Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  I mean, if he and I had gone on an op, and I’d broken my leg, he would never have left me. But if he had broken his leg, I’d have buggered off and left him for sure – which would have been the right thing to do according to our training and instructions. He was a very fine bloke, an excellent fellow. His outstanding qualities were honesty and integrity, I would say. He was a bloody loyal bloke and he’d never let anyone down. Never. Not even when they deserved it. For example, we had a basket of a ration sergeant who was cheating the Mess Fund – and that is an unpardonable sin in the army. I was for cutting his balls off, but Gavin wouldn’t have it. He said to me: ‘That fellow’s a sergeant. If we take his stripes away it won’t be him that we’ll be punishing but his wife. Her sergeant’s allowance will be cut but it won’t make any difference to him at all. I’ve visited the glasshouse at Aldershot and I swore that I’d never put anybody in there if it was in my power to avoid it. Now it is in my power to avoid it – so I’ll just pay the bloody bill myself!’ A hundred-odd pounds it was. He was very irritating in things like that. He had no sense of the value of money – money didn’t mean anything to him, it was just something that his mother gave him. I remember having a pair of sealskin gloves and he wanted them and offered me a lot of money for them. He irritated me like bloody hell for thinking that everyone had a price and he could buy anything if he had enough money to pay for it. But against that he would sit down and make tea in a tin hat like the rest of us.

  Gavin was greatly respected as a teacher by his Resistance students, and was given a nickel-plated, ivory-handled .32 Colt semi-automatic by a Norwegian student as a token of gratitude when he was Commandant at the Rhubana STS towards the end of 1943 – the same pistol with which he pretended to shoot me in the head when I first encountered him in London fourteen years later. Few agents ever returned from enemy Europe to record their view of the practical value of Gavin’s courses. One exception was Peter Kemp, who remembered him as a tremendous teacher. Another was Suzanne Warren (a cover name).

  Suzanne was a courageous, attractive, twenty-two-year-old Frenchwoman who arrived for para-military training at SOE Arisaig in June 1944. For the first three years of the German occupation of her country she had worked for a Paris-based network which had helped Allied escapees to evade capture and return to England. But in January 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo and for two months subjected to brutal interrogation. When it became clear she would not talk, she was sent to a hostage prison at Castres, from which she escaped during a mass breakout the following September. After several months in hiding in a monastery guest house, she joined another Resistance network as a courier and escort travelling to and from Paris. Eventually orders came from London instructing her and a number of other Resistance personnel to embark for England, and in April 1944 she was picked up on the Brittany coast by Royal Navy gunboat and brought to Dartmouth carrying important secret papers. Some weeks later, after recovering her health and strength, she was sent up to Arisaig as a member of the last intake of European Resistance students to be trained at the Arisaig schools before the end of the war. This intake included a thirty-four-year-old agent of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the American equivalent of SOE) by the name of André Charisse, whom Suzanne was later to marry, thus becoming the sister-in-law of the future Hollywood film star Cyd Charisse.

  ‘Gavin reminded me of Byron,’ she recalled, ‘but a nicer man than Byron. He was one of the few people in my life who were like shining stars – something really special.’

  I was at SOE Arisaig all through July of that glorious summer. I used to go out with Gavin in his lobster boat and explore the coves and islands along the coast, and the seals would follow us and the birds swoop around us, and it was all so beautiful and wonderful after the nightmare of the Gestapo. I got to know Gavin very well in that short time. He was a marvellous person, a gifted leader, and I grew very fond of him. He never pulled rank on us and treated us all as his equals. We were an unruly mob of different nationalities but he never used a rod of iron, he was not a run-of-the-mill officer, he didn’t go by the book. He was a rebel, like me. He exercised leadership by the sheer force of his personality. And he created such a happy atmosphere that there was no resentfulness, no rebellion, even though we were all confined and cooped up and couldn’t go anywhere. I don’t like people telling me what to do, but he could, and I didn’t resist it. He made you feel you were part of a team, so he got far more out of us. He wasn’t soft – we had to work damn hard. But he could be very kind and considerate. Once, when we were practising grenade throwing, one of the students – an Englishwoman called Joan – pulled the pin out of the grenade, then felt faint and was in danger of dropping the grenade and blowing them both up. But Gavin calmed her and helped her and gently got her to throw the grenade over the wall.

  There was always a bit of sexual tension in Gavin’s company. He didn’t flirt with me – after all, I had met André by then – but I knew he liked me. He was a very striking, romantic personality. I didn’t know then that he was the grandson of a Duke, and the darker side of his nature he kept hidden.

  There was precious little free time at SOE Arisaig, either for the instructors or their students. The relentless pressures of the war, the deadly serious business of preparing the Resistance agents for their imminent ordeal behind Nazi lines in the shortest possible time, meant that weeks and months went by without a break, and as the momentum for the Second Front and the liberation of Europe gathered pace, so the pressure on SOE mounted. By the autumn of 1943 Gavin was not only Commandant of STS 24 at Knoydart (and subsequently Commandant of STS 22 at Rhubana) but also Chief Instructor at his Foreign Weapons School at STS 22a at Glasnacardoch.

  But sometimes on a weekend, during the long northern summer days, he was able to slip away on his motorbike for an hour or two’s birdwatching, or take his lobster boat, the Gannet, out for a trip among the bays and islets of that glorious Arisaig coast, or stalk deer among the wild hills overlooking Loch Morar. And now and then on a Sunday evening he would meet up with some of his SOE officer friends at the Morar Hotel, or venture further afield to his favourite watering-hole at Lochailort, in the Commando training area, to down a few drams and exchange a few words and sing a few songs at an impromptu carousel or ceilidh at the Lochailort Inn, run by his hugely larger-than-life friend Uilleamena MacRae. An eccentric, warm-hearted, striking-looking, Lewis-born woman in her early forties, with a Bonnie Prince Charlie hairstyle and a big, swishing Inverness cape, Uilleamena had once had a Hollywood screen test before the war, and ran her wartime inn like a private home for her friends and her horde of pets. Gavin was especially fond of her, and recognised in her a kindred spirit and life-force to whom he instantly and instinctively related.

  It was Uilleamena who, not long before her untimely death after the war, was to sell Gavin the furniture (fairly awful furniture at a fairly outrageous price) with which he furnished his retreat at Sandaig – the Camusfeàrna of Ring of Bright Water.

  Leisure time was so rare in SOE that a year and a half were to pass after Gavin’s arrival at Arisaig before he had an opportunity to visit the tiny island of Soay – his ‘Island Valley of Avalon’ beneath the Cuillins of Skye – to which his mind had once turned during the London Blitz in the early days of the war.

  SOE had two yachts at its disposal in the West Highlands. One was a luxury yacht of eighty tons called the Orca, which was used almost exclusively for entertaining the Colonels in Mallaig Harbour. The other was the Risor, a forty-ton Norwegian lifeboat converted into a small varnished yacht, with bottles of champagne stowed in the bilges as ballast. The Risor had originally been requisitioned by SOE to run secret agents to and from Norway, but was used most of the time to give SOE students amphibious training in the Mallaig area. Gavin had made friends with the yacht’s commanding officer and original owner, Tommy Martin, and on the first day of his summer leave in 1943 he persuaded Martin to take him across to Soay. It was to be one of the most momentous ex
cursions Gavin ever made – his second stepping-stone to adventure – and its repercussions would be felt to his dying days.

  They sailed from Mallaig on a blue, hot morning when there was not the faintest breath of wind and the whole length of Sleat was mirrored in a still sea dotted with resting birds. In a little over an hour they rounded the point of Sleat and headed due north for Soay through the long, oily swell of the Hebridean seas, the island barely separable from the long bulk of the Cuillin hills as they soared, peak upon peak, across the eight miles of sea from Sleat to Skye.

  ‘We crept cautiously into Camus na Gall, Soay’s east bay,’ Gavin was to write of his first landfall at the island, ‘the leadsman calling soundings from the bows. The yacht’s captain, a stranger to northern waters, had the navigational guide in his hand, a long bleat of warnings that makes one wonder at any stranger sailing the Hebrides without a pilot. At “By the mark, five,” he gave the order to let go, and the anchor rattled out noisily into the stillness.’ Though there was smoke coming from the dozen or so cottages above the high-water mark, no one appeared as the visitors rowed to the shore.

  And so Gavin stepped ashore at last on the island he had called his Avalon, and for two hours of that hot, breathless July day was free to explore its diminutive microcosm of moorland, glens and lochs. Climbing to the top of a round purple hill, he looked down over the western end of the island and saw the Sea of the Hebrides stretching beyond, with all its islands spread dim and blue upon the horizon.

  ‘I made my way down through a wood of oaks to a small bay on the Soay Sound. The sun was hot on the red, sea-smooth rock. Six feet below me the tide lapped, a vivid intense blue, with the transparency of white sand and sea-tangle two fathoms down. From everywhere on the island the Cuillin seemed towering and imminent, three thousand feet of bitter black rock rising stark and hostile out of the sea.’ The island seemed pervaded by an immense stillness, the only sounds the low lapping of the tide, the humming of the bees in the heather, the champing jaws of the cattle cropping the rushes.

  Gavin returned to Camus na Gall, and as he was rowed back to the yacht one of the crew began to relate some of the island’s troubles: its inadequate communications and transport, its decreasing population, and the absence of state support. There was a lot of feuding between the inhabitants, he told Gavin, which inclined them to think that a resident landlord would do the place some good.

  Not long after this first visit to Soay, Gavin decided to buy the island, if he could do so at a figure that would give him the equivalent of a small rate of interest from rentals and feu-duties on his invested capital. He entered into protracted negotiations with the island’s owner, Flora Macleod, and a year later completed the purchase for the sum of £900, which he paid for with a loan from his mother. With the island came the salmon-fishing rights of its coast, a commercial bag-net fishing which had for some years been leased to a Scottish commercial salmon fishery. But Gavin made a blunder during his negotiations for the island which, in retrospect, was a worrying omen for his future business enterprise. By an oversight, the commercial salmon fishery’s lease had been renewed for a further eight years, with the result that he was deprived of the only substantial commercial returns that could ordinarily be derived from the island. From the purely financial point of view he had bought a pig in a poke. He could see no way of developing or improving the island or the welfare of its inhabitants, except by introducing new industry – which, in the Hebridean islands, had already defeated far richer men and mightier organisations than Gavin could ever aspire to emulate. He was now the owner of his Island Valley of Avalon – and also, as he was soon to acknowledge, ‘of all its troubles, internecine feuds, frustrations, and problems’.

  * After the war Gavin wrote a novel centred around these agents, all of whom went to their deaths. He showed me the manuscript but never allowed me to read it. ‘It’s no bloody good,’ he told me. ‘I can’t write novels because I can’t structure stories properly.’ The manuscript was later destroyed in the fire that burned down his house in Scotland.

  SEVEN

  Harpoon

  Dear God be good to me;

  The sea is so wide

  And my boat is so small

  BRETON FISHERMAN’S PRAYER

  By the late summer of 1944 the work of SOE was as good as over. After the Allied invasion of Europe the role of the Resistance was replaced by the regular forces of the liberating armies, and though SOE’s training schools in Britain were still kept fully staffed there was little for the instructors to do. Gavin, like the rest of his colleagues, found himself increasingly idle and free to spend the hot, still summer days as he chose. While others chafed at not being allowed home to see their wives and families, Gavin for his part wanted nothing more than to be where he was. ‘Those brazen days I spent in my boat,’ he was to write, ‘exploring the coast and the islands from Mull to the narrows of Skye, slipping imperceptibly back into a world I had almost forgotten, dream-like and shining. I used to visit the seal-rocks and spend hours watching the seals; sit among the burrows of a puffin colony and see the birds come and go, unafraid, from their nests; fish for conger eels by moonlight; catch mackerel and lobsters.’ It was during this halcyon period of unexpected leisure that Gavin first set eyes on a creature with which his future was to be intricately embroiled:

  We were returning from Glenelg; it was late afternoon, the sky paling and the hills turning to deep plum, their edges sharp and hard, as though cut from cardboard. We were about a mile off Isle Ornsay Lighthouse, heading southward over a still, pale sea, when I noticed something breaking the surface thirty yards from the boat. At first it was no more than a ripple with a dark centre. The centre became a small triangle, black and shiny, with a slight forward movement, leaving a light wake in the still water. The triangle grew until I was looking at a huge fin, a yard high and as long at the base. It seemed monstrous, this great black sail, the only visible thing upon limitless miles of pallid water. A few seconds later the notched tip of a second fin appeared some twenty feet astern of the first, moving in a leisurely way from side to side.

  When Gavin realised the two fins belonged to the same creature he was overwhelmed by excitement and fear. The sheer bulk of the first basking shark he had ever seen clear and entire was unbelievable – like a creature from a pre-historic world, and longer than a London bus. At a distance of only five yards Gavin could look down on a vast barrel of a body that seemed to get steadily wider towards the distant head. A wondrous deep-sea monster, its gigantically distended gills were the widest part of its body, and its mouth was held so wide open that a child could have walked right into it without stooping. Mounted in the bows of the Gannet was a Breda light machine-gun which Gavin carried in the boat to shoot up drifting mines and – fantastical though it may sound – to engage any German U-boat that came his way. (U-boats had been sighted as near as Eigg, and Gavin believed that a small launch armed with a gun could not only knock out the submarine’s periscope but command the bridge as well once the vessel had surfaced.)

  ‘Try him with the gun, Major,’ suggested Gavin’s assistant on board – a very fat but enormously strong local man by the name of ‘Foxy’ Gillies.

  Gavin circled the shark and approached it from behind, drawing so close that the boat almost scraped its side. Into the monster’s huge expanse of flank Gavin then fired a full thirty rounds point-blank in a single burst.

  ‘A great undulating movement seemed to surge through him,’ Gavin was to write, ‘and near the stern of the boat his tail shot clear of the water. Its width was a man’s height; it lashed away from the boat and returned, missing Foxy’s head by inches, to land with a tremendous slam upon the gunwale of the stern cockpit. It swung backward and hit the sea, flinging up a fountain of water that drenched us to the skin.’ Gavin closed in on the creature six times and with the last burst despatched him, as he thought, for good. But when Foxy tried to make the shark fast with the boathook, it was torn from his hands as the
shark, all too evidently alive, dived in a boil of white water. Not for some time did the hook reappear, shooting ten feet out of the sea as though hurled back in derision from the deep.

  Gavin’s curiosity was aroused by this encounter, and he tried to find out more about the gigantic creature. The basking shark got its name, it seemed, from its habit of ‘basking’ near the surface of the sea, but it was also known to the local fishermen by other names – as sailfish (because of the shape of its dorsal fin), or sunfish (because it was most usually seen on sunny days), or muldoan (from Muldoanich, an island in the Barra group where it was common), or by the Gaelic name of cearbhan. The basking shark was the biggest fish in European waters (up to 36 feet 6 inches), and the second-biggest in the world – only the Pacific whale-shark (up to 41 feet 6 inches) was bigger. And yet, remarkably, almost nothing was known about it. From the local herring fishermen Gavin gleaned a few facts based on first-hand observation, but these begged more questions than they answered.

  It seemed the basking shark, Cetorhinus maximus, had not been common in Hebridean waters before the 1930s, but since then it had increased steadily in numbers. As far as could be judged, they were seasonal, migratory creatures – possibly migrating south to north and back again, or perhaps from deep to shallow water in summer, followed by a return to their deep over-wintering grounds in autumn. In March they might be spotted off the Irish coast, having arrived from no one knew where, or gathered together in huge congregations in the open Atlantic south of Barra Head; then in the last week of April they would arrive among the Hebridean islands, returning in the autumn before disappearing from human ken in September at the latest.