Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Gavin loathed being interviewed on film, but he kept going for a few days and then he began to behave very peculiarly – he became very silent and strange. Finally he called me over to the house, gave me a dram and told me he couldn’t go on with the interview as he had business of overwhelming urgency to attend to. This was the time of the Christine Keeler scandal. John Profumo, the War Minister, had just confessed to lying to the House of Commons about his relationship with Miss Keeler, and had resigned and gone into hiding. The former Minister, Gavin confided to me, was now holed up at the house of a friend of his in the neighbourhood – possibly he meant Lord Dulverton’s shooting lodge at Eilanreach – and the press had got wind of it. He, Gavin, had to go and help sort it out. And with that he took his Norwegian revolver, stuck it in his belt, gave me a confidential look and roared away over the hill in his Land Rover.

  Fantastical or not, this was Gavin’s real world – a world that was to come into increasing conflict with the forces of ordinary external reality that had already begun to grind him down. As a temporary escape he went to Greece to stay with his brother Aymer at his villa on the Aegean island of Euboea – an excursion that began and ended with disaster. On the morning of 24 June 1963 he set off from Tormor in his Land Rover to drive to Inverness and catch the train to London on the first stage of his journey to Greece. He had only driven half a mile or so when a stag bounded out of a heathery knoll on his right and jumped right in front of the vehicle and down the steep hill-slope to his left. Gavin swerved, and was just righting the steering wheel when a second stag leaped on to the road immediately in front of him. There was a dull thud and the Land Rover somersaulted twice down the hillside, coming to rest on the driver’s side. Gavin found himself pinned in his seat by a heavy suitcase that had fallen on him from the passenger’s seat, now directly above him. He managed to shove the suitcase off, but then found that his left foot was trapped between the pedals. Only by dint of some violent twisting and squirming was he able to free his foot and haul himself up through the passenger’s door above his head.

  Once free of the Land Rover, Gavin lit a cigarette and assessed the damage. The vehicle seemed unscathed. There was no sign of the stags and no blood on the bumpers, so it seemed that both animals had escaped without injury. And so too, apart from a few bruises and a long graze across the instep of his left foot, had Gavin himself, or so he thought.

  He walked back up the road to Tormor to have one of Mary MacLeod’s restorative cups of tea and telephone for a recovery vehicle to haul the Land Rover back on to the road. He was still puzzled by the uncharacteristic behaviour of the stags, which in summer never normally ran down a hill into danger. John Donald was no less puzzled. ‘It’s not like the beasts at all,’ he agreed, and chided Gavin: ‘You get away with driving that Mercedes at a hundred and fifty miles an hour and you and the population of the British Isles survive it, and now you leave the road in a Land Rover doing less than twenty.’

  But Gavin had not got away with it as lightly as he thought. Five days after the accident he arrived by plane in Athens. As he walked across the tarmac to the airport building he became aware of a strange cramping pain in his left foot. Much to his surprise, the pain became so intense that he had to stop. Only when he stood still did it recede. Aymer was waiting at the airport with his car, and after that there was little walking for Gavin to do that day and he pushed the incident to the back of his mind.

  Next morning they set sail from the port of Khalkis in Aymer’s fifty-foot motor yacht, Lady Delft. It was a beautiful Aegean summer morning, and as the yacht’s white bows thrust through a sea the colour of lapis lazuli, Gavin’s worries slipped away and he began to feel as free and exhilarated as he had at Sandaig in the old, carefree days. ‘Perhaps,’ he thought afterwards, ‘the secret of keeping one’s vision was always to be a nomad, never to remain long enough in one place to allow time for the deadly clouding of sight, the creeping cataract, that is composed of preoccupation with past mistakes and their present results.’

  They came in to Katounia, on the north-west coast of Euboea, and after unloading Gavin’s baggage at his brother’s villa, whose flower-decked, vine-covered terraces looked down on to the sea immediately below, set off in a small inflatable rubber speedboat, roaring down the coast to a calm little bay below the towering, three-thousand-foot cliffs of Mount Kantili. It was a heavenly spot. A pair of eagles wheeled in swooping arcs on the wind-sheer above the great cliffs, wild oleanders flowered brilliant and pink at the head of the tiny beach, and the sea beckoned warm and emerald green in the cove. Though Gavin could not swim, he could, with the aid of a snorkel, bob out to the edge of the sea shelf and stare down into the shadowy abyss beyond, but when he returned to the shallows and tried to dive for an angel shell lying open and empty on a rock a few feet down, he experienced a sudden excruciating pain in his left foot.

  Now, for the first time, he thought there might be a connection between the pain and his accident. If he walked a hundred yards he had to rest to let the pain wear off; if he was in the sea for more than five minutes he had to come out and warm the foot on a hot rock until the cramp eased.

  Gavin had little need to exert his ailing foot for the rest of his holiday, for the next day they embarked on a cruise of the Aegean islands of Skiros, Skiathos and Skopelos, in the Sporades, and the opportunities for walking far were few. But on the fourth day of the voyage another accident occurred which could have been disastrous had it not stopped short at farce.

  On the morning of 4 July the Lady Delft put out from Trikeri on the south-east corner of the Gulf of Volos and set course for Kamena Voula with Gavin, Aymer and a Greek crew of two on board. Shortly after leaving, the captain reported that the port engine showed no oil pressure, and it was decided to carry on at reduced speed with the starboard engine alone. Towards midday, however, a deafening clattering noise – gru gru gru gru gru!– was heard from the area aft of the port engine.

  A quarter of an hour later the captain reported that now the starboard engine had no oil pressure either. The engine was stopped and the hatch lifted, to reveal that both engines were under water and the boat was filling fast – in twenty fathoms of water and half a mile from the nearest land. Before long the water was up to the wheelhouse window, and Aymer gave her not much more than twenty minutes before she went down.

  Lashing the rubber inflatable to the yacht’s starboard side, they drove its outboard motor at full throttle in an effort to nudge the sinking craft towards Euboea’s north-eastern shore before she sank. A hundred yards from the beach the keel grated sickeningly on the stony shallows and the yacht began to keel over. Salvaged belongings, mattresses, cigarettes and wine were ferried to a narrow shingle beach, and Gavin paused to take stock of his new surroundings – the mountain skyline, the field of new harvested corn, the aromatic shrubs and scattered pine, olive and fig trees.

  ‘It was baking hot,’ he noted in his diary, ‘and cicadas shrilled wherever there was no foliage. All that we did had for me the leisurely, porcelain quality of a Jane Austen picnic.’ The whole incident was, he wrote to a friend after the boat had been salvaged, ‘thoroughly Robinson Crusoe and much more my cup of tea’. Even in adversity there was nothing Gavin enjoyed more than a good drama.

  Gavin returned to Sandaig in July to pick up the threads of his professional career. By now this was all he was fit to do. Without the Greek summer sun to aid the circulation of his foot he was virtually crippled. He could scarcely walk, and when he sat at his desk he had to rest his foot on a hot-water bottle to avoid cramp setting in. Sandaig, he realised, was a wildly unsuitable place for someone in his condition. Now he felt as much a prisoner there as the otters were behind their wooden stockades. All sense of freedom had gone. But he began to perceive, perhaps dimly at first, that something else was going, too – the vision of Camusfeàrna, the spirit of the place and everything it had meant to him and to others.

  By turning his one-time sanctuary into a permanent base and deve
loping it into the tiny but complex empire it had now become, he had destroyed all the joy he had once found in its beauty and freedom, and it had become a burden to both his spirit and his pocket, and a drain on every minute of his time and every ounce of his energy. Sandaig had always been a house of crisis, but now it was a treadmill as well. Jimmy Watt, who had now been five years in Gavin’s employ, was the practical genius of the establishment, and without his skill and know-how the human, animal and mechanical components of Gavin’s world would have ceased to function long ago. But Gavin’s little Highland outpost by the sea had expanded to a point where not even Jimmy could cope with all the daily contingencies and periodic emergencies of Sandaig life. Jimmy was responsible not only for the welfare of the otters and the provisioning and day-to-day running of the greatly extended house, but the operation and maintenance of two Jeeps and a Land Rover, six dinghies and their outboard motors, and the Polar Star at her ill-sheltered moorings north of the islands. Replacements for the sorely-missed Terry Nutkins came and went at intervals, each leaving behind their own particular trail of disaster and adding to the burden of Sandaig’s soaring costs.

  Because of its isolation and inconvenience the annual expense of maintaining the Sandaig establishment totalled £5000, and before long the figure was to soar to over £7000 (about £75,000 in today’s money). The telephone alone cost £1000 a year. The otters ate over £20-worth of eels a week, despatched live by rail at huge expense from Manze’s fish shop in Fulham, London. The nearest laundry was eighty miles away on a Hebridean island. ‘I remember working out at one time,’ Gavin told me later, ‘that if I’d been foolish enough to telephone the general stores in Kyle of Lochalsh and asked for a box of matches to be delivered to me in the usual way – mail-boat from Kyle to Glenelg, mail-car from Glenelg to Tormor, then my own Jeep from Tormor down to Sandaig – that box of matches would have cost three shillings and eight pence by the time it reached me, or well over twenty times what it would have cost in the shop.’ The only way Gavin could meet his colossal outgoings was to immure himself in his little study-bedroom and write for long hours every day. He became a prisoner at his desk, not just because he could not walk far from it without suffering agonising cramp, but because he had to work like a literary galley-slave to pay the mounting bills.

  The only freedom Gavin could find now was on the Polar Star. When the weather was right and he had the time he would take her out to cruise along the winding sea lochs; or down to Mallaig; or out to the beckoning Hebridean island of Eigg that lined Sandaig’s southern horizon like a recumbent lion; or to visit his old friend John Lorne-Campbell, the laird of the isle of Canna, now only an hour and three-quarters away at twenty knots on Polar Star. ‘The glory of summer days on Polar Star is with me still,’ he was to write,

  but perhaps most of all the quiet evenings when we returned her to her moorings at sunset and we would sit for long in the open after-cockpit. We would sit there until the hills had become black silhouettes against an apple-green afterglow, the only sounds the water lapping against the hull and the crying of the seabirds, the colonies of gulls and of Arctic terns on the islands beside us. These moments of peace and stillness at Polar Star’s moorings had come to represent to me what the waterfall once had, the waterfall now disfigured by pendant lines of black alkathene piping that carried the water supply to the house and the otters’ enclosures. Enclosures: the whole of Camusfeàrna by now seemed to me an enclosure, the sea the only freedom.

  That summer Gavin had signed a contract with Longmans (and with Duttons in New York, who paid a handsome advance of $20,000) for an autobiography of his childhood, which was eventually to bear the title The House of Elrig. This, he informed me at the time, was to be the first of a planned series of three autobiographical volumes, which in conjunction with the books he had already written (about shark-fishing, Sicily, Iraq and Camusfeàrna) would span his life from birth to the present day. He was already busy contacting friends and contemporaries of years ago to enlist their help. To Anthony Dickins, who had been a friend at Stowe, he wrote ‘I’m writing an autobiography; 1st volume age 1–16, when I left Stowe. I’m looking, hoping to be reminded of things which will start new trains of thought and revive old ones … I am looking for myself at that age – someone I can remember and relive, but not without all the ways others saw me – their side (so hateful then!) of their assaults at my soi-disant purity.’

  Gavin was anxious to explore new themes and to get away from the image with which press and public had saddled him since the publication of Ring of Bright Water. ‘Because I had written about my pet otters,’ he complained,

  it seemed that I had become in the public mind an otter man, an animal man, without further scope or interests; I had become type-cast, and the books that I had written about human beings with much greater labour were overshadowed by the massive image of the otters. There is a general unwillingness in the public mind to allow a man to be more than one thing or to have more than one pronounced characteristic, for it is simpler to classify and thus to know, or believe one knows, in which pigeonhole to look for whom. The great mass of human beings is determined that its fellows should conform to a recognisable type; the nonconformist is an implicit threat because one does not know what to expect from him; he makes for insecurity.

  Ironically, however, because of the time-lapse between a book’s completion and its publication, Gavin’s first new book for nearly three years seemed to promote the very otter theme that he now disowned. The Rocks Remain, published on 21 October 1963, was the third of a trio of books featuring Camusfeàrna and the otters. It was not a work he was proud of. He saw it as a pot-pourri of unrelated incidentals, and referred to it as ‘this silly book’. To a friend he confided: ‘You won’t like The Rocks Remain, I’m afraid. Between you and me it was written in just a month during the worst of my marital crises, and perhaps for that reason it is riddled with doom. Gawd – if I’d added the truth about that to all the other disasters!’ Writing to John Guest, the senior editor at Longmans, he asked anxiously: ‘Do you really enjoy The Rocks Remain? I had no confidence in it at all and I do value your opinion a very great deal.’ Unfortunately, John Guest shared Gavin’s own view, and in his reader’s report (for Longman’s eyes only) noted tartly:

  The new book is a bit of a hotch-potch. One feels that the author has pushed himself at it, at various times and various moods; that he is lacking self-discipline; and that the success of Ring of Bright Water has gone to his head a bit, so that he is less self-critical. He is relying on readers to take anything from his pen, just because he is Gavin Maxwell … About three-fifths of the book deals with Camusfeàrna – though there is a different slant and the story is less idyllic. All this Camusfeàrna material is first-class, vivid, interesting, excellently written – only a shade below Ring, and not always below. It is the other two-fifths that are uneven …

  It is frustrating that a writer so talented as Gavin is so touchy, so unapproachable (conceited), so unamenable to normal friendly discussion of his work. But I believe it is no use expressing anything other than enthusiasm for what he turns in. He may yet become a more stable character.

  Robin McEwen, who had done some of the artwork for the book, had similar reservations about it. ‘Gavin’s book seems a triumph of the publisher’s art,’ he wrote to Mark Longman after receiving an advance copy, ‘though possibly, and with all due reservations, and in sotto-est voce, not of the writer’s.’

  Mark Longman had decided on an initial printing of forty thousand copies of The Rocks Remain, almost double the first print-run of the bestselling Ring. The book sold over thirty-three thousand copies in the first ten days after publication, and by Christmas there were only two hundred copies left and another ten thousand were ordered to be printed; in the United States the sales figures were almost identical. During the same period another hardback edition of Ring of Bright Water was printed for its fourth Christmas in succession – despite the fact that the paperback version wa
s selling prodigiously.

  Gavin had landed another bestseller. The Observer serialised it and commissioned their photographer Colin Jones to illustrate the serialisation. The critics, sharing the opinions of neither the author nor his publishers, reacted as ecstatically as they had to Ring.

  A lone dissenting voice was that of the author and poet Geoffrey Grigson, who disliked aristocrats almost as much as he disliked animals, and found himself confronted with a hefty dose of both. In his review for the New Statesman Grigson derided Gavin’s ‘defiant conceit’ and his ‘upper class recourse to evasive, excessive communion with animals’, and went so far as to confess: ‘I have a tiny sympathy with the minister of the Church of Scotland who shot Mr Maxwell’s latest otter cubs’ (a misreading of Gavin’s text). Gavin felt he understood the motives behind this review. ‘In 1950 or 1951 I went to the Nag’s Head pub with Roy Campbell,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘He encountered Grigson, who had written just such a slimy review of some work of Roy’s. Roy made him crawl round the pub on all fours while he kicked his backside. Grigson hasn’t forgiven my presence on that occasion.’ Gavin could not resist reminding Grigson (and the public) of this humiliating incident in a letter of riposte to the New Statesman.