Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  The para-military course at the Arisaig schools was short, packed and gruelling. Its main elements were physical training, including cross-country marches, swimming and rock-climbing; silent killing and knife work; weapon training; demolition training; map-reading and compass work; fieldcraft; raid tactics (including ambushing and house-clearing); elementary morse; appreciations, planning, reports and orders; schemes and exercises (including all-night schemes, survival training and living off the land); and para-naval training and boat work. It was training which could turn an ordinary mortal into a superman, capable of blowing up a bridge, sinking a ship, or derailing an express train with an overcoat.

  In the first few months of 1942 Gavin was a general instructor at the SOE schools in Arisaig, Knoydart and Morar in turn. His superiors were impressed with his abilities. ‘His knowledge of fieldcraft and minor tactics is an eye-opener,’ went one report. ‘His knowledge of weapons is first-class.’ In August 1942 he was posted, to his own surprise, as Group Instructor at the Group A Headquarters at Arisaig House with the rank of Captain, and a year later he was made Commandant of STS 24 at Inverie House on Knoydart.

  Gavin’s specialities were small arms (particularly ‘fast and fancy’ pistol shooting) and fieldcraft – he was less interested in explosives. The years he had spent in pursuit of deer and wildfowl before the war had given him tremendous expertise in the art of fieldcraft, and since there was no great difference between stalking a game animal and a human target, as far as camouflage and all the other tricks of the art were concerned, Gavin became SOE’s star instructor in the military application of fieldcraft. His lectures and practical demonstrations – the nature of night vision, the art of night hearing, how to make use of broken ground, double skylines, a low sun in front of the enemy and a full moon behind him, how to read different kinds of footprints – were a revelation to the student agents who attended them.

  In his weapon training sessions Gavin taught how to strip, reassemble, load, fire and maintain a variety of Allied and enemy firearms, in the dark as well as the light; how to shoot on sight at snap targets in the woods and in the streets of SOE’s specially constructed mock-up village; how to storm a room in which Resistance agents were being interrogated by the Gestapo (always kick the door open, always switch on the light, always select your targets deliberately and shoot them systematically one after the other). It was Gavin who provided the live ammunition firing at the SOE assault course, blazing away with a Bren gun just above the level of the students’ heads.

  Towards the autumn of 1943 Gavin formed an idea for a new training school at Glasnacardoch Lodge, where student agents, who hitherto had only trained on British and American models, could familiarise themselves with the weapons of all the Resistance organisations of occupied Europe, from his own extensive collection. At the same time he was put in charge of the Wireless Telegraphy Training School at Rhubana Lodge, in Morar, and promoted to the acting rank of Major. ‘I said I didn’t know how I could possibly do both jobs,’ he recalled, ‘and I was told: “Just do it!”’

  In spite of the gruelling schedule, Gavin’s time with SOE was probably one of the happiest in his life. He was involved in important and meaningful work at which he excelled. He enjoyed the security of a loose and congenial organisation which gave him status and freed him from the practical worries of life without sacrificing his independence and essential personality. Above all, perhaps, he was back in the land where he most wished to be – the Scottish West Highland coast. In short, he had found a niche in which he could function.

  Gavin found at SOE Arisaig a rather odd collection of people, many of them larger than life. One of them (a Norwegian) was a world champion ski jumper, another (a Russian) a world champion lightweight wrestler; one had been a Fascist at Cambridge and fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War; another had been a Communist at Cambridge and a member of the Apostles group that had included the Soviet spies Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess. Two legendary instructors in the early days, known collectively as the ‘Heavenly Twins’, had been officers in the Shanghai Municipal Police before the war and taught pistol shooting, silent killing and close combat. One, Captain Bill Sykes, looked and spoke like a bishop, but was endowed with enormous hands and fingers with which he taught students how to throttle people. (It was later rumoured that he was the model for a rather sinister character in the James Bond stories.) The other was Captain W.E. (‘Desperate Dan’) Fairbairn (‘Murder made easy, that’s me!’), a Black Belt judo master who devised a method of silent killing out of a mixture of ju-jitsu, karate and miscellaneous practices picked up from the villains on the Shanghai waterfront, and taught Resistance students such skills as the Chin Jab, the Bronco Kick, the Japanese Strangle, the Back Break, the Chair and Knife and the Match-Box Attack, along with the use of such silent weapons as the crossbow dart, the spike, the flick-knife, the spring cosh, the garrotte and an alarming-looking dagger of his own invention known as the smatchet.

  Tex Geddes, a rugged Newfoundlander and Sergeant Instructor in matters amphibious, used knives to play darts. Wildest amongst the students were the Poles, who fired their revolvers through the ceilings and tossed hand grenades into the mountain streams to catch trout. A few of the SOE personnel were endowed with serious personality disorders. One Quartermaster officer had a serious drink problem, and appeared one morning at breakfast waving a revolver, stark naked and spattered from head to foot in green ink.

  Gavin himself, of course, numbered prominently among the eccentrics of the community. He would interrupt students’ ping-pong matches by bursting into the games room and blasting the ball in mid-air with a Colt .45, or bemuse them by walking into a room in such a way that he appeared to be walking out.

  Dr James MacDougall, an SOE medic who kept an eye on the psychiatric health of the instructors and the trainee agents, believed that Gavin shared with Winston Churchill, the poet Robert Burns and many great artists a personality profile for which he employed the term ‘creative psychopath’. A creative psychopath’s personality is composed of an entire series – concurrency might be a more exact word – of characteristics that are absolute opposites. They can be simultaneously friendly and unfriendly, truthful and untruthful, bold and fearful, loyal and disloyal, thick-skinned and thin-skinned, considerate and callous, and so on through the entire range of human emotions and attitudes. Such a person, in whom opposing characteristics are perpetually at war with one another, is full of anomalies and can be very unpredictable and difficult to get on with, inspiring affection and loathing in equal measure. According to Dr MacDougall a creative psychopath also tends to lead a disorganised life and to have an inconsistent work record. Overall, a creative psychopath’s emotional make-up is more like that of a child than a mature adult; he is unable to sustain an emotion for any length of time, and though he is capable of deep feelings, they are fleeting and transitory. It follows that it is difficult for creative psychopaths to sustain mature relationships, and they tend not to get on well with people. It was Dr MacDougall’s view that Gavin was emotionally retarded, almost certainly because his sexual and emotional development had been put on hold at the age of sixteen, when his nearly fatal illness cut him off from all but his mother.

  Even among his colleagues in SOE, Gavin was not a figure who could easily be ignored. Though he was slight in stature, he had a presence and a manner – part aristocratic, part shy elfin charm – and a voice of resonant authority that compelled attention. With his full, blond, drooping moustache and his floppy shock of blond hair falling over his high forehead he looked, to at least one of his fellow officers at Arisaig, like Tenniel’s illustration of the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass. This image of the eccentric, questing knight was to be evoked by several of those who knew him at different stages of his life.

  Though his medical category was still abysmal – the SOE medics had diagnosed an enlarged heart and synovitis of the ankle as well as the usual chronic duodenal ulcer – Gavin was fit enough for mo
st challenges, and could display a toughness of mind and body that astonished instructors and students alike. Hamish Pelham-Burn, a fellow instructor and one of Gavin’s closest friends in SOE, recalled one occasion after dinner at Garramor when he and Gavin were drinking whisky with some French Resistance students who were soon to be parachuted into Nazi-occupied territory.

  As always, the conversation got round to the question of what they would do if they were caught by the Gestapo. The Frenchmen said they weren’t worried, they would just bite on their cyanide capsules. ‘Oh no you wouldn’t!’ retorted Gavin. ‘You’d try and survive it. Like this!’ He was going to stub out his lighted cigarette on his bare thigh, he told them (he was wearing a kilt), and they could watch his eyes and see what effect it had on him. So he took a puff on his cigarette and then ground out the burning end on his thigh. I watched his face and there was not a flicker of reaction to the pain. It didn’t do his thigh much good, but the French were very impressed. He’d made his point – as he always liked to.

  In spite of his relative frailty Gavin was a great outdoor man, forager and improviser. The years of stalking and wildfowling out on the hills and estuaries in all weathers had not only hardened him but also given him a hunter’s instinct and a predator’s awareness of the opportunities for human survival within the natural ecology – something that was generally lost on his more urbanised colleagues. He took full advantage of the natural provender of the hinterland to provide for both the staff and the students – generally in a style far above that to which they were normally accustomed. Dr Hamish Ireland, SOE’s first medical officer at Arisaig, remembered Gavin’s succulent messing regime well. ‘His menus were the most exotic and marvellous dishes of salmon, game and butcher’s meat ever set before us. His reign, alas, was short-lived – the Mess got into the red. But we all felt better for having lived off the fat of the land.’

  Gavin’s aptitude for living off the land was not entirely an epicurean pursuit. For the students it could be a matter of survival. He taught them how to collect mussels and limpets off the rocks in the inter-tidal zone and eat them raw when there was no alternative; by way of demonstrating the potential for survival using the most improbable by-products of the available wildlife, he killed a seal, removed the blubber, strained the seal oil through blotting paper, and drank it. Once he took a squad of student agents on a survival course in the hills. Before setting out Gavin told them he would personally eat any bird they brought him, to demonstrate what good meat there was to be had. His hope was that someone would bring him a tasty grouse, but the best they could come up with was a jackdaw, which he ate with as much relish as he could muster. He even incorporated basic butchery into his SOE lectures, starting with the warm carcase of a deer – a shocking experience for some of his more fastidious trainee agents.

  Though some of Gavin’s fellow officers at SOE found him rather strange and moody, and were inclined to tease him when they found him writing poems under a rhododendron bush, most were fond of him. He was not universally popular, however. Derek Leach, a lawyer in civilian life, was Chief Instructor at Meoble. He first met Gavin when he came over to Meoble as a training officer in 1943, and had mixed views about him. ‘He was a bit of a loner,’ he recalled. ‘He didn’t pull social rank, but he was offhand, unpunctual and somewhat egotistical – he’d interrupt you in mid-sentence and go on to his own thing.’ Dr MacDougall remembered: ‘When he was good he was very, very good, but when he was bad … well!’ He added: ‘All healthy relationships are based on ambivalent attitudes, but I believe Gavin inspired markedly ambivalent reactions – in friends and foes alike.’

  David Tree Parsons, for example, the Commandant at Inverie, didn’t take to Gavin at all when he first met him in November 1943, noting in his diary: ‘I found Maxwell highly-strung, spoilt, eccentric and intolerant. He told me he had written five, as yet unpublished, books.’ Before long, though, they were the best of friends, mainly because of their mutual love of nature and the great outdoors.

  SOE’s confidential reports on Gavin reflect some ambivalence. ‘Quite a cheerful person,’ went one, ‘but rather self-centred.’ ‘An excitable temperament,’ went another, ‘and egotistical to a degree.’ A third declared: ‘He is, I think, too inclined to create problems for himself and to worry over them. Although temperamental, he has a pleasant and likable personality.’

  Dr Hamish Ireland, Gavin’s medical officer during his first year at Arisaig, recalled: ‘He must have been a bit spoiled at one stage in his life. He was quite temperamental, a bit “agin the government”, and he reacted childishly if he was reprimanded by a senior officer.’ Gavin did not get on very well with the Colonels. ‘I was very much my own man in SOE,’ he once told me. ‘I was almost a freelance, in a way, and commanded my own establishments fairly early on. I didn’t get on with my superiors. Some of them had got there simply by influence and were very objectionable and unpleasant people. But one or two of them did say to me, “Well, your job is to get on with your job, so we won’t meddle and pry,” and with those I got on extremely well.’ To avoid being billeted with the Colonels at Arisaig House, Gavin moved out and lived on his own in a little old-fashioned two-up and two-down lodge on a hill near Glasnacardoch – a highly irregular arrangement by military standards.

  Gavin’s conflict with higher authority led to many difficulties with his commanding officer, Colonel Jimmy Young, who was in charge of the whole area command. Young, a former tea planter from Ceylon, was a personality in his own right – ‘a great wencher, a great drinker, a great character, but not a great brain’. According to Hamish Pelham-Burn, he once did a parachute jump wearing a kilt with nothing underneath, but was so overweight that he broke both legs on landing. Colonel Young was sorely tried by the antics of the more wayward and eccentric of the officers under his command, and was constantly engaged in a ‘passage of arms’ with Gavin. He took a dim view of Gavin’s non-military style of dress – cream shirt and yellow Texan scarf under his battledress top, family kilt instead of regulation army-issue one – and spluttered with outrage when Gavin asked him for compassionate leave after receiving a telegram from his mother at Monreith telling him his flamingos had flown out to sea. ‘I was recommended for court martial twice,’ Gavin once told me, ‘both times on rather flimsy pretexts. Once was when I left a British officer, who was going to be dropped into Yugoslavia, alone in a room at my weapon training establishment. After half an hour I heard a loud bang and when I went in I found he had shot his thumb off. I was recommended for court martial on the grounds of gross negligence, but it was never proceeded with.’

  For all his flaws, Gavin inspired genuine affection and loyalty among those in SOE who took to his mercurial personality. ‘He had a delicious sense of humour,’ recalled his old school friend Peter Kemp. ‘He could be very funny and he told very funny stories. He used to mimic me wickedly – he was a very good mimic and he mimicked everybody.’ Matthew Hodgart found a lot in Gavin he admired:

  He was very witty, very entertaining, very well-bred; and though he could be irritable and prickly, he was usually great fun to be with and cheered people up a lot. And he was a very gifted fellow, highly skilled at a variety of things. He was a terrific shot, a fine naturalist, and an excellent draughtsman; and later it turned out he was a wonderful descriptive writer as well. We had a lot of things in common. Both of us had had a father who had been killed by a German shell in the First World War. Both of us were products of Oxbridge. Academically I was much his superior. He was not a great scholar, and I am not sure if he had a first-class mind or not. Nor was he very literary-minded in those days, and I don’t ever recall talking about English literature with him. But he was socially much my superior. He knew the world in a way I didn’t. He was also quite the most neurotic person I have ever met in my life. He was very fond of Captain Michael Bolitho, an intelligent young officer from the Scots Guards who was an SOE instructor at Garramor. When Bolitho was killed in action in Algeria, Gavin cracked up �
�� he was absolutely devastated and began drinking heavily. There was never any shortage of whisky in the Highlands during the war. We used to drink like fish in the evenings after the day’s work and talk about everything under the sun. Looking back, that’s what it was all about – being young and alive in the most beautiful place in the world.

  A number of Gavin’s friends at Arisaig were sent on special operations. Derek Leach and Edward Renton were dropped behind German lines in Italy, Matthew Hodgart was sent on a clandestine mission into Algeria, Peter Kemp was dropped into Albania and Alfgar Hesketh-Pritchard lost his life with the partisans on the Yugoslav–Austrian border. Gavin himself doubted if he could have coped with field operations. ‘On one occasion we had a small batch of German trainee agents arrive for their para-military training,’ he once told me. ‘They were going to be parachuted into Germany itself. I found this amazing – it seemed an absolutely suicidal thing to do. And I remember thinking at the time that I personally lacked the cold-blooded courage to do something like that – I don’t think I could ever have gone off on special ops behind enemy lines. I’d have been much too afraid.’* Gavin’s colleagues in SOE doubted this. ‘Of course he had the guts,’ said Peter Kemp. ‘But he was totally medically unfit for the job.’ Others agreed, but added they thought he might have been temperamentally too excitable and too nice. ‘He was too bloody kind,’ Tex Geddes considered: