It was the spring of 1956. As best he could, given the incessant and distracting demands of his young otter, Gavin began to pick up the threads of his professional life. His first concern was for his second book, God Protect Me from My Friends, which had finally been published in the month preceding his return from Iraq. Its critical reception was almost universally enthusiastic. Bernard Levin wrote in the periodical Truth: ‘It is one of the most beautifully and brilliantly written books, and one of the most exciting, that I have had in my hands for many years. Mr Maxwell’s prose has the strength and the cool clarity of a fine sapphire.’ Mervyn Jones in Tribune called Gavin a ‘beautiful, beautiful writer’. Though few reviewers were able to comment knowledgeably on the subject matter, most agreed that the book made an exciting, engrossing and moving documentary thriller that took the lid off modern Sicily and all its troubles as no previous book had done.
But in spite of the glowing reviews, the book proved difficult to move in the bookshops, and Longmans reported: ‘The booksellers insist there is no interest whatsoever in Giuliano.’ The situation was much the same in America, where the book was published under the title Bandit. God Protect Me from My Friends was destined to be a succès d’estime and no more. In many ways it was the least satisfactory of Gavin Maxwell’s oeuvre – in part, perhaps, because it never really got to the bottom of the mystery surrounding Giuliano’s life and death, and in part because of all Gavin’s books this one bore least the stamp of his personality. A film company did take out an option on the book, but this fell through; and though Francesco Rosi’s powerful, documentary-style movie Salvatore Giuliano (1962) would appear to be loosely based on Gavin’s researches, he received no acknowledgement in the credits and not a penny in his pocket.
Of more pressing concern was Gavin’s next book – the journey through the marshes. At first he had thought this would be the easiest book in the world to write; but by the time he got back to London he had begun to have second thoughts, so much so that he warned Longmans that he feared he did not have enough material for a book at all. Only slowly, and in a desultory fashion, did the book that was to become a travel classic take shape.
Gavin had read widely in the field of travel literature and had given a great deal of thought to the genre before setting out to write a travel book of his own. He was to present the fruits of his studies in a lecture on ‘The Technique of Travel Books’ to the National Book League in London on 6 December 1960 – a lecture that was important not only for what it revealed about his attitudes towards his own craft, but also for the insight it provided into his approach to his book about his travels in Iraq, A Reed Shaken by the Wind.
Writers of travel books fell into two main groups, in Gavin’s view. The first group consisted of travellers who wrote; the second of writers who travelled. It was the latter category which interested him most:
A travel writer must, in fact, be a writer who travels and not a traveller who writes, and he must have some feeling or thought to communicate, something beyond observable or recordable fact; for him each journey must be to some extent a journey of the spirit, a journey of self-discovery. That, besides how to build an igloo or throw a boomerang, is what he has to communicate, and if he does so he has succeeded … The travel writer’s work should remain the presentation (and implicitly interpretation) of his sensory perceptions, and this necessarily involves selection and compression in exactly the same degree as in fiction writing. Once this necessity is granted the whole conception of an exact narrative becomes unimportant, at least on a literary plane as opposed to the transcript records of an expedition. We then begin to deal with the true material of literature, which is truth as opposed to fact.
Truth and fact may be related, but they are more often apparently opposed, and a collection of facts, no matter how conscientious, does not constitute truth unless by accident. The writer must state an imaginative besides a factual truth, and if he travels in company the imaginative truth will inevitably be questioned by his companions, who cannot be expected to see anything with his eye. Here the writer who travels alone is at an enormous advantage. He is untrammelled, he can compress and select without question provided he retains a certain basic integrity. He can also convey situations by reported dialogue, whose factuality is always dubious. I have never been in this fortunate position since I began to write. I have been afraid of the slightest rearrangement of anything that has happened to me, the slightest shift of emphasis that might be interpreted by ever-present witnesses as distortion of fact for my own ends.
It was with such precepts in mind that Gavin began to turn the raw material of his travels into the brilliant cinematographic imagery of his finished book. ‘In its preparation I enjoyed peculiar advantages not often accorded to voyagers in primitive places,’ he recorded. ‘Spending long weeks squatting during the daylight hours in a leisurely-paddled war canoe, with the priceless blessing of an introductory companion who was not by nature garrulous, I was at liberty to set down any thought or impression that occurred to me while the image was still fresh and unconfused. I carried a small notebook and biro pen in the breast pocket of my shirt and the published form of A Reed Shaken by the Wind was little more than the dateless transcripts of the diaries I had kept during two months of travel with Wilfred Thesiger in the great marshes of Southern Iraq.’ When he showed an early portion of his manuscript to Gavin Young, now back in London, Young was bowled over by the dazzling virtuosity of the writing, and realised that Wilfred Thesiger was in for a shock.*
Thesiger met up with Gavin in London later in the year. Their reunion took place at dinner at the London home of the formidable Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, a soldier and traveller of the old school, a mighty African hunter and ornithologist, a world authority on the birds of Arabia and the discoverer of the forest hog that bears his name – and an outspoken judge of a man’s character. Meinertzhagen was an old friend of Gavin’s Uncle Willie Percy, an explorer and naturalist from the same mould, and Gavin had met him once before the war, when his uncle had warned him: ‘I wouldn’t say things like that in front of him if I was you – he’s killed men with his bare hands.’
Meinertzhagen noted of the dinner in his diary:
I like Wilfred but I would not travel with him for untold gold. He is accustomed to have his own way and cannot stand contradiction or even views different from his own; he is inclined to shout down and trample on any obstruction or difference of opinion. But he is able and in many ways likeable.
Gavin is a vastly different person, amenable, enthusiastic, has much charm, but an adventurer who has never settled down. He has lots of ability but cannot tackle anything really worth doing. He has recently travelled with Wilfred and says he will never do so again; he wants to return to the Euphrates marshes but lacks money. Gavin is good company and there is something about him which appeals to me, but I cannot help feeling that he is near approaching what is termed a ‘rotter’. He is remarkably like Willy Percy in both looks and character but he has none of Willy’s bad characteristics whilst having most of his good ones.
Gavin hated keeping Mijbil cooped up in the confines of his London flat, and longed to introduce him to the wide, watery freedom of Sandaig. ‘I felt I could no longer wait to see Mij playing,’ he was to write, ‘as I visualised him, under the waterfall, or free about the burn and the island beaches.’ At last, not quite a month after his return from Iraq, he was free to set off. So began a new era in his life, and the realisation, for a while, of the idyll of his dreams.
* The water-Garden of Eden Gavin had explored did not remain for ever as he brilliantly encapsulated it in his book. In 1958 a revolution took place in Iraq which in time was to bring to power a dictator of extreme cruelty by the name of Saddam Hussein. During the Iraq—Iran War of the 1980s the marshes were bombarded with chemical weapons on Saddam’s orders in an attempt to exterminate deserters from the Iraqi army who had sought sanctuary there and the Marsh Arabs who had given them shelter; and in the aftermath
of the Gulf War of 1991 thousands of Iraqi Shias – 250,000, according to diplomats and opposition sources – fled into the watery, disease-ridden labyrinth of the marshes, only to be encircled and bombed by Saddam’s forces in a wilderness holocaust without precedent. In May 1992 Saddam Hussein launched a new and perhaps final offensive against Shia refugees in the marshes, using heavy artillery, helicopter gunships and amphibious assault vessels, and by the spring of 1993 two-thirds of the marshes had been torched, drained and poisoned. Gavin Maxwell’s ‘Lost World’ – a world Wilfred Thesiger once claimed had never heard the sound of an engine – is no more.
PART II
AVALON FOUND
SEVENTEEN
The bay of alders
And others – others go further still and move outside humanity altogether. A place, as well as a person, may catch the glow. Don’t you see that all this leads to comfort in the end? It is part of the battle against sameness.
E. M. FORSTER, Howards End
Gavin and Mij set off for the north in May 1956. Gavin had booked a first-class overnight sleeper for the two of them, and since he did not want Mij ever to be confined in a box again he bought a dog ticket for him and put him on a lead like a poodle.
Perhaps oddly for an animal that until a few weeks before had known no other world but the wilderness of the marshes of Iraq, Mij adored trains and everything to do with them – the hissing engines, the shouting porters, the jostling crowds, the rumbling luggage trolleys, the bustle and confusion. But paradise for Mij was the sleeping car with its wonderful panoply of Western technology – its hot and cold water taps, its light switches, its attendants’ button. He had no sooner entered the sleeping compartment than he discovered the wash basin and in an instant had curled up in it, his rubbery form fitting its shape ‘as an apple fits a dumpling’, his agile paws fidgeting feverishly with the shiny chromium tap like a manic midget safebreaker.
The train roared north through the English summer twilight as Mij explored, fingered, pushed, pulled, pressed, twisted, opened, closed and chewed every object and fitting in the sleeping car that excited his restless curiosity. By the time they were in the Midlands there remained only one item untested – a short length of chain which disappeared mysteriously into a metal tube high up above the luggage rack. By standing on a pile of luggage Mij was able to reach the cord while Gavin was staring absent-mindedly through the window, and by the time Gavin spotted what he was up to Mij had already seized it firmly between his teeth and braced his paws against the carriage wall preparatory to giving the cord a hard tug that would have brought the express train to a juddering halt. There was only one thing to do. Mij was very ticklish around the ribs, and Gavin began to tickle him furiously. With a foolish grin Mij let go and began to squirm violently. The situation was saved; the train roared on, and Gavin took to his bed in relief. When the attendant brought tea next morning he found Gavin asleep and the otter flat on his back in the bed with his head on the pillow and his arms outside the bedclothes. The attendant stared at Mij, then asked: ‘Was it tea for one, or two, sir?’
The plan was to stay at the family home at Monreith so that Mij could be given a partial but supervised measure of freedom before achieving total liberty at Sandaig. It was at Monreith, with its streams and loch and farm mill dams, that Mij was able to return to a watery world for the first time since he left the Iraq marshes. This was the first opportunity Gavin had had to watch Mij at large in his natural element, and he could only stand in wonder at the extraordinary swimming prowess which the otter now displayed. At the beginning, fearing that the call of freedom would be too strong for him, Gavin only let Mij swim at the end of a long fishing line. But after a week, worried that the line might snag underwater, Gavin let Mij swim free, wearing a close-fitting harness to which a lead could be attached in emergency.
To Raef Payne Gavin wrote excitedly on 4 June: ‘Report on Mijbil. Beyond wildest expectations; comes for long walks like a dog, swims free and untrammelled both in lochs and in the sea, returning to a whistle (sometimes the 141st whistle). On land he never goes more than a few yards from one’s feet – in water up to 100 yards, but always tries to keep one in view.’
For both man and otter those weeks at Monreith were a halcyon time. Gavin was later to describe that marvellous shared adventure: ‘The time of getting to know a wild animal on terms, as it were, of mutual esteem, was wholly fascinating to me, and our long daily walks by stream and hedgerow, moorland and loch, were a source of perpetual delight. Though it remained difficult to lure him from some enticing piece of open water, he was otherwise no more trouble than a dog, and infinitely more interesting to watch.’
Following Mij’s routes led Gavin into his native otter’s world – ‘a world of deep-cut streams between high, rooty banks where the leaves in the undergrowth met overhead; of unguessed alleys and tunnels in reedbeds by a loch’s edge; of mossy culverts and marsh-marigolds; of islands tangled with fallen trees among whose roots were earthy excavations and a whisper of the wind in the willows.’
And yet … and yet … Some troubled sense of rootlessness and despair seems to have seized Gavin by the throat even now. It was as if he had realised – as he was bound to realise – that an animal companion was no more than that, and could not be the final answer he sought. Gavin was alone at Monreith, and he found the old house, once so grand and fine, depressingly run-down and neglected. Crippling estate duties had largely impoverished his elder brother, Sir Aymer. Nettles and ivy were rampant everywhere, windows broken, pigeons nesting in the rooms. On 20 June Gavin wrote to Raef again: ‘This place alone is in the long run as bad or worse than any place alone. If I hadn’t got Mij I think I’d spend the summer in some auberge on the continent … I want to go and start a new life in a new land and make new friends.’
By late summer he was installed with Mij at Sandaig. It was flaming Mediterranean weather when they got there. The wild roses of the north blazed deeply pink against the royal blue of sea and sky; the yellow flag irises bloomed brightly along the burn and the foreshore; the white shell-sand beaches of the islands dazzled the eyes. On 14 September Gavin wrote to Raef: ‘Mij lives free with the door open, and comes and goes from the sea or the burn as he likes. It’s been glorious weather for most of the time – too good for any work – and only tonight it’s blowing a full gale and battering rain. Mij is asleep on his back in the chair you made.’
It was the beginning of the idyll. Avalon found. A story that reached back for years – but did not have much longer to run.
When Gavin first set eyes on Sandaig in the autumn of 1948, looking down from a bare hillside over the intricate scatter of islands and skerries and the deep, delicious lostness and tranquillity of the place, he thought of it as a paradise found, ‘something out of a dream.’ And so it remained while it stayed in the form in which he discovered it. Sandaig for a long time was a kind of frontier post, ‘a fortress,’ he wrote later, ‘from which to essay raid and foray, an embattled position behind whose walls one may retire to lick one’s wounds and plan fresh journeys to further horizons.’
For the best part of ten years Sandaig was a place upon which no human ambitions were allowed to impinge. Throughout that time it remained without a road or transport to it, without any modern conveniences of any kind, and with rudimentary furniture constructed largely from what was cast up by the sea on to the beaches nearby. Nor was there much intrusion by man. Few local people ever came down to the place, apart from the lighthouse assistant who made periodic visits to the automatic light on the furthest of the small islands. No casual tourists or passers-by visited, for none even guessed at the existence of this out-of-the-way haven, which was invisible from the single-lane road that traversed the hillside one and a half miles inland.
Unless the visitor arrived at Sandaig by sea, there was no way of avoiding the long, steep and arduous slog over the peat moors from Tormor, the green corrugated-iron roofed house that stood alone in a wilderness of mountain and pea
t-bog on the lonely road that ran above the sea between Glenelg and Arnisdale on Loch Hourn. Tormor was the home of John Donald MacLeod, the local road foreman and keeper of the Sandaig light, his wife Mary and their three young sons, who were Gavin’s nearest neighbours. Both were remarkable people. Mary had an extraordinary affinity with animals, and could talk to them and command their attention and affection in a quite uncanny way. Wild deer running on the hill would stop and approach at her call, birds would follow her when she was out walking and alight at her feet, bees would cover her and not sting, and the wildest of horses would allow her to ride them bareback. John Donald was a very different kind of person. ‘I have no objection to animals,’ he once told me, ‘as long as they are in their place – which is under my heel.’ He hated God, Christians, the British Empire, the Royal Family and D.H. Lawrence, in that order. He was a congenial, wise and erudite old Highlander and had read most of the English classics and many works on astronomy, evolutionary theory and English history. Conscious that he had had no formal education and lived far from the haunts of conventional culture and high society, he would preface any remark with the apology, ‘Oh, you wi’ not be wanting to listen to the bletherings of an old prole like me, but I have had a thought, a very foolish thought …’ Such were Gavin’s nearest neighbours and friends of many years – his link with the rest of human kind and an unfailing source of comfort and encouragement, hot baths, scone teas, canasta, ceilidhs and bagpipe music.
Gavin Maxwell Page 27