The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy

by Gavin Maxwell

  The procedure, which must of logical necessity be routine, seemed to me grotesque. I was put to bed, my temperature and pulse duly recorded, and I was told that in the absence of doctor’s instructions I might not even walk across the passage to the lavatory. The nuns who were on duty had no knowledge whatsoever as to why I was there, and when I tried to explain to one of them that I was to undergo left lumbar sympathectomy resulting from an injury six months before, she merely replied, ‘What is this operation you mentioned?’ I tried to supply the information she lacked, but she said, ‘That has nothing to do with me; I am not a surgical nurse.’ Indeed, as I discovered later, she was not a qualified nurse at all; in common with the great majority of the nuns who helped in the huge building she was merely fulfilling a supposed vocation. In many cases the vocation was considerably less than obvious.

  Later, a night nurse came on duty, who, although a Catholic, was not a nun. ‘What a lot of nonsense!’ she exclaimed; ‘of course you can go to the lavatory, or walk up and down the corridor all night if you like. These nuns just stick to rigid rules that double the work for everyone. What’s the sense in someone having to bring you bed-pans and things when you’re quite capable of doing everything for yourself? After you’ve had the operation – that’s a different matter, and a nurse’s head would be up on a charger if she put a foot wrong that way. But now, when you’ve just been admitted for an op like that, it’s crazy. They make me sick, the lot of them – they’re just not human, and no one’s going to tell me it does a patient any good to be treated like a corpse from the moment he gets into hospital. Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘Well, just at the moment what I’d ask for if I wasn’t in hospital would be a drink.’

  ‘You mean the hard stuff? I can fix that for you too – but keep it out of sight. I’ll be back in five minutes, and don’t take more than ten drinking it, because I’ll be back to take the glass away.’

  Oh, hard stuff nurse – I shall remember you with gratitude and affection for the rest of my life. I hope you will accept this tribute and be proud of a truer vocation than was apparent to me in the Order.

  The next morning the barber arrived, and after half an hour’s very conscientious work left my body smooth and hairless as a baby’s. He actually used a magnifying glass to make certain that the perfection of his work was unquestionable. It was strange, I thought, how the whole routine from the moment of admission could be taken by a stranger, some anthropologist observing a new tribal ritual and unfamiliar with its reasons, for a deliberate reduction to a dependent and infantile status of helplessness; this childish hairlessness the visible symbol of submission. Even the word ‘nurse’ was one belonging essentially to childhood; and here there were yet others added to the hierarchy of the nursery, the ‘Reverend Mother’ and the ‘Mother Superior’… I was the patient inferior.

  There was one curious thing about my subsequent convalescence while I was still in the hospital. I was working, as soon as I had recovered the energy and application necessary to work at all, on the autobiography of my childhood, which was published in 1965 under the title of The House ofElrig. I realized with absolute certainty that my helplessness and dependence, my hairless body, my reduction in middle age to a childhood status, had performed for me some miracle of time transposition, so that I was able to think as a child and to recall images and attitudes that would otherwise have been lost to me. In some sense I did really re-enter childhood, so that to write of it was not an effort of memory, but an actual reliving of those early years, because I was required now to conform to that distant authoritarian pattern. The recreation was strangely complete; I had passed through the stage of acute illness, corresponding to the dependent infant years, and gone on to impatient and resentful convalescence which found its exact parallel in the intolerant protest of puberty and adolescence. In this way and because the sequence of the writing followed these stages faithfully but unintentionally, long lost scenes and feelings, dialogues and mental directions, became things of the present and not of the past. The images, I suppose, were random, but they were real and uncontrived. The dedication

  This book is for the house

  and all I kissed

  But greatly more than these

  For children like I was

  If they exist

  was, in my mind, rhetorical; I did not really believe that they did exist, and I was genuinely amazed when many children’s letters began to arrive telling me that they were exactly as I had been, that I had put their own thoughts and confusions into lucid words. It is a terrible indictment of parents or otherwise responsible adults that children should feel driven to seek the confidence, and by implication the absolution, of a total stranger. I know that I owe this inestimable compliment to the two stags who caused my trivial motor accident, and the crushing of my left foot. Perhaps even to the curse upon the Camusfeàrna rowan tree; historically, curses seem often to have back-fired, and if I had not written the story of my childhood as honestly as I was allowed I should not now have the host of vicarious sons and daughters that brighten my world.

  4

  The Captive and the Free

  When at last I was discharged from hospital the temperature of my left foot had been restored – indeed it was slightly higher than that of the undamaged one – but I seemed no nearer to being able to walk. The same cramp would come on after the same distance as it had before my operation; no one seemed to be prepared to say just when mobility might be regained, but I understood that it would be a few weeks at most. I left the hospital double crippled, because besides the cramp in my foot my wound had not healed and my belly felt as if it contained a collection of spiked golf balls that bounced at each hesitating step. My brother, who was home for a time from his house in Greece, came to fetch me. I remember the long drive to our family home, Monreith, in Wigtownshire, because it was the first time for weeks that I had seen anything but the hospital walls and the drab view of industrial brickwork from my ward window. Now there were green fields, and moorlands and budding trees, and air that smelled of them instead of disinfectants.

  When at length I returned to Camusfeàrna in the late spring of 1964 I was completely helpless. I could not walk, and even to be driven in a jeep up the hill track with its rocks and potholes hurt my wound so much that I left the house as little as possible, and then almost always by boat. It was the beginning of a curious interaction between myself and those who staffed Camusfeàrna. Their solicitude and their desire to relieve me of every kind of task and responsibility, other than that of writing, worked upon me psychologically to increase my helplessness and dependence; at first I felt myself to be a cypher in my own household, and by degrees that is what I became. They were, the young and healthy, really and actually the masters; never had an adolescent rebellion so complete and satisfying a success with so small an expenditure of force. I could take no part in the activity of the others; I wrote for increasingly long hours every day, working simultaneously on The House of Elrig and Lords of the Atlas, but with an ever growing sense of frustration – and, I believe, a growing petulance and ill temper. At some unremembered stage of my upbringing I had been taught to believe that self-pity is one of the most despicable of human emotions, and no doubt my surliness and irritability were substitutes for the state of mind in which I really wanted to indulge. I felt like an aphis, immobile but solicitously kept alive in a cell by ants who tended me assiduously for my daily excretion of written words. Had my thoughts been less fogged by frustration I should have realized then that it was folly to try to perpetuate a mutant phase of Camusfeàrna that had proved in an evolutionary sense to be an unpleasant dead end, and instead of spending huge sums on the conversion of two isolated island lighthouse cottages I had bought in October 1963 I should have sold them and bought some house with a road to it, and thus minimized the effects of my crippledom. But those lighthouses became my chief distraction, both because I could reach them by boat, and because they seemed then to represent somet
hing emergent and hopeful in the general muddle of my personal situation.

  The two otters Edal and Teko were, like myself, by now confined. The Scottish otters, Mossy and Monday, which we had liberated early in 1963, had lived for months under the floor of the house, but at length they had decided in favour of less noisy quarters. They had taken up residence on one of the nearby islands, and we saw them increasingly rarely. At some time during my convalescence at Monreith, however, there had arrived at Camusfeàrna one of the strangest otters in what was by then a long series.

  It had become customary for anyone who had come into possession of an unwanted otter in Scotland – and sometimes very much further afield, even in South Africa – to communicate with us. Of the otters actually sent to us, owing sometimes to their extreme infancy and once to a malady carried from a far country, few survived.

  This new otter, whose owner had named her Tibby, was the companion of a bachelor cripple who lived alone on the island of Eigg, and who was unable to move without crutches. His increasingly frequent visits to hospital made him anxious to secure Tibby’s welfare in the future by finding her a permanent home where she could live free as she was accustomed, and he at once thought of Camusfeàrna. So Tibby had arrived, accompanied by her owner, during my absence. She was thought to be about a year old; she was small and friendly and domesticated, and in appearance almost indistinguishable from Monday at the time when she and Mossy lived under the coat-room floor.

  Tibby’s owner stayed at Camusfeàrna for a few days, and when he left Tibby was confined to the house for a week or two so that she might become accustomed to her new surroundings. At the end of that time she was placed in Teko’s enclosure, for Teko had never displayed animosity towards any otter that had shared his premises either by chance or design. So that she should have some inviolable refuge from him if she wanted it, she was provided with a separate shed with an entrance so small as to preclude the passage of Teko’s bulky form. This was the situation when I returned from Monreith to Camusfeàrna.

  The arrangement worked well enough for a short time, but Tibby suddenly discovered, as Monday had before her, that stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage. Nor, she decided, would she take these for an hermitage. She simply climbed out, and having done so she did not head south-west towards the distant island of Eigg from which she had come, but north-east towards the village, the direction in which her master had left, unseen by her, weeks before. At that time a local resident, Alan MacDiarmaid, who had spent his childhood at Camusfeàrna before I ever came to it, was working for us before setting up as an independent builder and contractor in the neighbourhood. He lived now in the village, and drove his car every morning to Druimfiaclach, the cottage on the road a mile above Camusfeàrna, and walked down the track to us. On the first morning after Tibby’s disappearance he arrived with her trotting obediently at his heels. He had found her on the road near to the village, caught her without difficulty, and put her in the boot of his white Riley. Liberated at Druimfiaclach, she had followed him down the track to Camusfeàrna without question or demur. We found the place from which she had escaped and made it, as we thought, impregnable. Alan spent the whole day working on the enclosure, and when he had finished it seemed that not even Monday herself, that Houdini of the otter world, could have escaped from it.

  Two days later Alan again arrived with Tibby bouncing along at his heels. Again he had found her near the village, caught her, put her in the boot, and driven her to Druimfiaclach. I can’t remember how often this farce was repeated before Tibby made up her mind that she would not be caught again. She decided to remain at the village. She located the only man who resembled her late master, in that he too was a cripple on crutches, and she tried to attach herself to him. She carried up grass and began to build herself a nest under his house. Unfortunately he was not otter-minded, and viewed her proposal of partnership with less than enthusiasm. Repulsed and no doubt bewildered, she forsook the immediate area, and it was some long time before I had any real evidence that she was alive. A month or two later an apparently tame otter appeared on a rock by the pier of Kylerhea ferry, a mile or two from the village, and sat down unconcernedly to eat a fish within a few yards of a number of tourists who were waiting to cross the ferry with their cars, but this may as well have been Monday. Months later I received a telephone call from a slightly inebriated gentleman who informed me that he had caught a ‘half-grown’ female otter and would I like to buy it. As far as I could make out, the call came from a village some twenty miles to the north. I asked him how he had caught it. He had been gathering shellfish on the shore and it had come up to him and sniffed at his shoes so he had ‘thrown his coat over it’. I pointed out that this could not be a wild otter, that it must be one of mine, and suggested that he set it free at once. But, he protested, otters were worth money – even the skin would fetch £4. I said that I would pay him double that sum to liberate her. He demurred, and said that he would consider the question and telephone back after a few minutes. Half an hour later he informed me that all negotiations were now at an end, because the otter had vanished. As this power of evaporation was common to both Tibby and Monday I could not be certain which of them this had been, but I thought that Monday was by now far too wary to sniff at a stranger’s feet.

  The next time, however, there could be no possibility of doubt. The telephoner said he had actually been followed to his house by an otter. The otter had tried to come in, but he had been afraid and had driven her away. Acting on a sudden inspiration I asked, ‘You don’t by any chance use crutches, do you?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied, with astonishment in his voice, ‘but how in the world could you know that?’ I told him the story of Tibby, and he promised to tell me if she came back, but I never heard from him again, and as I had not caught his name I could not enquire myself.

  Perhaps if I had never had the operation, and had lost my left foot by amputation, I should have earned Tibby’s allegiance for life.

  Mossy and Monday, I am almost certain, brought up three cubs on the island off Camusfeàrna where, in earlier years, there had always been an otters’ holt. Here some big boulders lay together in such a way that beneath them there were commodious but, to a human, inaccessible chambers. We knew that the holt had been untenanted during the time that Mossy and Monday had been first captive and then free but living under the house; we knew also that it became occupied once more at some time soon after they left us. In the late summer of 1964, while I was writing in my room at Camusfeàrna, I heard the extraordinarily penetrating sound, something between a whistle and a squeak, that a young otter makes when it is trying to regain contact with a lost parent. The sound came from the waterfall; I limped across the field and peered cautiously over the shrub-grown bank that screens it from the direction of the house. All I saw at first was Mossy, the male; no other otter, I thought, could look quite so stupid, so silly, so unaware of any intruder. He was sitting on a rock ledge at the side of the falling white water, below where a small holly bush grew from the steep bank at the water’s side, and he was, as usual, doing nothing in particular. Then the penetrating call came again, nearer at hand, and below my line of vision. I raised my head a little more, and three very small cubs came into view, cubs of about the same size as Mossy and Monday were when they first came to us. One was on a stone in midstream below the waterfall, and the other two were on the long, smooth, steeply sloping rock that formed the opposite bank from that on which Mossy was sitting. As I watched, one of these half slid, half tumbled down into the water; splashed around for a moment, climbed back out again; and then, looking to the top of the waterfall, called again. I looked up too, just, but only just, in time to glimpse a small sharp face like Monday’s peering round a rock at the lip of the fall where the water began to spill over in cascade. The inference was obvious; she had climbed the fall and the cubs could not follow; Mossy, as in all other situations in which I had known him, did not know what to do about it. I was reminded of a New York
er cartoon, in which a family of rats were attempting to board a ship by means of its berthing rope, and had been brought up short by the huge disc of a rat-stop. The little rats were fussing about on the rope behind their parents, and the mother was looking at them over her shoulder and saying, ‘Oh, do for heaven’s sake stop chattering and let your father think.’ Mossy was presumably thinking, but as usual without result.

  I was determined to secure a photograph of the family; I did not think Monday had seen me, but in case she had, and decided to take her cubs downstream again before I could return with a camera, I fetched a length of net and stretched it across the stream at the wooden bridge below the house. Then I went back to the waterfall with a camera. As I crossed the field I realized that the calling had stopped before even I had laid the net, and when I peered over the bank again there were no otters and no otter cubs. I walked downstream to the net, but they had not passed that way, for there was soft sand at each side of the stream, and if they had bypassed the net on land they would have left their prints there.

  It was foolish of me to think that I could outwit Monday, who had proved so often and so conclusively in the past that she was master of any situation I could devise. She must have seen me at once, and somehow contrived in the first minute or so after my departure to convey her cubs and her dumb spouse up over the waterfall and into the inaccessible reaches of the cliff-walled stream above it. Monday, with much experience of human ways, was free, and she intended that she and her cubs should remain so.

  Yet two and a half years later, in the spring of 1967, she hobbled into Camusfeàrna kitchen with a foreleg broken by a gin trap, and remained in the house until it was healed and she was again on the point of giving birth. She trusted us in her trouble, the highest compliment a wild animal can pay to humans who have once been its captors, and that she trusted Camusfeàrna and no other house was evident by her survival during the absent years.