Free Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare Page A

Gloucestershire. Robert – “a wild one!” – was a wanderer with a gift for languages and a large stomach. He could hold his liquor better than anyone else and held a great deal. He was in charge of the railway between Alexandria and Damascus and went mining turquoise in Egypt, south of Wadi Haifa. Emir Faisal gave him a dress of honour, the robe eventually taking pride of place in Bruce’s dressing-up box.
    But Isobel’s favourite relation was an insubordinate, snub-nosed cousin who travelled further than the lot of them.
    A scrap of Giant Sloth from Puerto Natales, Patagonia.
    Isobel’s cousin, Charles Milward, the son of a Birmingham vicar, rebuilt his life on the uttermost part of the earth. Birched as a child for telling lies, he escaped his father’s vicarage and went to sea aged twelve. He sailed the Horn 40 times, until he was shipwrecked there in 1898, on his first voyage as captain. Sacked by the shipping company, he settled in Punta Arenas where with a German partner he bought a forge to repair ships. For twelve years he was British Consul.
    In the year of Robert Harding Milward’s trial, Charles Milward befriended a German gold-panner who was blowing up a cave near Puerto Natales to obtain specimens of a prehistoric animal. The discovery, in perfect condition, of a Giant Sloth, or mylodon, excited European scientists into believing the animal must recently have been alive. Scraps of mylodon were sought by natural history museums and Charles Milward was in a position to supply them.
    Sometime in 1902 or 1903, he sent a piece of this mylodon to his cousin Isobel as a wedding present. The skin, a good-sized tuft, was a fragment of reddening, coarse hair attached to a card with a pin. It was wrapped in paper and kept in a pillbox.
    “We knew it came from abroad ’cause it was in the cabinet, see,” says Irene Neal, one of whose duties was to dust and polish the contents. “Everything in the cabinet had come from abroad. It was Mrs Chatwin’s pride and joy, even to the piece of fur.”
    Neal was not sure what the fur was. “Whatever it was, we knew it was precious, same as all the little knick-knacks that were in there. The housekeepers, especially the one Edna, she couldn’t look at it. Oh no! I had to pick it up and move it when they were cleaning the cabinet out. It used to put the creeps up me, an old bit of blacky, browny, bristly stuff as didn’t look very nice at all, the sort of thing you didn’t want to pick up. It was not until I had me grandsons as I learnt about dinosaurs. I thought it was only monkey fur.”
    Charles Chatwin believed the slothskin to be a dinosaur’s. “The one thing I could think of was the ditty: ‘ When the brontosaurus saw us in the prehistoric days  . . .’.” His father’s misattribution landed Bruce in hot water. “You know how all children dream about monsters,” he told an Argentine interviewer. “I had this very, very highly developed fantasy about what this animal looked like – and then, of course, my bitter disappointment to discover brontosauri were reptiles and I was told by my science master not to tell terrible lies.”
    The hairy remnant became Bruce’s favourite object. “Never in my life have I wanted anything as I wanted that piece of skin.”
    For Bruce, the lockable cabinet in West Heath Road was a sustaining metaphor and it informed both the content of his work (faraway places, one-offs, marvels, fakes, the Beast) and its style (patchwork, vitreous, self-contained). The shelves and drawers were a repository for collecting, movement and story. Bruce’s life would enact all three. “For those who are awake, the cosmos is one,” he wrote in his notebook, quoting Heraclitus. He hated to see a collection broken up.
    The art critic Robert Hughes says, “a very important component of Bruce’s imagination is his admiration for Wunderkammer ”. Hughes remembers Bruce’s enthusiasm for a little-known, meticulous drawing by Dürer, of