He seemed brighter and spoke buoyantly of returning to the island very soon. We planned a visit to the nearby island of Pabay to shoot rabbits for the island freezers, food for the buzzard, tawny owl and foxes already there and for birds of prey he hoped to acquire. I showed him my work, sheaves of draft text and notes for the mammal book. He was pleased. The future looked bright. I drove back to the island convinced that everything would come right.
I could not have been more wrong. The following day came news of the shocking diagnosis – advanced generalised cancer. He already had well-developed secondaries in a heel, a kidney, his brain and his spine. The tiny primary tumour in his lungs, smaller than a pea, would not be discovered until the post-mortem. He would never leave that room alive.
The last time I saw him, three days before he died, he was calm and utterly fatalistic. I tried to persuade him there was still hope of a recovery, but he laughed it off, quickly changing the subject. He was worried that without him Longman might not honour the contract for the mammal book – something that had never occurred to me. I didn’t know what to say. Suddenly my world seemed to be imploding, collapsing in on itself in an expanding heap of scuppered dreams. There was an awkward silence before he spoke again. ‘You said you’d like to be a writer. Well, I need someone to finish my story. There are a lot of people out there who will want to know what happened to Teko, you know. How d’ you feel about that?’
On the morning of 7 September 1969 the island phone rang. It was Richard Frere. ‘The news is the very worst.’ So died a man of many exceptional gifts. He was only fifty-five. He had been a racing driver, a portrait painter, a wartime intelligence officer and small-arms instructor for SOE, a basking shark hunter, a published poet, a celebrated travel writer, explorer and geographer, a naturalist, and a best-selling nature writer who would change the lives of a whole generation of naturalists. He was also hugely influential in conserving the British otter at a time when it was virtually extinct in England’s polluted rivers and its wider future was in serious doubt.
In his comprehensive biography, Gavin Maxwell – A Life, Douglas Botting suggests that Gavin’s death was a timely release – that perhaps he had ‘shot his bolt’. I profoundly disagree. Given the dire circumstances of his health I accept that his quick and relatively painless death was a mercy, but his impending financial crisis notwithstanding, and knowing how he had wriggled out of debt many times before, had he not contracted cancer I believe that at fifty-five he could have had at least fifteen to twenty years of highly productive work ahead of him. Such was his restless and creative intellect, and his thirst for adventure and travel, that I am sure there were more books of the scholarly quality of Lords of the Atlas – in my opinion his finest work, published only three years before his death – well within his reach.
As for the island zoo, now with the benefit of knowing Skye well I am sure that the project would have quickly foundered upon its own rocks. It was a whim, a folly typical of the man: impulsive, impractical and badly thought through. Ferrying visitors back and forward to the island across treacherous tidal narrows in the seldom fair and often suddenly foul weather for which the Isle of Skye is renowned would always have been too great a risk and a perpetual hindrance.
On Thursday, 18 September, on a day bright with late summer warmth and high, sunlit clouds on a dry east wind, an intimate throng of Gavin’s family, friends and associates led by Jimmy Watt and Terry Nutkins looked on as they buried his ashes on the bulldozed site of the Camusfeàrna house, around which the bright ring of the burn sparkled through its dark green curtain of alders. Last to appear, arriving by boat from Canna and walking up the beach to join us with her hair blowing in the sea breeze, came Kathleen Raine, whose title poem and perhaps whose curse had so changed Gavin’s life.
There is no doubt that she had loved him with all the passion a woman’s love can muster, quite simply the unassailable love of her life. In a too-late valedictory letter that he would never read, she wrote:
you and I . . . have seen the beauty of Eternity, such beauty and such glimpses of joy. For me this earth is, simply, the place where you are, where we have met. Without you it will be the place where you are not, and we must enlarge our terms. The bidden world will then be the place where you are, and, please God, we shall meet again without all the burdens and tears.
I have never been able to say how much I love you – but surely you know. And at any time, anywhere, you have only to think of me, and you will find me with you in thought and love.
. . . I don’t think it was ever as a ‘lover’ I desired your love. Something else – a more than brother. Something we are in Eternity, which has no name . . . in the practical terms of generation. Anyway, I am here now for whatever you may ask of me or need.
For the following few weeks, life on the island was chaotic. The phone rang solidly for the first ten days and, as the news of his death slowly spread, so our mailbag expanded to up to sixty letters and cards a day. Ring had been translated into twenty languages. Millions of his readers around the world were shocked; in crazed and sometimes hysterical responses, reporters, magazine feature writers and other news media all craved special insight into what had happened, what would happen to the surviving otter, to the whole island project. Often brutally insensitive in their demands, ringing over and over again for the latest titbit of information, they demanded to know why he hadn’t received proper medical attention, as though his illness and his death were somehow our fault.
Between us, Richard Frere and I answered every letter we received from his fans. We stencil-duplicated a thousand copies – a brief thanks and a short update on what was happening – and I dutifully mailed them off. I filed every letter by country, many from America, Australia, Canada, up and down the length of Europe as well as many hundreds from across Britain.
Initially, perhaps encouraged by the rush of public and media interest in Gavin, we clung to the hope that the island project could survive in his memory. I was left in charge and we continued to develop plans, building aviaries and fencing the paddocks. Although ageing, Teko the otter was alive and apparently well. We were all clinging to what I now realise was always an extremely slender hope that people would pay to come and see him; that he would be the star attraction.
It soon emerged that no one advising Gavin had properly understood the extent of his indebtedness or the simultaneous decline of his literary income. Nor had anyone succeeded in reigning in his extravagances. His books were still selling – seven titles in print – but principally in paperback, a far less lucrative format for the author. As the weeks passed the bills continued to pour in. Few records had been kept. We had no way of knowing whether they were genuine debts or cynical figments of avaricious opportunism. The island household’s credit account with the local grocery store on Skye where Gavin bought all his whisky, cigarettes and most household supplies came as a shock. The vet’s bills for the otters had apparently not been submitted for three years. The company in Kyle of Lochalsh that serviced the island boats submitted a startlingly huge invoice. Gavin’s private company, Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Limited, was struggling with much more than a cash flow problem. It was insolvent.
As the financial crisis rapidly deepened, the project staggered on for only a few more weeks. I think all of us involved knew in our bones that it was a hopeless cause, but while Teko was alive we clung to a thread of hope. Then one crisp September morning, only two weeks after Gavin’s death, Teko was missing. We searched his enclosure. No sign. The water in his pool was too murky until we drained it. There he was, dead on the bottom.
He could have died of many causes. At ten he was close to the end of his natural lifespan, perhaps an infection or a cancer, heart or vital organ failure – we would never know. I declined the idea of a post-mortem. He was the last of the Maxwell otters and I felt that his limp, wet body deserved the most dignified end we could manage. I buried him at the foot of a huge boulder a few yards from his pen. On the face of
the hard metamorphic rock I chiselled his name and dates: Teko 1959–1969. It was the end of the otter saga that had gripped the public imagination for more than a decade.
I was summoned to Drumbuie on Loch Ness-side, Richard Frere’s home. In 1966, before the Camusfeàrna fire, in a valiant attempt to turn Gavin’s fortunes around, Richard had stepped in as managing director of GME Ltd. I drove the eighty miles through the mountains knowing very well that his forecast would be bleak. With Teko’s death the few remaining sparks of hope had been summarily extinguished, but I still hadn’t grasped how critical the situation really was.
The island project would have to close down immediately and the house sold as quickly as possible. I was out of a job. ‘I’ll do my best but I don’t think we’ll manage to pay you this month.’ Richard looked embarrassed.
‘That bad?’ I asked, more as a resigned observation than a question. He nodded. I drove slowly back through the long winding glens to Kyle of Lochalsh in the dark. The winter sun was long gone behind the ragged skyline of Cuillin mountains and distant islands, and the narrows between Skye and the mainland gleamed black and sinister. I caught the last ferry to Kyleakin, where our dinghy was moored, and rowed myself slowly back through the darkness to Eilean Bàn. Only the lighthouse beam seemed welcoming. As I tied the dinghy to the island slipway with the salt tang fresh in my face, I thought that things couldn’t get much worse. I was wrong.
The following day I received a letter from Gavin’s literary agent, Peter Janson-Smith, informing me that Longman had withdrawn the contract for the mammal book because it was Gavin’s name that would have sold it and he had not so much as put pen to paper. I hadn’t received a penny in payment or expenses for the nineteen months’ research work I had done.
A few weeks later, with no idea where I would go or what I would do, I packed my bags and departed that beautiful little island with a leaden heart. No job, no money, no prospects, no home. I had a car, a few possessions and my faithful Labrador, Max. That was it. Richard and Joan Frere generously offered me a roof over my head at Drumbuie, their nineteenth-century turreted home overlooking the sweep and mystery of Loch Ness, while I looked round for a cottage to rent. I was determined not to go back to England and to the career I had hated so much; besides, I needed a little time to gather my wits and recover from the sudden collapse of my world.
Christmas came and went. I found a tiny cottage for a few pounds a month – a ‘but-’n’-ben’ in Highland terminology – but more like an eyrie than a dwelling, perched high on a hillside overlooking Loch Ness and the Great Glen. Under a rickety corrugated iron roof it had just two rooms, a kitchen-living room and a bedroom with an outside chemical loo. An old-fashioned pot-bellied stove was the only source of cooking and heating, and I drew my water from a spring that trickled out of the ground a few yards away.
In a curious but uplifting sense of déjà vu, it was almost an accidental re-visitation of Camusfeàrna and the castaway lifestyle Gavin had so cherished in his early days at Sandaig. Long before the otters, he had his spaniel Johnnie for company; I had Max and, like Gavin, together we turned feral, surviving on shot rabbits, wood pigeons and the occasional roe deer. Birch logs I gathered from the surrounding woods and I baked potatoes in the ash of the stove. I washed and cleaned my teeth at the spring, tossing the soapy water into the bracken and the nettles, as Gavin had so succinctly quoted from Psalm 60: ‘Moab is my washpot and over Edom do I cast out my shoes.’
For all its primitivism, I loved that little cottage. It was exactly the solitude and asceticism I needed, although I had no clue what the future might hold. In Gavin’s own words from the closing lines of Ring, it was ‘a fortress from which to essay raid and foray, an embattled position behind whose walls one may retire to lick new wounds and plan fresh journeys to farther horizons’.
Teko’s death had closed the final door to the Maxwell otter saga and opened another for me – nothing for it but to sit down and begin the book Gavin had asked me to write. The time and the opportunity had landed squarely in my lap. It is a well-worn aphorism that ‘hunger makes the best sauce’, besides, hadn’t I always wanted to be a writer? Later Richard Frere told me that in his last days Gavin had been deeply troubled by my looming predicament. ‘He’s given up a good job, abandoned his family, moved up here and now look what’s happened. I can’t deliver on the mammal book and the island zoo has a doubtful future.’ I am sure that it was out of that concern that he generously gave me the chance to write my first book, The White Island, published by Longman in 1972.
But without ever knowing it, Gavin Maxwell had given me much, much more. He gave me self-belief. He showed me a lifestyle I had never dreamed could be possible. He had enticed me away from industry and up to the glorious, and in those days very remote, Highlands, where I have lived and worked ever since. But perhaps more than anything else he gave me a cause – to be what I had always dreamed of becoming: a naturalist and writer committed to nature conservation and environmental education. More than this, the unpaid research work I had done for the ill-fated mammal book would prove to have been an immensely worthwhile apprenticeship, providing me with many valuable contacts and friends in the conservation world.
There was one more gilt-edged bonus Gavin had inadvertently provided. All the many hundreds of letters and cards we had answered after his death were filed in cardboard boxes in Richard Frere’s study at Drumbuie. Richard had become a close friend and I often dropped in to see him and to learn how the messy task of winding up Gavin’s affairs was going. He, too, was facing the gloomy prospect of being out of a job. Ever cheerful and always comically given to the absurd, he made light of it. ‘I suppose I could become a poodle clipper,’ he quipped with an impish grin. Neither he nor I had ever seen a poodle in the Highlands.
One day soon after sending the White Island manuscript off to Longman, feeling lonely, bereft and project-less – finishing a book is like abandoning a child – we were sitting together drowning our collective sorrows over a dram, the Highland remedy for all ills, when my eyes lit upon the row of letter-filled shoeboxes piled in a corner. ‘What are you going to do with all those?’ I asked.
‘Dunno,’ he replied, shaking his head and looking blank. ‘I could light fires with them for the next ten years, or perhaps I could write a begging letter to everyone who contacted us asking for a pound to bail me out of penury.’ We laughed together, lamely.
In my lonely cottage bed that night I was struck by a sudden spark of inspiration that jerked me instantly awake. If all those people had been sufficiently interested in Gavin’s books to pick up pen and write to us, perhaps they would be interested in coming to see the places and perhaps even some of the wildlife he had so lyrically brought to life. I could scarcely wait for morning to put my idea to Richard. With an impulsiveness almost equal to Gavin’s, by the time I arrived at Drumbuie it had grown tentacles in every direction. ‘We could start a natural history guiding service. How about Highland Wildlife Enterprises for a name? It would occupy us both all summer and would give me time to write in the winter.’
Those cardboard boxes had handed me a brilliant marketing opportunity. Nowadays they would be called a mailing list or a database, but such things were virtually unheard of in the early 1970s. A month later we had printed a simple brochure and posted it off to the entire list. Our guests would stay in local guesthouses and hotels. We would collect them every morning and take them far into the hills and glens. I would concentrate on wildlife and Richard, who was a keen mountaineer, on walking in the glorious hills and glens that surrounded us. I drew a silhouette of a golden eagle as a logo. But I also wanted to dedicate the project to Gavin’s memory. In the foreword to Ring he had written: ‘I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and the other creatures of the world; the evolution of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal, and yet he must still, for security, look long at some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it.’
Those words and the compelling conservation philosophy they espoused would never leave my head. I quoted them in the very first Highland Wildlife Enterprises literature and have done so ever since. They would become the founding principle for the field studies centre Aigas would become a few years later – where I have now lived and worked for more than forty years.
The response to that first mailing was electric. Our little wildlife guiding service attracted press attention. It grew and grew. By 1976 it justified buying the crumbling remnants of the Aigas Estate on the River Beauly, which would become my home and my life’s work. It is where I have raised a family and engaged deeply with the glorious wildlife, the otters, ospreys, golden eagles, pine martens and wildcats of the Highlands and the ever-challenging and absorbing world of nature conservation. And it is where we now work with the Scottish government’s wildcat captive breeding programme, selectively breeding wild purity back in and domestic hybridisation out, in a last ditch bid to save the species, Felis sylvestris grampia, Britain’s only native wild felid.
For me it has been a long journey, but one I have loved every step of the way. I know very well why ‘the big footprints of the wildcats in the soft sand at the burn’s edge’ were so important to Gavin Maxwell, and many times I have listened, as Colquhoun did, ‘in the calm twilight of summer to the cry of the tiger-cat to its fellow’. I now know, too, what made me a naturalist and gave me the cause I have pursued for so long.
* * *
Although my mother teetered on for a few years, she would never know what we would make of the Aigas Field Centre project. By 1976, when we first opened our doors to the public, she was in dire straits once again. This time it was a last resort. Under the leadership of Sir Keith Ross, Southampton Hospital’s cardiac unit had taken over from the Brompton. With a view to making it their UK base for their eventual retirement, my father had bought a cottage in a picturesque hamlet on the Lymington River in the New Forest so that they could be close to the hospital. Sir Keith had pioneered and specialised in homograft – the miraculous trick of grafting healthy valves from deceased patients into living hearts. It was another breakthrough, an extremely successful procedure on young, strong patients, giving them many years of disease-free life. My mother’s problem was that she had been a guinea pig far too often. She urgently needed a tri-valvular homograft: the aortic, the tricuspid and the pulmonary all failing, all requiring to be replaced. Sir Keith had told us that it would be touch and go, but that it was her only hope – her last chance.
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