Gavin had sent Andrew Scot in a dinghy to pick me up from the jetty at Kyle and we motored the mile or so to the island. Gavin’s new home was set in a vast amphitheatre of rearing rock and tossing sea; a landscape of interlocking mountain peaks and ranges and long, enfiladed sea views. Astern, looking across Loch Alsh and down Loch Duich, reared the Five Sisters of Kintail, blue and distant; on the port quarter loomed the Cuillin of Skye, and to starboard the splendid mountain fastness of Applecross; ahead lay the humped shape of Raasay and other smaller islands scattered across the Inner Sound. We passed the White Island’s close neighbour, the Eider Island, then pulled into a small bay on the south shore of the main island and landed at a small jetty. The North West Scottish Pilot described the area as the most dangerous stretch of the British coast, liable to Force 11 squalls that could spring up in five minutes without warning. I had barely set foot on Eilean Ban when a heavy sea mist suddenly came down and blotted Skye from view. Gavin had chosen his moat well.
I looked about me. On the left rose a seventy-foot-high lighthouse, automatic now, that was connected to the main body of the island by a bridge. A steep path led up from the jetty to the lighthouse cottage, a long, single-storeyed, limewashed building situated below the ridge that formed the highest part of the island. I walked up to the double front door and was ushered into the long reception room that ran most of the length of the house. Gavin was standing waiting to greet me. He now sported an auburn beard which gave him a raffish air, and looked more drawn and aged after the tribulations of recent years, but at the same time he seemed more content and expansive. ‘My dear Douglas, what can I give you to drink?’ he exclaimed cheerily, waving his hand in the direction of an enormous silver tray crammed with bottles. ‘Where would you like to sit? This,’ proudly indicating a large antique sofa, ‘was Sir Walter Scott’s settee. Next month they’re delivering William Wordsworth’s writing desk to me. Generally speaking, by and large, all things considered – a bit different from Sandaig, don’t you think?’
Gavin had lived at Sandaig in the homespun, makeshift way that befitted a simple tenant. But he had moved into the lighthouse quarters on Kyleakin Island – two long, narrow, back-to-back cottages that had been stylishly converted into one – in a manner more befitting a laird of the isle, or at least its part proprietor and sole permanent resident. The southern-facing cottage had been knocked into a single forty-foot-long living-room-cum-study from which a picture window looked over the windswept straits to Kyleakin village and the mountains of Skye. The rear-facing cottage, whose view was obscured by the ridge behind, contained three comfortable double bedrooms and a stylishly appointed bathroom. All was sumptuous throughout.
The long room made much use of windows and mirrors to lighten and broaden its corridor-like proportions, and its antique elegance was much more in keeping with Gavin’s aristocratic roots than the humble improvised charm of Sandaig had ever been. It had been converted by Richard Frere in accordance with Gavin’s design, illustrated with his own watercolour impressions, which may have been influenced, consciously or subconsciously, by the design of the Long Gallery at Syon House, the seventeenth-century home of his uncle, the ninth Duke of Northumberland, by the Thames at Isleworth.
It was a fabulous room, strongly reflecting Gavin’s life and interests, and richly furnished in the manner of a stately home in miniature with antiques, objets d’art, natural historical bric-à-brac, the gleanings of a lifetime of exotic travel. A log fire smouldered in the large open hearth and perfumed the room with the sweet aroma of wood smoke. Two long Victorian sofas were ranged against the walls on either side of the fireplace, upholstered in silk brocade and furnished with ancient embroidered silk cushion covers looted by an ancestor from some distant palace in eighteenth-century Imperial China. Above the fireplace hung a huge framed wax-and-fishbone representation of Icarus falling by Michael Ayrton; above a doorway was a framed cast of a fossil archeopterix, the primordial proto-bird; around the walls hung a set of sixteen original watercolours of British game birds by James Thorburn, along with an enormous gilt mirror and curved Moroccan daggers with silver sheaths and jewelled hilts.
Oddly at variance with Gavin’s image as a popular figure in the new conservation movement were various relics that hailed back to the pursuits of a past generation of sporting naturalists – the era of the collector, staffer and trophy hunter, in which Gavin himself was brought up. On one wall hung a pair of steel harpoons buckled by their impact with a basking shark’s back – souvenirs of Gavin’s epic encounters with this giant fish. A pair of stuffed jays stood on the mantelpiece and two mounted birds of prey stared ferociously at each other across the width of the room. A great outstretched fish eagle’s wing, framed behind glass, spanned a wall in another room. The sitting-room carpets, in a patterned Indian weave, were scattered here and there with the skins of goats, the fleeces of brown and white sheep, the hides of red and fallow deer, and a hearth-rug made up of the furs of twenty North African fennec foxes.
Though Gavin himself was not entirely oblivious of the paradox, it did not greatly concern him. His entire life and his whole personality had always been made up of opposites. The killer of animals co-existed with the protector of animals, just as the recluse and opter-out co-existed with the upper-crust and establishment man. On a second mantelpiece stood a bevy of invitation cards to exclusive functions, including one from the Duchess of Argyll asking him to a private concert at Inveraray Castle, with a handwritten message appended: ‘Do hope you can come and stay.’
Throughout the house the effect was ornate and luxurious; everywhere were discreet touches of old-fashioned aristocratic gracious living. In my bedroom, furnished with Moroccan tapestries, antique brass candlesticks and an enormous gilt mirror, my bedside table proffered a tiny flask of whisky, a carafe of water, and an ornamental Persian box full of cigarettes. ‘I have tried to arrange it,’ Gavin explained, ‘so that wherever you sit you have a box of cigarettes, a lighter and an ashtray next to you.’ There were cigarettes everywhere, in Persian boxes and Moroccan jars, silver boxes and pewter cases, on sidetables and sideboards, by the lavatory and by the bath, even on the dining table, where at dinner that evening a little silver ashtray and a silver box of cigarettes bearing the Maxwell family crest was set before each place. Gavin told me he was now smoking up to eighty cigarettes a day, and I noticed that he was often breathless after the slightest exertion. The meal itself was as lavish as the ambience – pâté, tomato salad in a cream and basil sauce, roast pheasant and game chips, raspberries and cream, an enormous Stilton on the sideboard, all washed down with claret, sauterne and Drambuie – real desert island fare.
The weather had taken an appreciable stride towards winter during the night, and next morning a fresh layer of snow covered the tops of the hills and a bitter easterly wind came prying and jabbing down the sound. Over on Skye I could see the long, thin ribbons of the waterfalls plunging sheer from the corries high in the hills and dispersing in mid-air in an explosion of white spray like firework smoke. All day long, and throughout the succeeding days, migrating birds streamed over the island in headlong flight to the south – fieldfares in a constant procession, a squadron of whooper swans, vast galaxies of white-fronted geese in precise V-formations, with greylags trailing behind them in loose, untidy skeins, the air full of their wild and urgent clamour, rising and falling in the wind.
Gavin, I noticed, felt the cold badly and looked pinched and wan inside the hood of his anorak as we explored the tiny bounds of his rough, heathery, ankle-snapping domain. Though the going was rough it did not take long to complete our round of the island. Within the confines of the eight and a half acres of sea-girt volcanic boss on which Gavin had chosen to perch himself there was a surprising variety of habitat, with a rocky, heather-covered top, a cliff or two, a couple of little marshes, a boggy valley full of rushes and cotton-grass, a boulder shore, and all around the wild and teeming ocean waters.
So, after a lifetime of pitching and striking ca
mp, Gavin had come to his final retreat, furnished with all the totems and trappings of his ancestral roots, as if at last he was now anxious to come in from the cold. By any ordinary standards it was a strange place to establish a permanent home, for he was extremely conspicuous on the island, though almost totally incommunicado. But Gavin liked to see people staring at him as they sailed past, unable to turn up at his front door. Now he had the island home he had always wanted, a sanctuary that, for all its comfort and elegance, resembled a prison of rocks and stones, heather and bracken, surrounded by a moat of often violent sea, though from the island’s single eminence there was a wonderful unobstructed panorama of mountains, islands, water, wilderness.
Unlike tidal Isle Ornsay, Kyleakin was a real island, and you came and went on the sea’s terms, which were harsh and uncompromising. Though the channel was narrow, a strong tide swept through it; and whenever it collided head-on with the prevailing wind from the west or south-west the sea raged. Between spring and autumn there could be paradise days of calm and sun; but white horses, beating surf, flying spray and horizontal rain were the usual order of the worst of winter days. At such times, those who had arrived could never be sure of leaving, and those who had left enjoyed no guarantee of return. Now the easterly was gusting to Force 9, a strong gale, and the tops of the waves in the narrows were breaking in white plumes of blown spindrift. For the six days immediately preceding my arrival, Gavin told me, the sea passage had been so rough that he had been cut off from all communication with the mainland on which he depended for supplies.
And yet he loved it. ‘It is better than Sandaig in many ways,’ he told me:
I like to be able to look down on the sea. Living at sea-level at Sandaig was claustrophobic in the end – the horizon was too near, too confining. The sea is much busier here, too, and I am endlessly fascinated by the comings and goings of people and birds and sea creatures. Every tea-time, for example, the island steamer, a kind of miniature Queen Mary, passes close by from Kyle. Every evening a large flock of ravens pass over the house on their way from Skye to their roosts in the hills beyond Kyle. Every Friday the ring netters come in from Atlantic coastal waters, followed by vast numbers of gulls feeding on the fish guts the fishermen toss to them. Every spring and autumn there are tremendous flights of migrating birds of all sorts flying over the island or resting on it. Every time I look out over the sea I see something new and strange – a Portuguese man-o’-war floating by, perhaps, or a killer whale blowing, or dolphins leaping, or basking shark cruising about, or a school of rorqual whales moving through the narrows. I’ve bought a x40 telescope with a tripod and with this I can watch all the toings and froings in the streets of Kyleakin opposite my window – I’m a kind of voyeur of a real-life Hebridean Under Milk Wood. I even have a perfect view of the public telephone box, and if ever any of my guests ring me up asking for the dinghy to come over and collect them – not knowing that I have a perfect view of them through my telescope – I like to surprise them by saying, ‘Yes, I’ll send the boat if you promise to stop picking your nose, or smoking that ghastly pipe!’ and so on and so forth.
Gavin had ambitious plans for the White Island, and they were to absorb much of his time and energy in the ensuing months. Close to his heart was the projected commercial eider duck colony on the Eider Island.
It was too late in the season to do much about it for 1968, but he had high hopes for 1969. In the meantime, he kept a careful eye on the birds. They were never far away. During my stay on the island I often saw large flotillas of these solid, ocean-going creatures just offshore. During October the eider population had been steadily increasing, and by the time I left it was up to four or five hundred. Gavin was full of optimism for the project. ‘You see those sticks with little blue markers on them?’ Gavin remarked to me, pointing towards the Eider Island. ‘That’s where they nested this summer. We’ve marked two hundred nests. We’ve also burnt the undergrowth off so that more of them can nest next year. Unfortunately we’ve burnt too much off, there probably won’t be enough cover for them, so we’re going to have to plant thousands of seeds before next summer’s breeding season.’
Gavin had also turned his mind to a complementary new project which he outlined to me with great enthusiasm:
What I am going to do here is establish a private zoo park for typically Scottish fauna – a small collection of all the creatures that people want to see – ravens, buzzards, herons, wildcats, hill foxes, native otters and so on, which you couldn’t normally see at close quarters in the wild. Everything except deer, because deer could wade across to the Eider Island and trample on all the eider nests. I might even open the house to the public and charge them ten bob a time to look at a famous writer’s home and all his pets. If the people pay to come and look at these creatures, I won’t have to try and write a book every year, as I do now. This has been a great strain on me for a very long time and I’ve thought that I could write better books if I was able to take two years to write a book instead of one.
Gavin had recently lost his old world, and he desperately needed to establish stability and security in his new one. On Kyleakin Island he was not only returning to the terrain of his enchanted boyhood; he was also going to populate it with the loved and familiar creatures of his past.
The nucleus of the zoo park – in which the birds and animals would live in a semi-wild state, not in zoo conditions – was already there. For a start, there were the wild seabirds and marine animals that lived on or around the island or passed close by it on their seasonal migrations. Then there was the little group of creatures that Gavin had imported on to the island. Chief among them was Teko, the most famous living otter in the world. Now in his tenth year, Teko was sadly old and toothless and testy, and had, in a sense, been put out to grass to live out his last days in honourable retirement. He inhabited a centrally heated little hut not far from the main house and spent his waking time making holts in his stone-walled, wire-covered garden, which contained a water tank where he could swim. He was seldom seen and was never introduced to strangers.
Then there was Malla, a young female European otter that had been found in some shrubbery in Caithness and brought to the island less than two weeks before my arrival. Malla was only three months old, just fourteen inches long and a little over two pounds in weight. She had only just been weaned and had to be fed every three hours on a special mixture of evaporated milk and water, mixed with the yolk of an egg, two drops of cod liver oil, a pinch of bone flour and a vitamin compound, plus a saucer of finely chopped raw liver once a day. In spite of the painstaking care with which she was looked after, Malla was frail and ailing and her chances of survival seemed small.
Finally there was Owl, ‘a ball of fluff the size of a tennis ball when she was found,’ Gavin told me. Not until Owl was fully fledged did it become apparent that she was no ordinary tawny owl but a so-called grey-phase tawny owl, a very rare bird in Britain. Owl was a friendly little creature, enjoyed human company, and spent much of her time during my visit perched placidly on the back of an elegant armchair in the sitting room. She had dislocated her left wing when she fell from the nest and was unable to fly. ‘Of course, she doesn’t know she can’t fly,’ Gavin assured me, ‘she probably thinks all owls are like this. But it means she can’t hunt for herself, so I have to feed her – mice, rabbits, gulls, meat, fur, feathers and bone.’
That was the nucleus of the projected zoo park – an ageing otter that was seldom seen, a dying baby one, and an owl that couldn’t hunt or fly. Not a promising start, but Gavin was full of enthusiasm, and these were early days.
The ostensible reason for my visit to Kyleakin Island was to interview Gavin for a series of articles I was planning on the subject of ‘opters-out’. In the late sixties – the era of the youth revolution and experimental life-styles, of flower power, hippies and back-to-nature self-sufficiency – opting out by the successful and well-heeled was a growing phenomenon in both Britain and America. It involved
quitting the so-called rat-race, turning one’s back on middle-class affluence and aspirations, and seeking a more meaningful, and usually more menial or contemplative existence in some remoter, simpler, environment. My subjects were to include an international fashion model who had retreated to an undeveloped islet in the Seychelles, a successful television producer who now tilled the soil as a crofter, a painter who worked as a deckhand on a trawler fishing the Newfoundland Banks, an Englishman who lived in the rainforest of British Honduras – and Gavin Maxwell, who lived with wild animals on a tiny Scottish rock.
My conversation with Gavin on this theme continued over a period of days and often far into the night, and ranged over many subjects – his childhood alienation, his views on education, on sex, drugs, animals, the future of the Highlands, his road to the Ring. Gavin spoke shrewdly and eloquently; there was never a dull sentence or a dull moment. But he was not an easy interviewee. He could cling to a train of thought or the logic of an argument like a terrier to a bone or an otter to an ankle. He was impatient with muddled thinking, and could be very tough. When I suggested, for example, that territories might one day be put aside for opters-out in a totalitarian state he retorted: ‘I am not prepared to discuss what might happen under a totalitarian state. I would not be there. I should certainly be liquidated for my beliefs and I should not take any part in the proceedings by being martyred. I refuse to discuss this hypothesis.’ When, for some unaccountable reason, the conversation got round to God, specifically what I termed an ‘objective, God-like perspective on the human condition’, Gavin snorted: ‘What on earth makes you define the deity in this curious term? Have you ever before thought of God as being objective? And if you haven’t, why do you choose this particular moment to speak of God as being objective? In so far as we were brought up to believe in the existence of God at all, we were brought up to believe that he is extremely subjective towards life – certainly not objective.’
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