by Dan Boothby
On the wall of the room where I was to sleep was a ‘Spy’ cartoon of Maxwell’s grandfather, Sir Herbert Maxwell. I’d seen it in a photograph of the Sandaig sitting room in Raven Seek Thy Brother.
‘A mock-up,’ Raef said. ‘The BBC had it made for a documentary they did about Gavin. All that Latin you see there beside the portrait – made-up gibberish. The original, you see, was destroyed in the Sandaig fire.’
Almost nothing had been saved from the flames: the manuscript of Raven Seek Thy Brother – the book Maxwell was working on, a couple of guns and Teko, little else.
Maxwell and Andrew Scot – the last-but-one otter boy – spent the next few months living in Raef’s croft, before moving to the cottage on Kyleakin Lighthouse Island. The cause of the fire was never determined. And owing to a lapsed policy nothing was insured.
‘It was a tragedy,’ Raef said at dinner that evening, ‘and I think it destroyed Gavin. He lost everything. When something like that happens, when everything you own is so violently wrested away from you, it takes a great deal of strength to begin again. And by then Gavin was sick, although none of us knew it.’
At dinner, Raef and I were joined by a man who lived in an annexe of the house. After dinner the man disappeared. Raef lit a fire in the sitting room and we drank wine and talked about India, a country, Raef told me, that Gavin had always planned to visit.
‘He had so many plans,’ I remember Raef sighing, ‘so many schemes, but never any money. He was always short.’
Raef fetched a photograph album, but my hopes of being shown pictures of Maxwell and the boys at Sandaig quickly faded when I was shown holiday snaps of Raef and a friend ambling in the avenues of Tangier, a trip to China, scenes from the Djemaa el-Fnaa in Marrakesh.
‘It’s a shame you never met Gavin,’ Raef said at one point. ‘He’d have liked you.’
We finished the bottle of wine and I went to my room. On closing the door I wondered for a moment if I ought to lodge a chair under the doorknob. But Raef was no Uncle Monty.
In the morning, after breakfast, Raef showed me a studio that Jimmy Watt had converted for him from the stable block.
‘Did Jimmy become a builder then?’ I asked.
‘More of a renovator, really.’ Jimmy was like a younger brother to Raef, and it was Jimmy who looked after the croft at Sandaig, kept it spruce and stocked with fish boxes for firewood.
‘Jimmy rather prefers to remain in the background. He was never comfortable with Gavin putting him in his books.’
Raef and Jimmy Watt were still directors of the company that had been set up to manage Maxwell’s affairs. They were his literary executors and looked after his interests, and they were protective of his reputation.
‘Gavin liked to pretend he was a recluse,’ Raef said, ‘but he craved company. He liked to talk – he was a brilliant conversationalist. He was no good when left for too long on his own.’
As I was preparing to leave, signing the visitors’ book, visualizing the long road-trip ahead, Raef said to me, ‘I expect you’d like to write Gavin’s biography, wouldn’t you?’
I squirmed. ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘One day.’
‘Writers are like magpies. Incurable thieves.’
He drove me to the outskirts of the village and dropped me off by the main road, where I stood a better chance of hitching a lift.
‘We could meet at Sandaig,’ Raef suggested, ‘next year. You could use the croft to cook in when the weather turns bad. I go in April because there are hardly any midges or visitors then. I like to be alone there and remember how it was in the early days, when Gavin and the boys and the otters were there. You’d be good company.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said.
But we never did meet down at Sandaig. The lines of our lives never converged again. Raef Payne died in 2001. I have his obituary here beside me as I write.
I stood by the roadside for a quarter of an hour that day. A decommissioned, disintegrating ambulance slowed to a stop beside me. Its driver was a science undergraduate travelling back to university. He had twists of cream lavatory paper stuffed up his nostrils.
‘Got uh gold,’ he intoned when I enquired, ‘Stops ze vlow.’
November. Copper-coloured pine needles lined the glistening, flooded winter roads. Hotel and guesthouse staff were laid off till Easter, restaurant- and cafe-owners shut up shop. The pavements and beaches lacked the strolling couples of the summer months; I missed the sound of voices drifting across water.
The seals were gone now, gone to the breeding grounds, but eider ducks – big, colourful sea ducks – ooh-oohing, came to paddle and drift around the island, and on windless days the silence would be broken by splashings as they ran heavily along the surface of the sea, wings flapping wildly to get airborne. On these days of glass-calm seas, chaffinches and dunnocks and robins emerged from their hiding places to preen and feed and sing. Flocks of redwing on their way south landed to strip the island’s rowan trees of berries, then flew on. A ménage à trois of red-breasted mergansers took up residence in East Bay, and long-legged curlews and redshanks visited the shoreline. Determined turnstones scuttled and prodded the seaweed. Staggered Vs of geese made their hauntingly voiced way over the island. I’d hear their honking and stand in the doorway and look up and high, high, overhead . . . the hounds of heaven, back from their summer feeding grounds in the Arctic, heading south-east down the loch.
Mice, drawn to the warmth of the cottage, scritch-scratched an increasingly well-worn path up the plasterboard walls to the roof space. They stripped foam lagging from water pipes to make nests. At night in bed I could hear them clomping about. Sometimes they came into my room. They took the poison I left for them, but they didn’t die. I set mousetraps and removed the dead.
The winds blew and keened and howled and wooed down the chimneys. The winds made window panes shudder and road signs clatter and fall. A dash of colour – tiny yellow flowers – spilled out of the gorse that grew on the bank by the bridge, and stayed. By four o’clock in the afternoon it was dark. I ordered up quantities of books from the library in Kyle and lay on my sofa and read. Through the half-windowed door I could see the warm orange glow of houselights across the water where, during the day, I might watch long green waves surf past the island, blown down the loch by a force-9 come in from the west. And on windless nights, sometimes, I’d hear the walls of the house flake and fall behind the sheets of plasterboard that lined them.
On fine days I went hiking in the Cuillins and explored the north and the east. Nearby community centres and village halls hosted ceilidhs and put on plays; travelling shows and exhibitions visited. The West Ross Field Club, the Scottish Wildlife Trust and the Kyleakin Lighthouse Island Trust organized monthly lectures, where slides were shown and a talk given to an intimate audience of mainly elderly incomers. There were talks on ‘Traditional Medicine’, ‘The Birds of Skye’, ‘Our Viking Heritage’, ‘Dolphins, Porpoises and other Cetaceans of the Hebrides’, ‘Butterflies and Moths’, ‘Toadstools’, ‘Wildlife Photography’, ‘Deer’, ‘The West Highland Seashore’, ‘Remarkable Trees’ . . . After, we loudly applauded. Then the scraping of chairs on lino would segue into the clinking of cups on saucers and the murmur of a little light networking. Always the same faces: a preponderance of incomers, a smattering of locals, and me – always the youngest there, by about twenty years.
Over the summer and autumn I’d remained remote, and had been a rare visitor to the pubs in the villages. I shared the paranoia that many English feel when they move to Celtic lands. We know we’re not really wanted. The English have historical ‘previous’: think of the Highland Clearances or the Welsh Not,4 think absentee landlords and Famine. The English have been oppressors and usurpers, loud, crass and bullying; an occupying, colonial force. English imperialism and heavy-handedness, the injustices of the past, still cause Celtic eyes to narrow, mouths to move, and men to bare their teeth. The Scots, the Welsh and the Irish don’t forget, unlike us English, who’ve moved on.
On nightly meanders around the island before bed I’d look west, where across miles of black water, behind the lump of the Isle of Raasay, the amber street lights of the only sizeable town within sixty miles – Portree – licked the sky like a flame. By Kyle of Lochalsh, the Black Isle beacons blinked black–white and the harbour lights pulsed red–green. The lights on the bridge twinkled and flashed, silently and continuously, reflected in the waters of Lighthouse Bay, projected onto the phallic white screen of the lighthouse, smeared when I blinked through a gauze of fine slanting rain.
One night,
14 November 2005
Back from a walk around the island. The night is dry and cold after three days of continuous heavy rain. The strong winds have blown the storm clouds north. Now there is no wind. A clear, cloudless night, the stars bright above me in the undiluted darkness. A full moon paints the paths bright white. Just seen a barn owl ghost under the bridge and alight on a girder to pluck at something in its talons. Hardly a sound but the soft lapping of the loch on the shore, the occasional thrum of a ship or a navy tug passing the island under the bridge and away out to sea. I stand outside the door of my room on this lonely knocked-about almost-isle, drinking down a view I know I will never possess again.
I would go to bed and be woken by a fierce drumming of rain on the Velux window above my bed.
During the long winter evenings, when there were no guests staying, I’d open all the interior doors of the cottage and get a fire blazing in the Long Room grate. With Sandy’s help I’d removed the cap on the chimney above the fireplace. Marcus and I had collected a lot of driftwood on our beach-cleaning circumnavigations, and there was always more along the shoreline after gales and spring tides. I’d sit long on Maxwell’s old sofa in the Long Room, occasionally in the company of Sandy, but mostly alone, feeding logs into the fire and watching shadows play across the curtains and walls, across Raef Payne’s portrait of his friend, across Maxwell’s furniture and pictures, his wall-hangings and desk; across his stuff. I’d grow wistful and wonder about the author of those books on the shelf beside me, reflect on the lighthouse keepers and the other ghosts who’d sat by a fire in that room before me. The fire drew well in the grate, the driftwood crackled and snapped, warming the house and drawing damp from the walls. But those fireside cogitations on Maxwell and his world made no sense, not really.
I was attempting to psychoanalyse a dead man who lived during a time I had never known. It is a rare thing to be able to fathom one’s own motives; attempting to understand those of a long-dead stranger is madness. The sum of a person can never be known fully by another. Everyone hides wounds under skin-coloured patches and a life isn’t linear but a series of blind corners – L-shaped. We never know what’s coming. Think of that stag. Think back to being ten, or twenty-three or fifty, and what came after. You’ve travelled so far to where you are now from where you were then. How did you come to be holding these words of mine in your hands, meet the people you now know, do the job that you do? Was there, is there, really any plan?
I’d read about the ghosts that are said to haunt the island. Maxwell never personally experienced ghostly activity there, but Richard Frere, who lived on the island while converting the lighthouse keepers’ cottages for Maxwell, wrote a lot about the phenomenon he called ‘the time-locked army’. Joyce, the daughter of the last lighthouse keeper and today the mother of a grown-up daughter, has heard many stories about the island’s ghosts. Every lighthouse keeper who ever lived on the island had stories to tell: of furtive whisperings in an unknown tongue, the sound of steel being dragged across stone, apparitions, presences.
I’d meet strangers who’d say with a glint in their eye, ‘Oh! You’re living out there, are you? You do know the island’s haunted?’ They’d watch me closely, waiting for a flicker of fear. I didn’t tell guests in the cottage about the rumours of ghosts but several experienced strange happenings: a shadowy figure passing along the corridor at the back of the cottage, a TV in an empty room switching itself on, the smell of cigarette-smoke in a bedroom when no one in the house smoked, a wraithlike presence by the Long Room fireplace, Gaelic mutterings in the lighthouse. A conservator who came to stay was awoken one night by the Ptsszz sound you hear when someone cracks the cap off a bottle of beer, the smacking of lips, gulping sounds and a long, thirst-quenched ‘Aahhhh!’ The conservator was alone in the house that night; I was away. When I returned to the island he rushed up to ask what I thought. He was truly spooked.
I don’t believe in ghosts any more. I’d like to but I can’t. Walking back one night from a pub in Kyleakin I noticed a light shining in the window of the Long Room. I knew for sure I’d switched off all the lights before leaving the cottage. I may have been tipsy, but I wasn’t drunk. Maxwell had reported stories of similar unexpected lights being seen around the island and house. I looked for an explanation and found it easily enough. That ghostly light was the reflection of a streetlight on the Kyleakin road, cast across the water to the window of the house.
I heard strange sounds all the time on the island, but like the light in the window they were explicable: bramble tendrils clawed each other and scratched against rock and tap-tapped on window panes, mice moved about in the roof; the creaking I’d hear on hot days wasn’t the approach of an arthritic-kneed ancient, but the black plastic guttering expanding in the heat of the sun. And it was the wind, not the ghostly mutterings of the Gael and the Viking undead, that whispered and hissed as it swept through dried stalks of bracken.
I have another theory about the island’s ghostly mutterings. Sound travels. At the back of the house there’s a curved buttress of rock, which resembles a little those concrete dishes – ‘sound mirrors’ – that in the 1930s were erected along the coast of Britain as early warning devices. Before the advent of radar, these acoustic ‘listening ears’ were very good at capturing the drone of approaching aeroplanes.
The windows of the bedrooms and bathroom of the cottage face this buttress. My theory is that on still days the voices and vehicles of Kyle and Kyleakin carry over the water and reverberate off the buttress to set up the whispered murmurings of the time-locked army.
Or perhaps it is more esoteric than that. I’ve come across the website of the artist Tom Newton, who writes:
Hendersen’s Bridge, built in the nineteenth century from the stone remains of croft dwellings and meeting houses on the Hebridean island of Raasay, has for generations been reputed to emit the sounds of human voices and dogs barking: a ghostly bridge. Science has proved, however, that the high iron-ore content in the stones of the bridge structure has, by way of a natural magnetic recording, trapped these sounds within, with no sense of time. When atmospheric conditions are favourable, these sounds are released, causing this strange phenomenon to occur.
As for the apparitions – Joyce, the last lighthouse keeper’s daughter, likes to blame the fumes from the Brasso with which the keepers polished the rails and fittings of the lighthouse. Failing eyesight unchecked by spectacles? Mental fatigue from weeks of watch-keeping? Too much whisky?
A Principal lighthouse keeper, William Mowatt, died on the island in February 1893. The Northern Lighthouse Board Register does not record whether William fell from the tower or drowned while out in a boat collecting stores or fishing, or from natural causes. William is the only person to have died on the island since the first lighthouse keeper stepped ashore in 1855. Before that time, we’ll never know . . .
The stories filter down, the ghostly goings-on go on.
The oil baron John D. Rockefeller, at one time the richest man in the world, once expounded on the secret of success. It is simple, he stated. Get up
early, work late – and strike oil. I wasn’t doing any of these things.
Gavin Maxwell struck oil, metaphorically speaking, in 1960 with Ring of Bright Water, and it took the writing of four books and many early mornings and late nights to get him there.
After moving to London in 1949, Maxwell mixed with fellow aristocrats, ex-SOE colleagues and, increasingly, denizens of the bohemian half-light of post-war literary London. Maxwell’s friend from Stowe days, Anthony Dickins, introduced him to Meary James Thurairajah Tambimuttu – ‘Tambi’, a poetry publisher and impresario and habitué of the pubs and between-hours drinking clubs around Soho and Fitzrovia. Tambi and Dickins had founded a magazine, Poetry London, before the War, which later morphed into a publishing house, Editions Poetry London. Tambi had published Kathleen Raine’s first two collections of poetry and he viewed Raine as one of his stars. He collected talent, lived in a state of chaos and great enthusiasms, and was an astute judge of literary ability. (The propensity to sport a beret, smoke Gauloises and lounge louche in the saloon bar of the Poets’ Pub is one thing, creative imagination and a workmanlike attitude quite another. And I should know, I’ve been in that pub striking poses for years.)
On hearing that Maxwell was trying to make a go of it as a portraitist, Tambi encouraged him to paint a series of portraits of literary figures of the day and hold an exhibition to drum up future commissions. To this end he took Maxwell round to meet Kathleen Raine at her house in Chelsea.
Raine was well known and respected in the London literary circle. She was forty-one years old, twice married, with two children at boarding school. Maxwell was thirty-five, not much interested in women, coming out of a depression caused by the collapse of both the shark-fishing venture and a relationship, and adrift. Later Raine was to write in her autobiography, The Lion’s Mouth: ‘It was as if he sought me out, he who seemed to need me; for at that time I was strong, he was weak; I was happy, he wretched; my life had achieved some sort of stability, his was in ruins.’