Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  The pressing question was where to live in the future. It was not just a matter of a roof over his head – it was finding a niche in which he could function, a place where he could sink new roots, and be happy. In Morocco his friends Michael and Cherry Scott had offered him rooms in their own beautiful villa in Tangier. But was living abroad the answer? Was there, indeed, any answer? Why leave Sandaig anyway, Robin McEwen wondered, ‘I don’t quite understand why you don’t regard Sandaig as your base, and gradually draw in your horns, financial and otherwise, so that if the worst comes to the worst, you would still be “sitting in your pitch pine parlour” just as at the beginning of Ring of Bright Water.’

  Gavin did not want to return to Sandaig immediately. With Jimmy gone he felt it would be a sad place. In any case it was full to bursting with new occupants. Beryl Borders, the practical young woman who had typed his early books, and Fionna, her seven-year-old daughter, had moved in at the end of May, bringing with them a whole pantechnicon load of donkeys, ponies, cats, geese and dogs (a dozen of them, ranging from Great Danes to miniature poodles) to add to Gavin’s two otters and three deerhounds (Dirk, his recently acquired mate Hazel, and their newly born cub) already in residence. Beryl felt that Edal and Teko had lacked contact and routine care over the last year or two, but they became normal again once they felt comfortable and secure. Richard Frere, who had taken over the running of Gavin’s company, soon formed a high opinion of Beryl – who was on crutches after breaking both her knees in a car crash – but was less enthusiastic about her menagerie.

  ‘Beryl is excellent,’ he reported to Gavin, ‘and excellent for Sandaig. But Beryl’s dogs make life at Sandaig a grim trial. In the morning one is woken by the whole range and variety of the voice canine, from the yip-yap of her somewhat obnoxious mongrels to the Baskerville baying of her Great Danes. One gets out of bed and trips over the excremental deposit that some night wanderer has surreptitiously bequeathed for one’s enjoyment. All day long one falls over dogs. They lie in wait, in darkness, behind doors. They meet you on the stairs. They breathe on you when you eat. You take your turn in the bath with them. Verily, they are a bit much – and would become a very serious problem if you were trying to write at Sandaig.’ Sandaig, Gavin noted, had entered upon a new and more visible phase of its decline; it had become an Animal Farm where the four-legged ruled. ‘The casual copulations of this curious community,’ he wrote later, ‘resulted in a spectacular population explosion. At one moment there were, to say nothing of other species, twenty-six dogs.’

  Gavin was in no hurry to return. There was much to preoccupy him in London. First and most pressing was the question of finding a home for the otters. A new zoo shortly to be opened in Aberdeen seemed the most suitable prospect, and after Gavin paid a visit in June it was agreed that the otters should move in when the construction of their enclosures was completed in October.

  There was also much neglected literary business to attend to. The manuscript of Lords of the Atlas had roused a hornets’ nest of libel problems. Under British law it is not possible to libel the dead. The problem was, who was dead and who was not? Libel lawyer Edward Adeane (later to become Private Secretary to Prince Charles) drily noted: ‘Where characters are clearly dead (e.g. Si Hammon who was eaten by a lion and then shot) I have not noted passages defamatory to them. I must however confess that I was alarmed by the author’s casual reference to one 106-year-old Moroccan who was apparently in the best of health.’ In France the position was trickier still, for under French law it is possible to libel even the dead. As the text stood, all the descendants of the Glaoui would be entitled to bring libel actions, and so would a number of French officers of the old colonial régime, or surviving members of their families. Safer, Gavin’s publishers decided, not to tempt fate again – the book would not be sold in France or any other country where a similar libel law prevailed.

  Gavin’s attention was now distracted by the need to adjudicate a literary prize which bore his name. In 1960, when he was beginning to feel rather rich from the proceeds of Ring of Bright Water, he had founded an annual prize – the Gavin Maxwell Prize tor English – with the aim of encouraging aspiring young writers at his old school at Stowe. Gavin himself was both judge and donor, and every May he would visit the school to award the £10 cash prize – a large sum by schoolboy standards (worth £100 today) – for the best piece of descriptive writing about a personal experience. Gavin’s appearance at the school to award the prize was always a matter of some comment. ‘I had expected to meet a hearty bluff northerner in tweeds and a pipe,’ recalled Brian Stephan, the master who administered the prize. ‘Instead what appeared was a very sleek, very intense and rather neurotic fellow with a big Mercedes sports car and heavy black glasses who looked the exact opposite.’ One of Gavin’s visits coincided with that of the actor Sir Ralph Richardson, who had a son at Stowe and had agreed to read extracts from two or three of John Donne’s sermons in the chapel during the Sunday morning service. As distinguished guests Gavin and Sir Ralph were seated together in a pew adjacent to the pulpit, Gavin looking rather ominous and mafioso in his black glasses. Afterwards a small boy was asked whether he had enjoyed the service and Richardson’s readings. ‘Yes, I thought he was splendid,’ replied the boy. ‘But I thought his bodyguard was a creep.’

  Gavin not only marked the prize essays himself, but wrote full and detailed comments for the guidance of their young authors. Several of the winners of the prize – Charles (Jesse) Graham, for example, and Justin Wintle – were stimulated by Gavin’s encouragement and advice to become writers after leaving school. Graham won the prize twice – the second time for a fictitious account of an encounter with a vagrant American guitarist on a beach in Greece. ‘Fiction was against the rules,’ he recalled: ‘But I got away with it – or maybe I didn’t. Some months later Gavin came to give a talk to the school literary society and floored me by gaily announcing the most remarkable coincidence. He had been in Greece and met the selfsame folksinger! I didn’t know what to say. Except it reminded me of one of his other remarks that always stuck in my head: “All writers are liars. Writers of fiction are merely avowed liars.” He was very encouraging to all my dreams of writing, read my scraps, advised, suggested books to read – and gave me practical help when I wrote a novel (at school). He also advised me never to throw anything I’d written away. He wrote me a letter about this:

  Even if you re-read things you’ve written and think they are poor you will almost inevitably also find particular phrases or images or ideas that you can put to new uses. For example, on page 71 of Ring of Bright Water the whole passage about the wild swans – ‘All through the night I heard their restless murmur as they floated light as spume upon the peat-dark waves …’ – was taken from an unsatisfactory poem written five years earlier. I couldn’t get the poem into the right shape, and finally abandoned it, but turned back into prose it was exactly what I needed for the book and still had the mood in which it was originally written.

  ‘He listened, said what he thought, never patronised or talked down. I remember one day he gave me a spin down the school avenue in his convertible Mercedes. He took the Oxford bridge at ferocious speed. The car was literally airborne. He chuckled and said, “I’ve always wanted to do that.” He was a celebrated author who happened to be kind and encouraging to a sixteen-year-old aspirant writer. I never saw a dark side. I didn’t know him in his whole range. For what he gave me I’ll always be grateful.’ Graham later became a Hollywood scriptwriter, and Wintle a novelist and travel writer.

  No winner of the Gavin Maxwell Prize was more grateful to Gavin or enjoyed a more spectacular take-off to his career as a consequence of his encouragement than Richard Branson, who won the prize in 1966 (having been runner-up the previous year). Gavin came down to Stowe to present the award with Gavin Young, who was on leave from reporting the Vietnam War for the Observer. Over lunch Richard announced that he was about to launch a new magazine called Student, aimed at a mass r
eadership in schools and universities. The project had snowballed somewhat – the first issue was to be a hundred pages long – and had become almost a full-time job. The dilemma which he put to Gavin was this – should he complete his education at Stowe, where he had a year or two still to go, or should he abandon his education altogether and concentrate on Student and the entrepreneurial career which he believed to be his destiny? He could not have asked a more untypical adult for guidance at such a critical crossroads in his life. Gavin was entirely for giving the young their head and encouraging them to achieve their creative aspirations. As a result of his own experiences at school, and the theories of progressive educationists like Bob Mackenzie and Hamish Brown at Braehead, he had become a convinced opponent of the conventional, formal, authoritarian and exam-orientated education system prevalent in Britain at that time. His response to Richard’s dilemma was unequivocal – if his magazine was really the most important thing in the world to him, if running his own business was where his ambitions lay, then he should leave Stowe at once and get on with it.

  Later that afternoon the two Gavins drove Richard back to his parental home in Shamley Green, Surrey, and on the way they stopped off at my own home in the nearby village of Compton. The discussion continued, and by the time we sat down to supper Richard announced his decision. He would leave Stowe and bring out his magazine. All three of us – Gavin, Gavin Young and myself – would contribute articles to it, and Gavin would provide useful introductions. At the foot of the little wooded hill on which my house stood lived another of Gavin’s old friends – the author and artist Wilfrid Blunt, whose brother Anthony was Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures (and was later exposed as a KGB spy) – who could perhaps contribute a further article.* The sixteen-year-old Richard Branson left to pursue his destiny. Today he runs his own airline, Virgin Atlantic, and with the recent sale of his Virgin Record group – the world’s largest independent record company – has become the ninth richest person in Britain (and, incidentally, he keeps otters).

  Gavin stayed on at my house after Richard’s departure, for we had other business to discuss. He had contracted to write a popular zoological reference work called Seals of the World, for publication in 1967, and I had agreed to rewrite and edit the text he had subcontracted from two able but unliterary young zoologists at the Zoological Society of London. He was also anxious to discuss the details of an expedition we were proposing to make to Mongolia to search for the rare Przewalski’s horse, the wild ancestor of the domesticated horse, and to look through my photographic library for pictures with which to illustrate his current project, his ‘standpoint work of philosophy/psychology’, to which he had given the title The Heritage of Fear.

  The thesis of The Heritage of Fear concerned the roots of human and animal behaviour. ‘The most obviously disastrous aspect of man’s nature is his enormous aggression,’ Gavin argued in the outline he gave me to read, ‘and observation of other animal species led me to begin with the hypothesis that there could be no aggression between members of the same species without this being due to fear in the widest sense.’

  There were, he went on, two basic sorts of fear: ‘primal’ fear (fear of death, fear of pain, fear of loss), which was shared by man and the lower animals alike, and ‘secondary’ fear, which was peculiar to man alone. ‘Secondary’ fear could be dated back to the earliest written records of the human race. The commonest noun in the Old Testament, for example, was ‘fear’ (or words derived from it), with ‘smiting’ and ‘slaying’ a close second. ‘The Old Testament,’ he concluded from this somewhat tenuous analysis, ‘is a massive example of the link between fear and aggression.’ The New Testament was in striking contrast, however, for the teachings of Christ enjoined mankind not to fear. ‘It is a terrible tragedy,’ commented Gavin, ‘that the Christian Church should, by its vast structure of sanctions, have increased a thousandfold the human heritage of fear its founder sought to dispel … In the last analysis, we still act most of the time through motives of fear.’

  ‘Exploring a new idea,’ Gavin continued, ‘is like beginning a huge jigsaw puzzle … When a large chunk suddenly fits together as though by magic one experiences a wonderful moment of discovery.’ That ‘wonderful moment’ had occurred at Sandaig one day when he happened to observe his deerhound, Dirk, defecating in a leisurely way on a favoured patch of grass; while the dog was thus occupied a sheep walked by doing the same thing – but never once stopped walking or browsing. ‘It was then that a key portion of the jigsaw suddenly slid together in my mind. The dog and the sheep, though both domestic animals, represented two great mammalian divisions – the beast of prey and the preyed upon. Or, to put it a different way, the feared and the fearful. The fearful, who might be killed and eaten at the first moment they were off guard, simply could not afford to take time off. The feared, like the dog, had no enemy but man, whose arrival on the scene has been so recent that it has not yet produced evolutionary changes in the habits of the predators … I felt I was on the edge of a great discovery. It all fitted in.’

  Gavin now turned his attention to the sexual behaviour of various species. This, too, appeared to prove his thesis. The sheep took only five to ten seconds to mate, the dog anything between twenty minutes and two hours. The preyed-upon rabbit mated in three to eight seconds, the predatory ferret averaged an hour. Buffaloes, zebras, wild asses and elephants – they all proved the point. ‘Therefore it was with great solemnity – almost awe – that I approached the data on the primates and mankind himself,’ Gavin wrote. ‘I was unprepared for the inherited “fearingness” of the primate body: chimpanzee, ten seconds average; contemporary primitive man, five to twelve seconds; modern civilised man, according to Kinsey, 120 seconds median. Our bodies – in this and many other ways – still hold our heritage of fear, and the more fearful the individual the more obvious it becomes.’

  Sadly, Gavin’s ‘great discovery’ did not find much favour. A lucrative £2000 contract for a series of articles for the Daily Mail was cancelled when he delivered The Heritage of Fear instead of the cuddly stories about his animal pets the newspaper really wanted. And when he submitted a revamped version of the same material (entitled ‘The Sexual Life of the Herbivores’) to the pre-eminent scientific journal Nature, it was rejected. The reasons are not hard to find. Gavin was a capable field naturalist but not a qualified or rigorously systematic scientific zoologist. His thesis, interesting as far as it went, was largely under-researched and unsubstantiated, and it ignored inconvenient animals that were both predatory and preyed upon, feared and fearful. And though there is no evidence that Gavin had ever read it, Aldous Huxley had aired similar theories on intra-specific aggression in a much more exhaustive fashion in his pre-war book, Ends and Means. Much as Gavin would have loved to have achieved distinction as a conceptual thinker, his true métier was that of a brilliant descriptive writer, and it was to this that he was now to return.

  Later in the summer he gave his theory another airing when he addressed the Stowe literary society, the Twelve Club, and astonished the headmaster by asking whether he might be permitted to take up residence in one of the many decorative eighteenth-century temples that were dotted about the school’s magnificent gardens. His preference, he said, was for the Temple of Venus, a Palladian structure overlooking the lake in the south-west bastion of the ha-ha, containing behind its Ionic portico a single bare, dark, horse-fly infested room. Gavin’s curious request was turned down on the grounds that it would establish an unwelcome precedent.

  When, later in the year, he travelled to Dublin to lecture to the Royal Dublin Society on ‘The Ring of Bright Water’, he met the distinguished Irish writer and poet Monk Gibbon backstage after the lecture. Gibbon was almost seventy, and a great admirer of Gavin’s book and his way of life, and afterwards he sent him a copy of his masterpiece, The Seals. Gavin’s letter of thanks was so effusive in its praise of the book – ‘a work of art’, he called it, ‘a work of genius’ – that Monk Gibbon kept it
among his most treasured possessions for the rest of his life, and used it to persuade his publishers to have the book reprinted.

  With nowhere particular to go, Gavin sought refuge in Margaret Pope’s apartment in Lausanne, Switzerland, for a few weeks in the summer – air-ferrying his Mercedes over at her expense – ostensibly to enlist her detailed and expert knowledge of Moroccan personalities to help solve some of the many potential libel problems that laced the text of Lords of the Atlas. There, in a single period of forty-eight hours, Gavin received news of the cruel deaths of two of his most treasured animals – his Pyrenean mountain dog at Sandaig and his wonderful white stallion in Marrakesh – both in sickening circumstances and both as the direct result of acts of neglect by young employees in whom Gavin had placed his trust.

  Gus, the huge Pyrenean dog that had earlier been castrated because of his savage nature, had died after one of the new employees at Sandaig had left him out all night, tied by a chain to a running line; it was a wild night, and in looking for shelter the dog tried to cross a stone dyke at one end of the running wire, but was caught up by his chain and died of strangulation as he hung there.

  Titish, the white stallion, had died because he had been treated with stupid neglect by Gavin’s Berber friend Ahmed, who had simply pocketed the money Gavin had given him to pay for the horse’s feed and upkeep. Hobbled in a filthy, stinking stable with donkeys and cows, without water, oats or proper forage, Titish was in a terrible condition and already ill with tetanus when an officer of the Society for the Protection of Animals in North Africa went to inspect him in Marrakesh at Gavin’s request towards the end of June. The horse was finally killed off when Ahmed rode him several miles at full gallop in the blazing mid-morning sun, all but destroying the poor creature there and then and accelerating the course of the tetanus from which he died three days later.