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waist riding by and being envious in some way or another.”
    To be stolen by gypsies was a better fate than to be Bruce Chatwin from Birmingham. In one of the five schools he attended before he was eight, he told pupils he was an orphan.
    In Australia, the man on whom he had based the hero of The Songlines – that is to say the closest he came to using the device of an alter ego – tried to find out about Chatwin. “Bruce was not the sort of person who liked talking about himself. If you wanted to ask him what he thought about something or what he knew, you could never shut him up. But if you wanted to find out about where he came from and about his family, somehow the subject drifted on to something else and before you knew it he was drawing out information from you. He didn’t say anything to give you a handle on his inner personal life.” He talked sparingly, if at all, of his ancestry or his family. “For most of his life he wanted us to think him so unique that he didn’t actually have parents,” says Jonathan Hope. Some people supposed that he was hiding his family away. A German aristocrat, one of Bruce’s lovers in the 1970s, said: “A middle-class conventional morality haunted him. He had a chip on his shoulder about his background, a critical way of dismissing the years before.”
    From what he has written and said to friends, he was not ashamed so much as protective of his parents. Hard-working, honest and straightforward, they laboured after the Second World War to put behind them the mistakes and humiliations of their forebears and to build a new life. But as secrets gnaw so Bruce would have absorbed the unspoken. “We were taught at Marlborough,” says his brother Hugh, “that the sins of the fathers are wrought upon the sons even unto the third and fourth generations.” He was, in a sense, a grandchild of shame.
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    In one of many attempts to make sense of a book on nomads, which dogged him for 20 years and which he never published, Bruce wrote: “This book is written in answer to a need to explain my own restlessness – coupled with a morbid preoccupation with roots.” From his mother, he derived his restlessness; from his father, an appetite for genealogy.
    The Chatwins had a firm sense of their place. They were honourable sitters and servers: lawyers, architects, button-makers, builders who stayed put. If they strayed it was to bring back and to make Birmingham better.
    The name Chatwin is a variant spelling of Chetwynde and derives from a hill in Shropshire once owned by Lady Godiva. Bruce Chatwin’s passion for provenance led him to believe that his name came from the Anglo-Saxon Chettewynde and that it meant “a winding path” or “a spiralling ascent”. But he referred only to the suffix, windan. Chette is harder to fix. It might stem from Catta , a nickname for cat; or from Caté, “a chatterer”. Chatwin most probably meant “Chatterer’s Corner”.
    There is a portrait of the first recorded Chetwynde in the Bayeux Tapestry, a tall, beaming spear-holder. He was so tall that the designer had to squeeze his name Turald beside his sword-belt, instead of over his head. Turald was a Norman from Rouen who served with William the Conqueror. His spoil would be part of Lady Godiva’s manor.
    The Domesday Book has Chetwynde as a demesne of 300 acres with a priest, a mill and two eel fisheries and values the manor at 50 shillings. Turald, who owned 13 properties in Shropshire, treated it as waste ground. It is from this giant Norman, who took the name de Chetwynde, that the Chatwins most likely descend.
    The Chetwyndes were knights, mill-owners and sharp-eyed businessmen. About one of them, George I, lately arrived from Hanover, complained: “This is a strange country. The first morning after my arrival in St James’, I looked out of my window and saw a park with walks and a canal, which they told me was mine. The next day Lord Chetwynde, the Ranger of the Park, sent me a