The Dun Cow Rib

by John Lister-Kaye

  That day in the library a sixth former came in to return Maxwell’s book. But before I could sign it in for him another boy snatched it from me. ‘I’ve been waiting for that.’ In and out again, that fast. A third boy tried to claim that he had been waiting longer. A spat erupted in what was supposed to be the studious silence of the library. Blimey! I thought. Perhaps I’d better read this book. No chance. The list of others waiting was as long as a yardstick. I went to the master in charge of the library to ask if we could order another two hardback copies. As soon as they arrived, I grabbed one.

  From the opening sentence on the first page I could see why it was in such demand. ‘I sit in a pitch-pine panelled kitchen-living room, with an otter asleep upon its back among the cushions on the sofa, forepaws in the air, and with the expression of tightly shut concentration that very small babies wear in sleep.’ An OTTER! I only knew otters from the snarling masks on their shields and their mounted pads and poles adorning the Manor House walls – hunted otters. I had seen otters’ silver-capped webbed pads worn as badges on otter hunters’ jackets. By the age of twelve, I had attended meets of the Culmstock and the Hawkstone Otterhounds, run the riverbanks in feverish excitement with the dozens of other country followers, watched the horn-blowing, staff-carrying huntsman in blue livery plunge into the icy stream with his hounds. I’d been there at the kill.

  Throughout my childhood the English field-sports tradition, whether hunting, shooting or fishing, was never far away, an unavoidable cultural omnipresence, a constant theme permeating throughout leisure, language, social acceptability, literature, art, men and women’s dress, jewellery and even interior decoration. The only otters of my acquaintance were revered for sport and hunted for pleasure. Dead otters. This one, Maxwell’s Mijbil, brought back as a cub from the Tigris marshes, was not only alive but asleep on a sofa – on a SOFA. And, in common with just about everyone else from a rural background, by the age of fourteen I had read Henry Williamson’s poignantly lyrical Tarka the Otter (1927) – another hunted otter, an otter gripped in the jaws of that grizzled old hound Deadlock, both drowning together in a gripping finale. It had never pierced my blinkered teenage imagination that an otter might be anything other than sporting quarry, certainly never crossed my mind that an otter might also be a pet.

  Ring – as he always referred to it – was not Maxwell’s first book, it was his fifth. While his previous books had been well received and moderately successful in general non-fiction terms, they had not been global or even national bestsellers. Until the publication of Ring, he was a well-respected travel writer, but not widely read. He can never have guessed that Ring would catapult him into preeminence, make him a household name and bring with it the unwelcome exposure to personal scrutiny he would come to resent so deeply. His literary agent, Peter Janson-Smith, once told me that Gavin had confided in him that he regretted having revealed so much of his inner self in the book. ‘I knew . . . that Mij meant more to me than most human beings of my acquaintance, that I should miss his physical presence more than theirs, and I was not ashamed of it.’

  In his friend and eventual biographer Douglas Botting’s words, Gavin’s upbringing of ‘no father, and a suffocatingly adoring mother in whose bed he slept until he was eight’ had made him ‘a shy, fastidious, romantic and guilt-ridden young man’ whose confused sexuality ‘was virtually decided for him by the circumstances of his early childhood’ and had rendered him incapable of forging a fulfilling relationship with another human being.

  The world was very different in Maxwell’s day. Gay rights did not exist and homosexuality would remain a criminal offence in the UK until after his death, and condemned by the church for much longer. A constant succession of animals, wild and tame, had formed a reassuring bulwark of security throughout his childhood. Hardly surprising that he would pour his emotional self into such an appealingly responsive animal as Mij, or that he would come to feel so keenly the outside world’s intrusive scrutiny of that relationship, at the same time as knowing that he had been the unwitting author of his own exposure. Douglas Botting revealed to me that Gavin ‘was never equipped to cope with himself, let alone with the unwelcome celebrity and fame dumped on him by Ring’. Fame weighed heavily. ‘Oh Gawd!’ Gavin would say, not always in jest. ‘When’s it all going to end?’

  I would be as captivated by the book as everyone else and immediately fell under his beguiling spell. Not just about otters. Ever since those wide-eyed days of reading Charles St John and John Colquhoun I had harboured images of the Highlands of Scotland as a frontier of wildness that I wasn’t at all sure still existed. Suddenly here was proof. Of the many differing enticements contained within Ring, and one that immediately fired my imagination, was his account of rescuing a wildcat kitten from the sea and keeping it in his Camusfeàrna bedroom until it could be shipped south to a zoo.

  St John and Colquhoun had made me dream of seeing a Scottish wildcat, a species so conspicuously absent from my pastoral English boyhood. Colquhoun’s words had branded themselves into my consciousness: ‘When a schoolboy I remember how often the hen-roosts were plundered by . . . wild-cats, which nightly crept forth . . . and the superstitious awe with which I listened in the calm twilight of summer to the cry of the tiger-cat to its fellow.’ I was a schoolboy and I longed to hear that too.

  Confirmation in Ring’s pages that such a fabled creature still existed in the 1960s, eighty years after Colquhoun, and was apparently common on Maxwell’s remote stretch of the west coast made me all the more determined to seek it out for myself. Early in the book, in a passage about the red deer stags that used to winter close to the Camusfeàrna house, in simple but electrifying prose he nonchalantly drops in that wildcats are there too: ‘I would wake to see from the window a frieze of their antlers etching the near skyline, and they were in some way important to me, as were the big footprints of the wildcats in the soft sand at the burn’s edge, the harsh cry of the ravens, and the round, shiny seals’ heads in the bay below the house. These creatures were my neighbours.’

  I wanted to see those big footprints for myself. I needed to hear Colquhoun’s ‘cry of the tiger-cat to its fellow in the calm twilight of summer’. And what did Maxwell mean, ‘they were in some way important to me’? I pondered that line over and over again. Without understanding why, they were strangely important to me too.

  At fifteen I felt that I was standing at the edge of awareness, not just an emergent pre-pubescent self-awareness but that something far bigger was unfolding, something urgent and personal and, yes, important – too important to ignore. If there was a revelation in that one sentence, it wasn’t the stags or the ravens, the wildcat footprints or the shiny seals’ heads, alluring though they all were to a budding naturalist.No, it was that he was able to feel their importance. At that moment in my impressionable teenage existence I also wanted to be a neighbour to those creatures. For the first time in my life, I knew with a steely grip of certainty that discovering those things for myself was what I wanted almost more than anything else. It would remain a pipe dream for many years, but there was time, plenty of time. Eventually I would get there.

  * * *

  I’ve always been wary of destiny. As an appealing notion, even as a subjective rationalisation of past events, I can grant it credence, but not the other way around. To me destiny exists after the fact, not some fancifully orchestrated collision of circumstances brought about by metaphysical forces. I’m too pragmatic for that – a hammer and nails man. So it wasn’t with any sense of destiny that I would meet and forge a brief but life-changing friendship with Gavin Maxwell – but it was perhaps serendipitous.

  It would be many years before I visited his Highland home, properly called Sandaig, and by then I would be an adult and he would be a famous author and a household name.

  By any measure Maxwell’s childhood had been obscure and intentionally esoteric. His paternal grandfather was Sir Herbert Maxwell of Monreith, a Lowland Scottish grandee of ancient lineage.
He was the Grand Old Man of Galloway, a seventeenth-century landed aristocrat, sometime Secretary of State for Scotland, a Lord of the Treasury, a painter, archaeologist, historian, naturalist, celebrated horticulturalist and prolific writer on country affairs. The aura of his presence dominated Gavin’s childhood as an unassailably formidable model of the Anglo-Scottish Ascendency. As Gavin would later write: ‘he departed this life as a Knight of the Thistle, Privy Councillor, Fellow of the Royal Society and Lord Lieutenant of the County of Wigtownshire’.

  Gavin’s heritage was hugely important to him, not just defining who he was but also dictating what sort of a person he would turn out to be. The Maxwells had been at Monreith on the Wigtown coast since 1482, ruling lairds over the ancient royal Barony of Monreith granted by the Queen Anne charter of 1705. His father, Colonel Aymer Maxwell, was Sir Herbert’s eldest son, heir to both the baronetcy and the family estates. In 1909 he had married Lady Mary Percy, the daughter of the 5th Duke of Northumberland and a celebrated society beauty. The Northumberland seats were the great medieval fortress of Alnwick Castle, surrounded by its vast estates, and Syon Park in London, as well as several other extravagant country and town houses up and down the nation, an aristocratic elite ‘who held themselves in more than royal state and seclusion, moving with a medieval retinue of servants between their various castles and palaces’ – another formidable family heritage, and one that would have a profound and lasting effect on all four children of the Maxwell marriage.

  Together Gavin’s parents designed and built the solid and bleakly romantic House of Elrig on the wild scrubland edge of the Galloway moors adjoining the Monreith estate, a country house and a setting ideally suited to an Emily Bronté or a Dickens novel. It was a mansion that matched the austere windswept quality of the surrounding landscape and the family tragedy that would almost immediately engulf it, changing everything. In October 1914, only three months into the Great War, Colonel Aymer Maxwell was killed in an artillery barrage at Antwerp, leaving Lady Mary with three children under four and Gavin, the final gift from her husband, barely three months old.

  Recovering from this shattering blow, Lady Mary retreated to Elrig and, to all visible intents, shut herself off from the outside world, effectively abandoning her femininity, striding about the moors dressed in tweeds, brogues and thick hose, pursuing the qualifying sports of the landed, principally shooting and fishing. To compound this reclusive and obscure lifestyle, she filled the house with a procession of kind and generous but comically eccentric Percy maiden aunts. The obscurity of this upbringing, blended with the inherent desolation of the landscape, was almost certainly responsible for Gavin’s consequential personality: ‘an incurable romantic with more than a hint of melancholy’. In his autobiography of childhood, The House of Elrig (1965), Gavin describes the moorland view of heather and bracken from the windows of the house as ‘the only landscape in which I ever felt completely at home’.

  It was one of these aunts, Lady Muriel Percy, whose lifelong preoccupation with nature and exhaustive researches into the aquatic life of ponds and rock pools was to give the young Gavin such a profound grounding in natural history. She converted his father’s unused gunroom into a nature laboratory full of aquaria. Frogs, tadpoles and gravel-shrouded caddis fly larvae mingled with sinister-looking dragonfly nymphs and the ferociously mandibled larvae of great diving beetles. Glass vivaria imprisoned slit-eyed toads, slow worms and lizards, while glazed cabinets displayed the various food plants of hatching butterfly eggs, caterpillars and pupae, eventually revealing the mysteries of complete metamorphosis and the slow, delicate wing-inflation of the exquisitely patterned imagoes of peacock, small tortoiseshell and red admirals. Rock-pooling forays to the nearby coast revealed the secrets of velvet swimming crabs, shrimps, tentacled sea anemones, little darting fish such as fin-waving blennies and rock gobies, tail-flicking shrimps and the occasional elongated pipefish.

  But it was to the woods and fields, the heather moors and scrublands, and the dunes and low cliffs of the coast that for the first ten years of his life and for many school holidays thereafter Gavin ran with his butterfly net and his predatory eye for nests. His birds’ eggs collection began in the nine acres around the house with meadow pipits, jackdaws, blackbirds and hedge sparrows and quickly blossomed into more adventurous expeditions to the nests of kestrels, curlew, lapwing, oystercatchers, black-headed gulls, herons, and the eider ducks he found nesting among the wrack and tangle of the beach’s tideline. Almost by default, and certainly by undirected inclination, Gavin was training himself to be a highly competent field naturalist. He would write: ‘I suppose I knew a lot about butterflies and moths. I . . . had collected all the species that were common at Elrig . . . I saw them in all their glory with the undimmed and finely focused eye of a six-year-old.’

  Even today, a hundred years after it was built, Elrig stands stark and alone in its remote and unpopulated corner of rural Galloway. To Gavin and his siblings it was their ‘Island Valley of Avalon’. It was where, in wholly unfettered freedom, they could explore the heather moors, the sweetly scented bog-myrtle flushes, the boomerang wind-shy woodlands and the sun yellow gorse- and broom-flowered scrublands of their childhood home. It was an altogether rarified existence, otherworldly, almost entirely cut off, both from people – except the deferential, liveried servants of the Elrig household – and, most significantly, from broader society’s distantly fizzing reality.

  Years later Gavin would tell me that virtually every night of his life, in those drowsy, half-sleep imaginings, he would find himself drifting back to Elrig and the moors, to the sound of the curlew’s bubbling call, the drumming snipe, to bog myrtle’s heady perfume and the rooks racketing in the long line of Scots pines below the house. He was only too well aware that this idyllic upbringing had been an unguarded preparation for a life in the real world. His mother encouraged his many pets – tawny owlets, a heron called Andrew, jackdaws, hedgehogs, woodpigeon squabs, among various others – and often their brief lives ended in tragedy, but ‘through these extinctions we learned a little sympathy, a little understanding and a little compassion – things that could be . . . extended to other human beings in later life’. But the oversight the blinkered Lady Mary made was to comprehend that her children had known and cherished these animals and pets to the total exclusion of ordinary human beings in a crowded world, an exclusion that would shape the personalities and lives of all four of them, but particularly Gavin, and from which he would never fully escape.

  As a boy growing up I was entirely unaware that a recent social connection to Gavin and his oldest brother, Sir Aymer, existed within my own family. When I went to Allhallows neither my parents nor I had ever heard of him until Ring was published in 1960. But years later Gavin would tell me that shooting partridges at Denby Grange, our family’s Yorkshire seat, was an important part of his upbringing and that the Rabelaisian house parties thrown by our bachelor cousin Sir Kenelm had been ‘huge fun’.

  I didn’t get access to Sir Kenelm’s game books until some years after his death in 1962 and I’m not sure that my father knew of the Maxwell connection either. Even if he had he wouldn’t have thought it remarkable or even worthy of mention. In those days between the wars, just as in the social milieu of his time, my grandfather had been invited to shoot on many family estates around the country, so, as grandchildren of the Duke of Northumberland, the Maxwell boys would have enjoyed the advantage of their much grander aristocratic heritage and the connections and social acceptability that inevitably preceded them. What it would mean to Gavin when eventually our paths did cross was that he would have immediately recognised my family name and would probably have turned to a reference book to check out my relationship to Sir Kenelm – whose mother was Lady Beatrice Pelham-Clinton, daughter of the Duke of Newcastle – a social parallel with which he would have immediately identified – in one of the several ‘snobs’ bibles’ where Britain’s ancient and noble families proudly logged their lineage and
their achievements. As he revealed in Ring, describing himself in adolescence as ‘an earnest member of the Celtic fringe, avid for tartan and twilight’, and ‘an arrant snob’, Gavin remained acutely conscious of his family heritage throughout his life. ‘To me the West Highlands were composed of deer forests and hereditary chieftains, and the sheep, the hikers and the Forestry Commission were regrettable interlopers upon the romantic life of the indigenous aristocracy.’ In an idle conversation years later he observed to me, ‘Dukes make a huge difference.’ While that may have been true for him as a grandson of the Northumberland dynasty, what Lady Mary had failed to prepare him for was that as the youngest Maxwell son he would inherit no houses or estates and comparatively little money. Like many younger sons of the landed, Gavin grew up wholly unequipped for a career, even for earning his own living, or any semblance of a ‘normal’ life.

  That obscure upbringing had produced a shy, inept, reclusive man disinclined to make friends outside the secure ramparts of his own class, further complicated by his confused sexuality, by his contorted view of women, his many artistic talents and his restlessly creative intellect. As a result, his closest friends, those with whom he felt most at ease, tended to be his male, aristocratic and landed sporting contemporaries. While the social connection to my family would and should not have mattered in any natural history context, I see now that it almost certainly did.

  * * *

  Setting otters aside, what strikes me now is that Ring of Bright Water is primarily the story of Gavin’s escape from his complicated upbringing into the most extreme wildness Britain had to offer, brought unforgettably to life by his lyrical descriptive prose. The unidentified parallel that possibly enabled me to forge an immediate friendship with Gavin, thirty-two years older than me, when we finally met, was that from an early age I had also escaped into nature from the complications of my own family situation.