Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Grigson apart, Gavin had notched up another critical success; and much to his delight he was in the money again. This time he was determined not to blow his fortune on personal indulgences and high living – or at any rate, not all of it. He would invest his riches as wisely as he was able. No one knew better than Gavin that he was no businessman – the shark-fishing venture was ample proof of that. But this time his choice of investment struck him as foolproof – especially as its financial attractions coincided with his personal interests and ambitions. He would buy a lighthouse – in fact, he would buy two lighthouses, and whizz from one to the other like a rocket in his high-speed flagship, Polar Star.

  Three miles from the small lighthouse on the furthest of the Sandaig islands, west-south-west across the Sound of Sleat, lies the much larger lighthouse of Isle Ornsay, off the Isle of Skye. The signal from the Isle Ornsay lighthouse – a double flash every seven seconds – is the only light that can be seen at night from Sandaig. It was this light that had so transfixed me when I first arrived at Sandaig in the breathless darkness of an early spring night five years before, for it lent an infinite perspective to that haunting nightscape, beckoning one on like a will-o’-the-wisp to the very edge of the vast and silent sea. Gavin, too, was drawn to it, and would often stand at the tide’s edge in Sandaig bay, lost in silent reverie as he stared across to Isle Ornsay in the gathering dusk, waiting for the stab of light from the distant white tower that marked the frontier of night. The place had an additional significance for Gavin, because it was between Isle Ornsay and the Sandaig Islands that he had encountered his first basking shark nearly twenty years before – an encounter that had led, step by step, to Camusfeàrna. Gavin had never landed at Isle Ornsay lighthouse, but the lighthouse-keeper was an old acquaintance of his who sometimes called at Sandaig on calm evenings when he had been fishing for mackerel, and at dusk one quiet evening in the summer of 1963 he had called again, with news.

  ‘I’m afraid this is the last dram I’ll be taking with you,’ he told Gavin. ‘Ornsay Lighthouse is being made fully automatic, and I’m being transferred to Ardnamurchan. The Northern Lighthouse Board will put it up for sale, no doubt, and it’ll be a lucky man who gets it.’

  Gavin pricked up his ears at this. He had always been drawn to islands and the encircling moat of water they interposed between him and the rest of the world. He had once been Laird of Soay, and had later tried to buy Temple Island on the Thames at Henley. As he was only too well aware, he was merely a grace-and-favour tenant at Sandaig and at the expiry of his lease he could be homeless – and alternative houses on the coast were simply not available. ‘There is virtually nothing left up here,’ he once told me when I was searching for a foothold in the Highlands. ‘Between Moydart and Torridon, which is a great stretch of coastline, there is nothing. Even if you found a ruin with four walls standing, the landlord wouldn’t sell it to you; and even if he did, you wouldn’t get planning permission to rebuild it.’ Isle Ornsay appeared to Gavin to be an ideal insurance against possible future homelessness. Flat out in the Polar Star it was only ten minutes away from Sandaig, and the lighthouse accommodation, consisting of two long back-to-back cottages and a large walled garden, offered great potential for conversion. Gavin made enquiries, and discovered that preference would be given to a purchaser who was prepared to buy not only the Isle Ornsay lighthouse cottages but those of Kyleakin lighthouse, eleven miles from Sandaig by sea, in the Narrows of Skye. Only the cottages were for sale – not the lighthouses themselves, nor the islands on which they stood.

  One glorious summer day, then, Gavin set out to inspect the lighthouse properties in Polar Star with Jimmy Watt and Alan Mac-Diarmaid. At Isle Ornsay they anchored a few hundred yards from the lighthouse and rowed ashore in the dinghy. Gavin surveyed the wheeling birds, the sounding seals, the profound peace and immense panorama that spread before the islet, from the distant point of Ardnamurchan to the towering hills of Knoydart and Loch Hourn and the minuscule Sandaig light dwarfed by the vastness of the hills that formed its backcloth. ‘It was as though I had found Camusfeàrna once again,’ he wrote:

  The same sense of freedom and elation, the same shedding of past mistakes and their perennial repercussions. Here, it seemed to me, where the rocks and the white stone buildings were the only solid things in a limitless bubble of blue water and blue air, one might be able to live in peace again, to recover a true vision long lost by now in the lives of other humans and in the strife of far countries; here one might set back the clock and re-enter Eden …

  I did not know, though I was already in middle age, that you cannot buy paradise, for it disintegrates at the touch of money, and it is not composed solely of scenery. It is made of what many of us will never touch in a lifetime, and having touched it once there can be no second spring, no encore after the curtain falls. This is the core of our condition, that we do not know why nor at what point we squandered our heritage; we only know, too late always, that it cannot be recovered or restored. I did not know it then; this was paradise, and I was going to buy it for hard cash.

  If Isle Ornsay lighthouse was like paradise, Kyleakin lighthouse was like home. Unlike Isle Ornsay, which was really a tidal peninsula, Kyleakin Island (also known as Eilean Ban, the White Island*) was a true island, in the middle of a narrow shipping thoroughfare between Skye and the mainland at Kyle of Lochalsh. Dodging between the busy ferry boats, Gavin nudged the Polar Star into a small bay on the southern side of the island and dropped anchor clear of the tide’s swirling current. Despite its proximity to towns and traffic and the summer tourist trade, Gavin was deeply drawn to the hilly rock and heather of Kyleakin, for it reminded him of his childhood home at Elrig – the house that for long had been his only refuge in a frightening and unfamiliar world. ‘At Kyleakin,’ he was to write, ‘I felt as if I were coming home. It was here, I decided that I would live if ever I left Camusfeàrna.’

  Though the lighthouse-keepers’ cottages on both islands would cost a good deal to renovate and convert to the standard he required, Gavin was determined to buy them both. One of them, he argued, could provide him with a future home, while the other could pay its way by being let to rich tourists drawn by their wild settings and his own famous name. ‘The Kyleakin one I’m going to do up to luxury standards and possibly let to some American millionaire with the charter of a boat. My brother Aymer gets £200 a week for a tiny villa and his boat (seven knots if you’re lucky). And I believe just as many Americans visit Skye as visit Greece, so …’ By the end of September the negotiations for the island cottages were almost complete, along with those for two cottages in Glenelg, one run-down and the other virtually derelict, which in a fit of mental aberration he had bought (as he bought his boats) without ever clapping eyes on them.

  I was at Sandaig at that time with my future wife, and one bright autumn day we sped out in the Polar Star to inspect the spectacular properties of which Gavin was now the proud owner. But Gavin himself was out of sorts. The injury he had sustained in the Land Rover crash in June still troubled him and he had some difficulty in walking. This seemed to prey on his mind, for he was more than usually tense and moody. ‘Gavin is up and down as is his wont,’ I wrote home. ‘He leads the most disorganised life I know – most of the disasters are avoidable.’ It was not just his injury which confined him to his room. A record-player filled the house with the exuberant sounds of a new kind of pop music by a group called The Beatles, and there was now beer and darts in the annexe, both unheard of before. Sandaig was more overrun by human-kind than I had ever seen it, for in addition to Gavin, Jimmy Watt, and Philip Alpin (who had replaced the irreplaceable Terry Nutkins), Gavin’s company manager from London, Michael Cuddy, was staying at the house, as well as my fiancée and myself, while a dozen schoolboys from a progressive school in Fife, on a field-study trip under the care of one of their teachers, the mountaineer and writer Hamish Brown, had taken over the croft opposite the main house.

  Gavin had first encoun
tered the young and bearded Hamish Brown and his pioneer outward-bound school parties one hot day in early June, when a boy had knocked on his door and asked him, with great composure and in the difficult dialect of Fife, to help identify a fish he had caught in a bucket out at the islands. ‘I asked him if he was interested in natural history,’ Gavin recorded at the time, ‘and he replied, “Well, we’ve all become a bit keen lately.” He said that he came from Braehead Junior Secondary School (mining area, very poor) and that the rest of the party were over at the islands, so I told him to ask them all in for a cup of tea.’

  In his diary Hamish Brown recorded: ‘A memorable visit. The boys delighted into silence at the house, its owner and animals.’ Gavin learned that Hamish Brown had conceived the idea of de-urbanising the boys and enthusing them about the natural world by taking small groups of them on two-week field trips to mountainous and roadless areas in the Highlands. ‘The result has been that boys of the most unlikely background have developed a phenomenal interest in wildlife of all kinds,’ Gavin noted. ‘I had some evidence of this interest myself. I took them up to the waterfall to watch the elver migration, and gave them an explanatory talk on the life history of the eel, which was new to them. Most urban boys would be bored stiff by it, but they were actually jostling for position so as not to miss a word. They also displayed themselves most knowledgeable about the various birds and beasts they saw here.’

  Gavin was so impressed with what he saw that he was prompted to dash off a note to Peter Scott, now Chairman of the World Wildlife Fund, proposing that children’s subscriptions should be used for financing field expeditions like those of Braehead School throughout the British Isles, rather than for saving some endangered species of, say, tortoise, many thousands of miles away. Though Peter Scott himself was open to the idea, and sent a copy of Gavin’s letter to Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands, then President of the World Wildlife Fund, for his consideration, Gavin’s scheme did not meet with an enthusiastic response, and the raising of money from children to save endangered animals remained the first priority.

  Nevertheless, the radical ideals of Braehead were to have a considerable impact on Gavin’s theories about the education of the young. This was a subject to which he was to devote a considerable amount of thought following Hamish Brown’s first visit, coinciding as it did with the recollections of his own unsatisfactory education, which he had begun to write down for his new work-in-progress, his autobiography of childhood.

  And so, in October, Hamish Brown was back at Sandaig with another party, to whom Raef had lent his long, one-roomed croft as a base. Gavin had installed film and slide projectors in the croft, and one evening he gave a slide show about his Moroccan travels, followed by a screening of films about my ballooning adventures over Africa and pictures of the journey through Siberia and Central Asia from which I had recently returned. The enthusiasm and high spirits of the party were infectious – all the more so for the lonely and dramatic setting in which they found themselves. ‘What a place,’ Hamish Brown jotted in his log:

  Day of a hundred things with a thousand views to ring the changes … Force 10 gales in Minch. Wild night and stormy day. Spume flying past the door. Lying in bed watching it through the glass door, with the white boat and beach, grass, bracken, and far stormy hills of Skye all flickering in a million changing lights. Cuillin edge just visible in moonlight … Down to dinghy and set sail and drifted sedately out into the Sound. Lost way and gale caught us and we drifted right across in the darkness on to rocks. Rowing hard took an hour for the half mile up to the beach. Lights all shining on shore and glitter in water … Days beginning to race away and hard to know days of the week … Timelessness … Last full day and another memorable one. All very sad to be leaving. So much still to do! Bed at one o’clock with a big moon and a sky patched with stars and clouds and the bay quiet in the silver light beyond the ebb tide band of dark shore … God, I love it here.

  For the moment Gavin’s most urgent preoccupation was with his half-crippled foot. Now that his Greek suntan had worn off the true colour of the foot was revealed. It was a cold bluish white, with a cratered ulcer forming near the base of the big toe. When Dr Beveridge examined it, she warned Gavin that he ran the risk of gangrene and amputation of the foot if he did not take urgent action.

  So late in November Gavin went down to London to seek the opinions of specialists. Their advice was conflicting. One said it might be possible to replace the damaged blood vessels with artificial ones. Another declared there was no alternative to a major operation – a lumbar sympathectomy. The blood vessels were too small to replace, he said, and would be cast off by the body’s system in a year or two. Already the foot was showing the initial symptoms of necrosis.

  From London he returned to Scotland, where he placed himself in the hands of an acquaintance who was perhaps the greatest surgeon in Scotland at that time. First there was an examination even more detailed and searching than those he had already had. Then there was an arteriogram, an agonising examination in which a substance which appears opaque on X-ray was injected into the arteries at the groin.

  Afterwards it was clear to Gavin that he could not go on as he was. When he set off to do his Christmas shopping in Glasgow he found he could hardly walk at all without the help of a stick. Even without the threat of gangrene and amputation, Gavin was reconciled to the need to undergo the lumbar sympathectomy operation, and he was not excessively dejected when he returned to Sandaig.

  When photographer Terence Spencer and reporter Timothy Green from Life magazine arrived to do a story about the bestselling author and wilderness man of Camusfeàrna, they were surprised to find not the craggy, reclusive St Francis figure they had expected, but a sophisticated gourmet with a zest for life and a passion for fast cars and guns. Tim Green’s notes record:

  Maxwell is 5'9½" high, weighs 126 pounds, has blue eyes – if you can ever see them – and fair, mouse-coloured hair, slightly receding. His mighty deerhound Dirk weighs 125 pounds and when he stands on his back legs he can reach all of seven feet which makes Maxwell look like a dwarf. ‘My great interest in life,’ said Maxwell, ‘undoubtedly centres around human beings (and then, perhaps, fast cars, pistol shooting and shotguns).’ At first hearing this may sound strange from a man who seemingly cuts himself off from the world in a remote home surrounded mainly by animals. But Maxwell believes it is only possible to understand man by having a thorough understanding of animals first. ‘Medical students start by studying animals lower than man. The same thing applies with psychology – animal psychology is part of all psychology degree courses, lower animals first, homo sapiens last. So in my case a stage on the way to understanding human beings is an understanding and affection for animals.’ Maxwell doesn’t let his standards drop and enjoys good food and large quantities of Scotch whisky. Breakfast may consist of caviar and white wine, while for lunch a Maxwell speciality is what he modestly terms canapé of smoked salmon but is much more exotic. He starts by placing lobster or caviar between layers of smoked salmon, adds a little mayonnaise, then sets to work with lots of different things – a dash of sugar, cayenne pepper, lemon juice and smoked shrimps. This is by way of hors d’oeuvre, for Maxwell also fancies himself as a game cook.

  It was at this juncture, while waiting for major surgery, that in accordance with the laws then operating in the United Kingdom Gavin was required to ‘provide evidence’ of adultery for his forthcoming divorce action. As often as not the ‘evidence’ in such cases was totally bogus, and entailed the ‘offending’ party (usually the husband) organising a fictitious adulterous encounter with a person of the opposite sex, and arranging for a friend or private detective to act as witness and provide evidence as to the pretended adultery in a divorce court. Gavin first tried to enlist the help of his former commanding officer in SOE, Colonel Jimmy Young, who ran the Portsonachon Hotel in Argyll, a convenient venue for an arranged liaison of the kind the court required. But Young declined to take part in such a
charade, so Gavin prevailed on friends who lived near Inverness to help him out instead. One evening in mid-December he arrived at the couple’s home in the company of a woman of the town whom he introduced as his wife, and shortly afterwards retired with her to an upstairs room, emerging a little later to ask for a cup of tea. In due course it was arranged that Gavin and Lavinia would be divorced, on the grounds of adultery, later in the summer.

  That ordeal over, Gavin now faced up to another. After the Christmas Day broadcast of his television interview at Sandaig, he was admitted as a private patient to the Bon Secours in Glasgow on Boxing Day 1963 – the same nursing home in which Terry Nutkins had been treated for his otter wounds more than two years before – to undergo a lumbar sympathectomy. The lumbar sympathetic nerves lie against and on each side of the spine at about the same level as the kidneys. Part of their function is to control the supply of blood to the lower limbs, and normally they act like taps which are permanently half turned on. By removing the left one entirely the surgeons hoped to provide a full, unregulated flow of blood to the crushed arteries of Gavin’s foot, and in that way restore it to a normal condition. It was a relatively commonplace operation, with a high success rate, and if all went well it involved no more than two weeks in hospital and a month or two of convalescence afterwards.

  But all did not go well. When he came round from the anaesthetic Gavin was aware of an appalling pain in his left side, and within a day or two he began to feel very ill indeed. He had caught a hospital staphylococcus, and by the time the surgeon came to see him again he was vomiting black bile, each retch seeming to tear the wound wide open. Twice more he was sent back to the operating theatre, each time returning with drainage tubes protruding from his wound.