Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  By descent Gavin thus belonged to the aristocratic élite, related by blood or marriage to other great dukedoms and earldoms of Scotland and England – the Argylls and Sutherlands, the Norfolks, Richmonds and Surreys – and through them down the ages to King James I of Scotland, Harry Hotspur, John of Gaunt, William the Conqueror, Charlemagne and the Consuls of Imperial Rome. Through his great aunt, Princess Alice, Duchess of Argyll, he was distantly related to the Royal Family, and he was also related – as twelfth cousin four times removed – to Lord Byron, whom he resembled in many ways.

  Gavin was keenly aware of his aristocratic background, and intensely proud of it. It was an essential feature of his personality, without which he would have been a different animal. In adult life he was to use it as a passport to get him wherever he wanted to go, a shield to hide behind, a snub to put down people he disliked. But he was to learn that happiness is not necessarily the product of privilege. For there were other forces at work in his infancy and formative years, and these were to mould him into something quite different from the typical product of his class and generation, creating the misfit and the outcast, the dissenting and mischievous subversive of his later years.

  Gavin was persistently and cataclysmically accident-prone throughout his life, so much a prey to misfortune that his life has something of the quality of a Greek tragedy, with Gavin in the role of the sacrificial victim of fate. His first misfortune took place at the very beginning, at the moment of his arrival in this world; his second not long after it. His delivery seems to have been a difficult and prolonged one, leaving him with five strawberry birthmarks stretching down his right inside forearm from the elbow to the wrist (‘a symbol of shame before strangers, the most private part of my body’) and a delicate and ailing constitution in childhood (according to his mother he had suffered at one time from a serious infection of the spleen). Then, less than three months after he was born, on 9 October 1914, his thirty-seven-year-old father was killed in the first German artillery barrage of the war, barely two or three hours after he had disembarked at Antwerp with the Collingwood Battalion of the Royal Naval Division of which he was commanding officer. His wife was thus left with three young children aged between one and three, and a sickly baby not yet weaned. The implications of this tragedy for Gavin Maxwell’s future development were considerable.

  The chances of the young widow marrying again were remote, for it was the unwritten rule of the Percy family that the daughters could only marry someone of the same faith as themselves, and this faith – the Irvingite or Catholic Apostolic Church, which believed in the restoration of the Twelve Apostles and the imminence of the Second Coming – had been embraced by only a handful of aristocratic families in the British Isles. Faced with the grief of mourning and the prospect of spending her prime in solitary widowhood, Lady Mary, who had been one of the two noted beauties of her family, rejected her sexuality. In her voice, manner and dress she denied her femininity, striding about the moors in tweeds as her husband might have done had he lived. All her natural instincts for love and affection were lavished on her youngest child, Gavin, who had been her husband’s final gift to her, and was the most vulnerable, most needy and most dear human being in her life at the moment when the shock and grief of her husband’s death were most acute and unbearable.

  ‘I kept Gavin very much as the child of my anguish,’ Lady Mary was to confide in her old age, ‘and he stayed in my bedroom until he was eight years old.’ Between the forlorn young mother and her ailing child there developed a relationship so close that it was to inflict a permanent imprint on the personality of the child. Many years later, in his middle age and in his cups, Gavin was to admit to a close friend in Tangier that he believed his mother was the cause of all the problems in his life. ‘Was she one of those cold, aloof, icily aristocratic mothers of the period?’ his friend asked. ‘No,’ Gavin replied. ‘Exactly the opposite, alas. I was suffocated by love.’ He was also suffocated – as were his siblings – by the sternly moralistic and dominating persona of his mother.

  Frail and ailing, and never knowing a father, Gavin was brought up close to his mother’s apron strings, and during the early years of his boyhood he not only slept in her bedroom but in her bed as well. Nothing could ever replace such mother love, and in the years to come life would always seem bereft by comparison. Brought up in a largely female ambience, and lulled by so much unfailing security and affection, it is hardly surprising that the boy grew up dangerously uncarapaced, like a hermit crab without a shell; hardly surprising that the adolescent found it difficult to relate to adult women or resolve the conundrums of his own sexuality; or that the adult was so preoccupied with proving his masculinity and rejecting female values.

  But there were substantial compensations to be found in the strange milieu in which he grew up. Chief among them was Elrig itself, built four-square on a hill of heather and bracken. Elrig was to be Gavin’s model for his idealised Island Valley of Avalon throughout his life, the Eden from which he was eventually expelled and to which he sought perpetually to return, the Paradise whose essence and myth he recreated in the Camusfeàrna of Ring of Bright Water, only to be banished one last time. Strictly speaking Elrig did not become his home until he was four, for during the war years his mother found it too painful to live in what had once been the conjugal home, and chose to reside with her children in various family houses far away in London and the south instead. But in the summer of 1918, with the war and mourning near to their end, she returned to Elrig, and it was Elrig that Gavin was to remember as his true childhood home. His memory of it, his longing and nostalgia for the untrammelled happiness he experienced there, was to haunt him through all the days of his life. More than forty-five years later he would still remember the house with a love undimmed by time – early images of ‘big windswept sunny spaces’, picnics on the moors, peat-fires in the nursery, the sound of the moaning wind, the smell of bog myrtle crushed in the hand, the acrid tang of hill sheep and the smell and taste of bracken fronds as bitter as almonds.

  It was in and around Elrig and the wide unencumbered spaces of rural Galloway that Gavin Maxwell first grew aware of nature and landscape, and first felt the exhilarating freedom of the moors and skies. From his mother he had inherited or acquired an appreciation for natural beauty that was spare, austere and wild – ‘an inherent approach of melancholy or nostalgia,’ he was to write, ‘so that splendour could not be splendid if it were not desolate too.’ It was at Elrig too that he discovered the deep, serene happiness of life far from the hue and cry, the baying gabble of the human pack. Gavin grew up as shy as a wild animal within the tiny, closed community of his family. Apart from his brothers Aymer and Eustace and his sister Christian he met no other children. Apart from his mother, occasional relatives, and the servants that tended this reclusive household – a full complement of staff in livery – he met few other human beings. Out at play on the wild moors, barefoot, kilted and armed with slate-headed tomahawks the gamekeeper had made for them, the children explored the world of nature with the intimate proximity of natives of the Amazon rainforest, tunnelling through the high bracken that formed a canopy above their heads, hearts pounding at the thump of a rabbit’s foot or sudden animal movement. It was out in the Elrig wilderness, close to the ground and in intimate contact with nature in all its teeming minutiae, that Gavin first learned to observe with a close, objective eye the myriad forms and idiosyncrasies of living things – the intricate pattern of bracken seeds on the undersides of the leaves, the tiny bubbles that made up cuckoo-spit, the sound and colour of insects swarming in the sun. ‘Slice through a bracken stem with the keen Stone Age tomahawk and one revealed in the juicy marrow the brown outline of an oak tree; the very tree, our governess assured us, in which Charles II had hidden …’

  Certain close relatives also played a key role in shaping the young Gavin’s interests and ambitions in those early formative years. Closest in terms of geography and chronology (though in no other
respect) was his paternal grandfather, Sir Herbert Maxwell, Bart., KT., P.C., F.R.S., seventh Baronet of Monreith, Lord Lieutenant of the County, Grand Old Man of Galloway, and scion of one of the oldest aristocratic families of Scotland. This awesome patriarch had not only pursued a distinguished political career as sometime Secretary of State for Scotland and Lord of the Treasury, but had also achieved academic fame as a man of letters and natural historian. Sir Herbert – a venerable figure whom Gavin knew as ‘Gar’ and who lived alone in the mouldering family seat at Monreith on the lowlands by the sea overlooking the White Loch of Myrton – was already seventy-three (and had another twenty years to live) when Gavin returned to Elrig at the end of the Great War. The chasm of age was too great to allow any close contact between the young Gavin and his family’s most distinguished elder, and in any case visits were few, for his mother cordially disliked the old man, who had turned his back on the family faith and was so financially inept that he had managed to run up an overdraft of £120,000. In the gardens of Monreith Sir Herbert had formed one of the finest collections of flowering shrubs and trees in Britain, and in his leisure hours, when he was not writing his voluminous memoirs and learned articles, he would work at an easel painting the flowers of his garden as a record of the collection he had planted beyond his window. For many years he remained for Gavin a potent model in the fields of writing, painting, natural history and historical enquiry, a model which the growing boy might himself aspire to emulate one day.

  A more direct influence and spur to action was Gavin’s aunt Lady Muriel Percy, the youngest of his mother’s sisters, and familiarly known as Aunty Moo. Unconventional, slightly mannish and inclined to outbursts of irritation, Moo spoke with a pronounced drawl and had the knack of arousing children’s interest in new things. She was, in Gavin’s estimation, an exceedingly good general naturalist, as well as a serious research zoologist specialising in the denizens of ponds and rock pools. Like Gavin’s mother she was also a talented water-colourist and draughtsman, though she concentrated exclusively on illustrating the creatures that interested her. Above all, her enthusiasm for revealing the secret lives of the natural world communicated itself to the Maxwell children ‘like mercury filling an empty tube’.

  With Aunt Moo’s guidance and encouragement Gavin and his siblings would explore the pools of the garden and encircling moorland and learn the slimy mysteries of frogspawn and tadpoles, newts and aquatic insects. Sometimes they would venture further afield, setting off in their mother’s 1914 Ford (with uniformed chauffeur, brass lamps and gleaming radiator) on excursions to the sea a few miles away, and bringing back new wonders discovered by Aunt Moo in the sea-pools and tide’s edge.

  It was Aunt Moo who arranged the unused gun-room of Gavin’s father into a biological laboratory – ‘a sort of primary school for the study of life’ – full of aquaria, vivaria and glass-fronted cages in which spawn hatched, caterpillars pupated, grubs metamorphosed, newts hibernated and the lower forms of animal life were ranged in all their oddity and variety, ‘so that we were on nodding terms,’ Gavin observed, ‘with almost every living thing we could see.’ The children became collectors in the classic Victorian mould, each a specialist in his favoured field. Aymer collected beetles, Eustace every kind of insect except beetles, Gavin butterflies, dragonflies and birds’ eggs. Because Gavin so worshipped his elder brother Aymer they would often go around together like twins, hunting for Aymer’s beetles beneath stones and the undersides of dead animal carcases – a true nether world of nightmare.

  But more often Gavin ventured out on to the moor alone in pursuit of his butterfly prey, dressed in a kilt and white cotton sun-hat, and carrying a butterfly-net and killing bottle. Sometimes, down in the marshy hollows of bog myrtle and rushes, he would glimpse a butterfly he had only set eyes on in a book, and once, when a very unusual and spectacular species eluded every swipe of his net, he was forced to resort to prayer. ‘Please God,’ he prayed aloud, kneeling on the soft sphagnum moss of the boggy hollow, ‘let me catch the Dark Green Fritillary.’ And God did, ‘strengthening an absolute belief that could not be called into question’.

  Under Moo’s aegis Gavin became a tireless naturalist, illustrator and author – an infantile pre-echo of the professional he was to become. By the age of nine he was compiling illustrated monographs such as ‘The Book of Birds with Beautiful Tails’ and his more general ‘Book of Birds and Animals’ – childish pastiches of the genre put together from arcane ornithological fantasies:

  The Crested Bird. This is a foreign bird you find his eggs in foreign lands they would be about as big as the biggest persons head if you compared the sizes.

  The Skiping Long Nose. He lives in America like the Mustangs. He has babies almost as big as their mothers. The mothers are only as big as your head.

  The Brown Legged Hinda. Does eat chalks and knifes and blue eyes and grass his babies are brown and white.

  Gradually the children progressed to an interest in larger creatures. There were goats, bantam cocks, hedgehogs, wild rabbits, owls, a tame jackdaw that was shot by the Duke of Abercorn’s butler in the act of stealing a spoon from the Elrig pantry, a whole family of rooks that would perch all over Gavin ‘like parasites’ wherever he went, and a heron that shone like a beacon in the dark, the phosphorescence of the putrid fish it had eaten glowing eerily through the thin skin of its distended crop.

  Gavin began to develop an extraordinary gift with animals that was never to leave him. His cousin Lady Elizabeth Percy (later the Duchess of Hamilton) remembered playing cards with Gavin after tea one day, with a barnyard hen he had tamed sitting on the back of his chair. ‘What was so remarkable,’ Lady Elizabeth recalled, ‘was that he had only made its acquaintance forty-eight hours before. He also had a tame Brown Owl called Andrew which appeared to live in a holly tree and came to him whenever he called. A mouse only had to run across the floor and in no time at all Gavin had befriended it.’

  From close relationships with a variety of pets, Gavin not only learned the habits and mental processes of birds and animals, but gained an awareness of the fragility of life. ‘All our pets came to what are called bad ends,’ he recalled, ‘but the end of an animal is bad anyway, like the end of a human being, and through these extinctions we learned a little sympathy, a little understanding and a little compassion.’

  There was one other member of the family who was to have a tremendous impact on the youthful Gavin – the formidable figure of his uncle, Lord William Percy, a father-substitute for whom Gavin conceived a deep and lasting admiration, ‘a little as a rabbit is fascinated by the antics of a stoat’. Explorer, soldier, secret agent, ornithologist and former Deputy-Governor of Jerusalem, Uncle Willie was, in Gavin’s view, ‘the perfect Buchan hero’, a man of steel who had traversed the greater part of the earth’s surface, the length and breadth of Canada and the Siberian Arctic, the whole of the American continents, much of the Middle East and the interior of Africa. He was a crack shot and a first-class field ornithologist, possessed of a keen intellect, hawk-eyed powers of observation and views on conservation far ahead of their time. When Gavin’s brother Eustace boasted of having just wiped out a whole nest of carder bees in order to remove the honey, Uncle Willie reprimanded him with the chilling rebuke, ‘Then you’re a very cruel and destructive little boy, aren’t you?’ This was Gavin’s first inkling of the notion of compassion and proportion in man’s relation to the natural world, and he felt an all-pervading guilt for the bees that had died in the killing bottle.

  Gavin did not just hold his uncle in awe – he adopted his persona and his mannerisms when it suited him. Short, slim and wiry, Uncle Willie was garbed habitually in riding-breeches and belted Norfolk jacket; his voice and gestures were crisp and incisive and his brilliant eyes bored into the object of their gaze ‘like the muzzle of a gun’. Uncle Willie, it seemed, knew no other form of conversation than cross-examination – a cross-examination in which the cross-examined was transferred within the first m
inute from the witness-box to the dock. Rare was the victim who could stand up to the simultaneous fire of the eyes and voice; any resistance was summarily dealt with. To Uncle Willie this was a game, and any temper or tears he caused his opponent were greeted with great and obvious glee. The least weakness in factual knowledge was pounced on, and if ever a return missile landed dangerously near, Uncle Willie would change the whole direction of his argument and suddenly attack from the rear, for it was a military maxim that a weak position should never be reinforced.

  Anyone who ever engaged in a lengthy conversation with the adult Gavin Maxwell will recognise that portrait at once. As Gavin grew older and discovered that attack was the best means of defence in his dealings with his fellow man, it was his uncle’s fierce and uncompromising directness of delivery – his ‘verbal ju-jitsu’, as Gavin put it – that was to serve him as a ready-made model.

  So Gavin’s infancy passed in happy and idyllic intimacy with the world of nature and his own closed family. ‘Between the ages of seven and ten, I was wonderfully, gloriously happy,’ he once told me. ‘This is when I became identified with the countryside, with other living creatures, and with my home at Elrig.’ By the age often Gavin’s unusual upbringing had given him many of the distinctive elements of the man he was to become – he was a creative, venturesome boy who loved nature and the wild countryside, loved to observe and explore, related more to animals than to human beings, painted and drew, wrote and read, and admired the tough persona and adventurous travels of his father manqué, Uncle William Percy.