Island of Dreams

by Dan Boothby

  I packed up my things. There wasn’t much. I lost a game of chess with Marcus in my room, out of the rain, before he quietly shook my hand with both of his and rushed off to catch his bus back to Broadford. I spent a day saying my goodbyes to Pete, John, the trustees – strangers who had become my friends. I couldn’t trust myself to say too much or prolong these meetings, there was a tightness in my throat that made me sound funny and my eyes, betraying me, kept leaking. The look of one particular face, watching me through a rain-smeared window as I skulked away, haunts me still.

  Most places, as soon as I’ve arrived, I’m plotting my escape. A growing familiarity with somewhere, and with its people, leads to boredom and restlessness. There is a big, wide-open world out there and there are many paths to follow to see where they lead. Leaving is usually so easy for me.

  I have never felt so distressed about leaving a place and its people in my life.

  ‘I’ve been living up here for years but this is the first time I’ve been down to Sandaig,’ Sandy says as we pull up beside the gate.

  ‘Yeah, but you’re not interested, are you,’ I say as we get down from his van.

  ‘Not really,’ says Sandy. ‘Someone gave me the book once,’ and I wonder: Which one, Sandy! He wrote eleven. ‘She was a Maxwell fan. But I never got around to reading it.’

  He looks around, slams the driver’s-side door. ‘It’s on Ebb ’n Flow somewhere. I think so, anyway . . . though I’ve not seen it for a while. Maybe I gave it away.’

  I haven’t been down to Sandaig for months, not since my car conked out. You really need a car or a boat to get to Sandaig.

  ‘Otters, though,’ Sandy sniffs in the crisp damp air, ‘I’ve got a lot of time for otters. My dog likes them too. But they look . . . untrustworthy somehow. I wouldn’t want one as a pet.’

  We hop over the gate and tramp along the rutted and lorry-slurried track through the fir plantation. The sharp tang of pine spices the air. We pass piles of newly cut, sap-oozing logs. I’ve seen stacks of these logs on Kyle Quay, awaiting trans-shipment to Norway. It seems crazy, symptomatic of the madness of the modern world – shipping Norwegian Spruce to Norway, the twenty-first-century equivalent of carrying coals to Newcastle.

  The track forks. A cairn marks the footpath down to Sandaig. Sandy and I duck under fir trees that have fallen across the path, and splash through muddy puddles. The burn clamours in the ravine below us. We reach the lower level of the hillside where the plantation is still thick, the floor a carpet of dropped pine needles, and through a gap in the trees I can see the islands and the sea meadow below.

  ‘Isleornsay!’ Sandy says, and points to the lighthouse and the white houses a mile away across the Sound of Sleat. I can see the burn rushing silver, flowing through the avenue of alders to the sea. ‘The ring of bright water,’ I say.

  We walk on down, balance our way across the rope bridge and pad through wet grass to Edal’s cairn. All traces of the rowan tree, just like the house, are gone now. The nearby larch has grown tall and full.

  ‘Who puts all these shells and stones and flowers here?’

  ‘Fans.’

  ‘Why?’ Sandy says, amazed. ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘There’s always more for Edal than for Maxwell,’ I say and lead Sandy across the meadow to Maxwell’s grave.

  ‘Gavin Maxwell, born 15th July 1914, died 7th September 1969,’ Sandy reads. ‘He was born on Saint Swithin’s Day. So he was what . . . fifty-five when he died. I’m ol— . . . he was still young.’

  ‘Cancer,’ I say. ‘The primary was in his lungs but by the time it was diagnosed it was everywhere, his skull, his femur, his back . . .’

  He died as the charred remains of the house were being bulldozed into the dunes.

  ‘Grab life when you can, Dan,’ Sandy says. ‘I’ve known too many people who’ve said, “When I retire I’m going to . . .” or “Just a few more years doing this, just till we’re set up and then . . .” and then something like that comes and takes them away.’

  It is a still, dull mid-November day. I have visited Sandaig so many times over the years, in all weathers, and so often alone. Dara and I had been boys when we’d camped down here so long ago. Now I am going grey and I haven’t seen Dara in twenty years.

  ‘That’s Raef’s croft,’ I say, pointing.

  We walk over to it. ‘I tried to rent it once.’

  No one knows for sure what caused the inferno that gutted the house at Sandaig. Sparks from a dying fire? Faulty electrics? An incautiously dropped cigarette? No one knows.

  ‘Nice little place,’ Sandy says. ‘It looks knackered though. Like the estate want it to fall down.’

  ‘I think they do,’ I say. ‘I think they’re fed up with Maxwell fans coming down here traipsing all over their land.’

  The driving Highland rain is quickly demolishing the building. The guttering has collapsed and hangs over the shuttered doorway like a furrowed brow. Mould and algae have stained the once white walls a dirty grey and green. There are no longer wooden fish boxes stacked neatly under tarpaulin awaiting Raef’s return, no tap tied to the fence with its black plastic pipe leading back to the burn. The telegraph and electricity poles are still there, but the wires are disconnected and hang uselessly in the air. The meadow in front of the croft is a squelchy, boggy mess. The beaches are littered with plastic bottles, crisp packets, lengths of nylon rope and netting, plastic bags, food packaging of all kinds, old tyres; globally available crap. Where once almost everything was biodegradable nowadays almost nothing is.

  ‘The first few times I came here, there was an old barn behind that fence,’ I say. ‘Now you’d never know. It was only sixteen years after Maxwell’s death, that first time. It seemed a long time to me then, sixteen years, but now I know it was nothing. Sixteen years isn’t very long at all.’

  ‘Long enough to put lines on a face.’ Sandy leaves me to poke around in the roofless shed beside the croft. When he comes out he says: ‘This whole area has changed loads. My parents used to bring me and my brother up to the West Highlands every summer when we were kids. There were loads of tourists even back then, and caravanners clogging the roads. Not so many English living up here though, people tell me. Highland culture was still strong, it still . . . held together. It was a different place to what it has become.’

  ‘Better,’ I say.

  ‘No. Life was much harder. Everything took longer. It’s no better or worse up here than anywhere else you might end up. And as for being “remote”, an elderly Luisach was asked by an English reporter once what it felt like, living in such a remote place. “Remote?!” booms the Lewisman. “Remote from where?”’

  ‘I’d like to have lived up here back in the black-and-white days,’ I say, and Sandy laughs.

  ‘You’ve admitted defeat in these days of colour, when life here is so easy. If you can’t hack it now, how long would you have lasted back then?’

  He sniffs. ‘I spoke with your Jimmy Watt once.’

  He is an enigma, Sandy.

  ‘I had a load of Ballachulish slates I wanted to sell that had come off a house somewhere. I put an advert in the Free Press and Jimmy Watt phoned. He’s a bit of a ladykiller, I hear. Anyway, we haggled for a while but couldn’t agree on a price. I managed to get shot of them in the end to an English bloke on one of those renovation projects. And I was in the Glenelg Inn once with a mate who pointed out Terry Nutkins sitting in a corner with his wife. I’d been wondering what that bloke off Animal Magic was doing up here.’

  ‘Oh yeah, right,’ I say, ‘and I suppose you also had that Kathleen Raine in the back of your taxi once.’

  ‘Who? What? I’ve never driven a taxi.’

  ‘Kathleen Raine. She was a poet. She . . . oh never mind. It doesn’t matter any more.’

  ‘Oh. All right. Anyway, and I used to drink with Tex Geddes in the Broadford Hotel. We had some wild sessions in there when he was alive, I tell you. Hell of a character. He told me a few stories . . .
about your Maxwell.’

  I take Sandy on a tour of the rest of Sandaig. We walk along the burn and I show him the outcrop of rock with the grassy top and parapet where I used to pitch my tent out of the way of the cattle and the midges. I show him the remains of the old boat on the beach, the sand martin burrows in the cliffs by the mouth of the burn, and the rope swing beneath the natural arch in the cliffs along the shore. The tide is in and the flat sea pushes up against the land, cutting us off from the string of islands and their white seashell beaches and rabbit-cropped swards. The Northern Lighthouse Board has replaced the Lilliputian lighthouse (which now stands above the slipway of the Kylerhea–Glenelg Ferry) with an ugly, modern, boxy beacon. We see few birds, and no ravens. We come across some droppings, but they are of fox, not otter or wildcat. The Sound of Sleat is empty of boats and Sandaig is an empty, haunted stage. There is little life down here now. The players left a long time ago and will never return.

  Gavin Maxwell, were he alive today, would be over a hundred years old. Raef Payne and Richard Frere and Tex Geddes have passed on. Kathleen Raine died in 2003 at the age of ninety-five, run into by a reversing car on Paultons Square, where she had moved to a house near the one she had once shared with Maxwell. The older generation of Glenelg and the surrounding villages still retain memories of the odd, highly strung, spendthrift ‘otter man’, but they are hazy memories now, mired by the mists of time. Soon no one who knew Maxwell or the house and menagerie at Sandaig will remain.

  I show Sandy the waterfall. He yawns and says: ‘Rather a gloomy spot, though it must have been brighter when there weren’t all these blooming fir trees crowding out the light.’

  The weather begins to turn. Grey clouds are building and merging, darkening the air above us. We jump over the puddles that spread out under the gate by the croft and begin the steep walk up the Land Rover track.

  ‘I’ve never really understood your interest in Gavin Maxwell,’ Sandy says.

  I have never been completely sure myself, but by now I have worked it out and so I tell him.

  It wasn’t about the otters, although the keeping of wild animals as pets is something I share with Maxwell, part of my own unconventional family history; it was about something else.

  Literature can be a very intimate art form. The act of reading a book is a silent meeting of minds, and sometimes a bond – a very powerful but always one-sided bond – takes place. Such a meeting is filled with artifice and impossibility. As a teenager, I imagined I had met Gavin Maxwell in his books. I fell in love with the idea of the kind of life that he and the boys lived, and with the pictures he painted in my mind. I connected, and I was seduced. But what I connected with so strongly was a carefully constructed version of himself. Compelling, but also quite false. Because part of his genius was to create a semblance of honesty in his books, enchanting and involving the reader by telling us all about it. He made us feel like we were his intimates. It was all a mirage in the end, of course, just Art, but Gavin Maxwell introduced me to the Highlands and the Hebrides, and he showed me the power of the written word. And in my imaginings of Gavin Maxwell – who’d taught me things and taken me on adventures – I found the surrogate father that, all along, subconsciously, I’d been searching for.

  I was a shy, bookish, country-bred boy, living among others whose interests I did not share, and I possessed the credulousness and innocence of all country-bred children. And I am a dreamer. But dreams aren’t sustainable, and they’re never as good in reality as they are in your head. All my life I have been led on by writers whose words on a page I have fallen in love with. We think of books as tablets of stone, but all writing, even the autobiographical, is full of fiction: a fraudulent, transmuted reality; a distorted projection of truth. I got lost early on.

  At the top of the Land Rover track, by the parking place that looks down over the domain, over the croft and the islands, Sandy and I stop to catch our breaths.

  ‘They’re prisons,’ Sandy says, ‘places like that. Cut off from the road, the only useful access from the sea, no neighbours for miles around. They’re all right for the occasional retreat, to get away from the world, but to try and live in them full-time! A prison, like your island must have been for those lighthouse keepers and their families. And there’s something trophy-home-ish about them too, somewhere for your mates to come and see and then envy you for owning such a beautiful place. And they’re impractical, and expensive to run. Much like Gavin Maxwell was, I’d say – expensive to run and impractical.’

  Sandy starts off up the track but I hang back, looking down on Camusfeàrna, over the domain, over the gravestones and the deserted stage, its dramas all played out.

  The books were so full of incident, and life. Now there is nothing, just loneliness, an emptiness blown by the wind.

  I hear Sandy stop, walk back to where I am standing. He touches my arm.

  ‘Come on, Dan,’ he says. ‘Come away.’

  I turn away from Camusfeàrna, look at Sandy. He is contemplating the sky.

  ‘You know, Dan, it’s better not to have heroes. But if you have, don’t get too close. Because if you do, you’ll only find they’ve got feet of clay, just like the rest of us.

  ‘And,’ he says, ‘I think, God help us, yet again, it’s going to rain.’

  We set off along the track and I ask who Saint Swithin was and Sandy tells me about the saint and about other things as we press on through the pines up to the road and his van. Then we drive down the mountain to Glenelg and away home, whatever that is and wherever it turns out to be.

  A Clarification

  The real name of Kyleakin Lighthouse Island is Eilean Bàn. The trust that manages the island and the Bright Water Visitors’ Centre is called the Eilean Bàn Trust. However, Eilean Bàn is not the island’s original ‘given’ name, which is in fact Eilean nan Gillean. Due to a cartographer’s error way back in the mists of time (1872), the lighthouse island became misnamed. In Gaelic, eilean means ‘island’, bàn means ‘white’, and gillean means ‘boys’ or ‘youth’ (although gillean may be a corruption of gilean, which means ‘clefts’ or ‘gullies’). I have called the place I lived on and write about here Kyleakin Lighthouse Island, because I prefer that name and because it is what Gavin Maxwell called it.

  I have not always used people’s real names in Island of Dreams. I have omitted people who were there, and the timeframe of my sojourn on the island has been rearranged. This has been done less from a need to obscure than from the needs of the memoir form, and story.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks are due to Suzanne Arnold and past, present and future trustees of the Eilean Bàn Trust for letting me onto the island in the first place, and for continuing to champion the life and work of Gavin Maxwell.

  Book- and writing-business thanks to: Kris Doyle (for opening the door and much else besides), Sara Lloyd (for crucial intel.), Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson (for a fine eye and dash), Iain Finlayson, Peter Benson, Rupert Heath, Gillian MacKenzie & Niall Griffiths (supportive insiders), Will Atkins (for critiquing the text), Philippa McEwan (in advance), Sarah Drummond (Illustrator), Stuart Wilson (for the cover design), Hemesh Alles (Map maker), Claire Gatzen, Dina Obolsky, Mindy Chillery; Jim Taylor (for writerly missives and the first review), Peter Urpeth & the anonymous work-in-progress reader at Hi-Arts, the Academi Critical Service for Writers, Sam Hawkins, Sara Hunt & Craig Hillsley, and Bob Davidson & Moira Forsyth.

  Thank you, Judy Scott (for affordable lodgings), Sally Baker, Awen Hamilton, Nia Wyn Roberts, Ceri Shore & Ty Newydd (for the work and the rooms), Bernie, Russ & Stefan (for percipience in Rishikesh many moons ago), and Tina (for demanding a walk at four every day).

  Et enfin, thank you, Ali Roberts (my lovely).

  I am grateful to the following for permission to include copyright material:

  Jimmy Watt, the Marsh Agency, and Jane Frere.

  The photograph of Gavin Maxwell and Edal here, and of Camusfeàrna here, are reproduced by kind permi
ssion of Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Ltd.

  Select Bibliography

  BOOKS

  MAXWELL, GAVIN, Harpoon at a Venture, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952.

  ——, God Protect Me from My Friends, Longmans, 1956.

  ——, A Reed Shaken by the Wind, Longmans, 1957.

  ——, The Ten Pains of Death, Longmans, 1959.

  ——, Ring of Bright Water, Longmans, 1960.

  ——, The Otters’ Tale, Longmans, 1962.

  ——, The Rocks Remain, Longmans, 1963.

  ——, The House of Elrig, Longmans, 1965.

  ——, Lords of the Atlas, Longmans, 1966.

  ——, Seals of the World, Constable, 1967.

  ——, Raven Seek Thy Brother, Longmans, 1968.

  ARMEN, JEAN-CLAUDE, Gazelle-Boy, The Bodley Head, 1974.

  BATHURST, BELLA, The Lighthouse Stevensons, HarperCollins, 1999.

  BERNARD, PHILIPPA, No End to Snowdrops: A Biography of Kathleen Raine, Shepheard-Walwyn Ltd, 2009.

  BOTTING, DOUGLAS, Gavin Maxwell: A Life, HarperCollins, 1993.

  BROWN, HAMISH, Hamish’s Mountain Walk, Paladin, 1986.

  COCKER, MARK, Loneliness and Time: British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century, Secker & Warburg, 1992.

  COOMBS, FRANKLIN, The Crows, Batsford, 1978.

  FITZGERALD O’CONNOR, PATRICK, Shark-O!, Secker & Warburg, 1953.

  FRASER DARLING, FRANK, Island Years, G. Bell & Sons, 1940.

  FRASER DARLING, FRANK & BOYD, J. MORTON, The Highlands and Islands, Fontana, 1972.