To begin research on this new project Gavin set off for Sicily again in May 1955, writing to Raef Payne on the thirteenth:
I am still in Palermo, because my beautiful car [a locally purchased Fiat of 1930 vintage] broke down, not once but five times, each time immobile on the road miles from home. No car that I have ever owned, driven or dreamed of has had so many maladies, or such a power of invention of ever-fresh reasons for coming to a complete standstill. Repairs and overhauls have so far cost considerably more than the car is worth. She is worth a chapter in the book, but would need careful handling to avoid reading like an article in Punch. I myself have been in bed for three days with one of my well-known spastic stomach attacks, but I hope that both the car and I will be ready to go to Castellammare tomorrow. I can’t say life is particularly bright; I long for someone to talk to without fumbling around in little known genders and constructions.
Gavin had decided that the best place in which to base himself for the tonnara season was Scopello, a few miles down the coast from Castellammare del Golfo. Not only was it one of the most beautiful places he had ever seen, but it was one of the most ancient and certainly the most isolated of all the tonnara along the Sicilian coast, without even so much as a road to it. A motorable track stopped short at a half-deserted village of scarecrow houses called Scopello di Sopra, and from there a stony path skirted the cliffs in a precipitate one-in-four descent to the sea five hundred feet below – a sea of purple and blue and peacock green lapping a coastline of jagged cliffs and great cactus-topped rock towers (or faraglioni) like pinnacled islands. It was down this track that Gavin stumbled and fell, into a world of thistle thickets and a wilderness of flowers, brilliant butterflies, gigantic bees and fat, foot-long green lizards, darting snakes and wheeling kites; everywhere the air was heavy with the sweetness of aromatic leaves and clangorous with the lazy thudding of distant, deep-toned cattle bells.
The principal buildings in the tiny, seasonal settlement of Scopello were a square pink villa known as the palazzo, where one of the owning syndicate of the tonnara lived during the summer; a barracks inhabited by the tonnara crew; a few long low houses and storerooms; and a ruined Saracen tower high on a rock above the palazzo. Gavin had barely reached flat ground after his descent from the cliff top, and was wondering which way to turn, when the custodian of the palazzo stepped out of the shadow of an arch. ‘He was,’ wrote Gavin, ‘a man of vast girth, with the face of a good-humoured villain, and the rolling foot-splayed walk of a Turkish pasha. Most of his teeth were missing, and during all the time I was at Scopello I found him largely incomprehensible.’ It was this custodian, Roberto, who showed Gavin a room where he could stay – a square white bedroom, utterly devoid of furniture, at the top of a dazzling whitewashed building high on a rock. After having his luggage sent down on the back of a mule, Gavin moved into this room, which was to be his home for many weeks to come.
The only family living permanently in Scopello, apart from Roberto’s at the palazzo, was Alberto Galante’s in the cottage beyond the barracks. Here Gavin took his meals and talked with the tonnara crew when they came in to gossip and drink wine in their off-duty hours. Alberto looked after the stored fishing gear during the winter and worked as a member of the crew during the tuna months. The most remarkable member of his family was his mother, known as la nonna, who was then in her late sixties, though she looked a hundred. All day she would sit among the clucking hens in the cool of the cobble-floored kitchen, telling her beads and coughing and praying and from time to time farting thunderously. ‘La nonna was frail and weary,’ Gavin was to record, ‘but she would exhibit a terrifying energy in making me understand her stories, shouting and gesticulating until she was satisfied that I had taken everything in.’
On 23 May Gavin wrote to Mark Longman to report on his progress so far – not an easy task, for the absence of a table and chair in his sparse quarters made typing a challenge:
I am at Scopello, round which the book is to be based; the fishing has started three days ago. A bloody business by any standards (sharks hadn’t prepared me) but a spectacle indeed. This is the most beautiful place in the world; unnumbered flowers and bright insects under a sun like a burning-glass; utterly isolated and without any road to it. A cluster of rock towers jutting out of the sea at the foot of a mile of steep vineyards, olives and brilliant flowers. I think you’ll get a good book.
After two more weeks at Scopello, however, it was clear that things were not working out as planned. It was the worst tunny season for many years, and few fish entered the huge trap that the crew manned night and day – only a swordfish, some big blue mackerel and the flying fish that soared in rainbow parabolas to land in the scuppers of the encircling boats. Gavin penned a note to Mark Longman to warn him of the turn of events:
I feel I ought to let you have some news. Some aspects are, I’m afraid, discouraging. The fact is that this tuna fishing season has been a complete flop. Weeks go by with only an odd fish being taken here and there. I myself have been at the tonnara (Scopello) for more than three weeks; there have been only three days on which any tuna were taken, and then only very few. I selected Scopello as the place on which to base the book because of its isolation and its extreme beauty; I must admit that after this long period of inactivity, always either entirely alone or in the company of the whole crew of the tonnara (50), I am heartily sick of both … They say this is the worst season in living memory, and with the amount of money that is being lost daily I doubt whether the tonnara will go on working for more than another ten days or so. I think I shall stay in Sicily for several weeks after that, mainly in the hope of accumulating more writable material and to see the tuna festa at Favinniana – that is if they hold it this year; the cheers for St Peter after the taking of two or three puny fish have already become ragged and rebellious.
What this really boils down to is that the book will have to change its character in order to survive; it can no longer be a book solely about tuna fishing, but will have to be more or less a personal journal embracing other subjects, with the tonnara of Scopello as the thread to hold everything together.
Here, then, is the germ of the idea which was to bear fruit in 1959 in Gavin’s disturbing and impassioned account of the lives of the Sicilian poor, The Ten Pains of Death. He had already begun to jot down the personal stories that members of the tonnara crew confided to him during their days of enforced idleness at Scopello – stories that for the most part revolved around their four abiding preoccupations of sex, money, politics and religion. Gavin conceived the idea of writing a book composed entirely of autobiographies told to him by members of the Scopello tonnara; but he soon realised that a series of exclusively male self-portraits from one occupation would be too limited in scope, and that to do justice to his theme he should collect stories from the broader catchment area of the villages dotted about the hills and plains of western Sicily.
Meanwhile he hung on in Scopello through the rest of that abysmal tunny season, as the sun grew hotter and the earth cracked and gaped and the flowers faded and died. So oppressive was the heat of the sun that increasingly the tonnara crew were all forced into the shade and thus into greater privacy, and this enabled them to speak more freely to Gavin about their lives and thoughts, ‘It was like the Arabian nights,’ he reported later; ‘there were not a thousand and one, but if there had been they would not have become wearying, for I was learning more and more about human beings.’ One of the many things he learned during those conversazioni in the heat of the day was the fact that most members of the tonnara crew had a criminal record, for grinding poverty had made thieves of them all, or nearly all; in Castellammare 80 per cent of the adult male population had been convicted of criminal offences, from petty theft to murder, at one time or another. ‘When the babies cry we steal for them’ was a sentence Gavin came to hear very often. ‘There is at the heart of their attitude,’ he wrote, ‘the sullen violence of the oppressed, who, because Sicily also contains ri
ch men, are bitterly conscious of their under-privilege.’
Sometimes, tiring of his confinement at Scopello, Gavin would venture forth into the hinterland – usually to his old haunt at Castellammare, where he had a few friends with whom he could pass the time of day. Often on these trips he would take the country bus, an instructive window into the chaotic heart of everyday Sicilian life, but sometimes he would set off in his treacherous Fiat. The Fiat had developed the embarrassing vice of hooting spontaneously at the sight of a policeman, and on one occasion even loosed off a wheel at one. In a vehicle as idiosyncratic as this it was impossible to tell whether even the shortest journey would be successfully completed.
In the hope that one day the tuna shoals would appear in all the teeming abundance of previous years, Gavin remained at Scopello until the end of the season in early July, when the entire trap was dismantled and taken ashore. The season had been such a fiasco that the festival on which he had been hoping to write a complete chapter was abandoned, and on 21 July he left Sicily. After three days in Rome he returned almost empty-handed to London on the evening of 25 July.
During Gavin’s absence abroad the manuscript of his book about Giuliano, entitled God Protect Me from My Friends, had been set in galley-proofs. Mark Longman warned the proof-reader: ‘Gavin Maxwell is a most awkward person and very stubborn … I have a great admiration for him as a writer, although I certainly wish he was a little easier as a person.’ This admonition proved all too well founded. Two days after Gavin’s return to London his publishers sent him the galleys, together with editorial comments and illustrations for captioning. Gavin’s riposte to the editorial comments was scathing. The trouble was that after three years’ work on the book he had almost lost interest in it. He could not be bothered to correct the proofs, and ill-advisedly ignored his publisher’s libel lawyer’s qualms about certain passages, especially one describing the alleged involvement of one Prince Alliata, a member of the Italian Parliament in Rome, in a massacre of Communists at a May Day rally in Sicily in 1947, and another accusing Bernardo Matarella, a minister in the Italian Government, of being an influential member of the Sicilian Mafia.
Within a day or two, Gavin left London on a lengthy round of visits to friends and relatives in the north. ‘Gavin has decided to go away again,’ a weary Mark Longman advised Harper & Row, ‘and therefore cannot correct his proofs or do his captions … This book must surely be one of the most tiresome ever and I shall hardly believe my eyes if and when we actually receive some bound copies.’ There seemed nothing for it but to put the book back to the following year. ‘But it will be good when it is done,’ he added encouragingly, ‘and all the trouble is worthwhile.’ Harpers were not so sure. The delay, they warned, was now verging on the catastrophic. ‘If it is delayed yet again in the US it will have appeared in three catalogues and been carried by Harper’s salesmen three times.’
Gavin, meanwhile, continued his tour of the grand houses and remote seats of Northumberland and the Scottish Highlands. All thoughts of his book were driven from his mind by a more overriding concern. His springer spaniel Jonnie had fallen ill with pneumonia in the spring of 1954 at Tormor, the house at Upper Sandaig where he lived in the care of the road foreman and keeper of the Sandaig light’s wife, Mary MacLeod, who was Gavin’s nearest neighbour. He survived that illness, but he was an old dog now, and a few months later he was diagnosed as suffering from cancer; by the winter the vet on Skye was recommending that he be operated on at once. Gavin drove him to the surgery and helped hold the rubber mask over his dog’s face as the anaesthetic was administered.
For an hour or so Gavin wandered up and down the Skye shore. The grey, leaden sky and bitter wind from the sea matched his mood of sorrow and foreboding. Jonnie had been his constant companion since his army days twelve years before, and he recalled with a pang how he had taught him to retrieve and quarter the ground for game, and had used his fleecy flank as a pillow in open boats. There had always been an effusive welcome from Jonnie whenever Gavin returned to Sandaig. But now?
Jonnie survived the operation, and for another six months enjoyed an active life at Sandaig. But in the late summer of 1955 the cancer came back, and this time it was inoperable. With a heavy heart Gavin agreed to Jonnie being put down. On 30 August he wrote to Raef Payne from the house of a friend, the film actor and ornithologist James Robertson-Justice, at North Kessock in Ross-shire, announcing the sad news. ‘In answer to a letter from Mrs MacLeod I felt I had to sign his death warrant. I felt a traitor to him and a double traitor in not feeling able to be there when it happened, but I thought that in the state of emotional depression that I was in I could only make things more difficult for everyone by being there.’
Jonnie died in Mary’s arms. ‘Yesterday I drove over to see her,’ Gavin wrote. ‘I thought her looking terribly ill and worn out and hated to go and leave her. Having Jonnie had meant more to her than even I had understood; she says she doesn’t know what to do with herself from the time she gets up in the morning. She asked me whether now that Jonnie was dead I was ever going to come back to Sandaig, so I said of course I was, and I hope to God I wasn’t telling a lie but am a little afraid that I was. I shall be back in London in about a week and don’t suppose I shall be away from it for long for many months – or at least until my new book is written. I’ve no money, and have been put on a weekly salary by Longmans until mid-Jan.’
But by November, having finally attended to the proofs of his Giuliano book, Gavin was back in the north again. He found Sandaig a lonely place without an animal companion – especially as Jonnie’s death had coincided with the traumatic and bitter break-up of his relationship with Tomas. In a mood of deep despair and rootlessness he moved on to Monreith. There he announced that he planned to try for the Iraq marshes again, and two weeks later Mark Longman applied to the Iraqi Embassy for a visa on his behalf.
In January 1956 Gavin was back in London and being treated again for depression by his psychiatrist, Dr Stungo. He met Wilfred Thesiger several times in London during January, but by now his commitments seemed so interminable that there appeared to be little chance he could leave the country before April. On 23 January, Thesiger’s last free evening before he left for the marshes a week later, Gavin met the explorer for dinner one last time.
This would be his final journey to the marshes, Thesiger told him. After that he was going to spend the summer among the pastoral tribes. Gavin could join him there if he wanted – though life wasn’t so different there as it was in the marshes.
Gavin leapt at the opportunity, and the two men parted with an agreement to meet in Basra on 2 April. But when Gavin returned home his mind was so restless that he could not sleep. The cause of his sleepless discontent, he realised, was the fact that while Thesiger was going to the marshes for the last time, he himself would be staying behind in London. He was passing up an opportunity which could never be repeated. By four o’clock in the morning he had made up his mind, and he rang Thesiger as early as he dared.
‘Wilfred,’ he said when his call was finally answered, ‘if I can get visas, can I come with you on Monday?’
Thesiger agreed. Gavin was to bring nothing but two shirts, two pairs of trousers, one pair of shoes, a jacket, a razor and an old Leica Mk. III camera, and they would meet for dinner on the evening of their flight to Baghdad. A day or two later Longmans sent each of them a contract – to Gavin for a book about his prospective travels through the Marshes of Iraq (which was to become A Reed Shaken By The Wind), and to Thesiger for a book about his past explorations of the Empty Quarter of Arabia (Arabian Sands). Thus it was that late in the evening of 30 January 1956 the future authors of two of the finest works on Arabian travel in the English language sat side by side as their plane droned over the wastes of the Syrian desert en route to Baghdad.
Looking down from a height of five thousand feet, Gavin stared fascinated as the sun dipped towards the dim and smoky horizon. ‘Every now and again,’ he wrote, ‘I co
uld make out specks whose shadows were longer than themselves, long rows of moving specks that were the camel caravans of the nomads. They and the clusters of black tents were the only signs of life in all the desert. As I looked down at them I became conscious of an emotion, an unease, and I shrugged it off, but it returned, demanding attention. I took it and looked at it and turned it over, as it were, and recognised it with surprise, even bewilderment. I was feeling afraid.’
FOURTEEN
Into the great marshes
What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind?
The Gospel According to St Matthew
They did not tarry long in Baghdad. Armed with letters of introduction to the governors of the provinces through which they would travel, they took the night train to Basra, the great port on the Persian Gulf, and after a few days hired a taxi, loaded it with medicine chests, and drove for an hour to a village of date-cultivators at the edge of the marshes, where Thesiger’s crew of marshmen and his canoe awaited their arrival.
To the north the marshes stretched over two thousand square miles of flatland crossed, drained and fed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In the central area lay the permanent marshes, which were the travellers’ principal destination; to the east and west were the semi-permanent marshes, subject to seasonal flooding. The Iraq marshes were one of the world’s great unspoiled wetlands, and until Thesiger ‘discovered’ them six years previously this watery wilderness had been one of the unexplored territories nearest to the civilised world, the heart of the marshes virtually unknown to the world at large. The marsh people, the Ma’dan – a name which defines a way of life rather than a tribe – had little contact with the outside world and maintained an existence unchanged since pre-Christian times, extracting a living from the reeds and the water and dwelling in reed huts that sat on the water like a fleet of boats at anchor in a calm sea. It was a world of stillness, as Thesiger put it, that had never known an engine.
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