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case a single word was deleted to avoid causing distress to someone still alive. Casting Chatwin in a good or bad light has not swayed us. We have attempted to follow the advice of Isaiah Berlin, who wrote in a letter: ‘we have all far more to gain than to lose by the publication of even indiscreet documents, which always emerge one day and then do more harm than if they were published openly, candidly and quickly.’ Our choice has been determined by whether the material is interesting or illuminating. Obvious errors have been corrected; punctuation, addresses and spelling regularised – although we have retained his school misspellings. Dating the letters, even when they bear a date, has not always been easy. Chatwin was uncertain even of his wife’s birthday; several letters are marked not only with the wrong month, but the wrong year.
    If Bruce Chatwin were to have written an autobiography to what extent would it be this? Had he yet been alive, how much of this volume would he have left out, or rewritten? These questions have been everpresent during our preparation of Under the Sun . The answers lie, inevitably, in the same realm as his unwritten books. But a fascinating version of his life is here, from the first Sunday at Old Hall School in Shropshire when he sat down after Chapel to write to his parents.
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    NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE

CHAPTER ONE
    SCHOOLDAYS: 1948-58
    Bruce Chatwin was conceived in a hotel south of Aberystwyth and born on 13 May 1940 in the Shearwood Road Nursing Home in Sheffield. His father Charles Chatwin was a Birmingham lawyer; he was away at sea in the Navy when Bruce was born. His mother, Margharita Turnell, the daughter of a clerk for a Sheffield knifemanufacturer, brought him up in the homes of great-uncles, great-aunts and grandparents. He had a younger brother Hugh, born on 1 July 1944.
    For Chatwin’s first six years, mother and son were everything to each other as they fled from the noise of war. The carpet-bombing of Coventry in November 1940, in one night flattening the city centre, frightened Margharita into giving up – without telling her husband – the small house which Charles had rented for them in Barnt Green; Birmingham’s Austin Motor works, making Hawker Hurricanes, lay over the railway line on the direct flight path of Luftwaffe navigators. Her memory of the awesome orange glow in the night sky continued to haunt Margharita long after she bolted north. She had panic attacks. She would talk to herself and shout out, hunting for her absent husband, ‘Charles! Charles!’ ‘What is it, mummy?’ ‘Oh, nothing, darling. Nothing. It’s all right.’ As they shuttled on the train between a dozen dwelling-places, including poky lodgings in Baslow and Filey, Chatwin’s duty was to be the brave little boy looking after his distressed mother: aunts and uncles told him so.
    When Charles returned from the war, the family moved first back to Birmingham, taking a lease on a house in Stirling Road which had been used by the army as a brothel; then, in April 1947, to Brown’s Green Farm twelve miles south of Birmingham, a ‘fairly derelict’ smallholding with eleven acres, for rent at £98 per annum. A lawyer during the week, at weekends Charles invented himself as a food-producer, keeping an eventual tally of pigs, geese, ducks and 200 chickens. ‘We were brought up as country children, tied to the rhythm of the seasons,’ says Hugh.
    At the end of April 1948 Chatwin went away to Old Hall School in Shropshire. His first surviving letter was written after attending one of three Sunday services in Chapel. He was seven years old and would spend the next decade at boarding school.
    Old Hall School, a fifteenth-century manor house set in 25 acres, was a preparatory school for 108 sons of the factory-owning and professional and commercial classes of the Midlands, and the personal fiefdom of Paul Denman Fee-Smith, a