The Dun Cow Rib

by John Lister-Kaye

  That meeting would happen by accident, brought about by one of his Camusfeàrna otter keepers, the boisterous and ebullient animal-obsessed fourteen-year-old London lad Terry Nutkins, whom Gavin had adopted as legal ward in 1960. A year later Terry had lost the greater part of two fingers on his left hand and half of one on his right to a savage attack by Edal, Gavin’s second otter, injuries that resulted in gangrene and amputation. He was lucky not to lose his whole arm. It is testament to Terry’s robust character that he recovered remarkably well from that near disaster, but he would eventually leave Sandaig under a spectacularly dark cloud.

  By the sexually adventurous age of seventeen Terry had matured into a tall and handsome youth who would lose no time in mobilising his virility. Sandaig was cut off from girls of his age and, entirely predictably, he told me he had begun to feel trapped – although I think the word he actually used was ‘imprisoned’. When in January 1963 an attractive thirty-year-old American divorcee called Wendy came to stay as a friend of one of Gavin’s guests, Terry plunged headlong into his first affair. Gavin was furious with both of them. An almighty row blew up and Terry, who had been restless for some time, eloped with Wendy to her remote cottage hideaway at Spinningdale in Sutherland, on the far northeast coast, 120 miles from Sandaig, a love nest where they holed up together for several weeks. A little while later he left Gavin’s employ forever and debunked to Wendy’s flat in London, in search of a job at the zoo.

  Gavin always felt deeply guilty about the loss of Terry’s fingers, so, in an attempt to repair the relationship, in 1964 he asked Terry to check out a small new wildlife park on the outskirts of Bristol as a potential final home for Teko, another of his otters that had turned vicious and savaged a visitor. Gavin was very particular about the conditions and facilities on offer. At the Westbury-upon-Trym site a pen and a pool would have to be built and Terry was asked to design it and broker the arrangements with the park’s owners. In the end those plans would fall through, as had a previous attempt to house his otters at Woburn Safari Park, but long before they did, Terry had to find somewhere to live.

  At that moment I was working in Bristol and had enjoyed some involvement with the formative park. I met Terry there and he ended up renting a room in my flat. It was not the cosiest of domestic arrangements. He arrived with a large, boisterous dog called Compass, half Labrador and half English pointer. Compass was not only a bitch but she was also heavily pregnant. A week later she whelped eleven pups in the flat’s only bath. Terry refused to move them, thereby denying all four other occupants anywhere to bathe for two weeks.

  He was wild, a wildness certainly partly instilled by the freedom of the three unregimented years he had spent at Sandaig, but Terry was also impulsive, reckless and ‘devil may care’ by nature. If Gavin had taught him anything, it was to ‘get out there and follow your dream’, to which in Terry’s case might have been appropriately added ‘and to hell with the consequences’. He could be good company and fun in a laddish sort of way, and always lived life to the full, but he frequently left a messy trail of disruption behind him, almost always involving women and money. In later years when he had established a career as a television presenter of animal programmes, he would openly describe himself as ‘a self-confessed sex maniac’.

  In the autumn of 1965 and lacking a car of his own, he asked me if I would like to drive him up to Scotland on a brief visit to Sandaig. I didn’t know it at the time but he was also unhappy at the way he had left Gavin’s charge and sought to make amends. Still very much in awe of Ring, I leapt at the prospect of meeting the author and seeing the fabled Camusfeàrna.

  * * *

  Allhallows and its resplendent undercliffs would go on advancing and heightening my love of natural history for the full five years of my time. I rose to Tommy Wallace’s effulgent tuition and excelled at biology, a synthesis of hard science with field knowledge and experience which seemed to click somewhere in the depths of my brain, suddenly firing my head with motivation and zeal.

  I had come to love Allhallows. Not purely for the cliffs and my unceasing engagement with its wildlife, but also because I made good friends and, by any standards of normality, I had learned to conform and enjoyed moderate success. I played rugger for the 1st XV, ran a fleet 880 yards, won the silver bugle in the corps band, sung bass in the chapel choir, became a school prefect and eventually ascended to the crowning rank of Head of School. After five years I departed that blessed place with the Greek alphabet more or less intact but persistently in the wrong order; maths an impenetrable fortress; having played a drunken Trinculo in The Tempest, Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Thomas Cromwell in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons; able to recite, word perfect, a comprehensive suite of Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquies and long chunks of The Canterbury Tales and Paradise Lost, and without the slightest clue as to what I would do next.

  I also had a huge problem. Natural history had become a passion. In those days jobs in nature conservation were extremely rare and those there were required a science degree, something I was ill-equipped to achieve. But of far deeper concern, I also knew it was not what either of my parents wished for their son. My father had made it clear that nature was ‘all very well as a hobby’, but that he expected me to follow his example and pitch into industry or commerce. He saw no need for me to go to university. Perhaps understandably my mother had always hoped I would be a doctor, an aspiration I could never share. And anyway, neither of those bleakly conventional alternatives appealed to me in the least. I thought perhaps I could fall back on journalism.

  Not long after leaving school I crash-landed unforgettably in un moment délicat. My parents were quietly enjoying afternoon tea. I walked in to find my father in his big wing chair invisible behind a copy of the Daily Telegraph, and my mother taking her mandatory afternoon rest with her feet up on a sofa quietly engaged in needlepoint embroidery. I sat down next to her and helped myself to a cup of tea from the trolley. After a few platitudinous exchanges she gently posed the question which, for all three of us, was as omnipresent as a tiger sitting on the rug at our feet. ‘What are you thinking of doing next, Jay?’ A long pause. No sign of interest from behind the newspaper, so I plucked up courage and replied softly, ‘I’d really quite like to be a writer.’

  The corner of the Telegraph collapsed inward and my father glared at me over his horn-rimmed spectacles before he spoke. ‘Write what, exactly?’ The words stung. His demand was accusative not inquisitive, entirely rhetorical and spiked with barely concealed contempt, from a face set in stony disdain. I knew only too well from previous exchanges that he considered writers and writing to be frivolous, not a proper job and certainly not a career. The corner of the newspaper rose again. He neither sought nor received an answer.

  They were the wartime generation. They had witnessed real austerity and hardship and had lived through the colossal sacrifices of the war effort. Irreparably scarred by nationalisation of the family coal mines and what he saw as the double injustice of iniquitous death duties, my father had dedicated himself to restoring the fortunes of his family. He expected me to do the same. It had never impinged upon his tightly conventional perspective that his son might be hearing a different drummer.

  Despite their relative prosperity, they would both have felt guilty about spending money on themselves for the rest of their lives. He had made his views entirely and immutably clear: a worthwhile career for me was ‘getting out there and helping rebuild the national economy’. It was what he had always pursued for himself with absolute dedication – a successful businessman and head of an old and distinguished but rapidly failing family dynasty. It was the model he expected his only son to emulate. To ‘knuckle down to a proper job and put the family back on the map’.

  My mother’s view was far more liberal, but blinkered by her health-imposed unworldliness. Her love of the Arts and the controlling Romantic in her nature sought to cast caution to the wind and to hell with convention, but the en
forced invalid longed for her son to follow those she respected most, the medical professionals who had shored her up for so many years. Her own rudely truncated education had not included even the most fundamental principles of science or anatomy. I don’t think she ever properly understood her own condition or the internal workings of her poor exhausted heart. She would listen, totally absorbed, when, as a keen biology student, I tried to explain to her some freshly acquired insight in human physiology. ‘You really should be a doctor, Jay,’ she would proclaim, her eyes shining with pride. Flattered by her belief in my ability, I would have loved to have made her prouder still, but I knew in my heart that I could never satisfy either of my parents’ ambitions.

  In the absence of any other immediately viable options, I gave in to inducements and did as my father wished. He had arranged for me to join an industrial stockholding company first in Bristol and then South Wales, servicing the heaviest sectors of all, the coal, oil and steel industries of Cardiff, Newport, Port Talbot and the Swansea Valley. I became what was euphemistically dubbed ‘a management trainee’. My days became a drudgery burdened with a deep and simmering resentment, trapped by economic necessity while silently festering inside. I was desperate to escape but could see no possibility through the enveloping smog of those carbon-polluted, smoke-belching horizons of that tortured landscape. I could not have been more miserable in a dungeon.

  22

  ‘Future plans for this island’

  Not long after I had started work in industry the opportunity to meet Gavin for the first time came as a sunburst of release. Just as Ring of Bright Water had spun its readers into a proto-nostalgic dreamland far removed from their everyday lives, so the chance to visit Camusfeàrna and stay with the creator of the idyll would have a similarly mesmeric effect on me, multiplied in intensity many times over.

  After a twelve-hour drive we had arrived as a raging sun was crash-landing into the Cuillin mountains of Skye, the rims of their gabbro peaks kissed with fire, an ideal stage-set for high romantic drama. As the last rays struck the flat calm sea, it glowed like molten lava, crimson against the black rocks and islands in the shadow of the towering mass of Skye.

  We left the car on the single-track public road and made the bracing, mile-and-a-half trek down to the house. The unpaved path snaked and veered steeply through tangled woodland and scrub. Terry was excited. He half ran, half stumbled down the hill until we arrived at the burn. The colour of brandy-wine, its water burbled merrily between gnarled alder trees sprouting from banks of mossy boulders, ringing round and past us to the little waterfall hidden from our view, the waterfall of which Gavin had written, ‘[it] always seemed to me to be the soul of Camusfeàrna, and if there is anywhere in the world to which some part of me may return when I am dead, it will be there’.

  We stood catching our breath and gazing out over the tranquil scene spread in front of us: the lonely house, the bay, the gleaming sea and its dark rocky islets. I had been to Scotland before but never to anywhere as remote and indescribably beautiful as the ring of Sandaig Bay and its little archipelago beyond. It had halted Gavin in his tracks on his first encounter: ‘The landscape and seascape that lay spread below me was of such beauty that I had no room for it all at once . . .’

  Terry burst into the house with all the gusto of a Viking raider. Gavin and Jimmy Watt, Terry’s companion during his four-year sojourn at Sandaig, were sitting in the kitchen-living room so evocatively decorated with the jetsam of years of beach-combing, lobster creels, baskets and netted glass floats hanging from the ceiling, Gavin with a cigarette and whisky glass in hand. A driftwood fire hissed and flapped brightly in the hearth with the famous and prophetically ironic inscription carved across its stone mantel, ‘NON FATVVM HVC PERSECVTVS IGNEM’ – It is no will-o’-the-wisp that I have followed here.

  The room was largely unchanged in the six years since Ring had been published. It was precisely as the text described and the photographs illustrated, many of them taken long before, almost as if an idyllic past was being intentionally preserved, like stepping into the set of a much-loved film. I found myself distracted, gazing round all the time, recognising and identifying the component parts of the idyll.

  Scallop shells and pebbles inscribed with the calcium hieroglyphics of the serpulid tubeworm, ‘precise in every riotous ramification’, crowded the mantel and a model yacht in full Bermuda rig precariously perched above them. A goat skull with long curving horns hung from the wall on one side, above shelves of books, contorted tangles of driftwood collected and arranged with the eye of an artist, alongside cans of food, bellows, a framed ‘Spy’ cartoon of Sir Herbert Maxwell, all mixed in with the general paraphernalia of daily living. Every item held a peculiar fascination of its own, demanding closer scrutiny, and while giving the appearance of being random, the whole came together like a carefully constructed still life in a distinctive assertion of its creator’s multi-faceted artistic talents.

  Gavin embraced Terry warmly, all signs of past animosity entirely dispelled. He was smaller than I had anticipated, less than six foot, lightly framed and wiry, looking fitter than he probably was. He smoked continuously, not like Mathey with a cigarette pendant from his lips but held between the fingers, each draw long and deeply inhaled so that smoke plumed from mouth and nostrils as he spoke. I learned that at times he had smoked up to eighty cigarettes a day. He was warmly welcoming and immediately handed me a large slug of whisky. Still palpably animated, Terry rushed me up the stairs to show me to my small bedroom with a steeply combed ceiling, typical of nineteenth-century Highland croft houses. It contained a single bed with a polar bear skin spread across it and the window in the gable a naval porthole salvaged from the great wartime battleship HMS Vanguard. I had never slept beneath a polar bear skin before.

  My diary’s selective scribblings don’t record what we ate for supper that first night, but they do note that it was late – perhaps ten o’clock – and liberally diluted with more whisky, a universal West Highland habit it took me a while to adjust to. Afterwards I asked if I could go outside for a few minutes to imbibe the night air. ‘Of course,’ Gavin acceded with a broad smile, ‘but please don’t get lost, we don’t go looking for people after dark.’ He spoke in what used to be called ‘the Queen’s English’, no hint of a Scottish accent or affectation, but with the precise enunciation of every syllable and graced by the prescribed politeness of an English public school education, which I knew very well from members of my own family of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation. Terry came out with me; in a lowered voice he said he needed to talk privately to Gavin and when I came in would I mind going off to bed.

  Slowly, I was settling back to earth. Gavin had greeted me so generously, had been so openly friendly and welcoming, well beyond expectation, that the aura of famous author had immediately begun to evaporate. I felt a heartening ease in his presence and his quick, bright conversation was cocooned in genuine warmth. Outside, the night was as dark as the sea, only the pale gleam of gently breaking waves rimming the beach below.

  Terry had given me plenty of advance warning that the Camusfeàrna of the Ring had long since vanished and that the house had been haphazardly extended and fenced in. The otters, by then ageing, unreliable and dangerous, had been banished to their own jerry-built quarters at the back and the once unsullied site would be littered with the abandoned junk and detritus of years of Gavin’s chaotically alternative, idiosyncratic existence.

  I walked only a few yards to a gated fence and thought better of going any further without a torch. As my eyes adjusted the sky emerged as a glowing rook’s-wing purple, against which I could just make out the great bulk of the hills to the north and west, black and foreboding. The September air was chill on my cheeks and the only night sounds were the hushed gossip of water in the burn, the shrill piping of oystercatchers on the beach and the sibilant murmur of the sea breeze shimmying through the circle of alders. Camusfeàrna. Bay of the alders. Blimey! I thought. I am
here. Standing here in the dark.

  I stood for twenty minutes, waiting. Just waiting for it all to sink in, to settle around me like the closing night: the welcome, the famous house, the bay, the looming mountains, the whisky, the polar bear skin – the sheer splashdown jolt of being there at all. I felt myself emptying down. If there were parallels between Gavin’s upbringing and my own, I had entirely failed to see them, swamped by the existential loading of the moment, and, of course, I had not the slightest inkling that this accidental collision of our lives might change mine forever.

  All I knew was that something deep inside me was calling. I was overcome by a humbling, almost ethereal awe, as though waiting for the night sounds of that extraordinary place to claim me. There was no ‘cry of the tiger-cat to its fellow’, but I felt sure they were out there somewhere and one day – not then, perhaps not even very soon, but surely one day – I would locate them. Terry’s loud voice and laughter coming from inside shattered the moment. A shiver passed through. I turned back to the house and tiptoed upstairs to bed. That night I dreamed sweet and long of the Manor House. I awoke to a steel dawn punching in through the round lens of the porthole, wondering where on earth I was.

  We stayed for six days. By day we walked and beach-combed, the bay glistening with tidal newness; we fished for floppy silvery pollock (locally saithe) from a small dinghy with the resolute and dexterous Jimmy, who was clearly in charge of the whole Sandaig operation: boats, otters, household, catering, everything else. He marshalled us into dragging a storm-washed tree up above the high-tideline to dry out for firewood; I watched as together he and Terry fed fresh fish to the otters, Edal and Teko, in their respective houses and pens; and we saw nothing of Gavin. I never discovered what time he got up, but he had immediately shut himself away in his study to work. That first day he only emerged at five o’clock and appeared irritated that the fire in the sitting room hadn’t been lit. He poured himself a large whisky and sat on a bench seat with a book he said he had to review. ‘Please don’t talk to me. I need to get this done.’