Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  11 May Mossy very active all night, lost fear of me on floor. Managed somehow to tug at my hair. In the dawn a great crying of gulls on the grass outside caused her terror, and the sight of their wings passing the window even more so. They sat on the chimney stack and the chimney acted as an amplifier to their voices.

  Mossy established a lavatory behind the door and returned to it four times during the night. Besides her whistle call note, indistinguishable from any of the otters I’ve heard, she has a whimper like a puppy and a cluck that may precede or turn into it. Tremendous proclivity for climbing – tried writing table legs, wall, etc.

  12 May Another bad night. Mossy v. active – managed first to climb on the writing table (went through motions of attacking my ankles when recaptured and put on the floor) and then, inexplicably, into the clothes basket, where she was located at 6 a.m. feed.

  16 May Message arrives – Mossy for operation Inverness Wed.

  18 May Mossy to Inverness with P.C. [Dr Peter Crowcroft, research zoologist, visiting Sandaig to collect live mice and voles] Operation performed; Mossy died post operational shock at Glenelg.

  Mossy buried at foot of rowan tree.

  Mossy’s death was perhaps preferable to a life with a major deformity that would have made hunting and eating in the wild a losing struggle. ‘To a wild animal perfection is necessary,’ the London Zoo pathologist, Oliver Jones, consoled Gavin. ‘Man is not so fussy.’

  A week after Mossy died the Davins decided that Sandaig was the only home in which they could confidently leave Teko. Since Edal’s hatred of the interloper was seemingly permanent and insuperable, the only answer was for the two animals to inhabit separate quarters and lead separate lives. With only a few days to go before Teko’s return Gavin and Jimmy worked from dawn to midnight for two days running to build an otter-proof stockade around the house and separate paddocks for each of the otters, and an old lean-to outhouse-cum-coalshed at one side of the house was converted into living quarters for Teko and a pool was dug for him at the back. On 26 May 1960 the new otter arrived to take up permanent residence at Sandaig. He was then only eight months old but growing rapidly (Edal was a year and nine months old, but always smaller and slenderer).

  Teko settled into his otter paradise at once, revelling in the tumbling wonder of the falls and the adventure playground of the sea’s edge. From the Davins Gavin had acquired a personality profile of his new acquisition. Teko’s favourite foods were sponge cake, tinned pilchards and Dublin Bay prawns. He had a phobia about extremely tall human beings but loved music, especially classical music, which always soothed him and even sent him off to sleep. Like Edal he liked shiny toys and was especially fond of a celluloid man that floated in water. His favourite game was ‘matador’, in which he played the part of the bull and a towel served as the cape. When he slept on a human bed he liked to rest his head on the pillow. After a swim he expected to be dried. He had to be taught to swim by Del Davin and was still frightened of deep water and the open sea. When he was roaming about on land he made a strange panting, laughing noise which seemed peculiar to him alone. ‘He is the most fascinating little animal I have ever known,’ Mary Davin told Gavin. ‘Such a happy little chap.’

  For the first few nights Gavin slept on a camp bed in the coalshed to keep Teko company. But nights with Teko were as disturbed as they had been with Mossy. After exploring the contours of Gavin’s face with his hands and prodding the various orifices of his head with his fingers, Teko would squirm into Gavin’s sleeping bag and so pass the night, though not always in sleep. Some nights he would go to his pool every quarter of an hour and soak everything on his return. One morning Gavin woke up to find the lining of the sleeping bag chewed to pieces, his nose, mouth, ears and eyes blocked with kapok, and Teko lying on his back and wriggling violently with his mouth wide open – the luterine equivalent of a loud and prolonged belly laugh. After that Gavin decided to leave Teko to his own devices at night.

  So began a life with otters – almost a full-time job in its own right. Edal and Teko had to be taken for walks separately, fed separately, played with and cared for separately. Edal was furiously jealous and resentful if either of her keepers took Teko out, and every stratagem for reconciliation between the two otters proved fruitless. A six-inch square hole had been cut in the wooden wall of Teko’s enclosure and covered with a double mesh of wire netting so the two animals could see and smell each other but inflict no damage. All day Edal would stand at this hole and utter an almost continuous scream of rage – a shriek so ear-splitting and unearthly that Gavin was forced to close the hole for the sake of the sanity of Sandaig’s human inhabitants.

  With the advent of two otters at Sandaig the whole polarity of Gavin’s life underwent a distinct (and, as it proved, irreversible) shift. Though he kept Paultons Square on, it was no longer to be his home base but merely a pied-à-terre in London; from now on his life was to be centred on Sandaig. ‘From the concept of a four-roomed cottage standing unfenced on a green sward, the sheep grazing to the door, and neither water nor electric power in the house, things had to change,’ Gavin commented a few years later. ‘I had to be practical. Camusfeàrna became not a place for fairweather holidays, but a home of permanent residence – through the terrifying storms of winter and the weeks of blanketing snow without transport for fuel. It was rather like maintaining an Antarctic weather station, and we had to avail ourselves of every modern invention we could.’

  But ironically – and tragically, too – the moment Gavin decided to settle in his Avalon, Avalon itself began to disintegrate bit by bit, both as a concept and as a reality.

  First came the telephone, the destroyer of all illusion and peace of mind. If Sandaig was where he was going to live and work, Gavin decided, he had to have communications, he had to be plugged into the world, with all its distractions and alarums. For a mere five pounds – the same charge as for connecting a house in a suburban street – the post office were prepared to join Sandaig to the nearest phone line, one and a half miles away over the hills. All through the early spring the telephone engineers dynamited holes into which to plant the telephone poles. On 11 April 1960 the big bell over the front door rang to announce the first incoming telephone call. Less than three months later, and at a cost two hundred times that of the telephone, electricity arrived at the house through a cable strung between poles that strode over the same one and a half miles of dynamited moorland. Gone was the Robinson Crusoe charm of candlelight and paraffin heaters; in their place, infinitely more convenient but infinitely more prosaic, came electric light and an electric cooker, electric heaters and an electric mains radio.

  Until now the essential virtue of Camusfeàrna’s Avalon had been that it was not of this world. Now there was no escape, no refuge, just the struggle to lead the serious everyday life of a professional author and otter-keeper in a corner of Britain that was no longer a never-never land, merely at times extraordinarily inconvenient and expensive – and, as often as not, crowded and full of commotion. For in addition to Jimmy Watt and Gavin himself and a ceaseless host of visitors, a second member of staff arrived in July to relieve Gavin of the need to attend to one or other of the otters himself every single day (since one person could not look after both). The new arrival was Terry Nutkins, an able, sensible and cheerful fourteen-year-old London schoolboy who had a passionate interest in animals (and was later to find fame as a presenter of animal programmes on television). Terry had taken to helping the keepers look after the elephants at London Zoo during the evenings and at weekends, and jumped at the chance of coming up to Sandaig to act as Teko’s keeper during his school holidays. Sandaig was changing not only its character but its purpose. It was not so much a hermitage now as a community; the house was no longer Gavin’s refuge but his home, and its human and animal inhabitants his family.

  There is no evidence in the early years of change that Gavin regretted the metamorphosis he was bringing about. Occasional visitors and entrenched romantics m
ay have rued the passing of something unique and precious – but they did not have to live there during weeks of rain and gales, when the fire would not light and clothes would not dry and there was nothing to eat but what you could gather from the sea or carry on your back over the hills in the windy dark.

  Telephone communication and electric power were just a beginning. The simple shepherd-cum-lighthouse-keeper’s cottage that had stood untrammelled on the edge of the sea and the wilderness like a symbol of freedom now began to sprout its own symbols of restriction and incarceration. The elaborate system of fences and double gates around the house was the very antithesis of what Camusfeàrna had once stood for. Some years previously Kathleen Raine had dreamed that the house and the rowan tree were barred to her by a high palisade of wooden palings – ‘a fit symbol of the wall built about the first Eden after the Fall’. So when she returned to Sandaig that summer – her first visit since the death of Mij, and her last – it was a shock for her to find the house enclosed by just such a palisade as she had dreamed of, and she seemed to be repelled by an intangible negative force, as if the death she felt she had caused still hung there – ‘or some greater evil to come’.

  Through much of that summer chaos seemed never very far away at Sandaig. Gavin appeared unable to keep up with his commitments, and complained of having to write up to twenty letters a day, seventeen in one morning. ‘It must be difficult for you to realise what it is like to keep a house like this going,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘This is a house of crisis. There is no peace until one gets into bed at night, and then one is too tired even to read.’ He was besieged by a steady stream of visitors, for Gavin, though he was not a ready mixer, was not a true loner either, and did not like to be deprived of human company for long. Life was made more complicated by the web and mire of human relationships, for several women seemed to be contending jealously for his affections.

  One of them was Princess Constanza de Mazirevich, aged about forty, daughter of a former Hungarian Ambassador at the Court of St James, and known to her friends by her married name, Constance McNab. Constance’s life had been a cosmopolitan and adventurous one. Eventually, in a roundabout way, she had arrived in London from Argentina with next to no money and a young son to educate, and had found accommodation as a paying guest in the house of Lord Patrick Kinross, the author of books about Turkey and Latin America. There, at a party in 1958, she met Gavin for the first time.

  Constance was an attractive, energetic Central European intellectual with an active mind and soul. A Hellenophile and classical scholar, she wrote poems and painted pictures, and had written a fine book about T.S. Eliot’s poetry. She was quick to perceive in Gavin a wayward genius, a troubled spirit, and a knight errant on a quest, and she found him unusual and intriguing. Gavin for his part was impeccably charming and agreeable on their first encounter. ‘He spoke with a very beautiful voice,’ she recalled:

  He was tremendously alive, in top gear, and he talked always about fascinating things. He had a good looking, rather cruel face, with a high dome of a forehead full of creative thoughts, and a wiry, emaciated sort of body that moved like a woman’s but was also attractive to women. I don’t agree with Kathleen Raine that Gavin’s eyes were so blue. His eyes were mostly cold, sometimes turned in, sometimes expressive, but not especially spiritual or beautiful. In this country fair men often have these eyes. No, I think it was a general impression of this thoughtful head – and great breeding. He inspired in me a mixture of admiration, pity, fascination, mental stimulation.

  Before very long she was hooked. ‘If he had asked me to marry him,’ she told me many years later, ‘I would have felt absolute delight, then fear, then second thoughts. I wouldn’t have been able to resist.’

  In the middle of June Constance arrived for the first of two visits to Sandaig that summer. ‘I am afraid you won’t enjoy yourself,’ Gavin had warned her. ‘If you come here you will find it just like living in a cave – and not a clean cave either. Be prepared for SQUALOR.’ Constance was not prepared. She was amazed at how down-at-heel the place was after two months of continuous habitation. There were fish baskets full of dirty clothes and sheets over the fireplace, pots and pans piled up thick with grease, windowsills covered in dead flies. The ambassador’s daughter made herself useful. She took the laundry down to the burn and left it to soak for twenty-four hours weighed down with stones; she took the pans to the stream as well and scoured them with sand and grit. But she felt she was at Sandaig only on sufferance. ‘That is my loo stone,’ Gavin had told her shortly after she arrived, pointing to a prominent stone in the middle of the burn towards its mouth. ‘I don’t know where you are going to go – you’ll have to find your own stone.’ Once Gavin dismissed her for a whole day, telling her: ‘There are days when one has to be alone.’ She found it a strange life. ‘Gavin and Jimmy ate abominably,’ she recalled. ‘They had a huge breakfast, then nothing till late at night.’

  One day, when the weekly box of live eels that were the otters’ staple food failed to arrive from a London fishmonger, Constance was sent off with Jimmy Watt and John Donald MacLeod to ‘raid’ the tiny cluster of islands in the vicinity of Sandaig for seabirds’ eggs. They returned with nearly four hundred – a disastrous haul for the gull colonies that nested on them, but Gavin was unrepentant about living off the local ecology in order to survive.

  So the summer days passed. Constance passed the time talking and painting and writing poems. One of the poems she wrote at Sandaig was explicitly erotic, in reaction to Kathleen Raine’s Platonic love poetry inspired by Gavin. ‘I showed it to him in the kitchen-parlour. We were sitting by the fire, and when he read it he really sat up and became interested.’

  One night Constance had a dream. ‘I dreamt I saw a wood with a path with grass and flowers growing beside it, but it was not sunny, it was overcast, and at the back was a lovely country house, and by the path there was a priapic statue or garden god, and I went up to it and I felt indescribable pity and lust, and I embraced it and put my arm around it and said “It will be all right,” and this white marble face had closed eyes, as if it was asleep, but now it opened its eyes and the blood came up into its head and it shuddered and shook itself and then it went back to sleep. It was so beautiful – I told Gavin about it, because it was about him, I knew.’

  Constance’s dream prompted a reply from Gavin:

  I have nothing to offer you, Constance; please understand that it’s not really my fault. And please realise that I’m not the garden god, only a worn-out human being who would like to be more practically useful in any way, but my potentiality is very limited – and always will be.

  Like me, your emotions are too active; in the end too destructive (self-destructive), and of this we must be free. Both of us have responsibilities that we must not drop, and your torment that I understand so well (and in other directions share) is something one must set aside and not allow to occupy twenty-four hours in the day. You understand? – on one level I am faithful to people who are so mistaken as to love me, but in the end I have little to give you but an image of your own creation; my preoccupations will always be elsewhere except in emergency, and it would not be fair on my side to pretend otherwise. I think you should look elsewhere for what you seek in me, because there will be no completion, no real fusion at a human level. I do not inhabit your world, nor you mine – nor can either of us effect the transposition. Don’t you agree that it is better to understand this? We each live in rarefied atmospheres, which because of their intensity cannot touch except momentarily, and to hope for anything more will always be a disappointment on both sides. You look for a perception beyond my capability, I look for a rationality and knowledge beyond yours. In many ways you remain a child, with a child’s wisdom, and in so far as that is true I shall always be an obstacle in your life, always destructive.

  Before long Constance felt she was de trop, not just at Sandaig but in Gavin’s life in general. She left Sandaig in early July, but returned i
n September. Though she was never destined to be Gavin’s lover, she got to know him well enough to form a perceptive insight into his complex personality:

  He was a knight on a knightly quest – or an ego trip. He was at complete loggerheads with his society and his times – with machinery, with mediocrity, with mass-produced vulgarity. He needed adventure and excitement and he lifted everything up to a very high plane of adventure and romance. Even his friends had to be extreme, way-out, romantic people, and whenever he could, whenever there was a glimmer of justification, he would resurrect their old aristocratic titles. There was no middle way for Gavin. ‘People are only tolerable,’ he once told me, ‘at the top and the bottom of society. In the middle they are simply suburban.’ His ideal, his life value, was almost medieval, like the troubadour’s life, but in the end it came to nothing because it was pas tout à fait sérieux. It was a luxury to be like that in the mundane modern world and I wish there were more people who lived as imaginatively as he did.

  Gavin needed the fuel of admiration because something was missing in him which he much regretted. His mirror image, his Narcissus reflection, was Icarus who soared towards the sun, then plunged to earth when the wax that held his wings on melted. He couldn’t bear the ordinary everyday, so he was always creating dramas which could not be sustained; and in every drama that he created he was the main protagonist, the star lead. One of his dramas was to push women to the limits of their self-control and watch them explode. So every day you got up wondering what the drama of the day would be.

  What was the object of his quest? It was the development of awareness – of nature, surroundings, people, everything – a lifetime’s search. His quest was to become a more complete man and overcome his own limitations – to become more than he was. It was a drive for perfection. In this he had something in common with Parsifal and the legend of the Holy Grail – and though he was anti-Church this does not mean he was not looking for spiritual perfection. But with his temperament he could not have achieved wisdom or sanctity. Part of his quest was to find a perfect love. But perfect love is not part of this world and causes only unhappiness – it would have left him in mid-air, not soaring like Icarus but circling like a condor. Perhaps the ultimate goal of his quest could have been something like Peter Scott’s Wildfowl Trust at Slimbridge. This would have given him tremendous satisfaction and made him a less tormented person.