Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  What the photographs do not reveal are Gavin’s ordeals at the end of the shooting day. Always shy and unnerved in large social gatherings, but held together by black tie and dinner jacket, he would reluctantly deliver himself to the tortures of trial by sherry in the stately home ante-room, the torment of the formal dinner in the antlered, chandeliered castle dining-hall. This was the price he paid for the freedom of roaming some of the wildest and grandest hunting lands in the world in pursuit of the birds and beasts he loved – and loved to kill.

  But Gavin was still essentially an interloper in the Highlands. ‘My own yearning for the Highlands was in those days as tormenting as an unconsummated love affair,’ he recorded later, ‘for no matter how many stags I might kill or feudal castles inhabit I lacked an essential involvement; I was further from them than any immigrated Englishman who planted one potato or raised one stone upon another.’

  There was more to Gavin than the image of the simple gun-toting aristocrat and Hibernian romantic might suggest. A completely different dimension to his personality is revealed by his Stowe friend Anthony Dickins, then a music scholar at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, whom Gavin visited unannounced in his college rooms on 20 November 1935. Dickins noted in his diary:

  Towards evening the door bursts open and in comes Gavin Maxwell!! God! how my heart races to see him again. I am dumb, completely dumb. He is publishing a volume of poems at Methuens soon [an unrealised ambition]. He is now grown very good-looking – clean-limbed, clear of countenance, as eager and enthusiastic as always, with a great personality and a fire or wind that burns or blows through him catching up his life in ardent fury. He stays about half an hour and then I go to see him off in his immense Bentley on his way to dine at the Pitt Club. He wears a cloak.

  But that today Gavin should walk in out of my past still seems like a dream. He is as child-like as he ever was, as simple as ever; with this new thing added. He takes my mind back to long winter evenings in Chatham house-room and afternoons in Stowe grounds. He has much of the true poet in him.

  By now the day of reckoning was drawing near, as Gavin approached the end of his University career. But in late April 1937, at the beginning of his last term at Oxford, he contracted a bad bout of jaundice and was left with only six weeks in which to prepare for his final examinations for his Bachelor’s degree. In vain he asked to be allowed to retire on the ground of ill-health rather than face certain failure. He was to sit for his degree, he was told, no matter what the outcome might be. So he resigned himself to six weeks’ hard work – and somehow managed to scrape through.

  FIVE

  To the Low Arctic

  The strong life that never knows harness;

  The wilds where the caribou call;

  The freshness, the freedom, the farness –

  O God! how I’m stuck on it all.

  ROBERT SERVICE, ‘The Spell of the Yukon’

  Gavin came down from Oxford at the end of June 1937 with a Third Class Degree he did not value and training in a profession he did not respect or intend to pursue. Educated he might be, but he felt lacking in any meaningful qualification to put after his name – essentially an amateur in every sphere.

  Almost immediately after taking his degree Gavin was offered the job of private secretary to Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, then British Ambassador in Iraq. It was, Clark-Kerr told him, a ‘back door to the diplomatic service’, and Gavin was eager to accept. But his uncle and guardian Lord Eustace Percy, now Minister without Portfolio in Neville Chamberlain’s Conservative government, disapproved of Clark-Kerr’s unconventional approach to life and the British Establishment, and strongly urged Gavin to decline. Gavin followed his guardian’s advice, and when he told Clark-Kerr of his decision, the Ambassador replied: ‘You’re making a big mistake. I’m going to the top and I could take you with me.’ The following year he was made Ambassador to China; in 1942 Ambassador to the USSR; and in 1946, as Lord Inverchapel of Loch Eck, Ambassador to the United States. Occasionally he wrote to Gavin from his exalted postings abroad. From beleaguered Russia he wrote to assure Gavin that he was as certain the Allies would win the war as he was that he would be a future Ambassador to the United States. He could still get Gavin out of the army and on to his staff if he wanted. But by now Gavin was preoccupied with other things and – ‘like a bloody fool’ – he again declined.

  Having let this opportunity slip by, Gavin cast about for more mundane employment as a temporary tutor, placing an advertisement in the papers which provides a remarkably exact profile of his interests and attributes at this stage of his life:

  Mr Gavin Maxwell, age 23, educated Stowe and Hertford College, Oxford, is seeking a post as holiday companion-tutor to not more than 3 boys of Public School age, period July 25 to September 25 or shorter period. English or Scottish country’ house, Scottish preferred. Good teacher of shooting with rifle or gun. (Oxford University team for the latter.) Fair and careful shot. Experienced in the training and handling of gun dogs. Thorough knowledge of all game, deer, wild fowl, and natural history. Could act as stalker or puntsman if required. Excellent and careful car driver, all makes, clear licence. Could teach estate management in all branches, English literature, composition and style, and ordinary school subjects. Willing to be useful in any way.

  References as to character and capacity from Mr Maxwell’s uncle, The Rt. Hon. Lord Eustace Percy, M.P., The Lady Elizabeth Motion, and the Principal of Hertford College, Oxford.

  A few weeks later Gavin joined a bizarre little agricultural firm in Hereford called the Sprout Chemical Company, which was partly funded by his brother Aymer and which manufactured a novel (and fairly useless) maize sprouter for the farming industry. ‘The Managing Director, who had invented the sprouter, was a comical character called Mr Wallace Turner,’ Gavin was to recall, ‘and he looked – and sounded – exactly like a frog. “Wonderful prospects, wonderful potential,” he croaked at me when I went for my first interview. But when I asked him whether he had sold any of these devices he closed his eyes, put his fingertips together like a bishop, and silently mouthed the word, “No.” Well, he gave me the job of what he called “Fieldsman Number One” with the ludicrously grand title of Managing Director for Scotland, which was simply another way of saying I was the commercial traveller in Scotland – a one-man band in a joke organisation. I stuck this for more than a year, but it was very much not what I wanted to do, and as I had great difficulty in taking orders from idiots in authority over me, eventually I resigned.’

  That was the end of the first and last job Gavin Maxwell ever had in his life. War years apart, he was to be a freelance to the end of his days. By the spring of 1938 he was already contributing occasional freelance articles to The Field, the magazine devoted to field sports and country pursuits. But his real ambition was to be an explorer – not as a member of large expeditions (his dislike of groups precluded this even more than his lack of formal scientific qualifications) but as a lone wolf, using a minimum of his small capital to pursue his own interests and travel where he wanted, and returning to write about what he had found and seen. The question was – where to go?

  Three main influences contributed to his decision. The first was the residual influence of his boyhood reading – of North American wilderness writers like Jack London (White Fang and The Call of the Wild) and Ernest Thompson Seton (Wild Animals I Have Known, Wild Animal Ways). ‘The books I loved best when I was a boy were all about the Rockies and the American north-west,’ Gavin was to recall, ‘and I think that’s why, when I broke away and began to travel, I went north rather than south to, say, Arabia or the tropics. I used to fancy myself as someone obsessed with the idea of the far north and all that went with it.’ It was a particular book he had come across at one of his prep schools that impelled him to the Arctic – a boys’ picture book with a garishly painted polar landscape on the cover, complete with polar bear, fathomless sea, and flaming aurora borealis. ‘I was drawn into a majesty of icy desolation and loneliness
,’ he recalled, ‘of limitless space and awful splendour, colder and remoter than the stars, so that my throat tightened and I wanted to cry because it was so beautiful and terrible.’

  Another influence was his passion for wildfowl – the essentially northern geese and duck he hunted obsessively, and equally loved and protected. At Monreith he had been building up a unique living collection of the wild geese of the world, starting with the native birds he had wing-tipped on the mud-flats of Wigtown Bay and brought back to Monreith to nurse and tame. The collection grew till it included such exotics as snow geese from North America, bar-headed geese from Tibet and a Cape Barren goose that would walk through the open french windows of the library to squat in front of the fire – ‘her delicate dove-grey argus-eyed plumage quivering with contentment’. All these exotic geese fed out on the nearby loch or grazed on the grassy slope below the old castle, and at the hour of the evening flight, Gavin would recall later, he would listen to the wings and desolate music of the greylags and the snow geese from the loch. It was a fair bet that if ever he headed off into the wilds it would be for reasons connected with these entrancing creatures, who were for him the very embodiment of the freedom of the vast skies and far horizons of high latitudes.

  The third influence – the essential catalyst – was his friend Peter Scott, only son of the Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Peter Scott was five years older than Gavin and already an established and successful painter of wild landscapes and flying geese. He and Gavin had many interests in common, not least wildfowl, natural history and painting, and Gavin visited him sometimes at his lighthouse at Sutton Bridge, Norfolk, where the Nene runs into the Wash. It was Peter Scott who provided Gavin with the aim and direction for his first independent travels abroad. Friends more experienced than Gavin in matters of exploration had already advised him not to be too ambitious at the start – better, they said, to begin with a short journey and a limited but attainable aim. Such an aim was suggested to him by Scott. It was well established, he told him, that the beautiful little duck known as Steller’s eider had its breeding grounds along the Arctic coast of Siberia. But did those breeding grounds extend across the border into Arctic Europe, and specifically into that part of Finnmark (Norwegian Lapland) adjoining Varanger Fjord, where the Russian and European Arctic meet – a barren region of cold tundra four hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, the most north-easterly coastline in Europe and the only place in Europe where Steller’s eider could normally be seen? Whether or not they bred there, it would be worth trying to track down this elusive bird, for it had never been photographed in the wild.

  So off to the Arctic tundra of East Finnmark Gavin went in the summer of 1938, travelling alone with just £100 in his pocket and what he could carry on his back. A Norwegian steamer, the Linga, took him from Newcastle to the Norwegian port of Bodö, then on to Spitzbergen in the High Arctic to pick up fur trappers, and from there to Bear Island and on to Nordkapp, the most northerly point of Europe, before carrying on to the small Norwegian settlement of Vadsö on the Varanger Fjord – his final destination. Years later he was to regale me with the highlights of this first journey abroad alone:

  I thought to myself – this is the life for me, close to nature, testing my physical prowess. But when I arrived at Vadsö at half past three in the morning, after twelve days on board the steamer, it was raining sheets and sheets of rain, and an awful perpetual grey daylight, neither dark nor light, persisted throughout the whole 24 hours, and I thought, ‘This is the most depressing place I have ever come to in my life.’ I had made prior arrangements to stay in the house of a Norwegian woman, Fru Pedersen, who had once worked as a nursemaid in Newcastle, so I shouldered my heavy rucksack and walked down the gangway on to the pier and wandered through the village in the pouring rain till I found the house. I knocked on the door and after two or three minutes a girl in a nightdress opened it. She stood there talking very rapidly in some foreign language I couldn’t understand, but eventually she showed me to a room and said, ‘Madam will come soon.’ I sat there on the edge of the bed and I waited and waited for hours, looking out of the window at the rain streaming down, but nobody came. Then suddenly I saw a dozen or so of one of the birds I had come all this way to see – Steller’s eider – so close I could almost touch them. That cheered me up enormously. And after about four hours madam came at last. She brought me tea, smoked reindeer, an exercise book in which she had written out Lapp phrases for me, she even brought me supplies for the tundra – a whole smoked salmon, two dozen boiled eggs and so on. ‘Leave your luggage here,’ she told me. ‘Come back when you like. Wake us up when you like. I’m going back to bed now.’

  So I drank my tea and packed my rucksack with the food she had given me and set off into the tundra. It was sheeting with rain, and after about two miles I walked, literally, on to the nest of another bird – a rare goose, a Lesser Whitefront – which flew away when I arrived. I got my camera out of the rucksack, and sat down and waited for the bird to come back to the nest, and when at last it came back I photographed it – and that proved these birds nested here.

  After that I decided it was time to go home – except I had no idea where home was. In that vast, featureless expanse of bare tundra I was quite lost. I wandered around trying to get my bearings, and after a while I saw a man striding across the tundra towards me, and when he came up to me he said (in very curious English): ‘Did you know there’s been a search party out for you?’ No, I replied, I didn’t. ‘You must never go on to the tundra again alone,’ he told me. ‘This is very important. Never go on to the tundra alone. Understand?’ Then he took me back to Vadsö. The next morning Fru Pedersen produced a pair of Lapp boots with great turned-up toes, and a reindeer skin jacket and reindeer skin trousers and other Lapp garments. ‘If you want to live in this country,’ she said, ‘you do what the Lapps do, wear what the Lapps wear.’

  After that I went to see the man who had rescued me. He worked in the mayor’s office. ‘So you are one of those people,’ he said, ‘who want to know whether Steller’s eider breeds here or not? The Russians were here last year for the same reason. All right then. You go out on to the high tundra, to a district called the Thirteen Lakes, about twenty miles from here. I’ll lend you a guide, and when you get there it will be as if you are on the moon.’

  So the next morning I set off with the guide, and I was out there, on the moon, among the Lapps, under those brilliantly jewelled night-long Low Arctic sunsets, for many weeks – far, far from anywhere and happier than I had ever been in my life, or ever would be again.

  Gavin saw plenty of Steller’s eider out by the Thirteen Lakes, and though he could not prove they bred there – in fact they don’t – he was able to take a unique series of photographs of them. By now he was living with a Lapp family, and on one memorable occasion he assisted in the breech-delivery of a Lapp baby, a boy whose father named him Gavin.

  Gavin was so taken by the strange, desolate world of the East Finnmark tundra that in the early summer of the following year, the last summer before the war, he returned there to collect Lesser Whitefront goslings for his wildfowl collection at Monreith and to study Steller’s eider again. From Fru Pedersen’s Hospitzet at Vadsö, Nord Varanger, Gavin wrote to Peter Scott the day after his arrival:

  Well, Peter, I have arrived. Conditions here are Arctic, or nearly so. It is a very late year. In many places the snow is several feet deep; there is ice everywhere. I saw a lot of reindeer higher up, many weird birds of prey, including a hawk owl; but many I did not recognise. One interesting thing about the Lesser Whitefronts – or perhaps you know it – is that they feed on crowberries. The droppings are a deep steel blue, almost ultramarine, full of crowberry seeds, and stained a little with streaks of purple juice. L. Whitefront are pretty tame; they fly round your head, cackling. The noise reminds me of your lighthouse.

  On 30 June 1939 Gavin wrote again to Peter Scott from Vadsö with a further report of his ornithological
progress in the Far North:

  I am bringing you back 3 skins shot in May this year here: one adult one adult and one immature Also 3 eggs, May this year, and some nest down. I am bringing back anyway 2 geese alive, caught as goslings here 2 years ago. But – awful complication – their legs are almost pink, while all the others have vivid orange legs. I have not found any signs of a Steller’s nest, but I have taken some very good photographs of them, and today I am going to try and catch some. The country is so vast that a few Steller’s nests would be very easy to overlook. I may still catch some goslings if I am lucky; I shall stay here another week anyway.

  A few days later Gavin received a telegram from home warning him that war was imminent and advising him to return to Britain immediately to avoid being trapped in Scandinavia for the duration. He sailed on the first available boat and returned to Elrig towards the middle of the month, bringing with him the eggs, down and geese he had collected – and also a few little Lesser Whitefronts which he released among his collection of exotic geese in the grounds of Monreith. ‘They would answer to their names,’ he was to write later, ‘with a shrill clamour that reminded me of the vast tundra and the shine of still lake water under the midnight sun, of the sour tang of reindeer grease and the smell of trout cooking over a camp fire.’ Though he had not proved whether or not Steller’s eider bred in Varanger Fjord, he had at least brought back more rare photographs of this mysterious bird, and his future life might well have taken this direction had not the war intervened.