Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Once Gavin attained a state of mind in which he was able to make a decision, the decision made itself. Isle Ornsay had been sold the previous year, and London was out of the question. Gavin had hoped that because Camusfeàrna was famous worldwide it might be rebuilt and devoted to some purpose that conformed to the public’s image of it. ‘I felt it ought to be a place of pilgrimage,’ he wrote, ‘not for my sake but for what it had come to represent in people’s minds. And when they arrived there they should have facilities for seeing nature, or (shall we say) for being in the same frame of mind in which I wrote Ring of Bright Water. But no – it was going to be left a ruin, unbuilt, unrestored …’

  Gavin’s landlord, Lord Dulverton, had no wish to see any phoenix rise from the ashes. ‘The fact is,’ he explained later, not unreasonably, ‘that he really did give me a lot of trouble after I had taken pity on him and gave him a base at Sandaig, whose privacy and charm is now entirely a thing of the past.’

  There was only one place left to go – Eilean Ban, the White Island, in the narrows of Skye. To any ordinary mortal it might have seemed the height of folly to envisage permanent residence on a tiny, trackless, rock-bound desert island such as Kyleakin, with no utilities on it and no boat service to it. But Gavin was no ordinary mortal.

  ‘I felt drawn to Kyleakin,’ he had written in his latest and as yet unpublished book, ‘as I had to few other places in my life … At first I thought it might be due to nothing more complex than the fact that Camusfeàrna, with all its echoes of past unhappiness and loss, was out of sight. But I think now that it was a far call back to childhood, for the long, rough heather, the briars and the outcrops of bare rock might have been those surrounding the House of Elrig, where I was born, the house that obsessed my childhood.’ It was here, he decided, that he would live if ever he left Camusfeàrna. He loved its situation and he enthused about its potential for development as an eider colony and zoo park, ideas which he now began to pursue with renewed vigour. On the White Island, perhaps, lay his last, his true Avalon.

  But the decision could not be implemented straight away. Kyleakin Island had to be made ready for its new occupants. The house had not been lived in for three years, the generator had not been turned over for two. Slates had been blown off the roof and the damp was coming back through the interior walls. More importantly, quarters had to be made ready for Teko, together with an escape-proof paddock or garden; and a radio-telephone had to be installed to provide communication with the outside world. For several weeks in the early spring Richard Frere was busy making the necessary improvements to the Kyleakin establishment.

  By May the work was finished, but there was still no telephone. June came and went and still there was no telephone, but Gavin decided he could put off his departure no longer. 16 July was fixed as the date on which he would turn his back on Camusfeàrna for the last time and move his ménage to his new home on the White Island.

  Andrew Scot, Teko and Owl, and a few possessions, set off from Sandaig to Kyleakin by fishing boat. Gavin proceeded separately, travelling by road to Kyle of Lochalsh, where he met up with Richard Frere. Together they crossed over to the island in Gavin’s small boat, the Assunta, a former ship’s lifeboat. It was not an easy day for any of them, but especially for Teko. ‘You can imagine,’ Gavin told me not long afterwards, ‘trying to move a wild animal from the place that has been its home for nine years. We had the most appalling first week. Teko seemed determined to try and return to Sandaig, and escaped day after day.’

  On 18 July Teko made his first and most successful escape bid. His absence was not noticed until the evening, when Andrew Scot took him his evening meal and found he had gone. A search of the tiny island revealed no sign of the errant otter, and it was not until Gavin began to scan the sea with his binoculars and spotted a dinghy making straight for the island that the mystery was solved. ‘Have a look at that!’ he said to Richard. Richard took the glasses from him and saw an astonishing sight.

  ‘A man was rowing the dinghy,’ he recounted subsequently; ‘in the stern were four delighted children; between them, rolling about in ecstatic joy, was an object which was undeniably the missing otter.’ The party landed and the man told all he knew; Gavin and Richard filled in the gaps. Teko had been found in the man’s house in Kyleakin village on the Isle of Skye. To get there, the otter had broken out of his escape-proof garden on Kyleakin Island, made his way across the island to the water’s edge, swum across the strongly flowing steamer channel, landed on Skye, headed into Kyleakin, crossed a busy main road, found a way into the house, discovered the bathroom and clambered into the empty bath. There he had been discovered by a young child, and the two had become instant friends. Realising that the otter must be the property of his famous new neighbour on the island across the water, the child’s father had promptly set out to return the creature to his owner. By this time Teko had greatly taken to his young friends, ‘It took quite a lot of persuasion to convince him that his home was on the island,’ Richard commented, ‘and not in the village opposite.’

  Though Teko escaped several more times, never again did he swim out to sea. On 20 July he broke out of his quarters a second time and was found in the lobby of the house. Three days later he got into the sitting room and staked out his territory by urinating in a wide circle over the expensive carpet. Richard Frere, who after all these years had never before come into direct contact with this famous but unpredictable animal, took the precaution of standing on the back of the settee out of harm’s way. The next day Teko escaped again, returning of his own accord at tea time. Confined to the spare bedroom, he quickly turned the place upside down and inside out. ‘Utter devastation,’ Gavin noted succinctly in his diary. Removed to the annexe, an outbuilding that had been converted into a self-contained bed-sitting room, he reduced this too to chaos. Finally Teko gave up his vain search for his lost territorial home and settled down to a new life on the island.

  For Gavin it really did seem a new beginning. The anguished memories of Sandaig and its long sequence of disasters were now behind him. His period of penury, too, seemed at an end. Money from the film rights to Ring of Bright Water and from advances and serial rights for his new book, Raven Seek Thy Brother, had at last enabled him to pay off his old debts. Between June and October 1968 just under £13,000 was paid into Gavin’s account – a tremendous sum by the standards of the literary profession, and the equivalent of some £150,000 at the present time of writing. During the same period, however, over £12,000 was paid out in settlement of outstanding accounts, the bulk of it to Gavin’s bankers. This did not leave much to tide Gavin over the winter, but for the moment he was out of the red, and enjoying an illusory sense of prosperity. ‘I shall be very surprised,’ he assured me a week or two after he had lashed out on a new de luxe 220 SE Mercedes saloon to supplement his sporty but unreliable 300 SL, ‘if I ever get into debt again.’

  Gradually he began to settle back into a working mode. It was not easy, for he still had no phone and no secretarial help. Occasionally urgent business from the outside world commanded his attention. Most pressing was the question of libel in Raven Seek Thy Brother, which (like most of Gavin’s previous books) bristled like a porcupine with defamations and libels of all sorts, arising from his brushes with the medical, legal, academic and zoological professions and with various personal acquaintances during the course of his life and adventures over the last five years.

  Closer to Gavin’s heart was the future of British otters, a question which had preoccupied him for some years – more so since the death of Edal. Not long after the Sandaig fire Gavin had, at the suggestion of Peter Scott, opened a popular appeal, called the Edal Fund, under the umbrella of the World Wildlife Fund, of which Peter Scott was then Chairman. Both Gavin and the WWF believed that the tragic death of the world’s most famous otter should be turned to the advantage of the animal kingdom, in particular the otter. At that time the otter was not on the official list of protected animals, and was still
hunted. Many experts believed the otter was facing a severe population decline, though hard facts were scarce. A national campaign for donations to the fund was launched, and the Mammal Society was asked to undertake a survey to determine the status of the British otter and the extent of its decline. But it soon became clear that Gavin and Peter Scott and the WWF did not see eye to eye as to how the money should be spent. Gavin wanted instant action to save as many British otters as possible as quickly as possible, and an immediate end put to the most obvious horrors, such as hunting with otter hounds and trapping for skins; he chafed at the delay that an otter survey would entail. Peter Scott saw things from a broader, more international perspective. From Paris he sent a telegram to Gavin, who was still without a phone, stating his point of view: ‘Edal Fund should help all otters not merely British stop principal effort needed against river pollution and fun-fur trade but opposition to hunting and vermin control must also figure stop Mammal Society as objective scientific assessment essential to carry balance of public opinion.’

  Gavin began to grow restless. He felt Peter Scott was too busy to give his proper attention to the Edal Fund, and began to feel left out of things, even slighted. By the middle of October he was waxing wrathful. Since his move to the island he had become markedly more quarrelsome, and the targets of his aggravation were increasingly his oldest and closest friends. Now it was Peter Scott’s turn. Marooned, incommunicado and increasingly paranoid on his lonely Scottish rock, Gavin felt impelled to pick a fight with the friend he admired and envied perhaps above all others. For Peter Scott was just about everything Gavin had ever wanted to be himself – a war hero, a leading naturalist and ecologist, an enormously successful wildlife painter, the founder and director of one of the world’s premier wildfowl sanctuaries and one of the world’s leading conservation organisations, a pioneer of natural history programmes for television, and a national gliding champion, an Olympic and America’s Cup yachtsman, the son of one of Britain’s greatest popular heroes, and an eminent international figure in his own right – the list was endless. Feeling ignored and powerless, Gavin got the biggest target he knew in his sights.

  First came a long, emotional phone call in which Gavin reproached Scott in a rather hysterical manner – though for what was not entirely clear. Then came a series of petulant postcards. Gavin accused Scott of being too big for his boots, of megalomania and empire-building at the expense of old friendships and small but urgent causes. He was dissatisfied with the way the WWF was handling the Edal Fund, he said, and threatened that if there was no improvement he would pull out and make a public statement giving his reasons. Scott replied on 18 October:

  My dear Gavin,

  I am much saddened by your cards. We have been friends for rather a long time even if we had our ups and downs, and it seems a pity that we have to have ‘showdowns’ (or ‘showups’?).

  I am ‘busy’ and have been for weeks trying to make a statement about WWF and otters. We have a situation which I don’t believe is so terribly complicated and difficult.

  In the statement which went out about the Edal Fund we said: ‘This scheme would naturally have as its first target the otter species in most danger of extinction, but if there is sufficient response it would be desirable to give all possible assistance to any populations of otters which have suffered depletion or are under pressure.’ This would mean help for British otters.

  Lord knows I personally detest otter hunting, but I reckon we must see whether that is really the best place to spend Edal Fund money. Restocking ex-polluted rivers in the English Midlands with an undertaking not to hunt them for five years might be much more useful. Otter hunting will be dead in five years anyway. Actually the Manu National Park for the Giant Otter in Peru is probably far more important than anything in Britain.

  I’m desperately painting to earn some money for the Scott family which is pretty broke. The Bewicks [swans] will be arriving in a couple of weeks. Couldn’t you come and see them one day? And don’t let’s quarrel because of lack of communications between us. P. Scott is always available to talk to G. Maxwell – not for finding out what would be the clever thing to do but what would be the right thing to do – and for just talking to his old friend.

  Yours

  Pete

  Gavin replied somewhat huffily from Kyleakin a week later:

  The only contact I can make with you personally is after a row, and the complete silence between rows is bound to make for misunderstanding. On such occasions you invariably remind me of our long friendship; I’m sure you will understand that there are occasions on which I feel somewhat aggrieved that there is so little evidence of this friendship on your side. Of all my long-time friends you were literally the only one who, after the fire had left me without any clothing but one pair of blue jeans (no top half, shoes or socks) sent me not so much as a jersey or a message of sympathy.* Of course I feel this to be sad, as anyone would, but it isn’t an irritant, as the handling of the Edal Fund has been …

  To turn to more pleasant subjects, there is nothing I’d like more than to come and see the Bewicks. I wonder whether after the New Year would be any use? Life here has its teething troubles, and is very much of a full-time business – a sort of House that Jack built – what with fuelling the boat that carries the diesel to drive the pumps that pump the diesel to fuel the generator that pumps the water … to say nothing of the days when we are cut off from the shore by heavy seas. But it’s a marvellous place, as I hope you’ll come and see for yourself, and as at Slimbridge there is always something to watch from the windows … Do try and pay a visit here when you can.

  Sadly, the old friends never met again. Nor did the Edal Fund (later renamed the Gavin Maxwell Otter Fund) ever fulfil its early promise. Most of the money, never substantial, was siphoned off into research, little of which did much to save endangered otters, and it was left to others – notably Philip Wayre of the Otter Trust in Suffolk – to carry out the sort of action Gavin would have liked. It was not through the Edal Fund that Gavin made the greatest impact on public opinion about otters, but through Ring of Bright Water, which marked the beginning of a groundswell of worldwide support for otter conservation that has continued to the present day. Gavin’s contribution to saving the otter was immeasurable, and was probably the greatest achievement of his life. Today the otter is a protected species, and is making a comeback in many parts of Britain.

  The house on the White Island pleased Gavin greatly. ‘This is a glorious place,’ he wrote to Peter Janson-Smith not long after he had taken up residence in it, ‘and you must come and pay me a visit. Next year, when I have some animals on the island and the eider colony is in full swing, I am going to open the house and island to the public – but the interior of the house is so beautiful that one could almost open it now.’

  Gavin was proud of his new home, and all through the later summer and autumn he held open house for a steady stream of friends and relatives. The converted lighthouse keeper’s cottage on Kyleakin was not only grander than Sandaig but much easier to entertain people in, offering a great deal more comfort and space and a more obviously spectacular setting. Gavin’s hospitality was no less spectacular. He boasted a drinks tray which was laden with every kind of spirit and liqueur, and his dining table groaned under many a lavish and lordly spread. Colonel Colin Mackenzie, CMG, who had run SOE Far East during the war, was now Gavin’s nearest neighbour, and a good friend. He and his wife Clodagh lived in Kyle House, on a rocky promontory of Skye only three hundred yards across the water. He vividly recalled the hospitality on the White Island: ‘When he invited us for lunch he sent a boat over to collect us. His drinks table supported anything up to twelve bottles of different whiskies. Conversation flowed easily – and was necessary, as cooking seldom seemed to start till after 2 p.m. Food was abundant and rich. I remember one lunch which started with lobster and continued with a whole grouse each.’

  * Two days later, Gavin made the same accusation against me. In vai
n I pleaded that I had been in the Far East at the time of the fire and helpless to assist – I was condemned for betraying his friendship and trust.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Opting out

  This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods,

  I better brook than flourishing peopled towns.

  Here can I sit alone, unseen of any,

  And to the nightingale’s complaining notes

  Tune my distresses and record my woes.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594)

  Behind shades in the Hebrides,

  To keep your eyes in.

  DEBORAH RANDALL, ‘Gavin’ in The Sin Eater (1989)

  The old single-track Highland Line train from Inverness to Kyle meandered slowly through an autumnal Highland landscape as marvellous as I could ever remember it. It was October 1968. Four years had passed since I had last come north to visit Gavin in his West Coast home, and I had forgotten how foreign the landscape was to a southerner like myself, how stark and invigorating, how lambent and pellucid the quality of light, how shrill the lovely blue sky of the north, how hushed this lonely world of gorse and bracken, tarn and sea loch could be. Autumn was more advanced up here; the woods rusting, the berries blazing, the leaves of the silver birches flickering like spinning coins; around Kyle the tops of the mountains were already covered in a light dusting of snow, the first harbinger of the approaching winter.