Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Torn between his old freedom and his future hoped-for security, Gavin finally prised himself from Sandaig on 19 January 1962, and headed south for the unknown – his wedding and the uncharted territory of married life. Three days after he left, Teko attacked Jimmy Watt – an act of savagery that would soon lead to the confinement of the last of the famous otters and mark the sad end of the Camusfeàrna idyll.

  Gavin Maxwell, aged forty-seven, and Lavinia Renton, aged thirty-seven, were married on 1 February 1962. By a cruel coincidence Kathleen Raine happened to pass the end of Paultons Square at the exact moment the hired car arrived outside the house that had once been her home to take the man who had been the love of her life to his wedding. ‘The marriage hearse!’ she thought, shuddering, as she hurried on. The wedding, a private ceremony held at St Colomba’s, the Church of Scotland’s Crown Court Church, squeezed between the Fortune Theatre and a post office hard by London’s old fruit and vegetable market in Covent Garden, was attended only by family and close friends, including the Earl and Countess of Harewood on Lavinia’s side and Gavin’s uncle, the Duke of Northumberland, on his. The choir from Jimmy Watts’s old school sang Schubert’s setting of the twenty-third psalm. The press were waiting when the couple emerged. As the flashbulbs popped, Lavinia beamed and Gavin raised his hand and gave a wan smile. The Daily Mail reported of the occasion:

  It was a wedding to be wondered at – if only for the incongruity of the setting. Amid the torn cabbage leaves and crushed fruit littering Covent Garden sat a red Mercedes roadster. It was the bridal car.

  Barrow boys pushing loads of crates jostled with Rolls-Royces for parking space and the bride and groom looked as unconventional as the porters who impeded their access to the church. The only thing missing was the otter.

  Mr Maxwell’s sole concession to convention was a carnation in the buttonhole of his navy-blue lounge suit. But the greatest contrast was for the bride. Her previous wedding in the Chapel Royal at Windsor Castle had all the pomp and splendour of a State occasion. It had been attended by King George VI and all the Royal Family.

  The reception was held at Lavinia’s parents’ home in the Old Stables at Kensington Palace. Gavin’s literary agent Peter Janson-Smith recalled: ‘The reception was not exactly small, but it was typical of Gavin. There were two separate rooms: one for the aristocracy and the other for “trade” and servants etc. Needless to say, my wife and I were firmly ushered into the “trade” room.’ The newly-weds set off for a short pre-honeymoon vacation (their real honeymoon was to be in Morocco in the early spring) at Albury Park in Surrey. Lavinia was wearing a long scarlet shawl that had been given to her as a wedding present, and remarked to Gavin how beautifully it matched the colour of his Mercedes. ‘Now darling,’ Gavin replied, ‘remember we are very unusual and unconventional people. So why don’t you let your red scarf fly in the wind as we roar off.’ Then he revved up the car and with a squeal of tyres they raced away, Lavinia’s scarf streaming behind her.

  Albury Park, the great house of Gavin’s Northumberland relatives, was currently owned by Gavin’s aunt, the Dowager Duchess Helen, widow of the eighth Duke of Northumberland. It was in this massive mid-Victorian pile, surrounded by elegant eighteenth-century parkland, that the couple spent their wedding night. They spent a further two nights at the home of Lady Kersty Hesketh (the sister of Gavin’s friend Robin McEwen) at Easton Neston in Northamptonshire, a beautiful late-seventeenth-century country house designed by Hawksmoor like a miniature palace, then returned to Lavinia’s home in Carmel Court, Kensington and the ordeal of the great wedding party.

  This gigantic bash, held on the evening of 6 February in the First and Second Ballrooms at Claridge’s, was Gavin’s own idea, and was quite alien to his usual social inclinations. ‘It was odd for Gavin to arrange such a thing,’ Lavinia commented later, ‘in view of his horror of great gatherings. I think it was due to his wish to do the right thing and be the bridegroom – he did try terribly hard at the beginning of the marriage.’

  Nearly three hundred people turned up, and the whole lot formed a great queue to shake the hands of the bride and groom, Gavin looking rather odd and formal buttoned up in his grandfather’s frock coat with braid lapels. I was not among them, for on that day I was camped under a giant fig tree in the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, waiting to continue the balloon safari that had been planned at Sandaig the year before. In the memory of many who attended the event it remains the grandest and most lavish wedding party they had ever known. No expense was spared, and to help meet the bill Gavin asked for (and got) an advance of £1000 from his publishers against his general account.

  The guests were drawn from every corner of Gavin’s life, and represented an extraordinary spectrum of professions, interests and classes. ‘There was a great mob of people and a whole army of waiters whizzing around pouring out champagne,’ John Hillaby, then Zoological Correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, recalled. ‘There were various groups. One was an indeterminate group who seemed to be family who I never talked to. Then there were some awful “beatniks” – don’t know who they were but they were chums of his – and I thought, “Where am I?” I might have been in the middle of Borneo. Anyway, I wandered round and I found a group of zoologists there and all his chums from the academic world – Dr Harrison Matthews from the sharking days, Dr Parker from the Natural History Museum, people like that. So he had his “beat” life, his intellectual life and his family.’

  The ordeal was over. Gavin was a married man. He lived in hope of a transformation of his life, but only up to a point. As he left the Claridge’s reception Peter Janson-Smith heard him turn to Lavinia and say: ‘Well, I’m going to Sandaig. Where are you going?’ The next day he left London and set off alone for the seclusion of his remote and beloved Sandaig. This was not a dereliction of his marital duties, however. Gavin had pressing reasons for returning north. Sandaig was where his home was, and he was still responsible for its complex human and animal ménage. The otter situation had undergone significant changes during his three weeks’ absence, and the implications of Teko’s attack on Jimmy Watt required urgent attention, as did the acquisition of the second of two wild Scottish otter cubs.

  The first of the latest arrivals was an unweaned male cub that had been caught by a gamekeeper on a river bank in the south of Scotland about a week before Christmas. The gamekeeper’s first thought was to telephone the author of Ring of Bright Water, and a couple of days later the cub was collected by Mary MacLeod and brought down to Sandaig by Gavin, carrying the young animal inside his shirt. To the newcomer, an easy-going but not very bright little creature, Gavin bequeathed the name Mossy, in honour of the cub of the same name whose life he had tried in vain to save a year and a half or so before. A few weeks later, on 28 January, another telephone call came through, this time from the Isle of Skye, to say that a bitch otter in milk had been shot a few days before and now a roadmender had found a tiny unweaned female cub in a ditch nearby. The following day this second otter was brought to Sandaig and was promptly christened Monday, after the day on which she arrived. Monday was younger than Mossy, being little bigger than a large rat; but she was evidently far more intelligent, and possessed of a great deal more confidence and initiative than the older male. By the time Gavin returned to Sandaig Mossy and Monday were sharing Edal’s old room upstairs, and here they were destined to remain, living under the carpet for the most part in a state of inseparable infantile togetherness, until Gavin and Lavinia returned from their Moroccan honeymoon in the spring.

  At the end of February the newly married couple embarked on a small Dutch cargo boat, the SS Vrijburgh, bound for Casablanca. It was a rough voyage, and the little vessel pitched and tossed through the Bay of Biscay’s storms and snow squalls, while Gavin’s Land Rover strained at its lashings above deck, and Lavinia lay in her bunk below, doped with anti-seasick pills that left her half comatose for much of the voyage. They arrived in Casablanca on 6 March, the day of rest following t
he end of Ramadan, the Moslem month of fasting, and as the customs office was closed they were not allowed to disembark until the following day.

  This infuriated Gavin, Lavinia recalled:

  I was asleep on my bunk and he came in and said: ‘Darling, you must get up at once and go and see the captain. I’ve just had a word with him and I told him he’s got to let us off. He said there’s no way we can get off until tomorrow, so I told him that you’re a cousin of the Queen of England. You must go and talk to him.’ Well, I did, and the captain was absolutely seething. ‘I don’t care who you are,’ he said, ‘there’s no way I can get you off. You’ll have to wait till tomorrow like the rest of us.’ We didn’t finally disembark till the following evening, and Gavin was adamant: ‘I’m not going to spend another night on this bloody boat!’ So we checked in at a hotel, the Hotel El Mansour, and Gavin started sending telegrams and ringing up various important personages that he thought were going to welcome him with open arms.

  Morocco was Gavin’s patch, and he was anxious to impress his new bride as he drove her around the country in his big expedition Land Rover. Money was no object and they stayed at the best hotels – La Tour Hassan in Rabat, the El Maghreb in Marrakesh. ‘In Marrakesh we stayed a few more days than we meant to,’ remembered Lavinia:

  We wandered round and saw various people. One of them was Si Mohammed el-Khizzioui, the Glaoui’s former secretary, whose aged mother gave me a lovely old kaftan which had been her wedding dress and the wedding dress of her mother before her. Our plan had been to drive up into the High Atlas Mountains along the beds of the dry wadis; but there was still snow on the high passes and the wadis were streaming with meltwater and quite impassable. So we drove down to the south along the coast, turned east and approached the high passes from the other side. We went to the Glaoui’s great tumbledown castle at Telouet and slept on the floor in one of the towers, in one of the few remaining rooms with a roof, and I found some lovely old ceramic tiles in the harem of the castle when I was wandering around and gathered a whole box full. And the next day we hired mules and rode up a wadi for a day to a Berber village and drank mint tea with the headman and his wife and I got very sunburnt and came back with a beetroot nose. It was a good trip. Gavin was a good companion in Morocco and I was very happy. There is no doubt at all that he was as happy as I was. At first he had thought in terms of a mariage de convenance between us, but to his surprise it had turned into something much closer on both sides.

  The Moroccan honeymoon was the first test of the marriage; the first occasion, in fact, that the couple had been in each other’s company non-stop for any length of time. Inevitably, they were to see aspects of each other’s personalities that they had not fully appreciated before. Lavinia recalled:

  The image he liked to project of himself was of the cool, calm, intrepid explorer, and really he was nothing of the sort. This demonstrated one of the pressures on him that made him behave the strange way he did – he could not bear people to see through him. That’s why he put up this terrific barrier to protect himself – the dark glasses, the whisky to boost his morale, the remote islands and out-of-the-way houses, the reluctance to let his friends meet each other in case they talked about him together behind his back. I was an adult living with him as a wife and companion and he knew that I saw things about him which he didn’t want to be seen and this put a lot of pressure on him – and on our marriage.

  After three weeks in Morocco it became evident to Lavinia that Gavin needed solitude and seclusion as other people needed food and drink, and that her constant presence was at times oppressive to him. So halfway through the honeymoon she returned to England by air – ostensibly to get her sons back to school, but mainly to afford Gavin a few weeks’ breathing space in which he could research his book about the Glaoui, the so-called ‘Lords of the Atlas’, and plunge off into the wilds on his own. From Casablanca on 4 April (by which time Lavinia was already settled in at Sandaig) Gavin sent his considered (and contrite) balance-sheet of their marriage so far:

  Well … I’m afraid the Moroccan trip had some pretty bad downs for you, and I only hope that the ups will stick in your mind more – I thought there really were some, even though I have been appalled to realise what unsuitable material I am for a husband and how far short I must fall of any reasonable standards. I feel miserable when I think how often I must have hurt you, and how often my being what I am may hurt you in the future. It seems all wrong to start the first letter to you since God knows when with a lot of self-analysis, but I think all the same that it’s a perswective [sic] thing to do, because I found it difficult to say, and my brain is very clear this morning.

  Anyway – However deep our feelings towards each other go, and whatever levels those feelings are on, we do at the moment lack wide community of interests. I’m coming to realise that my mind seems to inhabit a world composed of only about four things: Animals, primitive peoples, literature, and painting (perhaps something else should come in here?!) – the first two being based on some knowledge besides a lot of feeling, and the second two on the way I think and look at things – I mean that I see any landscape or scene in thought-terms of paint or words (the latter very often being images from poems long known) – and in all these things we lack a common ground as yet. It will come, but at the moment I think it’s an aspect responsible for more of my ‘absences’ than you always understand. It was basically responsible for my friendship with Caroline Jarvis, and I know you won’t misunderstand if I tell you that I do miss that a lot sometimes (besides being upset that I have hurt so deeply someone I was fond of). Because, oddly, I never had many ‘animal’ friends, and even fewer ‘literature’ friends. So it’s bound to leave a blank.

  And all these things will come right in time, Inshallah; this is just an apologia and an attempt at explanation (to us both, really) …

  Sitting at the bar before dinner in walked a man with a desert fox on a lead – gosh how beautiful. Full grown, the size of Mossy when I last saw him, very pale beige, almost off white, with huge dark eyes (Justine’s colouring) and a face like this (ears really not exaggerated) –

  He had reared it on a bottle two years ago in Southern Algeria, and keeps it just like a dog. He has more than once been offered a million francs for it (by film actresses and such) but says with passion not only would he not part with it for any money but that he would kill anyone who touched a hair of its head to harm it. This naturally turned my talk to otters, and I answered with a real childish heart-pang when he asked me whether mine never bit and whether they were free or kept like zoo animals. I lied and felt great big baby tears swelling somewhere inside me …

  My love to all creatures great and small.

  P.S. Pray for no disasters at Sandaig this year – I’ve counted, last year there were SEVEN major ones! [Five otter attacks, one shipwreck, one house-flood]

  One evening Gavin found himself at a villa on the outskirts of Marrakesh that was rented by an American film actor and occupied by a very odd ménage. Gavin wrote to Lavinia, ‘All the ménage were nude, but for a G-string worn by the females – nothing else. The American had broken one of the women’s jaw and all her teeth recently and she carried her jaw in a sling rather like her string.’ A Siamese fortune teller by the name of Doan Ving Thai was at the house and told Gavin’s fortune by the Tarot pack – a fateful prediction: ‘I shall always be rich and powerful, but my world is mystic and I’m doomed to live alone for ever and like the Wandering Jew to wander and travel until I die – because, according to the cards, I look for something (not defined) which doesn’t exist. Cor stone the crows – what a husband to have.’

  A week later Gavin came across a house for sale in the oasis just outside Marrakesh. Its name was ‘Dar el Sebaa’ and it was enclosed within a wall and built in the Moorish style with a fabulous view from its tower across the oasis to the great snowy range of the High Atlas. Gavin was enchanted by the place and, swept along by the enthusiasm of another irresistible scheme,
wrote to Lavinia to tell her about it: ‘Listen – I’ve put in train enquiries about the purchase of a villa. It would be the best springboard for buying a Kasbah such as Tamdacht [site of a gigantic Berber fortress on the lip of an imposing river gorge] in the mountains. OK with you? Silence but for birdsong, palms, a swimming pool, and flowers everywhere. You like, yes?’

  The following week he enlarged on this latest caprice: ‘The “villa” isn’t a villa in your sense. Stands in about eight acres, in the palm oasis about five km away. They are asking eight millions – I’m told they’d take four (that’s about £3000). Schön, nicht? Anyway, it’s only an idea …’

  In reality, for a man of Gavin’s temperament and aspirations, it was not at all a bad idea. ‘Dar el Sebaa’ was a beautiful house in a land he loved, and at a price he could afford. Only the timing was wrong; he had been married just a few weeks, and this was perhaps not the most tactful moment to dream of an exotic pied-à-terre in Africa, still less a kasbah in the Atlas. In any case his business advisers disapproved. When, years later, his thoughts turned again to a home in Morocco, he could no longer afford it.