Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  It was something of a shock, therefore, when the court, after a trial that was front-page news in Italy, found Gavin guilty of criminal libel. His co-defendant, Feltrinelli, was dismissed from the case after persuading the court he had not actually read the book. Gavin was fined £3000 and sentenced to eight months imprisonment in absentia. Since he actually had the money in Italy at the time of the trial, he lost the lot. But in spite of the fact that he had been found guilty of a criminal offence, Gavin could not be extradited, and he only had to make sure he did not set foot on Italian soil again, or on an Italian aircraft or ship, to avoid arrest.

  Towards the end of 1958, the Italian Government declared an amnesty for political prisoners, and Gavin felt free to return once more to Sicily. He had heard that the home of Giuseppe, his friend and collaborator, had been burgled and all his possessions (including his precious books) stolen. So at the end of December he returned to Sicily on a four-day visit (crossing by boat from Tunis where he was staying at the time) to give Giuseppe such help as he could. Aware that there were enemies more dangerous than the law in that lawless land, he took care to disguise himself with a beard and dark glasses.

  The disguise was not as impenetrable as he had hoped. At a trattoria, an old haunt, he was approached by two carabinieri. ‘Il Capitano Inglese, il Maxwell?’ said one of them. He ordered Gavin to roll up his sleeve. Under the heading ‘Distinguishing Marks’ Gavin’s passport mentioned five large strawberry marks on his right forearm. Gavin was promptly handcuffed. ‘You’re making fools of yourselves,’ he told the carabinieri. He was under amnesty, and there were no charges against him. One of the carabinieri went away to check, leaving Gavin under the watchful eye of the other. Twenty minutes later the carabinieri returned and unlocked the handcuffs. ‘The English could never take a joke,’ he said. Gavin was not amused. ‘I don’t like Sicilian jokes,’ he replied. It wasn’t the police Gavin had to worry about, he was told – it was them, the Mafia. He was advised to leave, and quickly.

  Gavin never returned to Sicily. He continued to maintain a lively correspondence with Giuseppe and to make a regular allowance towards the cost of his medical training at the university; but he had completed his work on The Ten Pains of Death, and Sicily, which had been a second home for almost seven years, was now an episode in his life that was over and done with. Ahead lay other horizons and other adventures – and, always, the peace and security of his Highland sanctuary.

  TWENTY

  The ring and the book

  For only out of solitude or strife

  Are born the sons of valour and delight.

  ROY CAMPBELL, ‘Choosing a Mast’

  In the second week of April 1959 Gavin returned to Sandaig for a prolonged stay. He had two aims in mind. One was to write Ring of Bright Water. The other was to try and rear a young otter in his own home. Within a few days of his arrival in the north, by quite the oddest of coincidences, he suddenly found himself in a position to do both.

  On 19 April 1959, having opened up Sandaig after its winter shut-down, Gavin and Jimmy Watt drove to Kyle of Lochalsh to meet the train bringing Raef Payne, who was making a short visit. The train duly arrived, but instead of taking the road back to Sandaig straight away the three of them decided to call in at the Lochalsh Hotel for a wee dram and a leisurely natter.

  They were sitting in the sun-lounge of the hotel overlooking the sea when the hall porter came running over to them.

  ‘Mr Maxwell!’ he called. ‘Mr Maxwell! Come quick to the door and tell me what’s this strange beast outside – quick!’

  Whether as the result of clairvoyance or intuitive deduction, both Gavin and Raef were absolutely certain what it was they were about to see. They ran to the door. A man, a woman and two foreign girls were walking past the hotel, making for a car parked near the jetty. Behind them, lolloping along at their heels, was a large, sleek otter of a species Gavin had never seen before, with a silvery head and a white throat and chest. He took one look at this apparition and then, with Raef and Jimmy in hot pursuit, bolted out of the hotel door and down the steps, still clutching his glass of whisky and feeling as if he was struggling in a dream. He quickly caught up with the otter and its human companions and breathlessly addressed them, jabbering wildly and incoherently about Mij and Mij’s death and how he had been looking for another otter.

  The name of the otter that had so fortuitously crossed Gavin’s path was Edal; and her owners were Dr Malcolm and Paula Macdonald, on leave from Nigeria. From them Gavin learned that Edal had been found by two African fishermen on the banks of the Benin River and taken to a nearby market where Paula Macdonald had bought her for a pound. That was the previous August, when the young otter was about one month old. With loving care she was hand-reared on a bottle, then brought to London at the end of the Macdonalds’ tour of duty, and from there to the West Highlands and the Lochalsh Hotel and the miraculous chance encounter with Gavin by the hotel steps. In six weeks’ time they were due to return to Africa, and were desperate to find a suitable home for Edal before they left. They had thought of a zoo – but perhaps Gavin could help? She was house-trained, they told him, and came and went as she pleased; and she liked ice cream and pastries and playing with matches. And she was irresistible.

  A week later Edal and her owners came to Sandaig for an afternoon to check the suitability of her prospective new home, and discovered for themselves that Sandaig was an otter’s paradise. Determined not to repeat the mistakes that had led to the death of Mij, Gavin set to work to get everything ready for the new arrival in the ten days before Edal was due to return. To the Macdonalds he sent an otter harness that had been specially designed for Mij; and with Jimmy Watt’s help he enclosed the house with a fence and dug a pool to which he piped water from the waterfall. Finally, on 9 May 1959, the Macdonalds brought their otter to Sandaig. Three days later they left her behind, stealing silently away while she slept, with her familiar toys and towel and Paula’s jersey beside her on the sofa, to reassure her when she woke.

  Once more there was an otter at Sandaig – an otter that was destined to become one of the most famous living animals in the world.

  Gavin started writing the Sandaig book, as it was still provisionally known, a few days after Edal’s arrival. ‘I put very little work into the book,’ he was to claim later, ‘and wrote it mostly in a leisurely way as I sunbathed. This was the first book I had ever been on schedule with.’ His guests saw it differently. John McEwen, the sixteen-year-old brother of Gavin’s close friend Robin, stayed at Sandaig while Gavin was writing Ring, and recalled that Gavin worked like a true professional:

  Gavin was extremely disciplined and retired upstairs for a full working day while we rampaged around with Edal and the five greylag geese. We pestered him to accompany us on some of our outings, especially when we took the outboard motor across the Sound to Skye, but Gavin always held firm. He was very good natured with guests and very kind to the young. He was most amused, for instance, when I succeeded in beguiling the greylags into the front parlour. The greylags were almost as much a feature of the place as Edal – full grown and unpinioned birds but completely tame. One of their most endearing habits was to come and settle alongside the boat when we were out to sea.

  I suppose the house was quite unsalubrious. Once, when we were all playing Monopoly in the evening, a splat of something unpleasant [Edal’s excrement] hit the board, having dripped through from the rafters upstairs. When it rained, which it did quite a lot – ‘the Sound of Sleat is on the roof’ was one standing joke – we amused ourselves by drawing the otter using the new felt-tip pens. Some of my drawings appeared in the book as end-papers for which Gavin paid me a very decent professional rate of £50. This was typical of the encouragement he gave the young.

  If there were no guests to get out of the way of, Gavin wrote sitting at the desk in his study-bedroom on the ground floor of the house, with a view through the small sash window to the hill above the house. It was a room like an exot
ic cabin. Pinned on the pitch-pine panelled wall opposite the desk was a Life magazine centrefold reproduction of a highly sensuous nude by Modigliani. Lower down was another nude by the same painter, pinned into a picture frame. Hanging on the same wall were three glass lobster-pot floats, an old brass sea-captain’s telescope, a whale vertebra from Lapland, and a peculiar antler shaped like a dead man’s hand. A single bed stood against the wall, with a fish barrel beside it, and a deerskin on the floor. By another wall stood a sideboard that was so warped it must have been immersed in the sea once, with books on it, and some lamps with lampshades decorated with fern leaves and wild flowers dried and pressed by Kathleen Raine. Nailed on the wall above the sideboard hung an elaborately patterned camel-wool blanket of Arab origin, from the middle of which stuck a candle-holder in the form of a Viking shield. On the mantelpiece above the small Victorian fireplace rested a big model yacht, a present to Jimmy from his father, and next to it hung some kilts in the tartan of the Maxwell clan. By the window stood the large wooden desk with a typewriter on it (used only for typing letters and reviews, never books). The window looked out over a small grass field and patch of flower-strewn boggy ground to the hillside beyond and to the burn – the ring of bright water – on the left. In summer, when the window was open, the room filled with the songs of the birds and the distant, lulling murmur of the waterfall nearby.

  Sometimes, when the weather was particularly fine, Gavin would retreat to the waterfall and write seated on a rock overlooking the pool – a cool, quiet, out-of-the-way spot. Indoors or out, he was rarely without a cigarette in his hand and a long, well-watered whisky at his side, and he worked steadily through the day without a break until by six or seven in the evening he felt he had reached a natural break or done enough for the day. He wrote fluently and without hesitation, with few pauses for thought and no hold-ups to research facts. It was as though the entire book was already written in his head, and all he had to do was carry out the purely mechanical operation of transferring it on to the paper in front of him. Later he was to explain his method of composition:

  When I have planned a book, I write it quickly. If I stop writing without knowing what I am going on to say the next morning, I may stop for weeks. But if I stop and know what I am going to say next, I can go straight ahead despite all distractions. I can’t write on a typewriter. I write with a fountain pen on foolscap pages and I leave the left-hand page blank. This large wonderful blank page tempts me to add to it and concentrate on alterations. I don’t have any fixed periods for writing but when I am getting pushed by my publisher I may write up to fourteen hours a day, after which I get sores on my elbows. Writing is always hard work to me. I would much rather be a painter. I was a bad painter but I loved it.

  In fact, Gavin positively disliked having to write for a living. Writing was ‘blood and tears, toil and sweat’, and writing a book indoors when the sun was shining outside was ‘like being shut up inside a prison’. He once wrote: ‘I do not consider myself to be a writer by nature, only to have a desire for expression which has been channelised into literature. In fact I loathe the process of writing.’ In a letter he wrote to me a few months after finishing Ring he explained why: ‘It is a hell of a job, and one I wish more and more I wasn’t so committed to. Always, always, always working against time, turning out stuff less good than it might be because of time and money.’

  Possibly Ring was an exception. He was writing about what he loved best, in the place he loved best. To safeguard the anonymity of that place he coined for it the Gaelic name of Camusfeàrna – ‘The Bay of Alders’ – a name that docs not exist on any map. That summer was a tranquil and contented time for him. The Sandaig in which he wrote coincided momentarily and completely with the Camusfeàrna of idyll and myth about which he wrote. The house and its environs were as enchanting as the day he first set eyes on the place. There were no gates, no road, no electricity, no phone, no intrusion of any kind from beyond the magic circle of the ring and Avalon’s natural, age-old defences of sea and mountain. Life in Avalon was bucolic, clockless and other-worldly – detached in space and suspended in time. Meals were still served off a frying pan on a Primus stove; at night the light came from the yellow glow of candles and oil lamps which created a mysterious and enchanted atmosphere, like a peasant cave in the hills, or a log cabin buried deep in the wilderness.

  To George Hardinge, his editor, Gavin wrote encouragingly from Sandaig at the end of May: ‘The Sandaig book – Ring of Bright Water – is progressing steadily, but of course not as fast as I had hoped. As a matter of fact I think it’s going to be rather a good book, and might be a breadwinner. I hope you are really going to town on illustrations.’

  Though Gavin was deeply preoccupied with his book, he did contrive to entertain the few visitors who managed to straggle down to Sandaig during that summer and early autumn. Mostly they were old friends he knew would fit in – Peter Scott, the painter Michael Ayrton and his wife Elizabeth, Robin McEwen and his wife Brigid and brother John, the actor and ornithologist James Robertson Justice, the falconer Phillip Glasier, the novelist Eric Linklater and his wife Marjorie, and a few others. In the last week of July I arrived at Sandaig to make a short film about Edal, the first otter I had ever encountered. Gavin was standing in the kitchen-parlour with his arms folded looking very baronial and pleased with himself when I entered the house.

  ‘Guess what I’ve found,’ he exclaimed, stepping to one side to reveal a large, silvery-grey animal squirming on a rug in front of the range fireplace. ‘Edal, this is Douglas,’ he said, picking the otter up by its tail. ‘Douglas, this is Edal, also known as Snoo. Snoo is a very clever young lady. She can do things you can’t do.’

  For example, with her shark-sharp teeth and man-trap jaws, Snoo could bite my ankles, and did so frequently in a relatively gentle, exploratory kind of way, so that I was forced to sit on the kitchen table with my legs crossed under me out of harm’s way.

  I spent much of my time at Sandaig filming Edal’s marvellous aquatic acrobatics as she explored the burns and pools around her new home, hunted for gobies and butter-fish in the shallows along the shore, dived and swam, or ran through the bracken, or stood on her hind legs to peer about for her human friends, or played with objects that caught her fancy – seashells, seaweed, dabs, marbles, ping-pong balls. The most remarkable thing about Edal was the dexterity of the monkey-like hands of her forepaws. Prehensile, unwebbed and without nails, her fingers were nearly as mobile as a human being’s, and with them she was able to peel an egg, roll a marble, pick a pocket, dribble a ball. But like all young otters she was liable to bouts of mischievous destructiveness, and inside the house every table and shelf had to be raised out of her reach, which increased week by week till by August she was nearly fifty inches long and some forty pounds in weight.

  Edal was not the only animal inhabitant of the human outpost at Sandaig. Five greylag goslings had been brought to Sandaig that year, descendants of greylags that Gavin had shot and wounded in his pre-war wildfowling days in Wigtown Bay and then introduced into his collection of wildfowl at Monreith. ‘Perhaps it was from some obscure part of the guilt under which, unrecognised, we labour so often, that I wanted these birds to fly free and unafraid about Camusfeàrna,’ he was to write, ‘wanted to hear in the dawn and the dusk the wild music of those voices that long ago used to quicken my pulse …’ The young geese were tame and fond of human company, but just as Edal had to be taught to swim, so they had to be taught to fly, once their wing feathers were long enough for flight. This was achieved when Jimmy Watt had the bright idea of running in front of them, wildly flapping his arms, until one day the goslings, running behind him and copying his actions, found themselves airborne – much to their consternation, since they had received no precise instructions from Jimmy as to how to come in to land again. Soon, of course, they were expert fliers, and ranged far and wide, till one evening they failed to return to the house at nightfall and Gavin feared they had gone for eve
r. But out on the islands next day he saw, half a mile to the north, the long, unhurried beat of goose wings against the sky, and recognised – ‘with an absurd surge of joy’ – his missing greylags. He called to them and they checked and spiralled down to alight on the sand at his feet. ‘It never ceased to give me delight,’ he wrote, ‘this power to summon wild geese from the heavens as they passed, seemingly steady as a constellation upon their course, or to call them from the house when the sun was dipping behind the hills of Skye, to hear far off their answering clangour, and see the silhouette of their wings beating in from the sea against the sunset sky.’ He gained more pleasure from these humble greylags than he ever had from his collection of exotic wildfowl.