Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  I don’t deserve the credit; it was my friends who wrote the book, not I. Surely the narrators [of the autobiographies] are objects of compassion because we all are? I am of course not a Catholic; I believe in no conceptual religion; and I think that the only sin is the conscious harming of others, or indifference to their suffering. Conceptualised religion – certainly any form, of orthodox Christianity – lends, I think, to both these things. So of course I don’t believe in salvation of souls by ritual procedure … As for the rest, I think one receives intimate confidence only by giving it; you couldn’t do this in your County Home, and beyond that we are of course all terrified of betrayal among ourselves – the confessional seal had after all to be established to overcome this dread. (In the book, notice how much less the practising Catholics talked about themselves – they didn’t need to because they had other confessors. Doesn’t this lead inevitably to obscurantism?)

  As for who is damned – all, you say; I say none. If you believe (as I don’t) in an all-merciful deity, how can you believe that people are damned because of their environmental training? And damned to what?

  From the Hôtel Café de France in the Place Djemma el Fna, Marrakesh, Gavin enlarged on his theme in a second letter dated 9 February:

  I am utterly convinced that all forms of ritual are specifically designed to kill thought, destroy true contemplation, initiate the solidarity of a group and provoke intolerance of other groups. More incidentally and fortuitously, they do, of course, provide comfort of a sort to the illiterate masses of the few great religions. There is, I should have thought, only one close parallel to religious ritual – military ritual (under which category I include the pageantry of the throne, which is of entirely military origin); and I invite you to consider the purpose of ritual in the management of troops. Contained in that paragraph are (somewhat tacitly) all my views on ritual worship!

  As for not being a Christian – can one not recognise the greatness of Christ’s teaching without believing that he was God? He never said he was. Why this desire to conceptualise a deity? – for the process is necessarily circumscribing, limiting and (if the deity were sentient) impertinent. If God is Good, that is an equation and can be reversed; if God is in heaven and the kingdom of heaven is within you, then God is part of the human (and, to my mind, the animal) entity.

  And to return for a second to the Gospels – if Joseph was no physical relation to Christ, why is Joseph’s ancestry traced to the line of David? Does this not suggest that the virgin birth was an arrière, very arrière, pensée? And even then it took the Church another two thousand years to find out that the Virgin herself had no human father! – and left no human remains! Is not our universe full enough of wonder and mystery, true wonder and mystery, without creating these fairy tales? I feel that for many they serve only to confuse and obscure, and because all our perception is necessarily a mosaic of symbolism, they obscure more than the point at issue. But while it is clear that the desire to worship is innate (and this is explicable only in terms of a species which has in the rapidity of its evolution outrun its security) it is also clear that the instinct is animistic, leading to the polytheistic attitude visible in the multiplication of saints in the R.C. Church and ‘marabouism’ in Islam. But while orthodox Islam condemns ‘marabouism’ the Roman Church exalts the multiplicity, and in its home country it has certainly restored a goddess as supreme in the hierarchy. In the Mediterranean the name of the Virgin is much more potent than that of Christ. (Woman, what have I to do with thee?)

  But enough of this – we must talk of it sometime, though I shall no more shake you than you will shake me! I’m sorry about this rather incoherent letter; the drums in the Djemma are a little distracting!

  Gavin had arrived at this dazzlingly exotic Place Djemma el Fna, beneath the snow-capped Atlas Mountains of Morocco, by a lengthy and circuitous chain of circumstances. For a long time now he had wanted to tackle another travel book to capitalise on the success of A Reed Shaken by the Wind. As early as August 1957, before Reed had even been published, he had mooted to his publishers the possibility of going to Siam or Assam to gather material for another book. But he was never very competent in practical matters and found it difficult to set up expeditions to faraway countries where he had no experience and no contacts. This is where I evidently proved useful to him. At our first meeting at the end of 1957 he learned that I had already undertaken expeditions in Africa and southern Arabia and was planning another among the aboriginal tribes of central India. Clearly his hope was that he could harness such expertise as I could provide to organise his own expeditions. I have no doubt that the main reason he asked me to accompany him to Sandaig the following spring was to assess my competence and compatibility under roughly expedition conditions. Afterwards he asked me if I could plan two trips – one among the Nilotic tribes of the southern Sudan, the other a mule trek across the High Atlas Mountains – which we could undertake jointly, he to write a book and me to make a television film about each foray.

  Planning for the Sudan expedition, which for some esoteric reason became known as ‘La Mission Maxwell au Soudan’, posed considerable technical problems, not least that of travelling and surviving in the uncomfortable and unhealthy swamps of the Sudd – a kind of hell-hole African version of the marshes of Iraq.

  One day we drove to Surrey in Gavin’s Maserati to seek the advice of a Missionary Bishop who had worked among one of the Nilotic tribes we hoped to visit – the Dinka – and had compiled a Dinka phrase book. This was the most terrifying car ride I had ever experienced. On short stretches of open road Gavin got up to nearly 150 miles per hour. At such speeds the vehicles ahead of us became subject to a curious optical illusion: instead of us catching up with them, they appeared to fly backwards towards us at breakneck speed. Only by the frequent and violent application of the Maserati’s brakes, it seemed, did Gavin prevent these flying vehicles from hurtling backwards into us. On the return journey I thought it would be a good idea to occupy Gavin’s mind with conversation, and began to read from the Dinka phrase book various handy expressions of everyday Dinka life in the days of empire.

  ‘Tonight we will set out by moonlight,’ I yelled over the noise of the slipstream. ‘I want ten strong men to carry my boxes. Mind the hyenas don’t eat the donkeys. If you do that again I will shoot you. When he said this, he died …’

  While I recited these phrases Gavin remained totally silent. One glance told me why. His face was contorted, his torso was hunched; and he gripped the steering wheel as if rigor mortis had set in. When he finally gave way to loud guffaws of laughter, his eyes were full of tears and the lorries were flying backwards faster than ever as we thundered through the leafy lanes of rural Surrey at very nearly the speed of light.

  We never did get an opportunity to try out our Dinka phrases on the tall, naked Nilotics of the Sudd of the Sudan. A few weeks after the car ride I received an invitation from the University of Ghana to join an archaeological expedition around Lake Chad in the southern Sahara, and disappeared from the scene for several months. One day in the middle of the African bush a native messenger rode up to our camp on horseback, and from his leather satchel produced a small folded piece of paper. It was a telegram from Gavin, addressed to Lt. Botting, Residency, Bornu, which read: ‘Moroccan co-operation superlative. Return soonest. Gavin.’

  This referred to the second expedition I tried to plan for Gavin – a long trek with pack animals across the High Atlas in the depths of winter along what was known as the ‘explorers’ route’. Gavin had first visited Morocco with his brother Aymer early in 1952 and had reported ecstatically on its ‘splendours and horrors’. He had always planned to return, perhaps even to live there, but somehow had never managed to. Then, in June 1959, when he was halfway through Ring of Bright Water, he contracted with Longmans to write a travel book about Morocco, though the substance of the book was not yet known. He had received the first instalment of the advance while I was at Sandaig filming Edal, and n
ow asked me if I would like to join him on his Moroccan travels – the arrangement being (as with the moribund Sudan project) that he would write the book and I would make the television film. He also suggested that the itinerary should be planned by me.

  When I returned to London, therefore, I installed myself in Paultons Square and began to make plans. Gavin’s criteria were simple: our route should lie away from the roads and among the kasbahs, the age-old fortified villages of the Berber tribesmen of the Atlas Mountains. The technical problems were minor compared with those posed by the ill-fated Mission Maxwell, and by the end of September I had drawn up preliminary plans for a two-hundred-mile trek by mule or donkey through the remote heart of the High Atlas. Because of Gavin’s schedule this had to be a winter journey, when the mountains were under deep snow; but we dismissed this formidable obstacle as a mere inconvenience. What scuppered the project was money. On receiving my detailed plans for the expedition Gavin wrote from Sandaig: ‘I am facing the worst financial crisis of my life, which is saying something. To try to get me out of it my agent is going to try and sell me lock, stock and barrel to another publisher. At the moment I have no money to go to Morocco. I would estimate expenditure per person as £529. And I’ve missed out mule fodder. GAWD! … What I wouldn’t give to have all these problems settled and be already in Morocco.’

  I stayed at Paultons Square during the ensuing winter, working on alternative plans to sail a Foochow pole-junk from Hong Kong to the Thames, and keeping an eye on the house and Edal, who was wintering in London in the care of Jimmy Watt. Edal had taken over the back basement bedroom of the house, with access to a glass-sided water-tank in the garden. She never failed to impress female visitors with her intelligence and extraordinary dexterity, for she could open a woman’s handbag no matter what kind of fastener secured it, and unscrew, unzip, unbutton, unclasp, uncap or undo any container inside. Sometimes I took Edal for a walk through the Chelsea streets, where she caused great astonishment, not to say commotion, among pedestrians and motorists alike.

  Gavin, meanwhile, had set off for North Africa on a reconnaissance of his own, driving down through France and Spain with his friend Gavin Young, who had taken a reporting job in Tunis. Gavin Young recalled: ‘He was a marvellous person to travel with – he had a tremendous sense of humour, a quick brain and a devouring interest in people and places. But he also had some kind of appalling devil in him which sometimes made him a formidably difficult person to be with.’

  In Tunis, Gavin was particularly intrigued by Gavin Young’s contacts with members of the rebel Algerian army, which had been fighting France for Algerian independence for years and had a force of about fifteen thousand men encamped inside the Tunisia–Algeria frontier, ‘very earnest, serious-minded young men who remind one of particularly solemn and studious undergraduates’. Perhaps it was the presence of these unusual men, and the whiff of war and revolution and behind-the-lines adventure that went with them, that helped turn Gavin’s head at the outset of his sojourn in Africa. Gavin Young noticed his guest’s firm grip on unreality at once:

  Gavin was a fantasist. I can’t think of anyone who was more fascinated by the unreal world. The fantasy side of him was like a blood clot moving across his eye. It was a tremendous handicap and diminished him in the eyes of anyone standing around. Without it he might have been a very great man. As it is, it took up an inordinate amount of his time and energy, diverted him from what he should be doing. It intruded less at Sandaig, much more when he was abroad and off his own turf. In North Africa he did not see things as they were but as he wanted them to be, and if they weren’t like that he tried to make them like that, or believed that they had been like that, or would create a great drama so that life could live up to his fantasy expectations. He was always exaggerating the danger and sinisterness of places. He expected North Africa to be like an adventure movie or spy thriller, with mayhem and political murder everywhere. On his first morning he came back from shopping at lunchtime and said: ‘Gavin, you realise the house is surrounded and you’re being watched on all sides?’ So I said to him: ‘Gavin, I’ve lived here for months and I know this can’t be true.’ And it wasn’t true. The fantasist side of him would take over at the most inconvenient moments. It was as though the straight, competent Dr Jekyll side of him was suddenly overridden by the incompetent, fact-ignoring, reality-shunning Mr Hyde side – and that was when everything went haywire for him.

  After spending Christmas on the island of Djerba and the New Year in the desert oasis of Gafsa, Gavin flew alone to Morocco on 12 January with a letter of introduction to Gavin Young’s friend Margaret Pope, a remarkable Englishwoman who ran the Overseas Service of Radio Morocco in Rabat. Margaret Pope was then in her early forties and something of a legend among the freedom fighters of the old French and British colonial empires in Palestine, India, North Africa and the Middle East, many of whom were her friends and fellow campaigners in the struggle for liberation and independence. Her friendship with most of the Arab nationalist leaders in North Africa made her a thorn in the side of the French colonial authorities and earned her the sobriquet of ‘the uncrowned Queen of the Arabs’ in the French popular press. By the time she took over foreign broadcasting in Morocco after independence there were few influential people she did not know and few important doors she could not open. Gavin came to form a great respect and regard for her and was soon an habitué of her crowded apartment in the Place Lavigerie in Rabat.

  It was through Margaret Pope that Gavin first got wind of the story he had been looking for – the exotic and horrifying story of the Glaoui of Marrakesh, the Lords of the Atlas, whose extraordinary reign had come to an end only five years before.

  In the course of the half-century ending in 1955, it seemed, two warrior brothers of an obscure Berber tribe from the Atlas Mountains succeeded, one after the other, in deposing two Sultans of Morocco – supreme temporal and spiritual leaders of their people – and placing pretenders on the throne. These two brothers, Madani and T’hami el Glaoui, enjoyed a medieval splendour of pomp and power, and riches beside which the fortunes of Western millionaires must seem as dross. Madani, the first of the brothers to depose a Sultan, died within a few years of realising his ambition. But some years later the cruel and rapacious T’hami became Pasha of Marrakesh, and after ruling all Southern Morocco from his ‘Palace of the Thousand and One Nights’ he succeeded, by violence and intrigue, in dethroning the Sultan, Mohammed Ben Youssef V, in 1953, putting in his place a pitiable seventy-year-old puppet. When in 1955 mass demonstrations and massacre forced the French to restore the rightful Sultan, the independence of Morocco followed as inevitably as spring succeeds winter.

  T’hami died within a few weeks of the restoration of the Sultan he had deposed; he wanted to die, because he had no more to live for. Now both the Palace of the Thousand and One Nights and the great fortress of Telouet in the Atlas Mountains stood empty and silent. The drama of the swift rise and fall of the house of Glaoua, set against the fantastic backcloth of southern Morocco and the snow-covered Atlas, was to be the subject of Gavin’s book.

  It was one thing to have an idea; it was another to find one’s way through the labyrinth to the secret at its heart. The recent history of the Glaoui was a matter of great sensitivity in Morocco at that time, and the government was only too anxious to forget the whole episode. The facts of the matter were largely locked away in the inner recesses of the Royal Court, or in the memories of the surviving members of the Glaoui family, and it was not easy for a prying investigator from the West to gain access to them. Unfortunately, Gavin had chosen the wrong moment to try. The Chief of Press Services at the Royal Palace in Rabat, His Excellency Moulay Ahmed el Alaoui, a friend and colleague of Margaret Pope and a cousin of the King, was away on a tour of the Middle East and the Holy Cities with the Sultan and his Court. The officials who were left behind in Rabat were unwilling to help without Palace approval, or to arrange an approach to the Glaoui’s sons until the way had b
een paved by the Palace.

  ‘I’m having every possible kind of difficulty and obstruction in my work,’ Gavin complained. For the moment, he found time weighing heavily on his hands in the capital. From the Hôtel Royale he wrote to Jimmy Watt on 20 January 1960:

  Life here is rather hell. I live between interviews with ministers of that and this and the palace and my empty hotel bedroom. Dinner with the Minister of Bubble-blowing, drinks with the Minister of Crossword Puzzles, endless research in the national library; but this empty room seems the core of my life and I am VERY LONELY. I’ve given several broadcasts on Radio Morocco but apart from these one is terribly lonely and only one man in ten speaks anything but Arabic. I spend part of my time wandering about the Medina (old Arab walled town), where one is back again in the seventeenth century, but one is a stranger and remains LONELY …

  I wish I was back in Paultons Square

  I wish I was there, was there, was there,

  I wish I was back with otti-tot

  And eels and mess and J.M. Watt.

  Without my explorer friend Botting

  I’m getting less keen on globe-trotting;

  J’aime poco Morocco

  Or Sicilian barocco;

  I’d rather be otting

  At home

  At home

  I’d rather be otting at home.

  Enter a long train of camels, on the last of which is seated, facing backwards, Thesiger.

  Thesiger: I see nothing.

  All camels: Nor do we.

  Thesiger: Then this must be the Empty Quarter!

  (Starts writing). (£10,000).

  The sun sets. Curtain.

  I must go and get something to eat. Hugs and kisses for Edal, and regards to all.