The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy

by Gavin Maxwell

  The Polar Star sailed from Bridlington on 16th July, to pass through the Edinburgh–Glasgow Canal, then the Crinan Canal, through the Mull of Kintyre, and so up the West Coast to Camusfeàrna. The voyage had an inauspicious beginning. The boat was no more than half an hour out from Bridlington when Jimmy saw fierce flames leaping from the stern between the diesel tanks and the Calor-gas cylinders. The crew were in the wheelhouse. When Jimmy raised the alarm, ‘they started charging about all over the ship looking for fire extinguishers, cursing and swearing and expecting an explosion any minute. I had a look myself and there was an extinguisher in the wheelhouse all the time, so I took it and got the fire out myself.’ After this mishap she made remarkable progress during the earlier stages of her voyage.

  On the third day I was sitting writing at my desk at Camusfeàrna when I found my mind wandering to the probable position of the Polar Star at that moment. She must, I decided, be in the Crinan Canal itself – and then a thought came into my head that sent a sharp shock of fear through me. A boat emerging from the Crinan Canal finds itself in the Sound of Jura, almost landlocked, and with only two northward passages to the open sea, those to the north and south of the Island of Scarba. To any uninformed person looking at a chart, the southern passage, between Scarba and Jura, would appear very much the more direct route to clear the southern end of Mull and reach the open sea. That passage, however, is a death-trap, the famous Gulf of Corryvreckan where many, many a boat bigger than the Polar Star has met her end in savage whirlpools or the roaring wall of water that is the main overfall. On board the Sea Leopard I had watched it from a respectful distance years before, a mad leaping confusion as if the tides of all the world had met in that one place. The CCC Sailing Directions call it ‘the worst in the West Highlands… at any time there is such risk that it is inadvisable to attempt it’. Now it struck me as just conceivable, but conceivable enough to bring out a fine cold sweat, that the East Coast crew aboard the Polar Star had not heard of Corryvreckan and were sailing without proper written directions.

  I grabbed the telephone and spoke to the canal authorities at Crinan. The Polar Star, they told me, had left the canal some minutes before; I explained my fears, and they offered to try to call her on her radio and telephone back to me. The next quarter of an hour passed slowly at Camusfeàrna, the slower for two incoming calls unconnected with my predicament, in the course of which I was barely able to remain civil. The third time the bell rang it was Crinan and they were reassuring. They had been unable to contact the Polar Star because, like much else about her, the radio was out of order, but they had talked with a fishing boat who had seen the Polar Star. She had passed, this boat reported, at about twenty-five knots, and appeared to be on course for the northern channel, not for Corryvreckan. I returned, a little uneasily, to my work. Jimmy had agreed to telephone from Mallaig, and that could not be for some hours.

  It was late in the evening before he telephoned, and his voice sounded odd and strained. ‘Are you in Mallaig?’ I asked.

  ‘No, we’re in Tobermory.’

  ‘Tobermory! But you left Crinan hours ago – is everything all right?’

  ‘Well, not exactly. We ran into some trouble. There’s no glass left in the wheelhouse, for example, and its hatch flaps have gone too. We ran into a sort of wall of water – like a head-on collision. Nobody was hurt – much.’

  The Polar Star’s English crew had indeed steered straight into the Gulf of Corryvreckan, at its most dangerous of all tides, half ebb springs, and had charged the main overfall at maximum speed.

  It was not until after Jimmy’s arrival that I heard the full story of this adventure that might so easily have proved tragic. He had not seen the actual impact, for he had been making tea in the galley just aft of the wheelhouse. The Polar Star was travelling at full speed, slamming from wave top to wave top as hard chine boats do, when she seemed to Jimmy to ram something solid. The teapot was thrown from his hand and he himself was flung violently against the bulkhead; as this happened a wave of water some four feet deep swept through the double doors leading into the wheelhouse. Entrance for’ard thus effectively blocked, Jimmy made his escape aft. The roll hatch separating the cabin from the after hold was pulled down against the wind; raising it, he looked out upon a chaotic sea. It had, he said, no real form or shape beyond an impression of confused violence, for so many things appeared to be happening at once; there were fierce down-sucked whirlpools, waterspouts and waterfalls, and towering waves truncated at their ends. He climbed out on to the narrow unrailed side-deck and began precariously to make his way for’ard to the wheelhouse. While he was doing so the helmsman put the Polar Star about, still at full speed, and she came round in a wide arc, with seas coming up at her from all sides, from ahead and astern, from port and starboard all at the same time. Once clear of the worst of it Jimmy and one of the two Yorkshiremen worked furiously at the pumps, for the boat was half full of water. Jimmy asked what had happened. ‘Dunno – something to do with the wind against the tide, I suppose.’

  The Polar Star made Tobermory harbour three hours later, and there, past caring for rigid etiquette, her crew picked up the first vacant moorings that held a dinghy, and rowed it ashore.

  I was reassured by one thought only; there could be very few vessels of the Polar Star’s size that could have attempted that folly and survived it.

  The following afternoon the Polar Star came up on the southern horizon. Watching her through the field-glasses I could see little but the enormous bow wave she was throwing up; whatever her defects, twenty knots seemed a very conservative estimate of her speed, for from the moment at which she was first visible some ten miles away until she hove to and dropped anchor in the bay was no more than twenty-five minutes.

  Terry and I rowed the dinghy out. This was my first sight of my new acquisition, and once aboard her I found it difficult to conceal my disappointment. Potentially, she was all that I had expected, but everything about her reeked of neglect and indifference, from the rusted and functionless instruments on her fascia board, to her uncaulked decks and damp-stained cabin.

  As with so many other ‘bargains’ she required an enormous amount of expenditure before at last she became both trustworthy and socially presentable. At the outset she had, like some aboriginal woman, little but speed and a sound hull; for the rest she was dirty, neglected, squalid in appearance both inside and out, and with a highly unreliable transmission system from the wheel-house to the two big motors in her stern. These were controlled, if the word may be applied to any operation so imprecise, by two throttles on the fascia board, and two gigantic and rusty gear levers not less than four feet high. The neutral position in the forward and backward travel of these monstrosities was exceedingly difficult to achieve, and when found remained, so to speak, an armed neutrality, for the vessel would still creep ahead until the engines were finally stopped. The system was obsolete, and had in recent models been replaced by two small levers on the fascia board, operating a hydraulic gearbox and acting simultaneously as throttle and gear levers. This innovation, we discovered, could only be fitted to the more modern type of engine. In every sphere of life I have always found that one of the most difficult decisions for me has been to determine the moment at which to cut my losses; now, rightly or wrongly, we decided to replace both engines and transmission. We should then have a sound hull and sound engines, and during the winter months we could work at bringing the interior woodwork and fittings up to the same high standard.

  This decision, however, we did not take until the autumn; and immediately after her first arrival at Camusfeàrna she had perforce to be sent to the nearest shipyard to remove the evidence of her encounter with Corryvreckan. There she spent some weeks, and we had little use from her that summer; none, in fact, beyond shopping runs to the village, a journey that we found she could accomplish in twelve minutes as opposed to our usual forty by foot-track and road.

  August 1961 stands out with a terrible vividness in my mind
. Before I began to write this book I wondered whether in the narrative that month should be omitted, whether people who through Ring of Bright Water had become vicariously fond of us and of our animals could take even at secondhand the shocks and blows that we sustained, for they came near to bringing about the disintegration of Camusfeàrna as we had known it. The shattering chain of events began with a single episode which, though alarming, did not prepare me for the nightmare that was to follow.

  We had staying with us Caroline Jarvis from the London Zoo, who, the previous year, had arranged Terry’s employment as an otter-keeper. At that time Edal had the run of the house for most of the day; she would go for her walk in the morning and sleep and play in the living-room; only if there were very many people, or if she was particularly obstreperous would we shut her up in her own quarters, a part of Jimmy’s bedroom that he had divided by a four-foot high plasterboard partition. Caroline, who has enormous experience and love of animals of all kinds, got on extremely well with Edal; they had gone for walks together, and only the evening before Edal had gone to sleep on her lap. There was no tension in the atmosphere, nothing to warn us of what was coming.

  The next morning Caroline, Jimmy and I set off for a walk with Edal. We had crossed the burn and were walking up the green slope beyond it when I saw Edal, who was close to Caroline, stop suddenly, almost like a pointer, and direct a malevolent glare at Caroline’s foot. There was something so unfamiliar in Edal’s expression that I called to Caroline to stand still, and hurried towards them. But it was already too late – Edal gave one piercing scream of rage and buried her teeth in Caroline’s ankle. Jimmy and I pulled her off and attached a lead to her while Caroline limped home, making light of her injury. Jimmy and I went on with Edal to the islands, discussing all the way the possible reasons for her outrage. At first we were inclined to think that there might be some brain damage remaining from her long illness, but on the veterinary evidence we were forced to discard this theory as untenable. If the nerve itself had been damaged she could never have recovered the full use of her limbs and tail; it must have been the nerve sheath and that could not affect her present behaviour. It was, we concluded, some sort of explosion of jealousy; Edal considered herself polyandrously married to Jimmy and myself and had put Caroline in the position of a rival. We made up our minds not only that she should not meet Caroline again, but that we should be very careful about letting her meet any woman at all. Caroline left two days later; I did not know then that she had given to Terry the thick woollen sweater she had been wearing. I went to London on business for a week, drove north in the Mercedes, and did not get back until after dark on a Monday night.

  It was so late that I was surprised, as I approached the village pier, to see in the headlights of my car the figures of Jimmy and of Raef Payne, an old friend who had taken over the holiday occupancy of the empty croft adjoining Camusfeàrna. They both looked grave and worried; I knew at once that some sort of disaster had taken place at Camusfeàrna.

  It did not take long to say; Terry had been very badly bitten by Edal, and had been taken the previous day to Broadford Hospital on the Isle of Skye. The local doctor had stitched him up as well as she could, but there was the possibility that one finger would have to be amputated. No one seemed to have any very clear idea of how it had happened; Edal had been in her own room, and Terry had gone up to play with her as he often would. He had been entirely alone in the house – Jimmy was out, and Raef had been in his own house a hundred yards away. Both hands were badly damaged. Terry had run over to Raef’s house more or less holding on a finger that would otherwise have dropped off.

  There was no way for me to get to Skye that night, for it was hours past the time of the last ferry-boat; I would have to wait for the morning. I do not think any of us slept very much.

  I went first to see the hospital doctor, so that when I went on from his house to the hospital I was not quite unprepared, for I had been told that Terry might lose one finger on each hand – it depended on how much deterioration there had been overnight. We had agreed that in any case I should bring Terry from the hospital to the doctor’s house for a confirmatory examination, that I should bring him home to Camusfeàrna, and that the following day I should drive him to Glasgow for plastic surgery.

  When I reached the little hospital I could at first find nobody; the place seemed deserted. I peered this way and that, and at length found myself looking down a corridor to the open door of a ward where a patient was visible sitting up in bed. He was not only sitting up, he was semaphoring wildly with his discarded pyjama-top – suddenly I realized that it was Terry, and that the signals were directed at me. I hurried down the corridor.

  There were only two other patients in the ward, an old man and a child, and both were somnolent. Terry could hardly keep his voice down as he demanded over and over again: ‘Do I get out of here? Are you going to take me away? You won’t leave me here?’ At close quarters the smell of gangrene was overpowering; its implications made my voice unsteady as I reassured him.

  Back in the doctor’s house, I tried to persuade him to close his eyes while his hands were being examined, for I knew by that stench what their appearance would be; but he would have none of it, and took a keen, almost clinical interest in the proceedings. The removal of the bandages revealed a sight so unpleasant that it is better not to attempt description. The top two joints of the second finger of the right hand had literally been chewed off, as had a slightly lesser portion of the same finger of the other hand. The local doctor had somehow contrived to stitch them on again, but now they were very dead indeed. Terry looked at them dispassionately: ‘Chop ’em off, Doctor,’ he said, ‘that ruddy lot’s no good to anyone.’ Terry was only just fifteen; he never shed one tear either in pain or in self-pity.

  The next day we drove to Glasgow, where his father had come to meet him, and he was installed in a nursing home. There he quickly became everybody’s pet, and the ten days passed more quickly than he had expected.

  When we drove back together to Camusfeàrna we had agreed upon deception for the time being – we were both frightened of the Press getting hold of the story (Edal was at the height of her fame), and also frightened of a local scandal, scandal that might end in her being killed. We owned a portable petrol-driven saw, and outside our circle it was to be given out that Terry had lost his fingers when the chain of this struck a nail in wood and flew off.

  I had questioned Terry so closely that he had brought to light the knowledge of which he himself had been unaware – when Edal attacked him he had been wearing Caroline’s sweater for the first time. Yet even with this partial solution to her behaviour, the savagery of the attack and the massiveness of the damage made it out of the question for her to meet anyone but Jimmy and myself in the future. It was plain that no amount of attachment to her could justify the risks inherent in her continuing to live in the house and being petted by visitors. If we were to keep her at all there was only one possible course to pursue, and having made the decision, we put it into action as quickly as possible. At the seaward side of Camusfeàrna cottage we would erect a prefabricated wooden house at right-angles to it, so that the two formed an L; this new house Edal would share with Jimmy, and through a hatch in its wall she would have permanent access to a spacious enclosure with two pools and every kind of waterworks we could devise. Her living conditions would not be greatly changed, for she could still share Jimmy’s bed as was her wont, and she could be taken out for walks on any occasion that the coast (literally) was clear. As an insurance policy against Teko some day surprising us by a similar attack, I decided that he, too, must have a large pool adjoining his lean-to shed.

  Jimmy’s new house arrived by sea in half a gale of wind, and its unloading presented a weird spectacle as we poled ourselves about on its sections, steering them clear of the rocks and painfully hauling them above the tide’s edge. My mind went back to the Island of Soay, and the building of the factory seventeen years earlier; I rea
lized that once again, as if it were an inescapable pattern, I was in the initial stages of constructing and maintaining a complex organization on an almost impossibly remote site.

  When the building was finally erected, decorated and furnished, it made an imposing room, thirty feet long by twelve feet wide, with eight large windows. The furthest ten feet were divided by a waist-high partition to form a bedroom for both Jimmy and Edal, and, since she was now to have permanent access to water and we could not dry her every time she emerged from it, we adopted the technique of an infra-red lamp hanging above a bed of towels just inside the hatch. This extremely practical idea had not, in fact, been ours in invention; it had been devised by one of the few other people in the British Isles who keep otters, Mr Jeremy Harris, and it ensured that the otter’s bedding would always be dry whether or not there was a human in attendance.

  At this point, while I am describing what may appear an excessive concern for Edal’s comfort and well-being, I should perhaps explain my own attitude towards her in the light of all that had taken place. She had inflicted terrible damage on someone for whom I was responsible and of whom I was fond, but for several seemingly valid reasons I did not feel I could send her away. Any private home to which she went would be exposed to the same risk, and it seemed an act of wanton cruelty to send this house-living animal to a life sentence behind the prison bars of a zoo. She was extremely and affectionately attached to Jimmy and to myself; she had acted instinctively; moreover, it was in some sense to the exploitation of her person in print that I owed my present prosperity. There will, no doubt, be those who feel these loyalties to be misguided; I can only say that in our minds we had no option.

  The prefabricated house was the easiest part of our plan to put into operation, though it involved much time, labour and expense; the installation of pools of the size we felt to be necessary was a very much more formidable task. In broad principle there are two main types of swimming-pool marketed for use in, say, suburban gardens; those which are circular, made of sectional steel sheeting standing upright upon the ground and holding a giant bag of waterproof material, and those which are rectangular, made of some such substance as fibreglass, designed to be sunk into a prepared pit of the same dimensions. Both are almost unbelievably costly, but of the two the sheet-metal-and-bag type is less so. This, in view of the general heavy outlay, decided us upon the wrong choice, and we ordered three, two of four yards diameter and one of six yards. One small and one large were to be installed at different levels, partially sunk, in Edal’s new quarters, and the third was to be erected in a new enclosure surrounding Teko’s house, in case he too should at some time in the future have to be treated with caution.