Among the activists who frequented Margaret Pope’s flat were various high-ranking members of the Algerian FLN, or National Liberation Front, which had been fighting a long and savage war against the French. At this time the situation in Algeria had reached a critical stage. The French were not only fighting against the FLN but amongst each other, with the French Army split in two, one half siding with the French settlers, the colons, the other siding with General de Gaulle’s government in France. What the outcome would be and where this would leave the FLN was unclear. ‘The situation was so confused,’ Margaret Pope recalled, ‘that some of my FLN friends asked me to get some independent observers to fly over and report on the situation. I knew Gavin was not really sufficiently briefed on the Algerian question and I was doubtful if he could digest much of what he might observe. But at least he sympathised with the FLN and there was no doubt he would do the best he could. Anyway, he agreed to go and I did my best to put him in the picture.’
Gavin left London a second time on 8 January 1961, picked up a connecting flight from Casablanca to Algiers, and checked in at the Hotel Aletti, a renowned watering hole and meeting place in the centre of the city, next to the Préfecture. No doubt many of Ring of Bright Water’s huge army of fans, fondly imagining their guru cosily ensconced with his wild creatures far from the cares of man, would have been greatly alarmed had they learned of his sudden metamorphosis from a latter-day St Francis into an alternative James Bond. Gavin’s overt reason for visiting Algeria – the one listed in his visa application to the Algerian authorities – was to write some magazine articles about the new oilfields that had been opened up in the Algerian Sahara. These were dramatic enough in their own right, as Gavin wrote to Jimmy on his return:
I went down to Hassi Messaoud, the principal oilfield in the Sahara, which is really extraordinary. One flies there in a very old and leaky DC4 (the heating was stuck full on when we went down in the morning and stuck full off when we returned in icy starlight – the first was an oven, the second a fridge) over about three hundred miles of desert and suddenly Hassi Messaoud is THERE with the desert stretching away for hundreds of miles on all sides. One can see the perpetual flames of the burning gas and the great columns of black smoke from nearly a hundred miles away. They have made an artificial oasis, with trees and flowers and swimming pools and bars and jukeboxes and, of course, many million pounds’ worth of machinery. In the sunset I drove across the desert itself for twenty miles to a lesser oilfield; when the sun got low everything was in shadow except the tops of the dunes we were passing among, and they were vermilion. I’ve never seen a sunset like it – the whole sky was tiger striped with every shade of red on the palette.
The rest of Gavin’s time in Algeria was less agreeable, as he hinted in the same letter: ‘It was no fun there, needless to say … I discovered a microphone in a cunningly concealed position in my bedroom, and snored and farted at it for a bit to keep it occupied … I also had the slightly traumatic experience of seeing somebody’s throat cut at close quarters. So traumatic I don’t propose to write about it now or at any other time. I spent the whole ten days afterwards thinking it was my turn next …’
In fact he did write about this particular incident later, in a vivid passage in his book The Rocks Remain: ‘Darkness on the waterfront in Algiers; a scuffle and a high bubbling cry. A burst of submachine-gun close at hand and a window splatters somewhere overhead. I turn the corner; no one has moved him. He lies there, an elderly Arab with a beard jutting to the sky. There is more blood than I would have believed possible; I had not seen a slit throat before. A group of French parachutists swagger by; one kicks the corpse.’
The handwritten draft of Gavin’s report for the FLN, which I found among his papers after his death, occupied twenty-four foolscap pages. It would appear to have been written on or about 21 January 1961. In essence it was a detailed profile of the state of the white business economy and the morale and political opinions of the middle-class French colons of Algeria at a point of grave crisis in the French-Algerian war – a point at which the French settlers were having to face up to the possibility that Algeria could become Algerian (and, worse, Communist). Here and there Gavin writes of the general atmosphere of tension and dread, the feeling of disillusionment and betrayal among some sections of the whites, the air full of plots and rumours and a widespread fear of an impending massacre, of British and American intervention, perhaps, even, of world war and a French nuclear bombardment (‘a rumour,’ Gavin commented with evident relish, ‘unconfirmed but uncontradicted’). Though his informants are identified only by initials, Gavin occasionally allows himself an aside at their expense. ‘Military Intelligence Captain (bearded) attached Préfecture,’ reads one such comment, ‘lives at Hotel Aletti, has two Muslim mistresses, one of whom is known to be in the pay of FLN. General impression that French security is crazily bad and that given time any European could find out anything.’
Gavin’s recommendations to the FLN (under the heading ‘Personal Summary’) were trenchant:
True significance of events is not now but in the future. Action must be now; before delaying tactics allow the situation to become fluid again. Feel that key point is not withdrawal of French Army, but right of address by Ferhat Abbas to all Muslim Algerians, and similar right by French to pieds noirs. Both should broadcast to all, of both races. Now, not later. In the present psychological situation 90+ per cent of all the Europeans would welcome this – they want to be led, want reassurance. In three months new movements will have formed, new allegiances, thinking will again have become blurred, new culs de sac will have taken shape. This is the moment. If it is not done now it will be too late to prevent the long, final, extensive war which both sides dread.
Gavin had done what he was asked to do and was anxious to put this troubled country behind him as quickly as possible. Privately, he was in no doubt how he felt about the colonial situation in Algeria and what he believed the final outcome should be. Later he was to write:
Morning, and the city under lashing rain; all along the waterfront the high waves rolled in, not Mediterranean blue nor nordic grey, but mud brown with dark Algerian sand, and when the crests curled over and the spume streamed back on the wind it too was brown. A French bar-tender looked out on it and said: ‘It is an omen – the brown tide, the Arab tide that will sweep us all away, and unlike this tide it will not recede.’ I ordered cognac; he poured two and raised his glass, ‘Algérie Française’. He looked to me to respond; I raised my glass vaguely and said, ‘Algérie!’ What other answer could there be?
On 24 January Gavin returned to Morocco. In Rabat he handed his report over to Margaret Pope, who translated it into French and passed it on to the FLN. ‘It was not of much importance in the long run,’ she was to comment later, ‘but the FLN boys were very grateful for his effort.’ Then he drove down to Marrakesh and the decaying comforts of the Hôtel Centrale in the city’s old quarter, ‘with a sigh of relief’, as he put it, ‘and farewell, anyway, to microphones and murder’. From Marrakesh he sent me a postcard: ‘Returned from Algeria Tuesday night. Hardly reorientated yet. Not a healthy country, that! I sent my first press collect telegram from Algiers – just like Boot of the Beast in Scoop; it began “Algeconomy moving crisiswards” and so on for two hundred words. Fun. Life in Africa is strange, don’t you agree, or don’t you? I do.’ He had also got enough material for fifty articles, he said, and had sent one off to the Spectator already. ‘It’s so badly written that I daresay they’ll decide not to use it.’
The hotel in which Gavin had chosen to base himself for his winter in North Africa was a curious one for a bestselling author who was richer than he had ever been in his life. ‘This hotel has practically fallen to pieces now,’ he wrote to Jimmy. ‘Last year it had four people: a French manageress, two Arab maids, and an Arab porter. Now the Frenchwoman has left, and the porter (who only speaks Arabic) is the manager. The Arab owners have evidently decided to let it fall down, as the
squalor and disrepair have increased a hundredfold. No one seems actually to live here except a very scruffy policeman, but there is a lot of coming and going all night and veiled ladies are to be seen leaving rooms early in the morning, so I think I know What Is Going On.’
The hotel lay off one of the narrow alleys that made up the infinite, bewildering complex of alleys of the antique Arab town, the earth-floored passage between the high mud walls full of the smells of spice, ordure, and impregnated dust. Gavin had a room in the garçonnière (bachelors’ annexe), which was somewhat removed from the main body of the hotel.
It was not a restful room, for all the welter of sounds of a teeming, closely confined Arab city poured into it by night and day. At sunset, above the endless plaint of the beggars, Gavin could hear the steady rhythm of drums and cymbals from the main square nearby and then the sudden siren that signalled the end of the Moslem fast of Ramadan for the day: ‘The siren shrills high and thin, a violin-bow of sound arched over the wide confines of the fantastic city, and suddenly there is everywhere the smell of food where before the air held only the dry tang of spice. The voices of the beggars are silent; the predominant sound now is of dancers’ drums. Turbaned figures eating bowls of thick harrissa soup sit huddled on my doorstep, for it is the only free seat above ground-level. The light goes out altogether, and I linger on because I have become one of the alley’s ghosts.’
Gavin was often asked why he chose to live in such a shabby place when there were large and comfortable European-style hotels within a mile. In his Moroccan notebook he addressed himself to this point:
It cannot be for financial reasons, for by my standards I am rich, horribly rich; I have never travelled with so much money before and my questioners know this. I answer with half-truths – that I dislike living in an atmosphere of conducted European tourists, that it is a question of habit, that when I go away for days or weeks I can keep the room and my things in disarray, for it costs so little. But the true reason is that I am one of the hotel’s ghosts, for whom these four shabby walls once had meaning, and where I was happy; I linger here savouring an emptiness of whose reality I am unable to convince myself.
Gavin’s first priority was to look into the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of his Berber friend, Ahmed, with whom he had hoped to travel in the mountains and the desert south. Ahmed’s departure to Holland had hit Gavin hard. It also roused the wildest and most exaggerated suspicions on his part. Had Ahmed gone voluntarily, or had he been taken against his will? Had he betrayed Gavin’s trust, or had he, as Gavin was strongly inclined to believe, been the victim of some dark Israeli plot, or even some sort of brown slave trade? Gavin had barely unpacked his bags before he sallied forth to find out. He gave his version of events in a letter to Jimmy Watt:
As soon as I got down here I saw Ahmed’s father (an old man who can neither read nor write nor speak any language but his own) and realised very quickly that something pretty fishy was going on. Ahmed had been given a passport to go to Germany, not Holland, but his letters (not written by himself) came from a postbox number in Amsterdam. No one knew even the name of the man who took him away, and no one had ever had an address, only this postbox in Holland. So I began to suspect he had been kidnapped. His father wanted him back at once, so I cabled the postbox, and the only reply was ‘Ahmed’s return impossible. Wolfgang.’ (Which is a German not a Dutch name.) I then began to suspect that he was after all in Germany, but that the man who took him had covered his tracks thoroughly by having only a postbox address in Holland. So I got Margaret on it, and she is now informing the Dutch and German Ambassadors and the Moroccan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And I divide my time between interviewing passport police and sitting by a telephone and talking to Ahmed’s father through an interpreter, who I don’t think interprets anything I say.
Next day, after looking through three thousand photographs at the passport office in Marrakesh, Gavin found Ahmed’s passport form – bearing a different name – and also the dossier, which revealed no name or address for the German or Dutchman who had taken him away. The same day Ahmed’s father received a letter in reply to his demand for his son’s return which claimed that he had now been sent to England. Gavin wrote:
I then found in the father’s house the only thing ever really written by Ahmed, a postcard from Germany. So I came to Rabat and put the whole affair directly in the hands of the Moroccan Chief of Police, who took a serious view of it and handed it over to Interpol, who are now searching three countries for Ahmed. So I’ve done all I can. Not, you must admit, a very happy situation, more especially as I’m so sick with worry about it all that I can’t sleep no matter how many pills I take.
What with the spying and throat-cutting and kidnapping, Gavin’s inveterate thirst for drama was being slaked to a remarkable degree. But he was rapidly tiring of it all. The loss of Ahmed was a mortal blow to his plans, for he was not just his friend and travelling companion, but his tongue and his ears as well, for he was fluent in Berber, Arabic, French and English and could arrange visits, fix introductions, facilitate Gavin’s passage through local society, and tend to the practicalities of camels, mules, water and lodgings off the beaten track. Without the able Moroccan to guide him the impractical Scottish author was left stranded and alone, deprived of the expertise and means of functioning that would have made his travels possible and his visit to Morocco meaningful. Trapped in his wretched room in the medina, a prey to mounting anxieties that gradually overwhelmed him, Gavin grew ever more aimless, depressed and fearful, till his mental state degenerated into a full-scale crack-up – the personal paralysis that lay at the heart of what he was to call the Haywire Winter.
‘I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a journey abroad less than this one,’ he wrote to Jimmy. ‘Everything has gone wrong, and everything is in a state of complete chaos. Not the happy carefree life that no doubt most people think I’m leading! I came across a piece in The Times Literary Supplement about me and Patrick Leigh Fermor, Peter Fleming and Alan Moorehead in my luggage today, and managed to raise a sardonic smile at the words, “They feel, fit, lucky, successful people in a world dominated by the petulant,” etc. Oh, they do, do they, I said to myself … Well, the drumming and dancing and snakecharming and so ON and SO FORTH go on in the square outside, but somehow this year I feel a bit cut off from it all, and friendless. I’d like to get my work done and come home.’
Sandaig, meanwhile, was in the grip of the Highland winter. The snowline crept lower and lower down the flanks of Ben Sgriol. The pale northern sun climbed less and less each day, and soon it was so low at noon that my body cast a shadow almost fifty feet long. Our provisions came by mail boat and mail car to a point on the road where I could carry them down to the cottage on my back. But if the sea was rough or the road snowbound, no provisions arrived, and at low tide we would go and dig up cockles from the sand flats by the islands, or tap limpets off the rocks. In prolonged wet weather, when Skye was blotted out from view and the waterfall ran in spate, it was impossible to dry out the driftwood, the only combustible fuel readily available, and the fire spat and hissed in the primitive range, filling the cottage with acrid blue smoke. Not all of this smoke, I noted with alarm, emanated from the range fire itself – some seeped out from behind the pitch-pine panelling of the kitchen-parlour walls, and where smoke could go, so too could sparks, or even fire.
Yet there were times when Sandaig seemed the most beautiful place I had ever known. It is the only place where I have ever walked from one end of a rainbow to the other. It was not a very tall rainbow, nor a very long one, for it fitted exactly into the small field of green cropped turf between the waterfall and the mouth of the burn; and when I reached the far end it was not a crock of gold I found but a crocked ram dying on its back, kicking its legs in the air, as though mortally felled by that arching spectrum of light.
When a high-pressure ridge passed overhead, the skies often had a brilliant crystalline translucency. At night every
star glittered like frost, Venus pulsed with white light, and Mars hung low over Hell Loch and winked alternately red, white and green. Sometimes shooting stars fizzed briefly though the night sky, and once – far away to the north-west in the direction of Greenland – I saw the cosmic, gossamer drapes of the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights. In such still, breathless weather, visibility seemed to be limited only by the curvature of the earth, and sounds, too, carried over enormous distances. No traffic noise, no sounds of people en masse muddied the aural environment of Camusfeàrna. From the water’s edge two hundred yards away I could hear an otter scratch itself. From far out in the bay I could hear the splash of a dolphin leaping and the snort of a grey seal surfacing to breathe – sounds as hard as diamonds. On some evenings I could hear the stags roaring far across the channel among the hills of Skye. The plop and rattle of every tired wave that slumped on the beach was clear to me, every heron kraak, every raven croak.
One morning I found the burn frozen over, its rocky boulders sealed together with a patina of bluish ice that was cracked like the glaze of old porcelain. The otters, with their infinite capacity for play, turned the frozen burn into a slide along which they would toboggan on their stomachs for hours on end. Only the great winter storms, which cocooned the house in frothy round balls of spume, damped the otters’ spirits, for in such ferocious winds they could only inch along on their bellies, with their legs splayed out like newts.
As week followed week Gavin’s love-affair with the Maghreb began to wither; yet he could not bring himself to leave. He was like a sleepwalker, he recalled, or someone in a hypnotic trance, living in an evil dream from which he could not wake. At the beginning of March he wrote to me: ‘The recent happenings have put the final spokes in all my wheels; I’ve rarely if ever felt so low. I’ve had dysentery on and off for some time, which I’ve now cured myself of with chloromycetin, but it’s left me very run down and what with one thing and another I’m groggy both mentally and physically. I project a book called The Haywire Winter.’ And a few weeks later: ‘I’ve got some awful ’flu in place of the dysentery and I’m so full of antibiotics I can’t ’ardly breave …’ Added to his depression and mental confusion, his physical debility made it difficult for him to summon up the energy to complete even the basic routine of the day. ‘Clinically, I recognised symptoms I had seen in others,’ he wrote; ‘they were those of multiple division of aim, for I no longer knew why I was there.’ In his notebook he added: ‘It is hard to admit one has failed in all that one has attempted.’
Gavin Maxwell Page 40
