Much can be explained by Gavin’s unusual and chequered boyhood – his romanticism, his unconventionality, his alienation and rebelliousness, his tastes in books, language and literary style, food and décor; his attitude to money, social classes, sex and mores, courage, nobility and the knightly quest; his reaction against religion, formal education, the parental role and any kind of authority; his passionate pursuit of those things he discovered for himself, like nature, animals and the wilds, painting and poetry; his thirst for freedom and his egocentricity and self-preoccupation, the consequences of childhood isolation. Perhaps by now Gavin had also developed the symptoms of the ‘bi-polar illness’ which was to shadow him all the rest of his life.
But that boyhood was now over. Ahead lay the years of maturity – and the battle to understand and come to terms with the human world and the cruel and wayward vagaries of time and fate.
FOUR
The Celtic fringe
Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum!
Here sit I till the grouse packs come,
Builded butt with a beachen floor,
Two guns, loader and Labrador;
We’ll pick up in the usual run
(Gather ’em galloping, sweep, my son!)
Twenty brace when the drive is done
Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum!
GAVIN MAXWELL, ‘Game Book 1932–35’
Shortly after his eighteenth birthday, Gavin took up serious shooting again. ‘I was brought up to be a country gentleman, shooting and fishing,’ he told me years later:
Not hunting, because it didn’t exist up there. I loathed fishing, but shooting became a passion with me – and, later on, wildfowling, the toughest blood sport in the world. To be out on an estuary – out on the salt-marsh and mud-flats of Wigtown Bay – completely on one’s own in the early hours of the depths of winter was hard beyond belief – the conditions were so tough you’d think nothing could survive out there at all, least of all a human being. These were challenges I deliberately sought out. After my illness, after being a weakling for so long, I wanted to prove myself physically, I wanted to prove I could do macho things, that I was a man of action.
But there was another element in Gavin’s passion – the call of the wild, the siren song of freedom. Out there in the midwinter wilderness between the land and the sea he would strain his ears ‘to hear in the dawn and the dusk the wild music of those voices that quickened my pulse as I waited shivering in the ooze of some tidal creek with the eastern horizon aflame.’
Gavin began to shoot game and game birds with obsessive fervour and increasing accuracy on the moorlands and wetlands around Elrig and Monreith, and eventually further afield. Sometimes alone, more often with his elder brother Aymer or various family friends and local chums, he strode the mosses and heather-clad roughs and hills, or lurked about the coverts and the lochs and dams of the Maxwell domains, blazing away at grouse, snipe, pigeon, mallard, teal, shoveller, greyhen, goldeneye, wigeon, greylag, partridge, pheasant, blackgame, woodcock, rabbit, hare, stoat, and even curlew and heron, with inexhaustible enthusiasm.
For the next five years Gavin was to keep a large and elaborate Game Book, as his father had done before him, in which he recorded his sporting adventures in meticulous detail, lavishly illustrated with photos, drawings, poems and elaborate lettering in his own hand, and written in the curious jargon of the shooting aristocracy – what he called ‘the priestly, esoteric language and all the passwords’ – which he had learned from his father’s Game Books. From this ornate compilation it is possible to draw up a tally of slaughter which might seem incomprehensible to people not brought up in the landed gentry’s age-old tradition of rural blood sports. In his first season, for example, when he was confined to his home ground, he took part in the shooting of 385 head of game in August and September and a further 621 head in December (including his first goose, a greylag) – a total of more than a thousand birds and animals killed in the course of a few days. The gunfire carried on merrily into the new year, as Gavin duly recorded for 5 and 6 January: ‘Good days, but not very many birds. Such as they were, they came beautifully, with hardly a low bird among them. The 5th was a glorious sunny day with slight frost – cock pheasants topping the high trees looked wonderful in the sun … The 6th was a good day, but the shooting at the mighty host of rabbits was a trifle ineffectual and the total of 82 does not do justice to their numbers … We finished with a terrific bombardment at starlings as they came in to roost, and must have killed a hundred or more.’
Much of Gavin’s time during the year following his release back into the normal world was occupied in intensive study with private tutors and crammers in an attempt to catch up with his interrupted education and qualify for Oxford. In the summer of 1933 he was accepted to read Estate Management at Hertford College, and in October he went up to Oxford for the start of the Michaelmas term.
Neither his college nor his course was his own choice, having been decreed for him by his mother and his guardian, Sir Eustace Percy, and Gavin felt somehow slighted that he had not been sent to Trinity, Cambridge, or Christ Church, Oxford, which were the more usual destinations of young men of his class and background. Hertford College at that time was neither particularly rich nor particularly brilliant. Its only notable luminary in recent years was the novelist Evelyn Waugh, who went down eight years before Gavin came up. He was to describe Hertford as ‘a respectable, rather dreary little college’, halfway up the University pecking order, with nondescript buildings (Bridge of Sighs apart) and no outstanding members of distinction among either the dons or the undergraduates. Its advantages were a good kitchen and an easygoing atmosphere free from boyish ‘college spirit’ and rowdy hooliganism. ‘It was,’ concluded Waugh, ‘a tolerant, civilised place in which to lead whatever kind of life appealed to one.’ It is likely that Hertford was as carefully chosen to suit Gavin’s particular personality and needs as Stowe had been – neither expecting too much from him nor imposing too much on him.
Gavin was not a natural college type, for he had a dread of institutions and organised collectives of all kinds. It is no accident that in the Freshmen’s group photograph taken in the main quad he is the only one of the thirty-three sports-jacketed new arrivals who has half-turned aside and is staring aloofly away from the camera. The majority of his fellow undergraduates remembered him as a loner who kept very much to himself. He took no part in college sports or other activities, was never seen on the river, never sat down with the college Dining Club, and rarely appeared in the Junior Common Room except to take a brief look at a magazine and depart without exchanging a word with anyone. He struck most of those who knew him as shy, retiring, introspective, almost aloof. ‘He had a raffish and well-heeled look about him,’ one contemporary remembered, ‘that deterred friendship.’ Some thought he might have been a bit ‘mousy’; others, noting the cloth cap and hacking jacket he habitually wore, assumed he was ‘horsey’.
In fact, Gavin did not ride at Oxford, but unusually for undergraduates of that time he did drive his own car – an enormous Bentley coupé with a leather strap round its vast bonnet. This was not the only monster car at Oxford at that time. Another undergraduate, a friend by the name of Mike Wills, owned a large sports car that could do 100 miles per hour on the new Woodstock Road. Wills liked to demonstrate his motor’s prowess by taking friends out for demonstration runs, and Gavin would find out when these demonstrations were taking place, lie in wait at a lay-by, then roar after them and overtake at 113 miles per hour. The Bentley set Gavin apart from most Hertford men of his age. So did the fact that he had the college furniture removed from his rooms in the quaint and ancient block between the Chapel and the Senior Common Room known as the Cottage and replaced with his own antique sofa, chairs, carpets and screen culled from the sumptuous recesses of Elrig and Monreith. When he moved to lodgings at 3 Banbury Road in his second year he took his furniture with him, and filled such space as was left with a multitude of stuffed geese.
Gavin’s inte
rests, like his friends, lay outside the bounds of his college. ‘In those days the various groups within the university were much more rigidly formed than they are today,’ he once told me. ‘But I was so completely non-integrated with my surroundings that I behaved like a chameleon. I tried to belong to all the different groups at the same time. I wanted to be everything to everybody. But you can’t do this – you have to put on a uniform of some kind.’ Before long he was to discover the uniform that suited him best during his Oxford years.
‘Looking back with distaste to the brashness of my late adolescence,’ he was to recall, ‘I perceive that I was an earnest member of the Celtic fringe, avid for tartan and twilight.’ This was not due to any Scottish nationalistic fervour (for he was, he confessed, ‘an arrant snob’, and looked down on this movement as an essentially plebeian one), but to aristocratic conservatism and nostalgia, and to what he was later to describe as ‘an inherently romantic nature tinged with melancholy’. The fact that he was not a Highlander but a Lowland Scot who could neither speak Gaelic nor perform Highland dances was immaterial; at least he was entitled to wear a kilt (of shepherd’s plaid), and his maternal grandmother had been a daughter of the Duke of Argyll, MacCallum Mor himself, the clan chief of the Campbells. In those days he did not question the established order, and for him the West Highlands meant deer forests, hereditary chieftains and the romantic life of an indigenous aristocracy.
It was hardly surprising, therefore, that at Oxford he became a member of a curious clique of assertively un-urban landed gentry, most of them Scots, who affected a way of living and dressing that was quite unsuited to University life in a town like Oxford. They wore tweed shooting suits and heavy, thickly dubbined shooting shoes studded with nails, and wherever they went spaniels or Labrador retrievers trotted at their heels; when they re-assembled in the autumn term their rooms were invariably hung with the heads of the stags they had shot in the Highlands during the summer vacation. Gavin himself looked back with disfavour on the brashness of his late adolescence, and viewed his clique as little better than a species of privileged hiker – ‘a striking example of the fact that aristocracy and education were no longer synonymous’.
The degree course in Estate Management for which Gavin had been enrolled may have been appropriate for some of his landed gentry friends, but it was not of the slightest interest to him. Such time as he devoted to academic studies during his first year at Oxford was dedicated to subjects closer to his heart, and instead of attending lectures in his own course at the School of Rural Economy he went to those at the medical and zoological schools, and began to learn to paint at the Ruskin School of Art. The inevitable result was that he failed his preliminary exams at the end of his first year, and was required to sit them again at the end of his second.
The implications were serious – if he failed the preliminary exams a second time he would be sent down in disgrace, and even if he passed he would still be faced with two more years of study before taking his finals, after four years rather than the usual three. But the second year was spent in much the same desultory fashion as the first; Gavin attended the minimum of lectures, and passed the time during the interminable discourses on inorganic chemistry, soil science and the like playing noughts and crosses with fellow undergraduates, emerging from each lecture as ignorant as when he had entered it. By the time the second exams approached neither he nor his fellow examinees were in any better position than they had been before. An emergency conference was convened in an oak-panelled room at The Old Parsonage, and over glasses of brown sherry and Balkan Sobranie cigarettes four of them hatched a plan.
There was only one way to pass the exams, they agreed, and that was to steal the examination papers from the houses in which they were kept in a series of perfect burglaries. Reprehensible though this might seem, it would spare their parents the distress of having their sons sent down, and it would harm no one, for the exams were not competitive and did not even confer a degree, merely entitled those who passed them to continue their studies at the University. The plan was elaborate and ambitious – to Gavin’s consternation it was voted that he should carry out the actual burglaries, since he was the lightest and nimblest of the group, while the others acted as look-outs and decoys. So they set to work. They carried out a reconnaissance. They ‘borrowed’ two keys and had replicas cut. They acquired masks, gloves and pencil-beam torches. They fitted two of their cars with false number plates. Then, on a moonless night a little less than a week before the exams were due to begin, they struck. In middle-age Gavin was to look back with mild disapproval and bemusement at this escapade of his youth: the palpitating progress up the long drainpipe of the first house he burgled, the signal of a double owl’s hoot to alert the get-away car when the work was done, the horror of stumbling on a confederate in a darkened room when he should have been keeping watch outside. Only the Economic History paper, locked away in an uncrackable safe, eluded them. For that exam, therefore, they covered their shirt-cuffs in white paper on which they wrote all the facts they required in microscopic lettering using pale yellow ink, and whenever they needed to look something up they studied their cuffs through high-powered reading spectacles.
‘So we passed our preliminaries in this disgraceful manner,’ Gavin recalled, ‘and we remained at Oxford for a further two years of idleness.’ Some passed the time in sexual adventures or a lifestyle of caviar, champagne and debutantes. Gavin, however, remained virgin, and pursued his childhood hobbies of natural history and painting.
He still shot as often as opportunity allowed. Sometimes he organised pigeon shoots with friends like Tony Wills (the future Lord Dulverton and landlord of Sandaig) and Simon Ramsay (today the Earl of Dalhousie), and in the spring he would go off into the countryside to shoot young rooks with his old Stowe friend John Hay (now a member of the Oxford and England rifle teams), returning to Oxford to cook a traditional dish of rook pie in his rooms. By now he was a first-class shot – good enough to be a member of the Oxford University gun team and reckoned by many to be one of the best dozen guns in the country – and throughout his Oxford career he invariably spent both the winter and summer vacations with a gun in his hands in the Highlands. He reported his continuing prowess in his Game Book. ‘Some wonderful shooting,’ he recorded of a December pheasant shoot at Cairnsmore House, Kirkcudbrightshire. ‘I got off 36 cartridges in 14 minutes and killed 27 pheasants and one woodcock. Total for the day: 98 pheasants and three woodcock – 147 cartridges.’ A few weeks later he wrote of another shoot on the same ground: ‘Enormous number of hares on the low mosses, of which quite as many were missed as killed (94). I had 63 head to my own gun and shot rottenly.’ By now he was shooting intensively – ‘36 days shooting since Aug 12,’ he recorded 45 days later: ‘16 at home and 20 away.’
Not for a good few years was Gavin to sense any paradox in both loving wild animals and killing them. He was born and brought up a predator, he was to argue, and his only concern was to kill as cleanly and efficiently as possible. But in a poem written in 1934 in celebration of his sport he does briefly question – and then justify – the mass slaughter:
Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum!
That is the way my pets succumb,
By the stone and the hundred brace,
Northern corrie and Southern chase;
But let guns be oiled and game books inked.
For here’s my view of it put succinct:
If they didn’t succumb they’d be extinct,
Gone to the dodo dead and dumb,
If it wasn’t for me and my Fee, Fo, Fum!
Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum!
Gavin was a keen and exotic game cook, digging out ancient country recipes for almost every kind of game, even inedible kinds. An old Stowe friend, Patrick Brodie, remembered dining uneasily at Elrig on greylag geese he had shot with Gavin in Wigtown Bay. Gavin stuffed the geese with red herring and dried them for a week before cooking them, but the result was not a success, and was not improved by a kitchen mix-up
whereby the birds were served with chocolate sauce instead of gravy.
By now Gavin was travelling widely to shoot at the grand houses and aristocratic estates of noble-born relatives and well-placed friends in the Scottish Lowlands and Highlands and even across the water in the Irish Republic, where he was Christmas guest at the Annaskaul (County Kerry) home of his friend Douglas Collins, the future head of Gaumont Pictures and founder of Goya, the perfume company. But the huge turreted castle of Inveraray, the ancestral seat of his great-aunt H.R.H. Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll and her husband the Duke – and the headquarters of the Clan Campbell since the fifteenth century – offered by far the stateliest accommodation and finest hunting on his vacation shooting circuit. At Inveraray Castle and at Strachur on the opposite side of Loch Fyne he passed most of his long vacations, and it was on Inveraray lands that he shot his first stag on 10 September 1935, as he duly recorded in his Game Book: ‘The Scaurnoch Wood. My first stag. Short stalk, lying shot at about 90 yards, in the wood to the N.W. of Donquhaich rock. Switch, wt: 15.12.’
These shooting days were not exclusively concerned with sporting endeavour, for in part they were the occasion for a seasonal get-together of Britain’s pre-war upper-crust, then in the heyday of its privilege and power. The photographs Gavin took of these exclusive shooting parties – the plus-foured, Harris-tweeded gunmen with their kills laid out in rows – depict human types now largely vanished from the British scene. Moustachioed, bandoliered and gaitered, they stand tightly buttoned and tied at the neck in informal military lines-abreast before Bentley and castle doorway, their stern expressions denoting innate breeding, and unquestioned authority – a ruling class as yet inviolate. Sometimes Gavin himself appears in these pictures – a slim, melancholy, waif-like figure clad in a checkered hunting suit and wearing a youthful moustache on his not very stiff upper lip. He seems to fit uneasily into these groups of stalwarts – half-hidden at the back, or diminished by perspective at the far end of the line, as if he wishes to conceal his presence among them, or is half-minded to dart away to the nearest covert.
Gavin Maxwell Page 7
