Bruno Scarfe – notes for an autobiography: overview

My birth certificate, Wigan1939, names me Francis Bruno Scarfe. For years I included a ‘Harold’, before settling for just ‘Bruno Scarfe’. Soon after birth I was taken to Glasgow, where somehow I survived the bombing. I began my schooling there, and continued at (Anglican) New College Choir School, Oxford, followed by the (Catholic) Benedictione foundation of Ampleforth, in Yorkshire, where I boarded. Schooling ended a term after winning a King Charles I open scholarship to Pembroke College, Oxford in 1956. My principal subjects of study were French and Spanish.

While in Glasgow, I had holidays on the island of Arran with my mother. While at New College, I had holidays with my aunt in Fraserburgh, and one in Stockholm and, from there, on the Baltic island of Sandham. Later, at Ampleforth, I was sent on courses to the Université de Poitiers at La Rochelle, and the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo at Santander, to improve my French, and Spanish. I spent my final holidays touring northern Spain alone, looking at monumental architecture (León, Zamora, Salamanca, the Escorial), paintings (the Prado), sculptures (Valladolid), the national archives (Simancas), not to mention landscape, people, and customs. Some excerpts from my diary were published. After Ampleforth and prior to Oxford, I studied German at the Goethe Institut, Kochel (Munich). This was followed by two months with Piper Verlag, a publishing house in Munich, where I advised on books in English, French and Spanish for translation into German. This period concluded with an academic year at Salamanca University, where I earned the Diploma de Estudios Hispánicos. While there, I wrote essays on Spanish customs, and poems in Spanish some of which were published in England, and gave private classes in English.

At Oxford I dropped French, did pure Spanish, adding a mediaeval component (made available at my request) which had proved so fascinating at Salamanca. I played a bit of rugby, rowed rather less, had prose and poetry published, and married. I graduated in 1961 with a B.A.Hons., but asthma and hayfever made for a disappointing grade.

After checking career prospects in Australia, Canada, England and the USA, I chose Perth, Western Australia. There I taught full-time: French, English language and literature, and more, with the Christan Brothers at Aquinas College. I taught part-time too: French at Loretto Convent, and Spanish at Leederville Technical College and for the University Adult Education Board. Tiring of the full-time work which showed no prospects of including Spanish, I resigned, and moved to an editorial post with the University Press, keeping the part-time Spanish. Then, within months, I was offered the career opening which had eluded me for six years: choice of a lectureship in Spanish at Auckland University or at La Trobe University. I resigned at the Press.

I stayed two years as lecturer-in-charge of Spanish at Auckland, before switching to La Trobe University, Melbourne, which was more buoyant. I lectured there till 1980, increasingly disenchanted with the values which marked this ‘university’department. It was in Madrid, on study leave from La Trobe, that I identified a batch of 2000 Spanish printed plays still unbound, ranging from 1604-1900, representing all major and many minor dramatists, an amazing range of dramatic genres, and sample work from printing presses of most of Spain, as well as Lisbon and Cuba. My research on this collection helped distract me from departmental policies and politics, and I was well funded and supported from outside and, even, from within.

In 1980 I decided to become self-employed. I chose Foster, a town of a thousand inhabitants, for building a bookshop to trade in new books. Though there were a few smaller towns around, and there was tourism, my bank turned down the project. I raised a private loan, resigned, and went ahead. I was, to some extent, a free man at last, the business worked, and the National Times commended the shop. But my asthma of forty-five years grew worse, and in 1986 I moved. This time it was to tiny Omeo, in the Victorian Alps, at a higher elevation. While the bookshop was being built, my father died in Oxford. I went to help my mother, then returned to Omeo.

Though my move had not helped the asthma, and I struggled still on a quarter of lung capacity, it was in Omeo it was cured – by a psychically gifted person using physical and psychological techniques. It was time. Then, in Omeo, my religious questions were answered, through writings from an ashram near Bangalore, India. I visited it three times, saw how it was run, and watched Sai Baba. I was convinced.

Finally, at Omeo, my first marriage ended. My wife and I had been living apart for ten or so years. I found a new partner, we combined resources, and offered an extra something: an alternative health centre, accommodation – and bookshop. I worked actively on tourism matters affecting the town and continued to enjoy employment ‘freedom’ and countryside. But in Omeo, as in Foster, my research was squeezed out.

When my mother, in Oxford, weakened in 1996, we sold, and by 1997 were there to keep an eye on her and controversial ‘friends’. We looked for work, and my partner returned to nursing. I worked as a sales assistant at Allders, where I enjoyed the company and atmosphere, obtained work awards and recognition. But in the end, physical stresses led to my third (and emergency) inguinal hernia operation. I was slow to recover, depressed, resigned soon after, and married my partner of twelve years, relocating to Cadiz, Spain. My wife kept on nursing in Oxford, watching over my mother and a variety of ‘helpers’. Soon my mother went to a nursing home, and thence to one in Cadiz, where she died aged 98. My wife joined me in due course.

In the meantime, while looking for suitable employment in Cadiz, I had turned again to writing poetry, and finalised the first poems in twenty years. What a joy.

I turned again to research work abandoned in 1980, and found it as rewarding as ever. In the course of the next few years, my wife still being in Oxford, I was able to cover a lot of ground. Then I began trying to donate the Collection to Spanish institutions, but on certain conditions: I would need some sort of payment for the three to five years work required to revise the catalogue prepared at La Trobe, and there would have to be an undertaking to publish the catalogue at no charge to me. The result was either indifferent silence, a reasonable offer accompanied by a middleman’s request that he receive two-fifths of the Collection (the ‘duplicates’) as his fee, or an offer which would have lasted me one year. So I decided to sell the Collection, but still on condition my catalogue be published, at the new owner’s expense. I would do the required work, at no charge. Following bids and other interest from the U.S.A. and Ireland, the Collection was purchased by Glasgow University Library. Ironically, the terms of valuation and grants had me described as ‘donating’ the two-fifths mentioned above. Glasgow put a nice gloss on these terms of sale by granting me the title of ‘Honorary Research Fellow’ in the Faculty of Arts for the duration of the project.