Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Gavin had barely had time to settle back in at Sandaig than more grave news forced him to return to the south again. To a friend, Bruno de Hamel, he reported:

  Within a week of the end of the Alliata case my mother (eighty-seven) had another stroke, and sank very gradually until she died on 18 March, having survived six days after the doctors had said she couldn’t possibly last more than another twenty-four hours. My sister and I sat with her right round the clock, and when it was over there was not only exhaustion but a mass of business matters and then several hundred letters of condolence to answer. In the end I only got back here yesterday evening [5 April].

  The financial crisis is at least temporarily solved. I did not expect to inherit anything from my mother, because when the matter was last discussed three years ago I was so stinking rich that I agreed to waive my inheritance in favour of my brothers and sister – but in the event it turned out that my mother – bless her heart – had chosen to ignore this agreement and left her original will as it stood. Thus averting disaster not at the eleventh hour but, as you might say, at five minutes to twelve.

  But Gavin was wrong in believing that disaster had been averted. He unwisely paid a portion of his legacy of £9000 into his ailing company’s account, and saw it instantly gobbled up without trace. A terrible financial crisis was gathering like a storm front, and he picked up the threads of daily existence at Sandaig with a feeling of deep foreboding, relieved only by the brief return of the wild geese to Camusfeàrna for the last time.

  The geese were the descendants of the small brood of unfledged greylags Gavin had brought to Sandaig from Monreith many years before – birds that were themselves descendants of the greylags he had wing-tipped in Wigtown Bay in the pre-war days when he had been an ardent wildfowler. Every spring after that the geese had returned from their unknown winter feeding grounds to breed on the reedy little lochan across the road from the MacLeods’ house at Tormor, a mile or so above Sandaig. Their arrival late in April or May had always been one of the dramatic events in the Sandaig year, for to Gavin the geese were the very symbol of freedom, of the vast windswept spaces and the boundless sky, their wild haunting cry – ‘like a bugle on a falling cadence … a tumbling cascade of silver trumpets’ – the authentic sound of the north.

  Now, in the late spring of 1965, he heard the geese again – ‘far away, thin and clear at first, then fainter and buffeted by a stiff southerly breeze that drove before it big shapeless white clouds above an ink-dark sea’. There were five of them, heading inland high over Sandaig in a tiny but perfect V formation. Gavin called out to them, and they checked their course a moment, as if in acknowledgment of the fact that they were indeed the Sandaig geese, then passed on out of sight in the direction of Tormor. Five minutes later they returned, slanting steeply down on outstretched wings from the skyline of the hill, to alight on the turf in front of the house – two ganders and three geese.

  One pair left almost immediately to nest inland in one of the many hill-lochs far above the house and was never seen again. A solitary unpaired goose stayed alone in the vicinity of the Sandaig beaches until she was killed by a local wildcat or fox. The remaining pair nested on the lochan at Tormor, as they had always done. But Mary and John Donald MacLeod, Gavin’s nearest neighbours for so many years, had recently left the area, and their roadside cottage lay shuttered and empty. Without their protective presence the birds were at the mercy of any human who happened to pass along that lonely road. The female did not even lay, and one day the male was found floating lifeless among the reeds, shot through the neck at close range. His mate disappeared soon afterwards, and no wild goose ever came back to Camusfeàrna again. ‘With their absence,’ Gavin recorded, ‘something, for me mystic, had gone forever.’

  It was probably at this point that Gavin’s mind began to turn to the possibility, inconceivable in the past, that he should one day leave Sandaig. The place was dying, and he found no more joy in it, or indeed in anything in his present life. Though he rarely found himself alone these days, he enjoyed no close or meaningful relationship, and began to retreat bit by bit from contact with his former friends and acquaintances. The stream of summer visitors of former years dried to a trickle, and his once voluminous correspondence was reduced to a few brief and perfunctory notes. All Gavin’s available time and energy was now concentrated on writing his books and fighting for survival. Such a dour, single-minded existence inevitably constricted not only his physical movements but his intellectual horizons as well; gone, for the moment, was the infectious fun, the tireless curiosity, the unbounded enthusiasm, the ceaseless quest that marked the positive side of his contrary nature. The one bright beacon in his life was the lighthouse property on Eilean Ban, which was now nearing completion.

  All through the brief days of the northern winter, with their storms and winds and frosts, Richard Frere had laboured long and loyally at converting the two run-down cottages on Kyleakin into a single, sumptuous residence along the lines of Gavin’s design. It had not been plain sailing. The Eider, the dinghy Richard used to come and go from the island, was broken up by a combination of high wind and tide while beached at Kyle; and her replacement, a leaky ex-lifeboat called the Assunta, sank at her moorings while laden with coal, sand and cement (though she was salvaged soon after). Nor did Richard’s two young assistants last long. Terry Nutkins walked out when Gavin forbade Wendy Stewart from visiting the island to see the wildcats she had helped rear; and once Terry had gone Philip Alpin lost heart and asked to go too. But it was not just Terry’s departure which prompted Philip to leave; it was also fear. Quite simply, the island terrified him – as it terrified others who came within range of its restless ghosts and hidden, haunting voices.

  Gavin had always in one way or another been associated with the supernatural and the paranormal. John Hillaby had noted his susceptibility to superstition as far back as the sharking days; and Gavin had always half-believed in Kathleen Raine’s supposed psychic powers. He was cautiously predisposed to accept that the supernatural formed an imperfectly understood part of the natural phenomena of existence – though he was, as he put it, ‘essentially of the faithless generation that waited for a sign.’

  Such signs were not lacking. In the course of a week during the previous summer Sandaig had been visited by a poltergeist that had hurled a marmalade pot a full six feet off a shelf in the kitchen parlour (this was witnessed by Jimmy Watt and Richard Frere as well as Gavin himself), propelled a kitchen windowpane five feet into Edal’s enclosure outside, projected a pile of gramophone records into a neat pile in the middle of the living-room floor, flipped a baby’s bottle in Gavin’s face, and tossed a laundry basket half the length of the annexe coat room. The sheer weight of paranormal evidence forced Gavin to abandon his scepticism.

  No further supernatural manifestations occurred within Gavin’s domain until Philip Alpin set foot on Kyleakin Island. Then, as Richard Frere put it, ‘he had come into range of the island’s psychic wavelength, and his subconscious mind had been invaded’.

  That there was something on the island which could not be explained in ordinary terms had been known to several generations of lighthouse-keepers. The experiences of all who had lived in the house which Gavin now owned on Eilean Ban had a common, unvarying pattern. First there were the sounds. These came from just outside the house, rather than within it, and they were of two kinds – low-pitched, incoherent human voices, muttering in a language that was neither English nor Gaelic, sometimes rising and falling as if in argument; and loud metallic clangs. Such sounds were usually heard in the small hours of the morning, but only in the autumn and winter, and not by everyone – Gavin, it seems, never heard them (and neither did I), but Richard Frere did, though only after Philip Alpin arrived to help him late in 1964.

  Alpin was frightened from the outset. At night he could not abide to be left alone in the house, and would follow Richard about like a shadow, even out into the dark when Richard went down to the water’
s edge to check the boat before turning in for the night. Once Richard found him buried under a huge pile of bedclothes with a large spanner in his hand. ‘He had heard many voices,’ Richard reported to Gavin, ‘and he was very, very frightened.’ So frightened that in January he asked to be allowed to leave the island, and was put on the first train home.

  Now Richard was alone on Kyleakin. For the first three nights he slept soundly. On the fourth night a strong south-westerly wind was blowing and he slept fitfully. Shortly after 3 a.m., when the wind had dropped and the rain had started to fall, he was awakened by a high-pitched metallic clang. A few minutes later, as the old moon rose over the sea, voices sounded outside, and seemed to move down the north side of the house from west to east. The voices continued for about ten minutes, the clang being repeated two or three times, but strangely the sounds did not unnerve Richard unduly, for the atmosphere inside the house was a benevolent one, and he felt at ease. In the subsequent weeks he heard the same performance repeated often again, though never in stormy conditions, and by March it was all over.

  Richard Frere was an eminently rational and level-headed man, but even he was confounded by the ghostly voices of Eilean Ban. On Isle Ornsay he had been subject to a similar barrage of night noises, but he had been able to trace each to its normal, physical cause. This was not the case on Eilean Ban, for no normal cause was ever found, and he was left with nothing but the local legend by way of explanation. Seven hundred years ago it seemed that King Haco of Norway anchored his invasion fleet in the lee of Eilean Ban on the eve of his last, disastrous attempt to conquer Scotland. From him is derived the name of Kyleakin – the Narrows of Haco – and it is to the ghosts of his time-locked army that the voices on the lighthouse island are popularly attributed in the area.

  There were also visual apparitions, which were even more difficult to account for – kilted figures, dancing lights, ships that vanished into thin air. The first of these incidents to take place after Gavin acquired the island occurred in April 1965, shortly after the night voices had ceased, when a number of people in Kyleakin village on Skye saw a lamp burning in the kitchen window of the lighthouse cottage, though electricity had not yet been installed and the house was empty and securely locked at the time. Some weeks later a friend of Richard’s, a clear-headed, no-nonsense businessman, saw a stranger come up the path round the house and then, to his complete bafflement, vanish into thin air before his very eyes.

  These mysterious events did not hinder Richard Frere’s progress towards the completion of his task. The dark, dank, dingy cavern of seven months ago had been transformed into a bright, sumptuous house, with a great vista of Loch Alsh and Loch Duich to the distant peaks of the Five Sisters of Kintail, and a single spectacularly beautiful sitting room all of forty feet in length, with windows looking across to Skye and furnishings which Gavin himself had chosen.

  Gavin was not at hand to admire the finished property on Eilean Ban. For some months he had been dreaming up schemes for further exploiting the commercial potential of his two lighthouse properties. Two such schemes won his particular favour – a dolphinarium at Isle Ornsay and a commercial eider-breeding colony (for the production of eider down) on Eilean Ban. The latter, about which he had been thinking in a desultory way for several years, was the more practical project. There had always been a small eider-breeding colony on one of the Sandaig Islands, but Gavin’s tenure at Sandaig had been too tenuous and the eider colony too tiny to allow him to develop the breeding site even on an experimental basis. But Kyleakin Island – or more exactly a small uninhabited island immediately adjacent to it – offered a perfect site. Thirty pairs already bred there every summer, and by farming them and increasing their number Gavin hoped he might be able to establish a minor industry in the area.

  Within only a week or two of his purchase of the lighthouse properties in October 1963, therefore, he sought the advice of his friend Peter Scott at Slimbridge Wildfowl Trust about raising eider ducklings in the wild. Towards the end of May 1965, when the Kyleakin Island property was nearing completion, Gavin took the matter up again in a more serious way. There was now a cogent extra reason for pursuing the project, for as soon as he finished his interminably delayed book about the Glaoui he planned to begin a new book provisionally entitled The Two Lighthouses. Clearly, the story of his struggle to start an eider farm on a West Highland island could form an important part of his new work, and make the project doubly worthwhile.

  Gavin discovered that in Iceland eider ducks had been farmed for their down for some eight hundred years, and on Peter Scott’s recommendation he got in touch with Iceland’s greatest living naturalist, Dr Finnur Gudmundsson, with a view to visiting his country and learning the techniques of eider farming at first hand from local experts. On 11 June, with Jimmy Watt for company, Gavin took a plane from Glasgow to Reykjavic to begin a short fact-finding tour of the eider farms in that remote, sub-Arctic island.

  Gavin disliked Iceland’s capital town – the natives were hostile, he found, and the cost of whisky astronomical – but enthused enormously about the vast wilderness that occupied most of the interior beyond – a land of fire and lava, ice and glacier. Heading for Dr Gudmundsson’s remote fortress island far to the north they passed through an almost empty country of bare hills, iceberg-filled fjords, black lava-sand beaches, snowy mountains, belching geysers and high falls, populated by a myriad of birds, huge herds of wild ponies, gigantic flocks of silent, bizarrely-coloured sheep, and dense, loudly humming clouds of biting black-fly that filled the lower air like an uninhabitable fog.

  Some of the eider colonies Gavin visited were surreal places, more like country fairs or gipsy encampments than duck-breeding sites, for the nesting birds were attracted by multicoloured flags, strings of red and white pennants and bunting, and whirring children’s windmills stuck in the ground around their nests. His notebook rapidly filled with the facts and figures of the business. Eider down came from the lining of an eider duck’s nest once the critical early stage of egg incubation was complete. It was not superior to the down of any other duck, but the eider could be concentrated in greater numbers than other species, which made it far more valuable for commercial farming. Thirty nests yielded a pound of down (worth about £10 in 1965), and in a peak year Iceland produced about 4½ tons of eider down for export (worth about £100,000 at that time). Already Gavin was calculating how many pairs of eiders his own island could hold, and seeing it in his mind’s eye fluttering with flags.

  When he returned to Sandaig in the last week of June, Gavin felt confident he could establish a commercial eider farm on Kyleakin Island’s neighbour (which was to be known henceforth as Eider Island). He quickly assembled his Iceland notes into a report which he circulated to all bodies he thought might be interested in supporting a new industry for the crofting population of the Scottish West Highlands and Islands, where eiders in large numbers already bred in a natural state. Gavin hoped that, using the techniques he had learned in Iceland, he could raise the eider population on Eider Island from thirty to two thousand. But many vicissitudes, both financial and personal, were to intervene before he was in a position to begin the experiment.

  At the end of June Gavin made a lightning visit to Eilean Ban, bubbling over with his Iceland adventures. He cast a cursory glance round the cottage, gave Richard his perfunctory thanks for all he had done, and rushed off.

  Richard was not amused. Gavin, he knew, was planning to hold a house-warming party on the island for some of his friends in a few days’ time, and it was evident that neither he nor Joan, who had worked long and hard to transform the houses on both islands, would be invited. Richard felt deflated and somewhat bitter. Dejectedly he finished the few jobs that remained to be done, closed the house, took the boat back to Kyle for the last time, and went home. Though he had come to feel some rapport with Gavin, he did not at this time count himself as one of his friends, and he did not expect to hear from him again.

  The day after Richar
d left the island Gavin returned to it in Polar Star, bringing with him a working party to help prepare the house for its first residential occupation. They worked all day, and did not leave till the twilight afterglow of late evening began to fade. The tide was running at about eight knots as it raced through the narrows of the Sound. Gavin, who was at the wheel, brought the boat round and nudged her in towards the pier at Kylerhea against the swirling tide; but he was thirty feet too far inshore, and as Jimmy Watt, the starboard lookout, called out in alarm, Gavin felt the sickening crunch of keel against rock once again. It was not until dawn that Polar Star was floated off on the returning tide and towed ignominiously away for another round of repairs to her long-suffering hull.

  This was only the first of a series of accidents and setbacks which followed in such rapid succession that they seemed like the urgent harbingers of ill-omen.

  A few days after the Polar Star ran aground, Gavin’s small house-warming party assembled on Kyleakin Island. Some of the guests – the Earl and Countess of Dalhousie, and their daughter, Elizabeth, Countess of Scarborough, and Susan Stirling, the sister-in-law of Colonel David Stirling – were old friends and relatives. Some – like former naval officer and retired businessman Bruno de Hamel and his wife – were almost brand new. ‘It was a very nice house party,’ Bruno de Hamel recalled, ‘and Gavin was very relaxed. At Sandaig he was a lord in a labourer’s cottage, but at this first gathering on Kyleakin Island he was able to dispense hospitality like a lord in his own right.’ Among the many toasts that night was one proposed by Jimmy Watt, who gave thanks to Richard Frere for bringing ‘the blessings of electric light’ to the house. As he stood to raise his glass Jimmy reached out a hand to steady himself against one of the light-brackets on the wall, and received such a powerful electric shock that he was thrown to the floor, where for a brief moment he lay unconscious.