Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare

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!”
    For the next five years – a period of “fantastic homelessness” – Bruce was “passed around like a tea-urn”. “All my early recollections are of travelling – from great aunts to friends to rented flats . . . the most dismal boarding-house kind of lodging. The whole idea of going somewhere else was always exciting.”
    Bruce’s experience was not unique: everybody was on the move at that time, letting their houses, having guests in, avoiding the bombs. But once his mother started moving she could not stop. Anxious not to settle, and on the run from her domineering mother, Margharita shuttled with her son back and forth, on the railways of wartime England, between Filey and a dozen