Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

He went out into the low evening light. The boys were standing in the sea, their figures silhouetted against the pale, glassy water. ‘They were shouting and dancing and scooping up the water with their hands, and all the time as they moved there shot up from the surface around them a glittering spray of small gold and silver fish, so dense and brilliant as to blur the outline of the human torsos. It was as though the boys were central figures of a strangely lit Roman fountain, and when they bent to the surface with cupped hands a new jet of sparks flew upward where their hands submerged, and fell back in dazzling cascade.’

  Gavin went down to the sea, and so dense was the mass of fugitive fish fry in the shallows – driven there by predators further out in the bay – that it was like wading in silver treacle. The scene was so extraordinary and the sense of fun so infectious that soon Gavin too was shouting and laughing and scooping and scattering new fountains of bright metallic chips. ‘We were fish-drunk, fish-crazy, fish-happy in that shining orange bubble of air and water …’

  The whole passage was an ecstatic celebratory paean to place and the natural world, but I little thought that in a year or two’s time it would form part of a modern nature classic that would transform its author into a guru of the wilds for a whole generation of readers. ‘I’ve come up with two possible titles,’ Gavin told me after ‘I’d finished reading the piece. ‘One of them is based on an invocation Wilfred Thesiger taught me when we were in the Iraq marshes. Whenever the Arabian bedouin see a raven, a bird of ill-omen, in the desert, they try and avert the omen by calling out: “Raven, seek thy brother!” The other title is based on lines from a poem written by a friend of mine, the poet Kathleen Raine:

  He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water

  Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea …’

  Gavin said he was inclined to use the raven image for his title; what did I think? I told him I thought it was too harsh and too black for what he had in mind. But a ring of bright water was a beautiful and evocative image. ‘It has to be Ring of Bright Water,’ I said. ‘There’s no other possibility.’ ‘All right, chum,’ Gavin grunted. ‘Anything you say, chum. Wouldn’t you say? Or wouldn’t you?’

  I at last saw Sandaig late at night under a clear and brilliantly starlit Hebridean sky. From Glenelg on the Sound of Sleat a single-track road ran along a hillside to Tormor and a lone corrugated-roofed house that stood like an eyrie between the mountain and the sea – the home of Gavin’s long-standing friends Mary and John Donald MacLeod, the local road-foreman and peat-digger, a canny and thoughtful old Highlander and an authority on the English classics. From Tormor the only way down to Sandaig was on foot, a mile and a half of slipping and stumbling over peat bogs and down precipitous rocky paths. Gavin had been dreading this final stage of his return to Sandaig and all the painful reminders he would encounter there of his beloved otter, Mijbil, who had been killed somewhere along the Tormor road almost exactly a year before. In the event, he put a brave face on it. We had had a few drams at Tormor before setting off and Gavin was in uproarious good humour as we plunged into the darkness. We had not gone far when he hit on a device that successfully took his mind off darker thoughts till we were near the bottom. This was the McBotting song, a soused improvisation on the infinite Gaelic permutations of my very un-Gaelic name of Botting, intoned like human bagpipe music to the approximate tune of a Highland reel.

  ‘O McBotty, McBottlich, McBottock,’ he sang,

  ‘O BotFiddich, BotLachlan, BotLoch,

  O BotTavish, BotDonald, BotGregor,

  O McBotWatt, McBotIntosh, McBot …’

  From time to time Gavin’s tone-deaf pibroch was cut off in mid-drone, and the sudden silence was followed by a violent thump and a forcible exhalation of breath as he plunged from one level of the hillside to a lower one without any visible step in between. Then, amid much hysterical mirth, the dirge would begin from a different and more distant part of the darkness, and recede ever more downward and seaward below me.

  ‘O McBotNot, McBotsIt, McBotsHisname …’

  At a natural platform halfway down the view suddenly opened out, the world wanly illuminated by the gleam of a full, cut-glass moon. The darkened bulk of Skye lay to the right, and the pallid surface of an ocean bathed in moonshine seemed to stretch to the edge of vision. Apart from the murmur of a distant waterfall there was an unearthly quiet all around, and in the dead centre of this eerily phantasmagoric nightscape a distant lighthouse winked its beam every seven seconds. We carried on down. On the left the roar of the waterfall grew louder. We crossed a torrential burn on two parallel wires. Then on a flat patch of turf the outline of a house loomed against the moonlit sky – an abandoned lighthouse-keeper’s cottage, two up, two down, with no electricity, water, drainage or indeed anything at all. ‘You drink the water higher up the burn,’ Gavin explained, ‘and do big jobs lower down the burn. No toilet paper, please. Dangle from the branch of a tree and use a smooth pebble dipped in water like the Arabs do.’ As we stood before the house, staring as if mesmerised at the sea silver and shimmering beyond, Gavin turned to me and said:

  ‘Welcome to my Island Valley of Avalon.’

  He turned the key in the door, then paused a moment.

  ‘Do you know Tennyson’s poem about Avalon? Well – this is where I come to heal my grievous wound. I know every dune and hollow and rock and twist and turn of the shore here like the back of my hand. Every stick and stone and fern and flower holds some memory for me. This is where my soul comes home to, Douglas. And this is where I shall leave my heart and bones.’

  We went in. The flickering candlelight revealed a kind of dark wooden-panelled peasant cave festooned with all the paraphernalia of the sea – fish baskets and glass lobster floats, ropes, flippers and sou’westers, brass barometers and multifarious shells and relics cast up by the waves. Much of the furniture was improvised from fish boxes Gavin had beachcombed from the tideline. One chair had been fashioned out of a wooden whaling barrel; another was a passenger seat from a Dakota salvaged from an aeroplane junkyard somewhere. A Primus stove stood on a fish box by the window, and on a stone slab beneath the mantelpiece were inscribed the words ‘Non fatuum huc persecutus ignem’ (It is no will-o’-the-wisp that I have followed here). After a year abandoned the house was chill and dank as a tomb. We tried to light a fire but the driftwood only spluttered and fumed in the ancient range-fire, filling the candlelit gloom of the kitchen-parlour with an eye-watering blue haze.

  We spent two weeks at Sandaig. The sea was a few yards distant, and a seal in the bay watched every move we made. On the left a snow-capped mountain towered more than three thousand feet above the house. When the weather was fine we walked out to the small islands at low tide to search the rocks for the holts of the native wild otters, snuffling with our noses close to the ground to catch a whiff of fresh spraint above the spray line; or we collected stones and scallop shells covered in the strange hieroglyphics of the serpulid tube worm; or scavenged the high-tide line of the long west-facing beaches for the flotsam washed up by the prevailing wind and tide – practical everyday objects like fish boxes and hot water bottles, or on occasion the enigmatic memento of some unfathomable sea drama, such as a sail with the words ‘NOT YET’ scrawled on it, and two brooms lashed together in the form of a cross. When the weather was foul we stayed in the house in a hot paraffin-fume fug of oil lamps and pressure heaters and toiled at our respective deadlines – myself on my English studies for my impending Finals, Gavin on the manuscript of his latest book, a portrait of life in a poor Sicilian village, told largely in the inhabitants’ own words, which was published the following year under the title The Ten Pains of Death.

  It became evident during my stay that I had not been invited to Sandaig simply to keep Gavin company in this lonely spot. It seemed I was also on probation in some kind of way. I suspected that Gavin was using this trip to weigh up my capabilities as a potential expeditionary on some joint venture in the future and to decide wh
ether I was compatible company in isolated circumstances such as these. As his friend Kathleen Raine was to write later: ‘He had the gift of making us all his slaves. It came naturally to Gavin to initiate adventure, and to assign the parts to those who gladly joined him.’ I was required to converse, to joke, to amuse, above all to sing (though he was tone-deaf he had a particular fondness for Greek bouzouki music and the Portuguese fado). I had to read poetry aloud (mostly Yeats) and comment meaningfully about it. I had to tackle questions on anything from the nature of God to the relative merits of the Ferrari and Model-T Ford. I had to ferry rucksack-loads of goods over the hills and forage for wild food around the bay as if I was on a survival exercise. I had to deliver an impromptu disquisition on the likely purpose and date of an ancient Pictish broch in the vicinity. I was expected to hold my drink and my tongue, comment intelligently on his manuscript, react sympathetically to his tales of lost loves and sexual misadventures, and be accepted by his friends – from peat-diggers and deckhands to local lairds and gentry. The fine details of social etiquette were important to him. ‘You take sherry, Douglas,’ he explained one day, ‘just as you take tea. No indefinite article, you see. Don’t ask me why. But – you have a whisky or a brandy. Definitely an indefinite article job, wouldn’t you say?’ My handwriting was analysed for clues to my personality, and so was my physiognomy. ‘Do you have a temper?’ he asked me one day. ‘Do you ever fly off the handle, blow your top, run amok, raise Cain, boil over? Do you ever, dear Douglas, chew carpets or foam at the mouth? No? You have flared nostrils, you see. And flared nostrils suggest a hot temper.’

  It seems that I passed the test, for on several evenings Gavin sat whisky in hand before the driftwood fire and rhapsodised on the great explorations we might undertake in some of the wildest and most far-flung corners of the planet at some indeterminate date in the future. ‘When you have finished your Finals,’ he would say, ‘you can start the planning. Africa, New Guinea, the Amazon Basin? What does it matter? A true writer can write about anywhere and anything …’

  The routine of the Gavin day was invariable. A huge and very late breakfast of black pudding, white pudding, bacon, sausage, egg, tomato and potato hash was fried up over the Primus stove in the kitchen parlour. Not long afterwards the first whisky and water of the day was poured out. There was nothing else to eat until late in the evening. By then Gavin would have finished the day’s writing and read it aloud for my comments. Then, endlessly chain-smoking cigarettes he stored in the sporran he wore over his kilt, his whisky glass on the desk in front of him, he would hold forth. In the oil-lamp gloom of his pitch-pine panelled study, with the waterfall roaring in spate in the wild dark outside, he spoke with a lucidity and authority that compelled my attention.

  ‘One of the primary symptoms of our civilisation is a search for our mammalian roots, for no social convention can destroy their validity or necessity. That is why there are now so many more books about animal relations than human ones …’

  The whisky seemed to act as a lubricant for Gavin’s mental processes and he ranged far and wide over a multiplicity of subjects, for he loved to inquire and discover almost as much as he loved to converse. Sometimes on these occasions I scribbled down the tumble of axioms, admonitions, confessions and musings about life and death, nature and art that poured out.

  At times his reflections would stem from his private life, though in what context was never entirely clear, ‘I have always found,’ he would declare, ‘that what you want and cannot have you can only have when you no longer want it …’ Sometimes more extraneous activities would dominate his mind. ‘Every journey must be to some extent a journey of the spirit, a voyage of self-discovery …’ he would muse, and continue disconcertingly, ‘What every secret agent wants is power – the power of knowing that nobody knows the power that he has …’ On other occasions literary matters engaged his attention: ‘I used to write poetry, but the poems I wrote were exercises in nostalgia, and no good poetry can be written out of nostalgia alone … Perhaps explorers who want to write their own records should be sent on a course first – nothing really tough, but to include the rescue of a perilously dangling preposition, the simple bridging of a yawning caesura, above all the avoidance of verbal wind-crust …’ Once he had warmed to his theme nothing but total profundity, nothing less than God and the Universe, was good enough as a subject for his probing speculation: ‘Why can’t one admire the greatness of Christ’s teaching without having to believe that he was God?’ he would ask. ‘He never said he was.’

  And so it poured out, night after night, as we picked periwinkles out of their shells with a pin, or chewed limpets and garlic on toast, or boiled up an improvised goo called ‘Maxwell’s Bean Feast’, a stomach-lining concoction which Gavin had invented in rural Sicily while researching the life and death of the notorious bandit Salvatore Giuliano. Sometimes he gossiped about friends and acquaintances: Augustus John, the ornithologist Peter Scott, Wilfred Thesiger, Kathleen Raine (‘the most beautiful woman of her generation at Cambridge’), Elias Canetti, the Sicilian social reformer Danilo Dolci, Princess Margaret and many others. But there were times when Gavin chose to reminisce about less salubrious company, and I was regaled with lurid tales from his past – brawls in Scottish dockside bars, dagger fights in backstreet Tangier rooms, live sex-shows on the Hamburg Reeperbahn, the low-life world of the outlaw and the outcast … All this, too, was part of the man’s contradictory and complex nature, for the knight errant who pursued a beatific vision of unattainable freedom and beauty also suffered from a nostalgie de la boue.

  So were his violent changes of mood. For days he could remain in uproarious good humour, imbued with a keen sense of the ridiculous and a driving zest for life, and bubbling with jokes and comic fantasies and hilarious mimicries of the speech and idiosyncrasies of his friends. Then one morning he would appear frowning and dejected and ask: ‘Have you ever known despair – I mean, real despair? I have spent the whole night staring at my bedroom wall in absolute despair.’ The source of this despair he never explained. Whatever it was, I had no doubt it lay at the heart of his troubled personality, and was the mainspring of many of his consequent actions.

  On my last evening at Sandaig before returning south Gavin gave a clue to the roots of his make-up. As an adult he was generally perceived to be a kind of romantic hero and cultured tough guy – an explorer, shark-hunter, man of the wilds. But as a child, he said, he had been physically delicate and socially isolated. ‘I was always ailing, always being laughed at,’ he told me. ‘I feel it has been like this all my life – being too vulnerable, too easily hurt.’ Gavin’s alienation from the mass of humankind and his compensatory passion for the wild creatures of nature was the direct consequence of an upbringing which, though privileged in terms of wealth and status, was deprived in terms of human relations and emotional life. He was born into the aristocracy and enjoyed all the perks of his caste. Yet it seemed somehow appropriate that his own private rendering of the Latin motto on the Maxwell family’s baronial coat of arms (‘Reviresco’– ‘I shall put forth leaves again’) should be ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down’. For the aristocratic insider grew up to be a radical opter-out; a social renegade so shattered by his own English public-school experience that he later proposed the dismantling of the entire system of education for the young; a Guards officer who was seconded to that most arcane of undercover organisations, the wartime resistance and sabotage agency, Special Operations Executive; the grandson of a duke and the brother of a baronet whose preferred abode was a two-up, two-down lighthouse keeper’s cottage in a West Highland wilderness and whose chosen company were the poor and unsophisticated – the tuna fishermen and rural bandits of Sicily, the reed dwellers of the Tigris, the Berber mountain people of the High Atlas.

  Quoting (or misquoting) his favourite book, Brideshead Revisited, Gavin bitterly spelled out his present lot. ‘I am homeless, childless, loveless, Douglas,’ he told me. ‘Time for another dram, ch
um.’

  Next morning, we climbed up the sodden hill from Sandaig and in a vaporous kind of saturating Highland rain nosed the Bentley down the narrow track towards the high Mam Ratagan pass and the long road to distant London – and another world.

  … But sing,

  Dream, laugh, move on, be alone, have a choice,

  have a watchful eye and a powerful voice,

  wear my hat awry, fight for a poem if I like –

  and perhaps even die.

  Never care about fame or fortune –

  or even travel to the moon!

  Triumph by chance or my own merit …

  Refuse to be the clinging ivy

  or even the oak or the lime.

  Perhaps I’ll not get far.

  But I’ll get there alone.

  EDMOND ROSTAND, Cyrano de Bergerac

  (translated by Anthony Burgess)

  PART I

  THE QUEST FOR AVALON

  ONE

  The house on the moor

  ‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end; and then stop.’

  LEWIS CARROLL, Alice in Wonderland

  Gavin Maxwell was born on 15 July 1914 in Elrig, the great grey house his parents had built for themselves on the lonely moorlands seven miles from the family seat at Monreith, Wigtownshire, in the Lowlands of Scotland. His father was Colonel Aymer Maxwell, a product of Eton, Sandhurst and the Grenadier Guards, a Boer War veteran and heir presumptive to the baronetcy of Monreith, who had planted rubber in Malaya, bred short-legged labradors, done a lot of shooting – and not much else. His mother was Lady Mary Percy, fifth daughter of the seventh Duke of Northumberland, head of one of the noblest families of England (and one of the biggest coal owners in the land), whose members moved between their castles and palaces at Alnwick, Kielder, Syon, Albury and Northumberland House with an almost medieval retinue of servants. When Gavin’s maternal grandfather died, it was his uncle and godfather, Alan, who succeeded him as eighth Duke of Northumberland. It was from the Percy side of the family that Gavin inherited the characteristically long, straight, sharp Percy nose; and from the Maxwell side, probably, that he unwittingly inherited a genetic disposition to a modified form of what is now called ‘bipolar illness’ a form of clinical manic-depression, that was to exert a considerable influence on his patterns of behaviour in later adolescent and adult life.