After that I was a genius.”
    Genius was a word he got hold of early. Aged seven, he told Hugh: “Erasmus says it is possible to be a great genius and a complete fool.” Hugh replied: “Then you, Bruce, must be a great genius.” Charles was doubtful. “A genius to me is someone who has a rather one-track mind and that was exactly what he hadn’t got. Unusual is the right word.”
    Charles linked Bruce in his mind to another remarkably precocious young boy. In the 1920s Charles had met the Daily Telegraph ’s theatre critic W. A. Darlington. On Leslie Chatwin’s invitation to judge a night of one-act plays, Darlington had stayed in West Heath Road and