Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  But the idyll of Gavin’s childhood at Elrig was violently shattered, as idylls often are, by an event so cataclysmic that he never totally recovered from the trauma, which left him psychologically and emotionally scarred for the rest of his life. For in September 1924, after several years of instruction by private tutors at home, he was despatched to a version of hell – a preparatory school in England, where his formal schooling was to begin.

  TWO

  Mowgli with a gun

  I went into the woods. They’re the safest place. I understand animals. Human beings are dangerous.

  VIETNAM VETERAN (1985)

  Gavin had developed into a shy, sensitive, gentle, caring and broadly contented child with an unusually limited experience of contact with human beings of his own (or any other) age. But at his first English prep school – Heddon Court, in Cockfosters, north London – he was plunged into a human jungle peopled by a tribe of savages the like of which he had never known. He had so far met fewer than ten other children in the whole of his life, three of them his own siblings. Now he was thrown among a multitude of boys, most of whom seemed alien and hostile, and so unnerving was this horror that even the simplest action seemed beyond him. From the moment he entered his first classroom Gavin lived in a world of total confusion punctuated by moments of fear and humiliation. ‘This was the beginning of the breakdown of my image of what life was,’ he confided to me very near the end of his life. ‘Going to school in England seemed nothing but a violent disruption, something terrible.’

  It was not the lessons that were the boy’s problem, for he was as well educated as any of his classmates. His vocabulary and his handwriting were precocious, and he was unusually widely read, having worked his way through all the animal stories of Ernest Thompson Seton by the age of eight, and the works of popular novelists like Baroness Orczy (The Scarlet Pimpernel) and Stanley Weyman (Under the Red Robe) by the following year. He could recite great swathes of narrative verse by heart, from the Lyra Heroica to The Lays of Ancient Rome, as well as ten long poems in German (a language he did not understand) which he declaimed with a Swiss accent acquired from a governess who was Swiss.

  It was people en masse that Gavin could not cope with – the treachery and enmity, the violence and aggression that seemed part and parcel of the human pack as he perceived it. Everywhere he turned he was confronted with images that shocked or terrified. Communal bath night and his first sight of naked human bodies. The stale tobacco smell of a dreaded master’s room. The ammonia stench of the urinals. The pain of a ‘beaker’ (an excruciating tweak of the buttocks) from the school bully, an ugly little pig called Garshawe. A beating with a cricket bat in the headmaster’s study. A stand-up face-slapping match with his first mortal enemy, a bat-eared boy called Studley with a face like a clown’s mask. Above all, the loneliness – ‘I was always mooching about in corridors or empty classrooms, and always alone.’

  At the end of the term Gavin was removed from Heddon Court and at the beginning of 1925 sent to St Cyph’s, Eastbourne, where Cecil Beaton, George Orwell and Cyril Connolly had been pupils some years before. The new school was dominated by the buxom figure of the headmaster’s sadistic wife, but it was his fellow-pupils who dominated Gavin’s life. They mocked him because of the birthmarks on his arm, the fact that he couldn’t swim or box and because his mother had a title and his uncle and guardian (Sir Eustace Percy) was Minister of Education. It made no difference that he could draw and paint, write fluently, run fast and shoot straight. Such skills made him doubly suspect. His insecurity and alienation crippled his behaviour in the company of adults and contemporaries alike, so that he appeared stupid, gauche and defensive.

  Gavin was beyond doubt the odd-boy-out. ‘You’ve got to learn to be like other people,’ a senior boy had warned during an evening’s prep. It was well-intended advice, but Gavin did not have the means to follow it – and never did follow it, for he was never to become like other people. As an adult he learnt to adjust to his chronic non-alignment with the majority of his fellow humans, but as a boy he suffered torment for it. Photo portraits of the young Gavin reveal the transition in his personality from the relaxed, smiling child of the pre-school years to the uptight, unsmiling schoolboy of twelve or thirteen, biting his upper lip in defensive frustration, the look of the hunted animal in his eyes.

  By his second year at St Cyph’s Gavin’s dull unhappiness had turned to outright misery, and he began to suffer nightmares from which he would awake after screaming at the full pitch of his lungs for up to a quarter of an hour at a time. By now he was highly neurotic, and could hold out no longer. Determined to be removed from St Cyph’s, he scribbled a desperate letter to his mother which ended, ‘For God’s sake take me away from this awful place,’ and climbed out of the school at dead of night to post it. Gavin was taken away from St Cyph’s in the spring term of 1927, a few months before his thirteenth birthday. He left not in triumph but in a mood of remorse at his apparent failure to succeed.

  Gavin returned to the amniotic security of Elrig – and pets, mother-love and the peace and freedom of the open countryside. With his brothers away at Eton and Winchester, Gavin attached himself to the family gamekeeper, Bob Hannam, as he went about his distant traps during those cold bright March days. Hannam was a homespun Yorkshireman, a brilliant mechanic and inventor – he invented the only really effective shotgun silencer Gavin ever saw – with an innate dignity of bearing and courtesy of manner. He lived in a remote, peat-fired cottage on Elrig Loch and went about in an old tweed suit that smelled of dog, stoat, mole, black tobacco, human sweat, peat-smoke and bog-myrtle. From this wise old countryman Gavin acquired an intimate knowledge of wildlife and a pragmatic philosophy which frankly acknowledged the incurable cruelty of nature and the ephemeral nature of all life. At that age Gavin hated to see anything killed – the baiting of a hook with flesh cut from a living fish filled him with horror and tears – and the sights he saw on his rounds of the Elrig estate in Hannam’s company (the gin-trapped animals, the strychnined birds) induced a profound revulsion in him. But Hannam reassured him. ‘They all come to die,’ he would tell the boy, ‘there’s no mercy in nature, and as like as not their natural deaths’d be worse’n that. The stoat eats the rabbit alive, screaming away for twenty minutes or more, and he’ll kill maybe a thousand rabbits in his lifetime … Na, na. A man doesn’t like to see suffering, but it’s there whether he looks at it or not.’

  Paradoxically, and with his mother’s encouragement and Hannam’s expert guidance, Gavin turned his interests from bird-nesting and butterfly-catching to guns and shooting, which before long became as obsessive a passion with him as it had been with his father. He saw no contradiction in loving the creatures he killed, and from now on he was to be accepted by those few friends he found as a sort of ‘Mowgli with a gun’.

  * * *

  At the beginning of the summer term Gavin arrived with his mother in the chauffeur-driven family Studebaker to begin a year at his third and final prep school, Hurst Court, overlooking the Sussex downland at Ore, near Hastings. Gavin’s mother had chosen the school on the advice of her brother, Sir Eustace Percy, who was not only Minister of Education but the local Member of Parliament as well. For the first time Gavin began a term without shedding tears. The staff accepted the new boy as a challenge, making allowances for the fact that he was known to be a ‘difficult’ child, and it helped that his brother Eustace (who had preceded him at the school) had won the respect of the boys and the teachers. But it was Hurst Court’s headmaster, Dr Vaughan-Evans, a highly decorated pilot of the First World War, who made all the difference for a boy as alienated and anti-authoritarian as Gavin now was. Gavin had nothing to worry about, Vaughan-Evans promised him. There were no ogres at Hurst Court, and everyone was prepared to like him. And he was indeed treated with friendliness by boys and staff alike – a transformation in his experience of human society that was almost bewildering.

  To Lady Mary the headmaster wrote reas
suringly a week after Gavin’s enrolment: ‘He appears normal in every way.’ One contemporary of Gavin’s at Hurst Court was Peter Kemp, a future secret agent and guerrilla fighter, with whom Gavin was to stay in touch for the rest of his life. Kemp remembered Gavin as a tender plant, bat a tremendously sympathetic person who found himself in the perfect school environment, for Hurst Court was an easy-going place where beatings were virtually unheard of Gavin became a fast bowler and captain of the second cricket XI, and in collaboration with the school’s head boy he produced a school magazine, The Overall, which reflected his own interest in animals and birds and his newly-discovered passion for motor-racing (he had recently watched Sir Henry Birkin lap Brooklands at 140 miles per hour).

  Gavin’s voice suddenly broke in class one day, plunging to the bass key. This public trumpeting of the onset of puberty generated a flurry of activity amongst his elders. ‘The pitcher seems to have gone to the well once too often,’ Vaughan-Evans declared, and took him into his study for his first sex talk. Sex was a subject about which Gavin was totally ignorant – the limit of his knowledge seemed to be a belief that babies came into the world via the navel. Dr Vaughan-Evans’ explanations and admonitions on this arcane matter added nothing to Gavin’s comprehension, and though he realised he was being warned against something, he wasn’t sure what. Later his mother gave him a batty and highly misinformative Edwardian sex manual called What a Young Boy Ought to Know which pronounced dire warnings concerning ‘the private parts’ (which were not defined) and ‘self-abuse’ (any other sexual activity seemed so beyond the pale as to get no mention at all). This clarified nothing. Not that it mattered much, for by his own confession Gavin was to remain sexually inactive for the next three years of his adolescence.

  In September 1928, at the end of the summer holidays spent sailing, sketching and lizard-hunting en famille in Brittany, Gavin was sent to public school. Again it seems likely that his guardian, Sir Eustace Percy, lent a hand in the choice of school, for instead of following his brother Aymer to Eton, Gavin was sent to Stowe, deep in the lush green countryside of Buckinghamshire. Housed in the fabulous country palace of the extinct Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos, Stowe had been open for less than five years, and unlike Eton and the other heavily academic, highly ritualised, tightly buttoned-up great public schools of that era, it was broadly permissive in attitude, tolerant of the individuality of its pupils, and lacking the complex of meaningless rules and rituals that permeated the daily life of the older institutions. There were no bounds, and boys could go sailing on the ornamental lakes or on expeditions into the great park, conceived on a scale to rival Blenheim Palace.

  Presiding over this magnificent and idiosyncratic establishment was its remarkable young headmaster, J.F. Roxburgh, one of the towering figures in the history of the British upper-class educational system, a brilliant eccentric who defied all the usual traditions and conventions of such organisations.

  Gavin was still frightened of human beings in numbers, and the numbers at Stowe were very much greater than he had hitherto encountered. His reaction to the implicit danger and threat he perceived in the mass of humanity that swarmed around him was very like that of some combat veterans after their return from battle – he went into the woods and sought solace in nature; the still, overgrown wilderness of Stowe Park, its rank green English jungles dotted with Palladian temples and follies, statues and arches.

  It was easy to be alone in such a vast landscape, and Gavin was indeed alone during his free afternoons and the free time after breakfast every morning, when he took to the thickets of laurel and rhododendron in preference to the school toilets, which he was far too shy to use.

  In time he made a few close friends among like-minded boys. Among them was Anthony Dickins, who entered the school on the same day as Gavin:

  He was an elusive boy of my own age with pale blue eyes and pink lips and cheeks and a certain unusually intense wiry alertness about him. A strong and independent spirit shone from his face beneath a head of lank, fair hair. Yet at the same time he was quiet and gentle. He was an aristocrat to the fingertips, of the old-fashioned country type. He was more at home among the bracken when the rabbits were out in the evening than anywhere else – but there was nothing offensively ‘huntin’ and shootin’’ about him. He was too simple to be a braggart or a swashbuckler. The amazing amount of mischief and good humour in Gavin’s compact little body attracted me to him – and the twinkle in his eye when he smiled. We planned to start a magazine together, with some clever caricatures of the masters drawn by Gavin, but it never went further than the manuscript copy of the first issue. I sec him now, fleet as Mercury, speeding down the hill to Buckingham on a Saturday afternoon wrapped in his huge rabbit gloves, myself following no less speedily but rather more clumsily, to have a warm tea of poached eggs and sausages at the Grenville Café. On free days when we did not have to take part in organised games we used to explore Stowe Park. It was on these explorations that I discovered how intimately he was in contact with birds and animals, and I was amazed how he seemed to be able actually to communicate with them.

  In the early days at Stowe the boys were encouraged to have pets. Several kept peacocks, and one even kept a bear. Gavin looked after the waifs and strays, including a tea-chest full of starving redwings that had been caught in an early snowfall and were fed on ants’ eggs and mealworms he bought with his pocket money. One boy, John Nesfield, was constructing an aviary and pigeon loft on some waste scrubland when he first encountered Gavin. ‘A young, rather quiet boy came up and asked if he could help,’ Nesfield recalled.

  He told me his name was Maxwell and he expressed a great interest in keeping birds. We soon had some dove house pigeons, blue bars and chequers, and before long we were keeping a jay, a magpie, three jackdaws, an elderly crow, a little owl blind in one eye, and a male kestrel hawk we bought for eight shillings. I found Gavin one of the most interesting friends I have ever had. He was always very well mannered: a gentleman in every sense of the word. We had many walks in the beautiful countryside around Stowe and discussed the future. Gavin did not want to be tied down to a profession like accountancy or the law. He thought he might be able to write and even considered joining the regular army one day.

  John Hay, an athletic, outgoing boy a year younger than Gavin, shared Gavin’s preoccupation with wild creatures and soon became one of the best friends he ever had at any school – a friend who possessed so many qualities Gavin lacked that he became inordinately proud of his friendship. During Gavin’s final term at Stowe he spent long happy summer hours wandering among the lakes and oakwoods of the Stowe wilderness – with the knowledge that he had found a true friend at last and was no longer alone in a cruel and hostile world. ‘By the time I left Stowe,’ Gavin once told me, ‘I’d formed one or two friends, and I was very fond of them. But what I couldn’t understand were my enemies. I couldn’t understand why they disliked me, why they mocked me. I feel this thing has followed me through life – being much too easily hurt, being unarmoured in some curious way.’ Even John Hay had to acknowledge: ‘Gavin was just all screwed up.’

  When it was not possible to go into the woods physically, during lessons, for instance, Gavin contrived, by means of a vivid imagination and a degree of self-hypnosis, to enter them in spirit – not so much the woods, in fact, as the Elrig countryside which was always for him his childhood Avalon. In his mind’s eye he would set off through the gun-room side door, then down the track and out on to the moors or towards the woods: ‘The world is full of birds’ voices; below me as I climb, the rooks come and go from the elm clump, above me on a hill a curlew trills a steadily ascending scale “Wharp—wharp—wharp—wha-a-up—wha—a-up”, a lark is singing at some invisible point overhead. Up from the bracken on to the short, bare heather, springy heather under my young springy feet, up on to the ridge … The sea is in sight now, a glittering high horizon; the sense of space is enormous, and holds in it something near to rapture.’

/>   Gavin did not always reach his journey’s end in these classroom reveries. For out there on the hill he would hear his name roared in anger and the whole insubstantial structure of his dream of Elrig would dissolve into the chalky present.

  ‘MAXWELL!’

  It could be any one of half a dozen masters who stood towering in outrage above the dozing boy. Perhaps his Latin master – ‘a little pince-nezed Himmler of a man with mincing voice and industrial-urban clothes’ – who would twist his ear and pull his hair and address a few insulting remarks to him.

  Not surprisingly, Gavin fared badly at Stowe academically. It was not that he was slow-witted, far from it; he was just not mentally there. His school reports were almost universally dismal. ‘He appears utterly incapable of any form of concentration,’ went one master’s subject report. To his mother, J.F. Roxburgh had been forced to admit: ‘I think if you taught Gavin yourself in Form you would understand what his Masters mean when they say that he is lacking in interest and concentration. Gavin’s manner suggests the most perfect indifference to what is going on, and he has quite definitely a vein of indolence in him.’

  Gavin sank to the bottom of his class and remained there throughout his Stowe career. A biology master and two English masters – Humphrey Playford and C.R. (‘Spuggins’) Spencer – managed to elicit (as Gavin put it) ‘ephemeral sparks from my dour flint’, and under Spencer’s eccentric and inspirational tutelage Gavin even rose to the top of the form in English for one brief term, having learned by heart most of the poems in The Golden Treasury. According to his friend Anthony Dickins, Gavin was a budding writer even then. ‘All this time Gavin was sexually virgin, totally inactive in every way,’ Dickins believed. ‘Hence all his latent sexual energy went into his dreams, daydreams, imaginings, longings, thoughts of his home and surrounding countryside. What he was really doing in these dreams and reveries was writing letters and descriptions to himself, even in class, which is why he always came bottom. He was teaching himself “silently” to write. In class I used to watch his lips moving as he told himself a story or described a walk through his home park at Elrig – always day-dreaming, always looking out of the window.’