Island of Dreams

by Dan Boothby

  But Mijbil wanders, as wild territorial animals tend to do. He roams further and further from Camusfeàrna and one day he disappears altogether. Raine searches frantically, fearfully, guiltily. For the writer had warned her, wild otters are considered vermin in the Highlands and are routinely killed by the crofters. Mij must wear a harness, always – to signal he is pet, not wild. But Raine had removed Mij’s harness and Mij had strayed, too far, and was chopped with a spade by a road mender from the village.

  The writer returns from his travels, forgives Raine (who for the rest of her life can never forgive herself), but is bereft. He casts around for another otter, for he has fallen in love with Mij’s kind, and one day, sitting in the bar of a hotel in Kyle of Lochalsh, he spies a man and a woman walking an otter on a lead. He rushes from the bar to intercept the trio, gabbles. The couple, on holiday from a posting in Nigeria, are looking for a home for their pet otter, Edal. This is how fate works.

  They agree to let the writer take Edal. Jimmy Watt, fifteen years old and having recently left school, is employed to look after Edal and to manage Camusfeàrna during the writer’s absences. The summer of 1959 has come. There is an otter about the remote house once again and, almost unthinkingly, the man sits down at his desk one day and begins to write the story of Camusfeàrna. With lyrical precision he describes the wild seas and wide-open lands of the far North, so far away and so removed from the drab, clamorous cities of the South. And he tells of the life and death of Mij, and of his fateful finding of Edal; of otters, companions that have brought him so much joy.

  Utopian literature was popular in the fifties and sixties. Books about wild places and living with wild animals were ‘in’. T. H. White’s The Goshawk had been published in 1951 and Michaela Denis’s Leopard in my Lap appeared in 1954. The Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz published King Solomon’s Ring and Man’s Best Friend in the mid-fifties and Gerald Durrell’s classic My Family and Other Animals came out to acclaim in 1956. Rowena Farre’s purely fictional ‘autobiography’, Seal Morning, about a Highland childhood and a trumpet-tooting pet seal, had been a huge best-seller in 1957, as had The Hills is Lonely, Lillian Beckwith’s 1959 comic novel about the goings-on of a village on the edge of the Isle of Skye. Joy Adamson’s Elsa-the-lioness book, Born Free, was on its way. There was something in the air.

  Ring of Bright Water, charming, erudite, humorous and escapist, lavishly finished with photographs and drawings, was published in 1960 and instantly struck a chord. The book was a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic, a UK Book Society non-fiction choice and an American Book of the Month Club choice. In its first year of publication 100,000 hardback copies were bought. (To date 2 million copies have been sold, and that doesn’t include the myriad foreign-language editions.) Ring of Bright Water was number 10 in the American book industry’s Publishers Weekly list of best-selling books of 1960. What Maxwell achieved with that book (his fifth) is a writer’s dream. He became rich, and famous. But . . .

  Towards the end of October 2004, seeking shelter from a grizzly afternoon of West Highland rain, I had looked in on the Bright Water Visitors’ Centre in Kyleakin. After I’d pushed open the door and shaken some of the rain off me onto the doormat, a woman of about fifty, with a drawn, pinched face had come through a doorway at the back of the room and bustled about behind a mock-driftwood counter. I squelched around the overheated and stuffy room, dripping warmed-up rain onto the polished pine floorboards. I was the only visitor. Double glazing on several of the picture windows had failed and condensation partially obscured the views of the harbour, the surrounding sea and the hills. Charts and posters and information boards lined the walls – how to tell a whale from a dolphin, dates and locations of recent wildlife sightings, a spotter’s guide to seabirds, how to take part in RSPB surveys . . . A raised sandpit contained painted wooden animals and model fishing boats. There was a large plywood cut-out of the lighthouse, and photographs. Silent footage of an otter with cubs gambolling among rocks and seaweed played on a loop on a TV. I stuck my hand into holes in wall-mounted wooden cubes and felt a plastic crab, a rubber starfish, dried seaweed and sea shells. A corner of the room was devoted to Gavin Maxwell – a desk with a fan of his headed notepaper laid under glass, copies of his books, an album of photographs of Maxwell and the boys and the otters, of Camusfeàrna and the Lighthouse Island, and a facsimile of the handwritten first chapters of Ring of Bright Water. Part of the room was given over to the sale of toys and trinkets, souvenirs – the usual Highland-themed tat. ‘Highland tunes’ filled the silence. There was a strong smell of damp.

  ‘How are the fortunes of the Trust?’ I asked the worried-looking woman behind the counter that rain-drenched day. Susan Browning, the Director, had looked up and been eager to tell me her troubles. Funding had dried up, she said, visitor numbers were down, and income from the island tours and shop sales was meagre. The Trust’s overdraft kept increasing. There hadn’t been a resident warden on the island for two years. She worried about security. They were having to let the main accommodation of the lighthouse keepers’ cottage to holidaymakers to bring in capital. They’d fitted a galley kitchen in the spare room in the cottage because they were thinking about advertising for a part-time warden/caretaker, but they couldn’t really afford to pay a salary. She lay awake at night fretting about the future of the Centre and the Trust.

  I listened, offered suggestions, agreed and wanted to help, both her and the Kyleakin Lighthouse Island Trust – for I knew all about the Trust. And I had visited the visitors’ centre and the tiny 8.5 acre island several years before, in 2001, when it was all shiny brand new. But as always I was in transit, circling, en route to somewhere else, looking for but never finding the perfect place to land.

  A week later I flew to India to sit out the northern winter and to work on a book I had provisionally entitled Travels. It was to be about my life up to that point: about what it is to be a stray, to cast oneself adrift time and again from the pontoons of family, friends and a steady occupation, to see where one ends up. I had been drifting for more than twenty years by then, and I wasn’t so sure it was such a fine and free thing to do any more.

  One December day that winter, procrastinating, pondering my next move, surfing the internet, I googled ‘Gavin Maxwell’. It was something I did periodically, to see if anything new came to light. Among the results was a link to the website of the Kyleakin Lighthouse Island Trust and it set me thinking. I went back to my typing and dreaming in Madras, and at the end of April 2005 returned to England with a completed first draft of my book. At the beginning of May I sent Susan Browning an email. Would the Trust like a volunteer to help out in the Bright Water Visitors’ Centre or on the Lighthouse Island over the coming summer season? I wouldn’t want paying, just a place to stay, free of charge if at all possible. Several days later I received a reply. More emails followed. Then, at the beginning of June, I got the news I’d been hoping for.

  The springs in the sofa bed in my room had been sprung some time way back in the annals of island history. Even if I hadn’t been eager to get on with my new life, chances are I’d have hardly slept a wink. I was up by six the next morning – wide awake and eating breakfast outside on the bench. The sun was tracking over the Kintail hills, over the loch, across a clear blue sky. It was cold, but warming up nicely. A lawn, almost obliterated by a tangle of brambles and bracken, sloped steeply away from me down to a rocky shoreline and the loch. An alder tree stood at the loch’s edge, its trunk obscured by more brambles and a mass of rosebay willowherb. Along the foreshore a hooded crow, with its sideways, skipping, Richard III gait, was jabbing at sea wrack and shells; foraging, casting aside.

  Traffic was moving along the approach road between Kyle of Lochalsh and the bridge. Over in Kyle, a train was parked at the platform by the harbour. A helicopter rose up from a pile of brown industrial buildings, circled tightly over two small islands near the harbour and blattered towards me before bearing away over the bridge. Fishing boa
ts were nodding at anchor in a nearby bay.

  Half a mile away across the other side of the loch in Kyleakin, a shingle beach stretched below a strip-development of modern housing, a village green, a youth hostel and pubs. A tent, hidden from the road by a thicket of trees, had been pitched on grass above the beach. I sipped coffee and watched a woman crawl from the tent, scuttle into the trees, crouch for a moment and nimbly skip back in. Cars and vans were moving along the road behind the trees. A red-hulled fishing boat puttered around Kyleakin slipway and motored past the island, leaving bubbles and Vs on calm water in its wake.

  I had read how Maxwell had often sat where I was now sitting, a telescope planted on a table in front of him, spying on Kyle and Kyleakin. And, like him, I was to be cheered in my solitude by the sights and sounds, and by the companionship, of the villagers.

  The Bright Water Visitors’ Centre opened at ten on weekdays. I strolled over the bridge and took the road into Kyleakin. A gaggle of kids carrying fishing rods and pond-dipper nets approached, stomping along, practically running. One or two were on bikes. I stepped aside to let them pass. They swept by, gabbling excitedly, on a mission. I followed the road through the village to its end. Gulls floated above the yachts and the fishing boats tied to the pontoons in the marina behind the old ferry terminal.

  An over-the-door cowbell tinkled as I opened the door to the Centre. Although the sun was shining strongly outside and I’d passed a number of tourists with cameras and awed faces, the Bright Water Visitors’ Centre didn’t seem to be attracting them. Susan Browning hovered behind the driftwood counter. The video footage of otters gambolling among rocks and seaweed played on the TV at the far end of the room. The dreadful ‘Highland tunes’ CD droned on.

  I reintroduced myself to Susan – it’d been a few months – told her I’d settled in, and said thank you.

  ‘Oh yes, I recognize you now,’ Susan said, passing me a ream of timesheets. ‘There are quite a few jobs that need doing on the island. Actually, I’ve made a list.’

  She handed me another piece of paper.

  ‘Sort out signage,’ I read out, ‘tidy up hide and bothy and interior of lighthouse, de-moss bothy steps, cut back brambles and pull up weeds from along edges of paths, plant gorse along wall on west side of island to stop trespassers, weed cobbled path, fix bench in front of house . . .’

  ‘I’m sure there’re other jobs you’ll find need doing. Really, I’d like you to take the island on as your project. Are you any good at marketing? It would help such a lot if we could really put this place on the map and increase visitor numbers as a priority. Everyone loves Gavin Maxwell but how can they visit us if they don’t know we’re here?

  ‘You should fill in the timesheets so that we can see what you’ve been doing. As we discussed over email, you work twenty hours a week in return for accommodation on the island. I’m afraid we can’t pay you for any hours that you might put in over and above that. You said you could stay until the end of October? Pete Baggeley, one of the trustees, takes the tours at the moment, but hopefully that is something else you can help with. I’ll be over on the island tomorrow lunchtime to get the cottage ready for the couple coming on Saturday.’

  I walked back through Kyleakin clutching my timesheets and to-do list and stopped by the beach. The bridge loomed massive above me. Traffic passed along it, kerr-lump, kerr-lump, kerr-lump. A young woman opened the flap of the tent I’d spied from the island, skipped over pebbles in a swimsuit and dashed into the sea, flinging glittery droplets of water into the blue. She floated on her back for a moment, trod water and, on seeing me, waved. I waved back. She swept her arms back and forth through the water, spluttering and laughing.

  ‘You should come in too,’ she shivered. A German accent. ‘It’s freezing c-cold but very . . . life-giving.’ I shook my head, waved again and tramped over the pebbles to the road. Up on the bridge, seagulls wheeled around me, sinking below the barriers, then with stiff wings riding the wind to soar high above.

  Back on the island I looked for the young woman again, but she and her tent had gone.

  That afternoon, storing away my gear with all the doors of my room open, I heard the whomp of a door being slammed shut and footsteps approaching. A very casually dressed portly man in his sixties appeared at the doorway.

  ‘I reckon the first job you could do is clear out the bothy,’ he said. ‘Pete, Pete Baggeley.’

  I held out a hand and he gave me a funny look but shook it. ‘I’m going up to meet the visitors for the tour. Coming?’

  Pete slouched along, scuffing the heels of his wellington boots in the gravel as he went. He had an extremely lazy way of walking.

  ‘Susan tells me you’re a writer,’ he said. ‘You should fit in a treat up here. Skye’s full of artists. Oh yes, we’ve got all kinds up here.’ He snorted.

  ‘I’m not really a writer,’ I said. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘Not a Maxwell nut, are you? We get lots of those here, Maxwell nuts, otter nuts . . .’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  I didn’t think of myself as a ‘nut’.

  ‘You’ve been to Sandaig, or “Camusfeàrna” as some of them call it, I suppose.’

  ‘I used to camp down there.’

  ‘I’ve never met any of them. Terry Nutkins and Jimmy Watt and the rest of them. A lot of the stuff in the Long Room came from Jimmy. I heard Terry’s got eight kids or something. Amazing.’

  Heads were bobbing about on the other side of the gate, faces peering anxiously over the wall.

  ‘At least we have the sun today,’ Pete called out. He opened the gate and five warmly dressed people trundled through it to stand by the rowan tree. Pete launched into a spiel about the Kyleakin Island Trust and then led us around the island, all the while regaling us with stories about Maxwell, about lighthouse-keeping, about Highland life; laughing his easy, see-sawing, guffawing, slightly nervous, cynical tic of a laugh. I brought up the rear of our little group, listening to Pete and taking mental notes, but mostly taking in the changes that had occurred since I had last visited the island four years before.

  The paths were no longer marble white, but grey, weed-ridden, mossy and thinly surfaced, much of the gravel having been washed away by the rain. The planks of wood used to edge the paths were submerged by thick clumps of vegetation, and rotten. The cobbled path between the lighthouse and the cottage was almost indiscernible beneath a blanket of moss and weeds; tentacles of prickly gorse spread along the few patches of grass that surrounded the house; the slipway was covered in seaweed and slime. I could see cracks in the cement on the lighthouse tower, and the wrought-iron gangway was rust-streaked and in need of repair. The exteriors of the cottage, bothy and lighthouse shed were a dirty white, the paintwork faded and damp-stained and flaking. Only the hide, a relatively new building, seemed in a good state. When Pete unlocked the door to the Long Room – a forty-foot room at the front of the house, which contained a number of Maxwell’s belongings and served as a museum celebrating his life and work – there was a smell of damp and something rotting. The whole island looked uncared for, Nature swiftly reclaiming her own. We didn’t see any otters.

  ‘It will be good to have someone living on the island again,’ Pete said as we waved the disappointed otter-botherers off at the gate. ‘There’s been no one living here since Gregory left. There were a couple of part-time wardens a couple of years ago but nobody since.’

  I’d visited in the spring of 2001. It had been a hot day. I bought a ticket at the Centre and was taken across to the island in a little motorboat. There was no visitor access from the bridge back then. A bespectacled man of about my age, with short blond hair, wearing a hi-vis puffer jacket and paint-spattered yellow sea boots, a pair of binoculars dangling around his neck, met me off the boat. Gregory showed me around: the remains of the boatshed, the lighthouse, Teko’s memorial, rockeries planted with aromatic shrubs and flowers (the Sensory and WI Gardens), the Long Room. We stood in the hide gazing out over
the Inner Sound, and Gregory told me the names of the islands we could see in the sun. Huge cumulous clouds were drifting over Raasay, dappling the hills with sunlight and shade. I was the only visitor that day.

  ‘You get used to beauty,’ Gregory said. ‘And the rain. You stop seeing it after a while.’

  He asked me what I knew about Gavin Maxwell.

  ‘A little,’ I said. More than you.

  Then he left me to wander about the island until the motorboat returned to take me back to Kyleakin, and I thought, You’ve got my job, Gregory. You’ve got my job and you’re living in my house.

  But thoughts and ideas flow through the mind and on in cascades, forever being submerged by the onslaught of more. I travelled away from the island that day and moved on to other things.

  ‘The start-up money ran out,’ Pete was saying. ‘When there was nothing left for proper salaries, the wardens skedaddled. We’re all volunteers now, except Susan.’

  The scent of honeysuckle hung in the air. I followed Pete into the bothy.

  ‘So, do you think you can do it? Help out with the tours? There’s a script Gregory wrote somewhere.’ Pete rooted around in a filing cabinet, handed me a pamphlet.

  ‘“Kyleakin Lighthouse Island: A Short History”. That should give you a good grounding.’ He pulled out a few pages of typescript from the filing cabinet. ‘This is the script for the tours. If you could start taking a few from next week it’d be a great help. They break up my day.’

  We meandered back up the path to his car.

  ‘Looks in worse condition than mine,’ I said.

  ‘I call it the Silver Dream Machine.’

  ‘But it isn’t silver.’