Much later in life, when Gavin had the opportunity to study the education system with the more objective mind of an enquiring adult, he concluded that part of his problem had been the system itself, which damped down and finally obliterated the untapped creative ability of many of those who were subjected to it. Later still he came to see the problems he had faced as a schoolboy in a more broadly sociological perspective:
All through my life, through school, right up to the time I joined the army, people were always trying to change me. They refused to accept me as I was. One had to conform. This was the main point of the whole of my upbringing. Everything that made you different from anyone else – any idea, any preference, any viewpoint – had to be erased. There was a norm to which everyone had to conform. This left you with two choices. You conformed and you suffered for conforming. Or you said, ‘I’m not going to conform, this is suppressing my personality, my potentiality,’ and so you broke out, and you suffered for breaking out, because you were shot at as if you were breaking out of a concentration camp, and once you were outside you were hunted too.
THREE
Breakdown
I’m going where the water’s deep
And wrecks have sunk before,
And there I’ll lay me down and sleep
And be reviled no more.
GAVIN MAXWELL, ‘I’ve Had Enough of Right and Wrong’ (1931)
15 July 1930 was a day Gavin would never forget. It was, for one thing, his sixteenth birthday. More than that, it was to end in a cataclysm that was to change his life and his attitude to himself and the world for ever.
The day had begun with a promising adventure and no hint of the catastrophe to come. Gavin had planned to climb out of his school house at dawn with a friend, James Ashton, and go rabbit-shooting in the surrounding country, for he had by now taken up shooting in a serious way and was in possession of a prized new .410 shotgun pistol which he had bought from the proceeds of dubious deals in jackdaws, owls and an owl-food composed of crushed beetles and meat scraps. The dawn was grey, the dew sopping, the human world still asleep as the two boys crept out towards the mist-hung lakes. ‘A sense of adventure and liberation,’ Gavin was to write of that portentous morning; ‘in all the world we were the only two awake, the only two hunters … I was the young predator in the dim red dawn of man.’ At the edge of the sandpit rabbit-warren they shot two rabbits with the new gun, and Gavin showed James – ‘expertly and with contempt’ – how to gut a rabbit with his roe-horn handled sheath-knife, a skill he had learnt from Hannam, the Elrig gamekeeper.
Then rain began to fall, drenching the boys in a deluge so heavy it seemed almost tropical. Their grey suits were sodden by the time they returned to the school, furtive and breathless, in time for morning assembly.
Morning lessons passed in the usual reveries. Shortly after midday Gavin’s elder brother, Aymer, and his mother arrived to take him off for a birthday lunch at Brackley. By the time they returned to Stowe Gavin was feeling indefinably ill, with a vague sensation of physical and mental depression, and he felt faintly relieved when his mother and brother left and he was able to clean his gun and sell the rabbits he had shot. In the late afternoon he went to the changing room to change his socks. He took off one sock and at that moment, he was to recall, ‘life came to a dead stop’.
‘I looked at my foot,’ he wrote, ‘and thought in a dull repetitive way: “It can’t be mine.” I took off the other sock and I said the Lord’s Prayer to myself and then my baby prayer, over and over again.’
His feet and ankles were covered in dark purple spots and patches, the joints were swollen and aching, and Gavin felt frightened and alone. Two boys came into the changing room and Gavin burst into tears. He ought to go to Matron at once, one of the boys advised him. But Matron could not explain the phenomenon and sent Gavin to the sanatorium to await the school doctor. By the time the doctor arrived the pain had intensified and spread to his stomach, and when Aymer returned later Gavin was so ill that even the presence of his revered brother brought no reassurance. The next morning an ambulance carried the critically ill boy off to a nursing home. ‘Of the journey I remember only darkness and pain,’ Gavin recalled, ‘and the sudden sweet release of morphia.’
At Kiama Nursing Home in Weybridge Gavin lay dreadfully ill, drifting in and out of consciousness. The massive internal bleeding from which he was suffering caused him intense pain and he was given constant doses of morphia to ease him through the long, desperate days and nights. His condition was diagnosed as Henoch’s purpura, a rare bleeding disease which in Gavin’s case, as his medical report concluded, ‘showed certain characteristics of Purpura haemorrhagica, with extensive ecchymosis, haemmorhage from all mucous surfaces and massive excretion of blood from bladder and bowel’. As his condition worsened his moments of consciousness became fewer. During one of these moments he was visited by the eminent Lord Horder, physician to King George V. Lord Horder was short, dark and very formally dressed, and Gavin disliked him on sight. Shaking his head slowly from side to side, Horder picked up Gavin’s right arm and remarked to the hospital consultant who was with him: ‘Should you come across this condition again, Doctor, it is worth noting that these ecchymoses on the right forearm are diagnostically perhaps the most typical.’
Summoning all the strength that was left in his exhausted body, Gavin exclaimed in the eminent physician’s outraged ear: ‘Those are birthmarks, you bloody fool.’
The prognosis was grim. Lord Horder was in no doubt that Gavin was dying. The next day a minister of the Apostolic Church arrived in Gavin’s darkened room, set out the miniature Communion plate on a table beside his bed and began to give him the Last Sacrament. His mother propped him up a little to receive the wafer and the Communal wine. ‘The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, broken for thee,’ the minister intoned, ‘preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life …’ After he had gone Gavin whispered to his mother: ‘Mother, am I going to die?’ His mother, with her eyes full of tears, replied: ‘Only if God wants you.’ Recalling this moment in the latter years of his life, Gavin believed that death would have been like taking morphine, and he would ‘float away through space and time to Elrig in perpetual spring sunshine’.
Of the following days the hospital medical records note: ‘After dangerous prostration and repeated transfusion, crisis was passed on August 5th.’ The bleeding stopped, the pain receded, and Gavin began the slow climb to recovery through a protracted, year-long convalescence. In the first few weeks he was helpless and almost totally dependent, for it was feared that the slightest movement would set off the bleeding again. All he could do was lie in his bed and look out through the french windows, enviously watching the birds and butterflies as they flitted about the nursing-home garden. Day by day his frustration at his captivity and the weakness of his frail and treacherous body grew in him. His desire for physical freedom was overwhelming, and he wanted nothing but to run, climb trees, and walk long distances.
In his memoirs of childhood, The House of Elrig, written some thirty-five years after the trauma of his adolescent illness, Gavin seems to have accepted the medical diagnosis that it was Henoch’s purpura that had nearly killed him. But reflecting on this a few years afterwards he gave me an alternative view which by then he found more convincing:
I believe very strongly that practically every physical ailment of the human body is directly under the control of the human brain, so my view is that this almost fatal illness was really due to psychological factors. I had very few friends when I was at Stowe. I spent most of my time alone, and I was completely sexually inactive, due to my upbringing. I think all these factors combined together might today have resulted in a nervous breakdown. But in those days things like nervous breakdowns were unheard of in the class to which I belonged, and in my own family would have been looked upon as shameful. ‘I’m afraid he’s not quite right in the upper storey,’ they’d have muttered, raising their eyebrows. Well, in my case it was not just t
he ‘upper storey’, it was all the storeys, the whole block of flats which gave way, and I suffered from a violent internal bleeding disease which today would be classified by part of the medical profession (though not all) like any other psychosomatic illness.
Gavin had more difficulty calculating the consequences of his illness. He acknowledged that he resolved to make himself a tougher, manlier, more physical person, but the true cost of his collapse seems to have escaped him, perhaps because it lay too close to the very heart of his personality to be detected by himself alone. In reality his illness had the effect of ruling a thick line across the course of his life to date. Though he was to advance far beyond it in terms of his intellectual development, emotionally he progressed no further, and remained stuck, like a needle in the groove of a gramophone record, at the age of sixteen, for ever an adolescent in his attitude to the adult world, his sexual relations and his interests and enthusiasms. In this enforced atrophy of his emotional development lies an essential clue to the mystery of his later personality, with all its unpredictable complexities and paradoxes.
On 23 August 1930 Gavin was discharged from the nursing home in Weybridge, and shortly afterwards he was installed in the best bedroom of Lower Northfield, the family’s winter home on the outskirts of Albury in Surrey. Here he was cosseted in almost total seclusion from the world. Subsisting on a salt-free diet of champagne and white fish (as it was thought his kidneys might have been affected by his illness), he slowly began to regain his strength and power of movement, and in the company of his sister, Christian, turned to drawing and painting and endless games of chess and cards to help while away the long, sedentary hours of his captivity. He also read whatever books he could get hold of. Many of them were poetry, including A.E. Housman, Siegfried Sassoon, Omar Khayyám (which he learnt by heart in its entirety) and James Thomson’s ‘The City of Dreadful Night’. He also began to write verse himself, generally in the manner of the poet he had last been reading. It was the sonority in poetry that attracted him, and melancholy and despair.
During these months of confinement at Albury Gavin stumbled, almost by accident, and after more than three years of repressed sexual maturity, on the physical manifestations of the sex drive while luxuriating alone in his bath. Brought up in the shadow of late Victorian sexual prudery, with its dour burden of guilt and shame, Gavin’s unexpected spasm of sexual take-off plunged him into an agony of moral confusion. ‘A moment later, awareness regained,’ he was to write in his adulthood, ‘I was trembling in the witch-doctor’s world of my indoctrination … madness, sin, and fear, fear, fear.’ His inhibitions had grown to become a substantial part of his psyche, and their destruction was a process of painful confusion. Agonised with guilt, the convalescent boy became locked in a desperate struggle to control the new-found demon, torn between pleasure and sin. Only after a close study of some rudimentary sex manuals he found in the changing room of the local masseuse (where he went for ultra-violet ray therapy three times a week) did Gavin begin to question his identification of sex with sin – although this revolutionary move left his sense of guilt ‘surprisingly intact’.
Towards the end of the year Gavin fell in love for the first time – ‘blindingly, helplessly’ – with a girl of his own age called Elizabeth whom he met in the Duke of Argyll’s great country mansion at Strachur on Loch Fyne, where he was staying with his mother. In The House of Elrig he was to recreate the exquisite torment of his unforeseen and hopeless condition: ‘It was the more confusing because I could not have said what I wanted of her; the longing, ocean-deep, poignant as a weeping violin, was supremely unconscious of its purpose.’ He first set eyes on his unattainable heart’s desire in the castle’s great drawing room – ‘a background contrived for passion’ – with its giant potted azalea, Aubusson carpet, chiming clock and enormous chandelier. ‘I cried myself to sleep because she was somewhere else, in another room; yet the idea of going to bed with her, which never crossed my mind as a desire, would have been sacrilege. I didn’t know that I wanted to.’
Shy, fastidious, romantic, guilt-ridden and confused, it was to be a long time before Gavin was to go to bed with anyone. But thinking about that disturbing encounter after he had returned to Albury, Gavin lit on a comparison which integrated the two strands of his conflicting adolescent desires – his emotional longings and physical ecstasies. A conjunction of the two, he realised, might lead to unimaginable happiness, ‘Some time, far away in the future; not this year, not next year; some time, but not never.’
Shortly before Christmas Gavin moved with his mother and sister to Cookes Place, a small house next to the Apostolic Church at the other end of Albury – a south-facing residence which it was hoped would catch the health-enhancing winter sun. In spite of occasional relapses, when the purple stigmata would reappear and he would unexpectedly lose consciousness, Gavin continued to gain strength. On 14 February 1931 his mother reported on his progress in a letter to J.F. Roxburgh, the Headmaster of Stowe. Though he was very much better and his kidneys had sustained no permanent damage, she wrote, he would have to undergo an operation for the removal of his tonsils once the warm weather came in April, so the prospects of his returning to Stowe in the summer were virtually nil. She added: ‘He is almost beside himself today with the rapture of what seems to him like a release from prison – in the leave given him by the doctor yesterday to walk where and as much as he likes (within reasonable limits) and to carry a gun. Although the object of the latter will be only vermin, it means much to him – after seven months’ severely restricted liberty; his heart was affected for some weeks in the autumn and winter, and he has not been allowed to walk uphill or for more than half an hour to an hour a day.’
In the spring of 1931 Gavin began to attend a crammer in Godalming as a day pupil with a view to sitting for his School Certificate at the end of the year. In the summer he learned to drive his mother’s Rover up and down the long drive of the Duke of Northumberland’s country mansion at Albury Park, taking over as his mother’s chauffeur on his seventeenth birthday and driving her on a long tour of her girlhood friends in castles and country mansions the length and breadth of England. At first he was shy and tongue-tied in these grand establishments, but he quickly learned how to tip and what to give a butler – ‘all the little rituals that together composed the password of the tribe’. He learned the totems and taboos, and conformed fanatically, for he had no tribe he could call his own. As he saw it, his family had been disbanded, his school was a thing of the past, and he was conscious of the need to be adopted by another tribe quickly. He met few young people of his own age on this grand tour, but the men warmed to him when they discovered his passion for shooting and his prowess with a gun, and it was in this world of plus-fours and dubbined boots, shotguns and rifles, that he sank temporary tribal roots.
Six months at various health-spots along the south coast of England were followed by a drab winter in out-of-season Bournemouth. By now Gavin was in the full flood and turmoil of adolescent rebellion. The only people he knew in Bournemouth were his mother and his tutor – a ‘poor old gentle gourmet’ who induced in him a silent and contemptuous fury. His only companion, the only recipient of his affection, was Judy, his bright little Cocker Spaniel bitch, whom he used to walk in the unspoilt pinewoods of Ringwood Forest. His mother herself became a stranger to him, and he fought and quarrelled even with her in his adolescent struggle for his personal freedom. ‘I hated everything that confined me, and I hated it with a sharp-edged resentment.’
Gavin’s immediate aims were now clear. He wished to achieve freedom and manhood. Above all, he wished to return to Elrig, his true home. In the spring of 1932 he was judged well enough to make the long journey to Scotland and to resume his life at a place far from emergency medical care. This news marked the end of nearly two years on the sidelines of society, and to celebrate his release Gavin wrote to his Stowe friend John Hay, asking if he could join him on holiday at Elrig as his first and very own guest.
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Elrig house impressed John Hay with its aura of great state and privilege. Almost uniquely among the Scottish houses of that time it had central heating, porridge was served with salt at breakfast, and the house cigarettes were Egyptian, very long and stamped impressively with the letter ‘M’. Garbed in Gavin’s bedraggled old Harris tweed plus-four suit, John Hay set out each day with his aristocratic friend to quarter Gavin’s home patch. Gavin was to recall of this time: ‘John and I explored the kingdom from which I had been exiled for so long. The high, wind-whining moorlands of rock and heather, the far hill and sea horizons; and in his company I consolidated a long-lost position. We went to look for an eagle’s nest in the Galloway Hills, and as we scrambled up the rain-gleaming rock and scree I asked, because this was important, “John, what do you ordinarily do in the holidays?” He said: “Well, nothing as good as this,” and suddenly the rock and the rain and all the gigantic windswept kingdom of Galloway seemed mine to live in, all exile over.’
Gavin Maxwell Page 6
