Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Inevitably such a label led to comparisons with a distinguished writer of a previous generation: Henry Williamson, author of the perennial bestselling nature saga Tarka the Otter, first published in 1927. Both books had a profound influence on public awareness of otters; but whereas Tarka was the fictional biography of a wild otter red in tooth and claw, Ring was the non-fictional story of a relationship between a human being and otters as accessible friends. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Henry Williamson and Gavin did not get on well on the one occasion they met for lunch in a London restaurant. Professional jealousy and personal antipathy were probably at the heart of the matter, but Williamson did become fed up with people saying to him, ‘Ah, just read your book Ring of Bright Water – terrific.’

  Like most popular images, Gavin’s projected only part of the truth. He was an infinitely more complex and versatile human being than the simplistic image of a guru of the wilds would suggest – indeed, never had the simple life been pursued by so complicated a character. Some were later to claim that he was bogus – not a real wilderness man at all but a kind of dilettante eco-tourist with expensive tastes for elegance and ease. Wildlife author Mike Tomkies, who was inspired to emulate Gavin’s example and live a wilderness life in the West Highlands after reading a tattered copy of Ring he had found on a Canadian rubbish dump, viewed Gavin Maxwell as a ‘great, great writer but a wilderness fool’. Certainly, although Gavin had often faced solitude, privation and the rigours of nature with courage and fortitude, he was too impractical to rough it for long periods, and saw little point in discomfort for discomfort’s sake. Essentially he was an artist rather than a rugged outdoor man, and Ring of Bright Water was more a work of the imagination than a documentary – not in the sense that it was fiction but in the sense that, like the best works of literary creativity, it selected, compressed and transposed pieces of his experience into a work of truth rather than a simple catalogue of facts.

  For the moment Gavin’s new persona suited him, however. It gave him a professional springboard, an entrée to the bestseller lists and a new-found freedom from penury. It also projected him almost overnight into the front rank of conservationists and popular natural historians. Yet at the time he wrote his book Gavin was only dimly aware of contemporary conservation issues; and though Ring profoundly influenced its readers’ views regarding man’s relationship with the natural world and its wild places, and particularly man’s relationship with the other living creatures of the planet, it did so by intuitive emotional persuasion rather than objective conservationist reasoning. As a naturalist Gavin really belonged to the nineteenth-century amateur tradition, and was in no sense a modern scientific specialist. His otters remained firmly part of his private life, not the subjects of any scientific or breeding research programme; and though at one time or another he toyed with applying for a research grant from the Nature Conservancy, or forming an Otter Society for those who had kept otters or had some specialised knowledge about them, he soon let these projects drop. His friend Peter Crowcroft, then Head of the Mammal Section at the British Museum (Natural History) in London, was unequivocal about this: ‘Professionally, on the zoological side, Gavin was really a non-person. He had no objectivity whatsoever, and that was part of his charm, of course. His rapport with his otters was remarkable and he did care about them. But his perspective was completely anthropomorphic (not that I condemn that out of hand); so I don’t think you can say Gavin contributed to knowledge of otters. But his was the finest promotion for otters there has ever been.’

  With the publication of Ring of Bright Water Gavin’s life would never be the same again.

  Ring was published with Gavin safely out of the spotlight in distant Sandaig. As the booksellers sold out and the summer drew into autumn, Gavin’s mind turned increasingly to his impending return to Morocco, where he planned to continue his researches into the history of the Lords of the Atlas and his exploration of southern Morocco.

  He was not looking forward to his travels in North Africa. After more than six continuous months at Sandaig he was out of sorts with himself and the world and not in the best physical shape. ‘You are right that I am ill,’ he wrote to Constance McNab towards the end of October. ‘I don’t know how or why, but I do know that Africa will be no cure.’ He had just received a letter from Ahmed, his young Berber companion and guide in Marrakesh, announcing that he had been taken to Holland by a rich Dutchman so that he could pursue his education in Amsterdam, and he would not therefore be waiting for Gavin in Morocco. Gavin was distressed and weary and showing all the signs of the depression that was to darken his forthcoming winter in North Africa. ‘I am quite powerless to do anything for anyone,’ he wrote to Constance, ‘nor do I want anyone to do anything for me. C’est la fin de l’été (et puis bon soir?). I am sorry not to be more coherent, but this has hit me hard. And I’m tired.’

  By now Edal had substantially, though not completely, recovered from her illness. Slowly she had regained the use of her limbs, and by early October she was fit enough to go out of the house, and by the end of the month to go to her pool. But then an incident occurred which in hindsight was even more serious than it appeared at the time – Edal attacked a stranger. The victim was Margaret Pope, who was on a visit to Britain with the entourage of Prince Moulay Hassan, the heir to the Moroccan throne. She had not been at Sandaig a minute before Gavin suggested she take a look at the otters.

  Edal was in an upstairs bedroom, so Margaret Pope took off her galoshes and followed Gavin upstairs to the landing. Gavin opened Edal’s door and called her name. In a trice the still ailing otter shot out of the room like a tigress, seized Margaret’s bare foot and bit through it so violently that Gavin had to use all his strength to force Edal’s jaws open and release the foot. There was pandemonium on the landing and blood on the stairs as Margaret ran out of the house. Down on the beach she bathed her injured foot in the sea while Gavin did his best to staunch the flow of blood. Margaret knew that Edal was still recovering from cerebral meningitis, but when the foot began to swell Gavin told her not to worry, it wasn’t infected, and gave her a bottle of whisky to drink during the night to keep her spirits up. ‘He was terribly apologetic,’ Margaret Pope recalled. ‘He had this anthropomorphic idea that Edal had attacked me because she was jealous of me. What a lot of nonsense! I’ve handled wild animals in Africa, but only when they were babies – the moment they grow up they bite you!’

  Gavin begged Margaret Pope not to tell anyone how she had been injured – it would result in the most terrible adverse publicity for his book. So she told the doctors who attended her at the hospital that she had been paddling in Loch Ness when she was bitten by a strange creature. The medics were puzzled. Bitten by a strange creature in Loch Ness? They could not make it out. Perhaps she had been shot, they suggested. Or attacked by something nasty in Africa? Even three months later the foot was still swollen, but at Sandaig no one was yet unduly concerned, for Edal’s unprovoked attack was still thought to have been a freak, one-off aberration, no more.

  Worry about leaving Jimmy and the two otters on their own at Sandaig during the long, hard, dark months of a northern winter added to Gavin’s many anxieties at the year’s end. Finally he hit on a fortuitous solution. At this time I was looking for a remote and rent-free hideaway in which to write a book of my own during the winter. If I would care to come up and act in loco parentis till the following spring, Gavin suggested, Sandaig was at my disposal, rent-free and all found. So the die was cast. Ahead lay a haywire winter for us both – for Gavin in distant Africa, for myself in a wintry Camusfeàrna buried deep in northern night.

  A few days before he left for the south Gavin found Edal in her room playing with a new toy she had found somewhere in the house. It was the round of pistol ammunition with which he had planned to put an end to her life three months before.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Haywire Winter

  I have tidings for you;

  the stag bells;


  winter pours;

  summer has gone;

  Wind is high and cold;

  the sun is low;

  its course is short;

  the sea runs strongly …

  Cold has seized

  the wings of birds;

  Season of ice.

  These are my tidings.

  ‘Summer Has Gone’ (Early Irish Lyrics, Oxford 1956)

  Late in October, when the geese in long arrow-headed skeins were passing high overhead on their way to winter quarters in the south, I arrived at Sandaig. It was to be mid-April before I saw shops or traffic again, or human faces in groups greater than three.

  Sandaig had never been permanently inhabited for the entire length of a winter before – not in Gavin’s time, at any rate. Living a normal life at such a remote place presented peculiar difficulties. Partly this was due to the extremes of winter weather, partly to the sheer practical problems of daily life, which took up an inordinate amount of one’s time. But the difficulties were infinitely compounded by the presence of two large, essentially wild, immensely precious, African otters, whose needs and whims and playful and sometimes destructive animal instincts made them a full-time occupation for their human carers.

  Before departing for Morocco, Gavin made it quite clear to me that he regarded these two creatures – apart from his personal feelings towards them – as his lifeline and livelihood. After all, Edal was fast becoming the world’s most famous living animal next to Elsa the lioness, the heroine of Joy Adamson’s Born Free. The health and well-being of the otters, both mental and physical, were therefore to be given an overriding priority during his absence from Sandaig that winter. Though I still harboured the illusion that I had come to Sandaig to enjoy rent-free peace and quiet in which to write a book, Gavin saw my sojourn more as some guarantee that his precious otters would still be alive and well on his return.

  At this time Edal was still as skinny as a rat after her illness, and weighed only seventeen pounds. Though she had begun eating eels shortly after I arrived at Sandaig, she was not eating enough to build up her strength, and in a week might not consume more than three eels, a few omelettes and some milk. But she was still a very pretty animal and had not lost her wits or her dexterity. If her omelette was too hot for her taste, for example, she would pick it up in one hand, carry it over to her drinking bowl, and plunge it in the water to cool it down.

  Teko, by contrast, was already more than double Edal’s weight, though he was only half her age. Each week he put on another pound, so that he seemed to be turning into a big brown bear before our very eyes. This was hardly surprising, for he ate voraciously and indiscriminately, and apart from his normal ration of thirteen eels a day he would consume whatever else he could scavenge, including mushrooms, seaweed and old bread. Whenever he was hungry and wanted feeding, he would whistle; and if no one paid any attention he would scream. He was a hefty, round, bouncy clown of a creature with a comical face and a nose like a rubber door-stop; and he ran sideways like a crab with his mouth open. He was also inordinately affectionate and indefatigably energetic.

  Both otters were incorrigibly mischievous. One day I would find Teko with his head in a pot of paint or in the process of devouring the foam rubber of the fish-box sofa in the kitchen-parlour, the next I would find Edal strumming my guitar with the fingers of one hand while systematically dismantling the sounding board with the other. Both were particularly attracted to the ankles of human beings, especially strangers. The sharp pinpricks of otter teeth on thinly fleshed human bone were not so much an act of aggression as a way of getting to know a newcomer by the most direct possible means. Most strangers found being affectionately gnawed by an otter with teeth like a piranha’s and jaws like a sprung bear-trap to be a novel and amusing experience for the first minute or two, a wearing one thereafter. The best refuge was the top of the dining table, which had been specially raised to provide a sanctuary from Camusfeàrna’s four-legged denizens.

  Living with otters, however, proved a delight as well as a trial. I had never associated with semi-wild animals in a state of such prolonged intimacy before, and I found the experience instructive. I learned to speak to them in a quiet, reassuring voice, to avoid sudden movements in their presence, to react gently and patiently when provoked by them, to try to understand their language and empathise with their way of thinking and range of needs, psychological as well as physical (including the need to play, to explore, to relate, to be themselves and to be accepted as themselves), above all perhaps to recognise their tremendous dependence on a regular, familiar, unfailing routine.

  The ailing and unpredictable Edal was more Jimmy’s charge than mine, though she accepted me happily enough, for she had known me almost from the very beginning of her life in Britain. Teko was largely my responsibility, however, and became during those winter months the closest animal companion I have ever known – an animal I still look back to, after many years, with nostalgia and deep affection. From this relationship I learned one final lesson – that once an animal has come to accept you as a friend, anger, neglect or treachery are beyond its comprehension.

  On 17 December 1960, nearly six weeks after his departure from Sandaig, Gavin finally set off for North Africa in his brand new Land Rover, the first of his lavish purchases from the profits generated by the success of Ring of Bright Water, with a small Union Jack and the word ‘Britannia’ sign-painted in large Arabic letters on the back and sides.

  Gavin’s route took him by easy stages through France and Spain to Gibraltar, and thence south down the coast road of Morocco to the capital city, Rabat, and the ever-tumultuous apartment of Margaret Pope in the Place Lavigerie. He had barely had time to settle down and get his bearings, however, than circumstances dictated that he should fly back to England again. When I spoke to him on the telephone on New Year’s Eve he was cryptic about his plans.

  ‘I’ve had to come back to London to get a visa to go to Algeria,’ he told me. ‘I couldn’t get one in Morocco. I’m also trying to fix up commissions for articles from the Spectator and London Illustrated News. But they’re just my cover, really. I can’t say any more on the phone. But I’m sure you know what I mean, Douglas. So wish me luck.’

  Gavin left me in no doubt that he was going to Algeria on a secret mission of some kind. Since Algeria at that time was torn by a singularly intense and bloody war of independence, it had to be assumed that such a mission was not without its dangers. I could only guess that he was acting as an agent for some intelligence organisation or other. Only many years later did I learn from Margaret Pope the exact nature and purpose of his visit to Algeria.

  Margaret Pope did not simply run a broadcasting department in Morocco. Her sparsely furnished and chaotic apartment in Rabat, with its avalanches of books and papers and its twelve-foot-long mattresses ranged against the walls, designed to accommodate all comers at all times, was a junction and clearing-house for revolutionary partisans and representatives of unliberated or imperfectly liberated countries from all over Africa. ‘Such men,’ Gavin confessed, ‘live in an atmosphere into which I am drawn as inexorably as a fly into the maw of an insect-eating plant, an atmosphere of intrigue and sudden death. In Africa, they warn me, a British author at large is a suspect figure. They advise me to inspect my car for bombs every morning; at this, while my more habitual proficiencies flag, I have become quick and unforgetful.’

  All this was grist to the mill for Gavin, for no one ever grew up with a more deeply ingrained urge to be involved in high drama and great adventure – an urge complicated by an irresistible tendency to see a drama where there was none, or create one where he could not see one. Gavin’s English friends in North Africa perceived this only too clearly. ‘Gavin was an acute observer of certain things but not of political “situations”,’ Margaret Pope noted, ‘and in any case all his observations in my opinion were always subject to certain moods and even powerful emotive factors which at times amounted to hallucinations and very curious
deviations of judgement. He was what one used to call a “tortured soul” and I understood that – but he was always fighting against that and inventing reasons for not facing certain facts. I often had arguments with him about this tendency.’

  For such a personality there was no more fruitful place to be sucked into the vortex of radical Third World politics and the anti-colonial struggle than Margaret Pope’s hospitable headquarters in the capital city of a country only recently liberated from the colonial yoke.