Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  After lunch they got down to business. Jack Couffer produced the script of the film and laid it on the table for Gavin to read. Gavin read the first few pages eagerly, then more haltingly, as if in disbelief at what he saw. When he spoke it was, as Richard reported, ‘in a voice of deep hurt’.

  ‘But you can’t mean it,’ he said, ‘– this is just not possible. You have depicted me as a middle-class businessman, as a, as a …’

  His voice trailed away. He was trembling with anger and disappointment. He pushed the script across to Richard. Richard opened it and his eye alighted instantly on a line of dialogue in which Gavin was addressing his greylag geese.

  ‘Scram, you guys!’

  Gavin meanwhile had helped himself to a large whisky, and thus fortified returned to the fray. The script, he informed Jack Couffer, was a sham, a prostitution, a crime. It would have to be entirely rewritten. If it were not he would not allow his name to be associated with it and would sue anybody who made use of his book.

  ‘Then I guess,’ drawled the unruffled Hollywood director, ‘we don’t have a deal.’

  Richard seized the first opportunity to halt the meeting. While Jack Couffer prowled round the house, Richard took Gavin on one side and bullied him into a compromise. ‘Gavin Maxwell’ the businessman was to be replaced by ‘Graham Merril’, a rebellious clerk who had formerly resided among the Marsh Arabs of Iraq. This and a few other minor changes to the script were agreed, and they had a deal. The money would come. The film would be made. Shooting would start early next year and Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna, whose film version of Born Free had been a wild box-office success, would be the stars. While Jack Couffer strode up the hill on the first leg of his return to sunny Hollywood, Gavin stayed behind in the Hebridean twilight and from behind his bottle of Johnny Walker contemplated his impending immortality on the silver screen.

  In every way, it seemed, Gavin’s fortunes were on the mend, and the years of retreat and disaster behind him. Even at Sandaig there was the promise of a return to the peace and stability of an era gone by. Earlier in the year, while still abroad, Gavin had taken on a temporary assistant whom he had neither met nor spoken to in order to help close down Sandaig and move the otters to their new home. The new employee was Andrew Scot, a Kentish youth of seventeen who had just left school. He was a devoted fan of Ring of Bright Water, and over the preceding five years had written many letters to Gavin in which he had expressed his passion for the Scottish wilds (this had led him to change his surname to Scot) and his yearning for the Camusfeàrna kind of life.

  The employment of such a sturdy and resourceful young man at this time could not have been more fortunate. Far from being downcast by Sandaig’s present shambles, Andrew positively relished the challenge. ‘It’s been such a chain of good fortune,’ he told me later, ‘more than you could believe would happen to someone. I mean reading the first book and taking part in the second, the true sequel to Ring.’ The isolation, the primitiveness, the wind and the rain, the hard slog over the hills for mail and supplies, the foraging for firewood along the desolate beaches in all weathers – all this Andrew took in his stride. From the outset Gavin and Richard Frere warmly approved of his enthusiasm, his capacity for unsupervised hard work, his love of animals and his keen appreciation of the beauty of his wild surroundings; and though Richard detected in the young man’s nature a touch of shadow and introspection which he feared might react uneasily with Gavin’s own complex psyche, he welcomed his arrival as the potential saviour of Sandaig in its final phase.

  It was Andrew’s encouragement, probably, that spurred Gavin to make the momentous decision to give Edal and Teko a taste of liberty after their years of captivity. Teko was the first to see the half-remembered world beyond the blank confining wall of his wooden palisade. One sunny morning in early September Gavin opened the gate to his paddock and called his name, and with a welcoming chirrup Teko emerged from the dark behind his half-closed door, and a little uncertainly, as if bewildered and lost, walked out into the unconfined world he had not seen for more than four years. When he caught scent of Gavin Teko began to talk as he had in the days when he was free to roam the house – the little joyful, affectionate cries that had not been heard for so long.

  Teko greeted Gavin with emotional affection. What, Gavin wondered, had he done to deserve such loyal trust? ‘I had confined him for four years,’ he wrote; ‘I had deprived him of the human society to which as a baby he had been conditioned by no will of his own; I had even at one point determined to send him to a zoo. I had betrayed him.’

  Teko was a sick animal. The right-hand side of his face was swollen and his right eye was completely closed. He had an infected tooth and was clearly in pain. On that first short walk in the outside world he had no wish to swim or wander; he would not stray from Gavin’s feet and every few yards he would stop for fresh reassurance. Once he was back in his little house his only concern was that Gavin would not leave him alone again. ‘What torture the human species inflict upon their “pets”,’ Gavin reflected.

  After a five-day course of antibiotics Teko was restored to health, and on his next venture outside he proved a very different animal. This time he made a dash for his old haunts, and plunged into the burn with all the zest and joie de vivre of years gone by, chasing fish and porpoising through the calm reaches of the stream. He emerged at frequent intervals to rush up to Gavin, stand and reach up to him and utter his excited squeaks of joy. Every day from then on Gavin took Teko out to the waterfall and the island beaches. Some of the spirit and colour of Camusfeàrna was at last restored.

  Giving Edal her freedom was a more difficult proposition. She had been the more explosively violent of the two otters, and ever since her attack on Jimmy Watt in early 1962, five and a half years before, no human being had touched her and she had never left her enclosure. Yet Gavin was determined to give it a try, and a plan of campaign was devised. A new gate was inserted into Edal’s fence, so that she could go straight out on to the dunes above the sea. Medical supplies – dressings, a surgical needle and thread, cocaine solution and a hypodermic syringe – were on hand in case something went wrong and someone was injured. At last, on 11 September, everything was ready. Andrew was posted to a spot on the hillside from which he could watch all that ensued and warn any casual visitor that a potentially lethal animal was loose in the vicinity; he was to follow Gavin’s progress through binoculars, and if Edal attacked he was to run down to the house and telephone the doctor in Glenelg at once. Carrying a pot of pepper for self-defence, Gavin opened the gate to the dunes and uttered the call that used to sound and re-sound so often about the house in those distant days when Edal was a young and gentle and free-roaming member of the Sandaig family.

  ‘Whee-ee! Ee-eedal! Whee-ee!’

  There was a pattering of paws in the tunnel that led from Edal’s sleeping quarters – and there she was, standing beside Gavin, poised at the exit to the sand and the sea and the great rustling, splashing, scenting, breezing broad void of the forbidden world beyond the palisades.

  Edal was interested in none of it. She stood at the door of her prison – then proceeded to investigate with studious intensity the lock mechanism of the prison gate! Gavin had half-expected she might make a mad rush for the sea; half-hoped she might have greeted her long-lost human foster-father with rapturous joy; he had forgotten the keenly intelligent curiosity with which she had once explored the world – and that that world had changed for her. All around her were man-made objects – most of them damaged – which she had never before seen. Only a few yards from the gate stood a broken-down Jeep, and for minutes on end she examined its axles and half-shaft, its switches, pedals and steering wheel. So she proceeded, from the Jeep to the upturned, staved-in dinghy, then on to the work-shed that housed the deerhounds and thence to the looming shape of the Polar Star on its wheeled cradle. Only then did she turn, with Gavin, in the direction of the great expanse of the open sea, crossing the exposed sands of
the ebb tide to chase dabs in the shallows. ‘She was plainly happy,’ Gavin recalled, ‘and I no longer felt afraid of her; nor, I think, did she in any way mistrust me.’

  A few days later it was Andrew Scot who took Teko out over the dunes and down to the beach and the mouth of the burn, watched intently by Gavin through a port-hole in an upstairs room of the house. Only four days later, at the end of their third walk, the unbelievable happened. Gavin was sitting at his desk when he looked up and spotted Andrew and Teko coming down the Jeep track. A few moments later he was distracted by the sound of otter laughter. He looked out of the window and saw Andrew and Teko romping on the grass. Teko was free and restored to the world and humankind at last.

  A few weeks later Gavin’s old relationship with Edal was restored in full. It was a rare and magical autumn day in late September – not a breath of wind, the sea still, the tide far out. Gavin took Edal out to the white shell and coral sands of the island beaches and the marine garden of the shallow bay beyond the island bar. Suddenly it was as though time had never passed, as though both man and otter had set foot in this enchanted world for the first time in their lives, and stood there in wonder and exhilaration at the very beginning of their long adventure together. Released into that brilliant sunlit bubble of seemingly limitless space, Edal gave full rein to her elation and dashed about all over the white sand and porpoised wildly at high speed through the shallow translucent water. For Gavin too it was like a return to an earlier era, and he looked about him not with the jaded, unseeing eyes of the careworn adult he had become but with the bright, unclouded vision of the absorbed child, the enraptured poet-painter he had once been.

  So absorbed was Gavin in his rediscovery of Camusfeàrna’s half-remembered natural paradise that he momentarily forgot about his gambolling otter. Then he felt a sudden nudge on the back of his leg and turned to see Edal corkscrewing in ecstasy through the water. Remembering a game they used to play, he took her by the tail, and began to swing her round by it faster and faster till she let herself go limp, her face wearing a long-forgotten look of fulfilment. When Gavin let her go she went shooting away in the clear water, and as he watched her he wondered which had restored most to the other. ‘To me the sky and sea looked brighter, more real,’ he wrote, ‘the shallow sea’s floor more brilliant than before, for an enduring mist of guilt had been lifted from them all. I was content now to let the future resolve itself, for I knew that I could no longer break the trust of animal friendship … High above me, wheeling in taut arcs, two buzzards mewed like kittens, and a single wild goose flew northwards over the Sound – a Pinkfoot, calling continuously, lost, as I had been for so long.’

  They began to retrace their steps back towards the house. At a halfway point Edal stopped and sat on a knoll to dry and polish herself on the heather and toboggan down the grassy slope, arms and monkey fingers waving. Her fur, Gavin noted, now had a sheen he had not seen for years, and her eyes were no longer dulled by the sensory deprivation of confinement but bright with new-found life and vigour. He pulled her towards him as he used to when she was a cub, and blew in her fur and rolled her over and tickled her toes and whiskers, and she responded as Teko had done, with little snuffles of affection.

  ‘When we started home Edal and Teko had between them given back to me the land in which I lived, the vision that I had lost … In moments of peace such as I experienced that day with Edal there exists some unritual reunion with the rest of creation without which the lives of many are trivial … The way back cannot be the same for all of us, but for those like myself it means a descent of the rungs until we stand again amid the other creatures of the earth and share to some small extent their vision of it.’

  Gavin had planned to close Sandaig down by the autumn, but autumn came and went, and Christmas fast approached. Though Richard Frere happily sawed and hammered away at the two otter houses he was constructing for the Woburn ottery, there was no longer the same urgency to move the otters there, for the financial pressure which was the underlying motive for the move was now largely a thing of the past. Besides, for the first time for many years peace and contentment now reigned at Sandaig, and with the liberation of the otters life had returned to the routine of the early days. Teko came into the living room each day to romp with his human companions, and Edal was a friend who was feared no more. Gavin still seemed disposed to go through with the move, which had gathered a momentum of its own, but the outcome was not entirely in his hands, and he now felt that it would be no disaster if it did not take place after all.

  At Woburn, meanwhile, there were many setbacks and delays in preparing the Chinese Dairy Lake for the otters and their elaborate otter houses, and in the middle of December, exactly a year after the breakdown of negotiations with Aberdeen Zoo, the authorities at Woburn telephoned Gavin to announce that they could not approve the programme.

  On 8 January 1968 Gavin and Richard travelled south to view alternative sites at Woburn. But none looked suitable, and Gavin shook his head decisively and strode off through the snow. ‘Compromise never suited him,’ Richard noted. ‘He preferred to scrap an idea rather than modify it.’

  They returned to the north. Perhaps, Gavin suggested, they might find a suitable site in Scotland. They came to the conclusion that the best place for a new ottery was Richard Frere’s own back garden, where rough woodland gave on to a small stream. Gavin was never happier than when hatching a new idea; he had a passion for making plans, for any creative act that did not entail sitting alone writing a book. ‘In his mind’s eye,’ Richard recorded, ‘the Drumnadrochit Wildlife Park was taking shape hourly.’

  But Gavin’s euphoria did not last long. On the evening of 19 January his mood darkened and he began drinking heavily. By the early hours he was well soused, comical and tiresome by turns, and causing growing concern to his two guests – Jimmy Watt, on a short visit, and Magda Stirling, Gavin’s attractive twenty-two-year-old cousin, who was spending a few days’ holiday at Sandaig. At three in the morning Gavin was falling about and dropping lighted cigarettes all over the house, and his guests were not sure whether to go to bed and leave him to his own devices, a danger to himself and perhaps to the whole establishment, or to stay up with him and deny themselves sleep. Eventually Jimmy staggered off upstairs, and Magda, left alone with her deeply inebriated uncle, decided that there was nothing to do but put him to bed. On an impulse she tucked up in bed with him, not out of any sexual motivation, but out of the compassion of one who understood what he was going through and loved him dearly. At about five, with Gavin calm and dormant, she finally fell asleep herself, having helped him through his despair to another day.

  The next morning, Saturday 20 January, Richard Frere drove over to Sandaig on a working visit. The house was quiet when he arrived. Andrew Scot was deep in a game of chess with Magda. Of Gavin there was no sign – he was still in bed, Richard was told, sleeping off the night before.

  The day passed slowly and uneventfully. Gavin emerged from his study-bedroom eventually, looking distinctly the worse for wear, and began to prepare one of his Maxwell’s bean feasts for his guests’ lunch. Apart from Magda, everyone seemed subdued. Soon the midwinter light began to fade, the lamps were switched on and the curtains pulled. At three the departing guests began to pack, for Jimmy had a train to catch from Inverness and Magda was on her way to see her fiancé in New York. The goodbyes were protracted; Gavin chose this moment to take Richard on one side for a private conversation lasting half an hour or more, and by the time they were finished it was getting late and they had to rush. At the door Richard looked back. Gavin and Andrew were sitting at the chess board on the fish-box sofa beneath the shelves of groceries on the far side of the room. The remains of a bean feast congealed on a plate on the dinner table. In the open hearth, beneath the mantelpiece with its Latin inscription ‘Non fatuum huc persecutus ignem’ (It is no will-o’-the-wisp that I have followed here), lay a pair of punctured bellows and a huge piece of driftwood smouldering fiercel
y.

  Richard closed the door, never to open it again.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Fire and ice

  Some say the world will end in fire

  And some in ice

  From what I’ve tasted of desire

  I hold with those who favour fire

  But if I had to perish twice

  I think I know enough of hate

  To say that ice is also great

  And would suffice.

  ROBERT FROST, ‘Fire and Ice’

  In the small hours of 21 January 1968 Gavin was slowly woken from a deep sleep by a painful choking sensation. For a moment he lay there fearing his lung problem had returned, but when he opened his eyes they smarted dreadfully and he realised the room was full of a strong reek of smoke. He reached out to switch on his bedside lamp, but though there was a click there was no light. Fully awake now, and thoroughly alarmed, he leapt out of bed and began to stamp on the floor and beat on the wooden walls of his room with his fist. Andrew slept in the room above, and Gavin knew the first thing he must do was to wake him.

  ‘Andrew! Andrew!’ he yelled. ‘This house is on fire!’

  There was no response that he could hear. Adrenalin racing, unshod and very nearly unclothed, Gavin groped his way out of the room and began to climb the stairs. Halfway up he collided with Andrew tumbling down, half-blinded by smoke and gasping desperately for breath. Gavin pushed him through the front door out into the open air, then grabbed the fire extinguisher from the lobby wall and burst into the living room, from which he could hear a low, deep, unnerving crackle. A few feet inside he was met by a wall of heat and acrid smoke. Round the fireplace the varnish of the pitch-pine panelling was bubbling furiously, and just below the ceiling flames were advancing on the open beams and planking of the floor above. Gavin directed the fire extinguisher at the hottest part of the room, but the flames subsided only momentarily, then roared back. Unable to hold his breath any longer, he rushed out of the room.