Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  It was eighteen months since Gavin had last set eyes on Monday, the semi-wild native otter, with her three cubs near the Sandaig waterfall. By return he sent an excited telegram: ‘WONDERFUL NEWS PLEASE FEED AND ENCOURAGE BUT MAKE NO ATTEMPT CONFINE STOP SUGGEST TIBBY NOT MONDAY STOP MACDIARMAID WOULD KNOW.’

  But it was indeed Monday that had come home, not Tibby, the otter with a penchant for men on crutches. And it was not just Monday – her timorous mate Mossy had come with her. The extraordinary news was confirmed in Beryl’s second telegram: ‘FEEDING FEMALE INDOORS PINK SPOTS NOSE INJURED BY TRAP FEEDING MALE UNDER LOBBY ALAN [MACDIARMAID] DOES NOT RECOGNISE CONFINEMENT UNNECESSARY WRITING.’

  Bit by bit, with the help of a series of letters from Beryl which arrived out of sequence via the erratic Moroccan mails, Gavin was able to piece together the story of the miraculous return of Mossy and Monday to the Sandaig house after an absence of four years.

  On 13 April, it seems, Monday had been caught by her right foreleg in a trap at the edge of the lochan up at Tormor. When she was released she flew at the man who had trapped her, then made off in the direction of Sandaig. Five days later, unable to fend for herself because of her injury, she evidently remembered the house which had once been her home and shelter, and simply walked into it with two of Beryl’s dogs. Beryl fed the newcomer, who seemed perfectly tame and at ease in the house, made a bed for her in the bathroom and put antiseptic cream on her suppurating leg. Later that evening Monday’s mate, Mossy, turned up at the house and took up residence under the floor of the coatroom.

  For the next four days Beryl kept Monday in the bathroom and fed her a regular diet of fish. By the end of that time the otter’s condition was much improved, and she began to take an interest in her surroundings (discovering among other things a mirror, in which she saw her own reflected image for the first time). To enable her to come and go as she pleased, Beryl cut a hole in the bathroom wall, and for the next two weeks Monday was out all day with her mate, returning at night to eat and sleep in the house. It was then that Beryl discovered Monday was pregnant. She hoped that the otter might have her cubs in the house, but this was not to be, for when Monday’s leg was fully mended she and Mossy left the house where they had sought temporary refuge with human kind, never to return. ‘I often see them over at the islands and in the river estuary,’ Beryl wrote to Gavin. ‘How wonderful it is to see them swimming and playing naturally in the sea and dashing around with each other quite free.’

  It was not only the wild otters that had returned to the Sandaig house. ‘A poltergeist has come here,’ Beryl wrote; ‘Yesterday it broke two windows; one while I was sitting on the corner of the sofa, and one in the kitchen while I was washing up.’ Beryl’s last paragraph caused Gavin the greatest heartache: ‘Sandaig is more beautiful than ever now; there are great banks of primroses, blue-bells, violets, and a great profusion of wild flowers everywhere.’

  On the same day that Monday returned to Sandaig Richard Frere issued a dire financial report. ‘We have reached the end of the road,’ he wrote. The latest interest in the lighthouse properties had evaporated. One of the properties in Glenelg was in such a ruinous condition that a demolition order had been issued against it, and Beryl Borders had declined the new asking price for the other house. Richard himself was owed nearly half a year’s wages.

  Gavin’s present penury had finally convinced him that he would, after all, have to find a new home for the otters and close Sandaig down. To put Polar Star to more profitable use he proposed using her for tourist outings on Loch Ness. Beyond that he could see nothing. ‘The future seems very uncertain,’ he wrote to Beryl; ‘Until the lighthouses are sold I can’t even begin to think about it.’ To Jimmy Watt he confided his immediate plans, hoping (in vain) to enlist the young man’s help during Sandaig’s final stages.

  As the weeks passed and Tangier’s brief spring began to ease into Mediterranean summer, Gavin’s life in the old Arab town began to disintegrate bit by bit. ‘He was working very hard and taking pills to go to sleep, wake himself up, keep himself going,’ recalled Cherry Scott. ‘Tangier was the worst possible place for someone like Gavin – violent, corrupt. It evoked the wrong side of him.’ To the alarm of his expatriate friends he became involved in unseemly scrapes with Tangerine low-life, and he was tricked and robbed on every side. Alarmed at this turn of events, his long-standing Australian friend George Greaves, a Falstaffian figure who was the doyen of the foreign press corps, did his best to persuade Gavin to leave Tangier and go home. ‘Gavin is getting into trouble,’ Greaves warned Margaret Pope. ‘You should do something about it. He hasn’t got any money.’ ‘Well, give him some money,’ Margaret Pope replied, ‘but get him out of Tangier.’ The trouble was that Gavin had no real home to go back to any more, and was full of strange presentiments. ‘Make a note of this, but don’t tell anyone,’ he told Michael and Cherry Scott. ‘I read my obituary in a dream last night, and I very much wonder if I’m going to survive September 1969.’ He hung on, moving from apartment to apartment – from Rue Dante to Rue Goya and on to the Boulevard de Paris – toying with his book and dreading a return to the financial and emotional uproar that awaited him in Britain, until even his own self-imposed deadline had passed by. Not even Beryl’s last poignant telegram could budge him: ‘JAMES DIED TONIGHT PLEASE COME HOME.’

  James Borders was Beryl’s estranged husband, a jovial Cockney lawyer thirty years older than her. Though Beryl had left him at a time of marital strain to seek sanctuary with her daughter and her animals at Sandaig, his sudden death from a heart attack left her emotionally shattered. Faced with the funeral and urgent matters to attend to, she had no option but to go south – but how could she leave Sandaig, with its huge population of animal dependents, while Gavin lingered on in Africa? Even now Gavin could not, would not, come home. Once again it was Richard Frere and his family who filled the breach, foraging from the local ecology at Gavin’s bidding and collecting more than five hundred herring gull eggs from the nesting colonies on the Sandaig islands to feed (in omelette form) to the otters, including the peripatetic Mossy and Monday. When the Freres returned home Mike Cuddy took their place at Sandaig, not realising it would be two months before Beryl came back, not two weeks, as he had thought.

  When Beryl finally returned from her husband’s funeral, she was almost immediately given Gavin’s coup de grâce. He would not return to Sandaig, he informed her, until she had left it and taken her menagerie with her. In the meantime, he had already arranged to replace her with a seventeen-year-old assistant who had volunteered to look after Sandaig until it was closed down at the end of the summer. For Beryl this was a humiliating affront, and from that moment the crumbling relationship plummeted into recrimination and hatred. She would only leave Sandaig, she raged at Gavin, when it suited her, and that meant after her daughter had sat her exams and her donkeys had given birth to their foals and he had returned the money he owed her. ‘No wonder you treat me like a fool,’ Beryl railed in a letter written on the day of Gavin’s departure from Tangier, ‘for I have obviously been one. How you must have laughed at my expense … Fionna is very excited about your return. She still thinks you’re God unfortunately. I am very, very sorry you are not my friend.’ For Richard Frere, observing the sad dénouement from the wings, this was a painful dilemma. ‘I had now shut my soul to the moral rights and wrongs of this sorry situation,’ he was to recall afterwards. Much of his sympathy lay with Beryl, he acknowledged – but she did not employ him. ‘It was as bleakly simple as that.’

  When Gavin returned to England on 18 June 1967 he had already devised a half-formed plan for the otters’ future. A zoo was out of the question; but a safari park (then a recent innovation in Britain) might be just the thing. An acquaintance of his by the name of Michael Alexander (a wartime inmate of and escaper from the notorious German prison-camp at Colditz) ran safari tours round the Duke of Bedford’s great park at Woburn, and was enthusiastic about the idea of Edal and Teko find
ing a home there. When Gavin went down to Woburn a few days later he was greatly encouraged by what he saw, and particularly impressed by the potential of the ‘Chinese Dairy Lake’ – a small round lake covered in water-lilies with a covered oriental-style colonnade on its banks. Here at last was the otter paradise he had been seeking, and he began at once to make plans for the islands and fountains and heated sleeping quarters with which he hoped to improve the site for his otters’ future comfort and enjoyment.

  Gavin returned to London, and was almost immediately struck down by a series of alarming physical disorders. The first hit him without warning one morning as he sat down at his desk to make a telephone call. When the number answered he found he had totally lost his voice and could not even manage a whisper. The next day he felt distinctly ill with headache and nausea, and began dosing himself with antibiotics, but after five days without any sign of improvement he called his doctor. The doctor, however, was less interested in Gavin’s general condition than in the crepitations he discovered in the base of his left lung. He thought Gavin might have an early pneumonia, while Gavin himself believed it might be lung cancer, for which, as a heavy smoker, he was a classic candidate. So convinced was he that he was doomed that he rang Richard Frere at Sandaig to tell him so in a conversation of confidential high drama. The X-ray revealed nothing untoward, however, and the mysterious condition soon cleared up, or so it seemed.

  But Gavin’s state of health was to continue to give cause for concern. During his latest sojourn abroad he had acquired a very rare intestinal protozoa by the name of coccidia isospora belli. This infection had first been recorded among Allied troops at Gallipoli during World War One, and was next observed among Axis troops in Tunisia and Algeria during World War Two; it had never been recorded from Morocco before, so Gavin had notched up a medical first. The symptoms included violent diarrhoea, nausea, vomiting and acute abdominal pains, and after a fortnight in London Gavin had lost a stone and a half in weight and was so weak he could barely drag himself across the room. There was no known cure for this unpleasant condition, though it was believed to be self-limiting and to run a course of six to seven weeks. In the meantime the doctors tried drug after drug in the hope that one of them might turn out to be a match for the thriving colony of rare coccidiae to which Gavin’s luckless guts played host.

  In the midst of this debilitating affliction came good news at last; indeed, coming so soon after the negative cancer diagnosis, Gavin might have been forgiven for believing that the tide had turned and the power of the rowan tree curse was on the wane. First, his agent Peter Janson-Smith advised him that literary income was now coming through again, from miscellaneous royalties and foreign contracts; then, on 15 July – his fifty-third birthday – Isle Ornsay cottage was sold in the space of twenty-four hours, black fungus and rising damp notwithstanding. Both Gavin and the company were, for the moment, solvent again.

  Though Gavin was still weak and ailing he decided to head north anyway, for his last summer at Sandaig was dwindling away at an alarming rate. On 1 August he arrived at Richard Frere’s front door at Drumnadrochit. The protozoa infection was receding and no longer worried him greatly. ‘At least, it’s out of the ordinary,’ he joked with Richard. ‘That appeals to me.’ Fresh air and rest and a regimen of large leisurely whiskies at Drumnadrochit completed the cure. But by 4 August Gavin had developed an intense pain in his right lung. It was agonising to laugh or to cough, and he could take only the shallowest of breaths. He thought it might be pleurisy, but when he began to spit blood he was not so sure.

  Meanwhile he had been invited over to Isle Ornsay to meet the purchasers of the lighthouse cottage, Mr and Mrs Stuart Johnstone, and discuss the cottage’s inventory before scaling the sale. So on 8 August he motored across Scotland with Richard, ‘doped,’ so he said, ‘with the maximum amount of pain killers that could be trusted not to kill me as well.’ And not just pain killers. Gavin was an extremely shy man, especially in the company of strangers, and often resorted to Dutch courage when required to confront new faces. The combination of antibiotic and Scotch proved a lethal cocktail. He slumped, mumbling incoherently on the sofa at Isle Ornsay, confronting the Johnstones with a celebrated author seemingly ailing in mind as well as body. ‘It’s the protozoa,’ Richard Frere informed his startled hosts as he nodded reassuringly in the direction of his hopelessly befuddled employer. ‘He’s just back from Africa, you know.’

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Revived fortunes

  But all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

  JULIANA OF NORWICH, Revelations of Divine Love

  From Isle Ornsay Richard drove Gavin on to Sandaig and his first night in his Highland home for nearly nine months. Sandaig was vacant now. As a temporary measure Beryl Borders had moved into the house in Glenelg, promising to vacate it when Gavin paid her her £2000 back. Now only one white Roman gander, a timid cat, two donkeys and six poodles were left of the horde of creatures that had once ruled this animal enclave by the sea. It was a brief homecoming. By morning Gavin was coughing blood again, this time in some profusion, and he was fearful he had escaped cancer only to contract tuberculosis. Richard Frere returned to Sandaig once more and drove Gavin back to the other side of Scotland, depositing him at the Culduthel Hospital in Inverness, where he was incarcerated inside a glass cubicle for tests for suspected pleurisy.

  Within twenty-four hours Gavin was ringing Richard asking to be rescued. He didn’t like the hospital, he said, he couldn’t stand the discipline, he hadn’t even got TB. Mysteriously, though the pain had been in the right lung, the blood seemed to have come from the left lung – from a blood clot that might be attributable to the coccidiae and in the normal course of events might be expected to disperse of its own accord. So Gavin discharged himself as an in-patient and signed on as an out-patient, putting up at the long-suffering Freres’ and travelling to the hospital every three days for further blood tests. During this enforced convalescence he busied himself with boyish enthusiasm on building a scale model of one of the two elaborate otter houses that were to be fitted into the colonnade around the Chinese Dairy Lake at Woburn.

  Summer was nearly over when Gavin finally returned to Sandaig at the end of August 1967. The house was in a sorrier state than at any time during the nineteen years that Gavin had known it. The unusually wild winter and the long occupation by Beryl’s animals had wreaked a special kind of havoc. Indoors the woodwork and plasterboard had been clawed, gnawed and holed, the bathroom ceiling had collapsed under the weight of a pack of poodles billeted in the loft above it, windowpanes had been broken by the poltergeist and rugs and carpets fouled by the dogs and cats. Outside the picture was little better. The winter winds had discoloured the once-white exterior walls of the house to decaying shades of fungus-green and dirty grey, and swept away the sand that covered the rubbish pits dug in the dunes, exposing a midden of rusty cans and old bottles. Forty head of cattle had trampled the surrounding turf into a mire of mud and dung, forced their way through the wooden gates, smashed the post-and-rail fence in front of the house and put their hoofs through the planks of the bridge over the burn. Far worse, someone had switched off the largest of the deep freezes, and the stench of eight hundredweight of rotting haddock inside it reminded Gavin of a similar disaster in the pickling tank on Soay during the shark-fishing days.

  ‘Camusfeàrna,’ Gavin noted simply after his return, ‘was in a mess.’

  But a few rays of sun beamed down here and there out of the pall of clouds that lowered over Gavin. Now, suddenly, there were rumours of a film deal in the air, and the prospect of real money coming in hard on the heels of the Isle Ornsay sale raised the prospect of an imminent end to the long financial nightmare.

  The cinema industry had shown keen interest in Ring of Bright Water even before the book was published. When Michael Powell pulled out, the American producer Joseph Strick took over. For some years Strick had held an option on the book;
then, in the early autumn of 1967, he decided to exercise it. The news caused an excited tremor of anticipation at Sandaig, for the money involved was substantial and would solve Gavin’s financial problems for some while to come – and might, indeed, obviate the need to close down Sandaig after all. The terms of the draft contract had been agreed by Peter Janson-Smith; all that was required now was for the film’s director, Jack Couffer, to come up to Sandaig, meet Gavin, discuss the script and decide whether the real ring of bright water was suitable as a location for the film.

  Gavin and Richard Frere shared the universal preconception of the Hollywood movie director – a fat, tough, sub-literate wheeler-dealer who chewed cigars, dined off silver and lived breathlessly on the verge of imminent cardiac arrest. Gavin decided that, for the significant occasion of Jack Couffer’s visit, no expense should be spared. He telephoned Richard’s wife Joan and asked her to scour Inverness for the very biggest Havana cigars, the very finest vintage ports, the most exquisite delicacies.

  The day came, and Jack Couffer arrived, to everyone’s surprise, on his own two legs, having found the way down over the hill by himself. Even more surprising, he was the exact reverse of what they had expected – ‘a huge, rugged fellow with the undeniable stamp of outdoor living upon him’, Richard Frere recalled. He rejected a whisky, even refused a mighty cigar, but appreciated the venison cooked to perfection by Gavin himself. Jack Couffer, it turned out, was no habitué of Sunset Boulevard but a genuine wilderness man in his own right. As director and cameraman for Walt Disney Wildlife Productions he had tramped many of the world’s wild places, and far from being sub-literate had written a book about his adventures, called Song of Wild Laughter.