Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Gavin added various codicils. One concerned the future of the zoo park on Eilean Ban, which was so close to his heart. ‘I should like the collection to be known as the Gavin Maxwell Scottish Wildlife Park,’ he decreed, ‘of which James Watt will be the owner and John Lister-Kaye the Curator for as long as he chooses to remain.’ Another codicil concerned the manner of his interment. ‘I wish my body to be cremated,’ he stated, ‘and my ashes to be buried on the site of Sandaig house (now being razed). A large boulder to be placed over the ashes, inscribed either by letter-cutting or by insertion of a bronze plate, “Beneath this stone, the site of Camusfeàrna, are buried the ashes of Gavin Maxwell, b. 15th July 1914, d. –.” The landlord of the ground has already given his permission, and as a forestry road is now being constructed to Sandaig the transport of a large boulder should present no problems.’

  So it was done. It seemed that the only thing left unresolved was the last of the two dates on the bronze plate. But Gavin’s friends could not let him slip away without exploring all last avenues of succour and hope. John Lister-Kaye arranged for Stuart Lennox, one of Britain’s leading chest specialists, to come to Inverness to examine Gavin. In the short period of waiting before Lennox’s arrival, with all important business tied up and little left to occupy his still alert and active mind, Gavin relaxed somewhat. He still hoped to be able to leave hospital and move in to Kyle House on 8 September, perhaps even go rabbit shooting on nearby Pabay Island with John Lister-Kaye if he was up to it.

  On 3 September he was buoyant enough to pen his last written work. It was not a serious work, but under the circumstances it is miraculous that he was able to write it at all. Though the cancer was eating into his skull it had evidently not affected his brain, which was as creative as ever. This last offering, called ‘Rabbits’, was a hastily scribbled fragment of verse which represents, if nothing else, a defiant two-finger gesture directed against fate and the blind and hostile heavens – and also, perhaps, through the medium of the hyperactive creatures, the ‘symbol of fertility and inexhaustible virility’ that are the poem’s subject, an affirmation of the author’s belief in life and love. From the jaws of death Gavin’s wit and sense of fun bubble resolutely through.

  Rabbits

  Have 2 habits,

  Breeding

  And feeding

  (The purpose of the 2nd

  Is just to keep them fecund

  And is not meant to interrupt

  The tupping and the being tupped).

  The feeding is clean,

  The breeding obscene –

  In précis

  It is mécis;

  The doe is in an interesting condition

  The same day as her parturition,

  For passing the buck

  Is an unknown habit

  In the female rabbit;

  And so is any undertaking

  To make an honest buck

  – They need no making.

  Now rabbit is a curious word

  Whose origin I’ve lately heard;

  Robert, as a human name,

  Is the origin of same

  (Just why I don’t pretend to know;

  The dictionary tells me so):

  The archetypal randy man

  (Casanova also ran)

  A symbol of fertility

  And inexhaustible virility

  (See things like Playboy Bunnies’ legs

  And rabbitry in Easter Eggs).

  One thing is sure, we share with Bobby

  The only really worthwhile hobby.

  Next day Stuart Lennox arrived from London, examined Gavin and his clinical records, and pronounced his second opinion. It was every bit as bleak as the first had been. The cancer was rabid and ravaging every part of Gavin’s body. Before long he would go blind and then lose the use of his legs. He might last at the most three months under sedation. There was nothing that could be done to effect a cure. There was no hope. From that moment forward Gavin knew that his life had no value, and that the sooner it ended the better. He pinned his hopes on his circulatory system, which was in tatters. There seemed a reasonable prospect that a cerebral or coronary thrombosis might bring a quick and painless end to his suffering before the disease progressed to its ultimate horrific conclusion. A likely candidate for the killer role soon presented itself – an enormously distended blood vessel, a thick, raised ridge, which pulsated violently like some throbbing reptile in his groin.

  ‘This might finish me, mightn’t it?’ Gavin asked Richard Frere hopefully in a hoarse voice. Richard had seen his own father die of something similar and told Gavin so. Gavin gave an audible sigh of relief.

  On Saturday 6 September, Gavin was wheeled into the theatre for an operation to drain his lungs. It proved a difficult business and it caused him much pain. Afterwards Richard visited him. He found Gavin sitting up in bed with a tube connecting his chest to a half-filled bucket of bloody fluid on the floor.

  Detecting Richard’s feeling of revulsion, Gavin muttered in a gurgling voice: ‘Isn’t this awful? I could have done without this.’ It was too late for meaningful contact, and after ten minutes of silence Gavin suggested that Richard come back the next day – the doctors thought he might be a little better then. ‘When I shook his cold limp hand,’ Richard recalled, ‘I was pretty sure it was for the last time.’

  ‘He has the mark of death upon him,’ Richard wrote in his diary for that day. ‘I do not think we can hope for better things now, except perhaps mercy.’

  That night, when the nurse bade Gavin goodnight, he said to her: ‘It’s not goodnight, nurse, it’s goodbye.’ And in the early hours of Sunday morning, 7 September 1969, that brave, frail, wayward heart stopped still. He was only fifty-five. Icarus had not fallen to earth but burned up in space.

  People reacted in different ways to the news. For Richard, who had been closest to him at the end, there was the feeling of guilt and remorse that is normal among those who have attended a dying loved one. Sir Aymer Maxwell was still in hospital in Athens when he heard the news, and was greatly shaken by it. Too ill to travel home, he sent a telegram: ‘Deeply grieved and worried because unable be near beloved brother.’ Kathleen Raine received the news in Dublin. But she knew before she heard. ‘Over my head on the evening before he died, a V-shaped flight of curlew had flown low, reminding me of Gavin’s beloved greylag geese … And as that formation of curlew flew low over me, I had thought, “Gavin!”’ Kathleen’s natural response took a poetic form. Within hours of Gavin departing this earth she had written this simple and deeply felt elegy (from ‘On a Deserted Shore’):

  The faint stars said,

  ‘Our distances of night,

  These wastes of space,

  Sight can in an instant cross,

  But who has passed

  On soul’s dark flight

  Journeys beyond

  The flash of our light.’

  I said, ‘Whence he is travelling

  Let no heart’s grief of mine

  Draw back a thought

  To these dim skies,

  Nor human tears

  Drench those wings that pass,

  Freed from earth’s weight

  And the wheel of stars.’

  On the morning that Gavin died Terry Nutkins, who was camping at Sandaig with his young wife, was looking down from a hill as a bulldozer levelled the burnt-out shell of Gavin’s house. That same morning Jimmy Watt was driving to Wales when he experienced a sudden splitting headache such as he had never experienced before or since – a pain so severe that he had to ask his fiancée to take the wheel. Later a friend rang to say that Gavin had died. ‘I felt then that I had been left alone in a desolate world,’ he recalled afterwards. ‘Gavin had been better than the best of fathers. But with his death I felt as though he had abandoned me. I was in the middle of the mourning process for a long time after.’

  John Lister-Kaye, newly arrived at Kyleakin Island, was just beginning to get to grips with his duties whe
n the news came that his employer and mentor was dead. He noted in his diary: ‘After breakfast Richard Frere phoned to say that at 4.30 this morning Gavin died under heavy sedation in Inverness hospital. Indeed a sad moment.’ All day the phone never stopped ringing. The BBC and the national newspapers telephoned for confirmation of the news. So did the local police, who had been receiving a stream of enquiries from well-wishers in the neighbouring towns and villages. From far and wide telegrams and phone calls of sympathy and commiseration poured into the tiny island, a great many of them from Gavin’s readers. ‘We must continue here as best we can,’ John noted at the end of a nightmare day. ‘Gannet very lively and strong and feeding well …’

  Lisa van Gruisen arrived in London from Paris for her prearranged rendezvous with Gavin on Kyleakin Island and was stunned to learn that she had arrived too late. ‘I was knocked sideways by his death,’ she recalled. ‘It was as though a lover had died. For months afterwards I couldn’t go into a bookshop in case I saw one of his books on the shelves.’ Mrs Lamm was at Paultons Square when she heard the news. Anthony Lincoln came down the stairs and said to her: ‘You knew Mr Maxwell, didn’t you? Well – he’s dead.’ Mrs Lamm was speechless; then she burst into tears. ‘I cried and cried,’ she said. ‘It was so sad. He was still so young to die.’

  I was in France, and was shocked and saddened to hear of Gavin’s death on the BBC morning news. I had always regarded him as a great man, in his idiosyncratic and sometimes contrary way; quite the most remarkable person I had ever met. But though he had died before his time, I was glad that at least he had been spared the anguish of encroaching old age, of loneliness and insecurity, the final defeated retreat from a remote and rugged island home that failing powers would have one day forced him to abandon. I rang Peter Janson-Smith, and he confirmed the details. He was puzzled, as many people were, that death had come so soon – though having watched Gavin drink most of a bottle of brandy and smoke most of a packet of cigarettes in the hour he was with him in hospital, Peter could see he was not going to do anything to prolong his life. Gavin had died within three weeks of being told he had six months to live. There was a hint, a faint whiff in the air, that his death had not been entirely natural. John Lister-Kaye, for example, felt inclined to wonder whether Gavin had jumped, perhaps, or been gently helped over the edge. It was a reasonable question, given the circumstances. John Lister-Kaye recalls having a conversation with Gavin the day before he died in which Gavin discussed with him various ways of ending it all, including injecting air into his veins and tying a tourniquet.

  The autopsy did not entirely dispel the doubts, though it did confirm the extraordinary extent of the cancer. In addition to the original primary in the lungs there was a second primary in one of the kidneys, together with five secondaries throughout the body which had deeply pitted the skull – hence the headaches – and all but eaten up the cervical vertebrae, so much so that it was just hanging by a thread. If Gavin had had the strength to turn his head sharply sideways he would in all probability have broken his neck.

  However, the likelihood of euthanasia being secretly administered to any patient in a hospital in Presbyterian Scotland during the period in which Gavin died is extremely remote; and Richard Frere, the last visitor to see Gavin alive, is convinced that suicide was no less unlikely. He wrote to me:

  I am disinclined to believe it was suicide. My own belief is that Gavin was prepared to stick it out despite his educated guess at what was in store for him. Both Eustace [Maxwell] and I saw the death certificate and Eustace took it with him. Neither of us were in the least surprised at its conclusions [that Gavin had died of a massive coronary thrombosis]; for my part I had seen the bulging blood vessel in the groin, which I took to be a main artery as it inflated with each heartbeat like a bicycle tube being pumped up. I am satisfied that Gavin saw this as a likely cause of his early death, and had no intention of expediting it … You may take it from me, if you wish, as one who had a daily and concentrated dose of the man for over three years, that Gavin Maxwell died of natural causes.*

  The obituaries were extensive. The Daily Telegraph, while acknowledging that Gavin was a greatly accomplished writer, rued the success of Ring of Bright Water – if it had been less successful ‘perhaps Gavin Maxwell would have written more and better travel books’. The Scotsman, in a lengthy tribute (‘Master of prose who lost his sanctuary’), came closest to an in-depth appraisal:

  With Gavin Maxwell die many unattained ideals, many unfulfilled projects, and no one knows how many unwritten books … The carefree existence his vast public imagined him to enjoy sent hundreds of people searching the Highlands for cottages like Camusfeàrna. Even without the benefit of otters, the remote and primitive life became an ideal, almost a mystique, which struck a chord in thousands of people trapped in an urban rat-race … Gavin Maxwell is dead, and the final chapter will never be told – not, at least, in his own words. His best-known books tell of his own life, and yet he gave away very little of his inner self. He managed, somehow, to conceal behind his impeccable prose much that might have thrown light on a mysterious and elusive personality. Yet he managed, without the aid of sensationalism, to beguile thousands of non-readers into sitting down and reading a book. And that’s no mean achievement.

  Gavin’s publishers issued a statement which spoke of ‘the warmth of his response to animals and to the beauty of the natural world’, and his corresponding aversion to the modern world and urban preoccupations, science and technology. ‘Brave, humorous and loved for his vulnerability by his closest friends, he turned his sensitivity to best advantage: his books gave, and will continue to give, pleasure to countless readers.’

  Looking back over all those years it seems to me that perhaps Gavin’s greatest achievement was to make out of his own life an amazing drama, a theatrical pièce de résistance, in which he was the protagonist on a stage of his own making, playing a part he improvised as he went along. If he came to a dull bit he would wind it up and create another extraordinary scene, which could literally be a scene – a quarrel – or an adventure like the wrecking of the Polar Star. Whereas a playwright or a novelist would simply write this down on paper, Gavin had to act it out and then write it down. So his life was a succession of dramatic crises, and when in the end the drama turned to tragedy it took a classically Greek form: a hero who was an aristocrat and a nearly-great man (but flawed in some crucial regard) was struck down by the gods for the sin of hubris – and the hubris in Gavin’s case was the work which had brought him fame and fortune, Ring of Bright Water.

  On Thursday 18 September 1969, Gavin Maxwell’s ashes were brought to Sandaig in a small wooden cask stowed in the boot of his green Mercedes driven by Richard Frere – three weeks almost to the day since Gavin had taken the wheel of that same car for the last time and driven down Glenshiel like a bat out of hell. Sandaig that September morning was at its finest – a clear, singing sky, a dry east wind, purple heather abounding, the trees just touched with autumn gold, the Skye hills still green across the dancing waters of the Sound. The house which had been Gavin’s home, the hub of the Ring of Bright Water legend, had gone utterly, bulldozed flat, the fire-blackened rubble buried out of sight in a great covered pit in the dunes. Amongst the wind-bent marram grass on a ridge of the dunes, staring out across the sea into the round void of the shining sky, stood Kathleen Raine, who had arrived from Canna by sea on the boat of Gavin’s ex-sharking skipper, Bruce Watt. Around the disturbed ground where the house had once stood a small assembly of friends and relatives gathered to pay their last respects. The sky was eggshell blue, the waterfall roaring in full voice. ‘I was quite overcome by the beauty and grief of it,’ Richard recalled, ‘and moved closer to my wife and little daughter, sure anchors against a perverse desire to shout for joy in this place of graves.’

  The open-air service ended when Jimmy Watt laid the casket containing Gavin’s ashes in the grave and Kathleen Raine placed a bunch of rowan berries from the tree upon i
t; then a tapestry of flowers designed by Terry Nutkins – a mass of pinks surrounding the image of an otter picked out in white carnations – was set down over the place where Gavin’s ashes had been laid to rest, the exact spot where the desk on which he had written Ring of Bright Water had once stood. The day ended, as Gavin would have wished, with a few companionable drams in Raef’s croft at the sea’s edge; and not until the sun began to set across the Sound did the assembly begin slowly to drift away.

  ‘The sky had turned apricot at the edges and royal blue overhead,’ Richard Frere wrote, ‘and the twilight fell like dew upon Camusfeàrna and its ghosts. I gave but one backward glance at the darkening field ringed by the flat white sea and thought still of my dear and worthy friend as my feet stumbled on the rough track which led back to the uncaring world.’

  Sleeper beneath the rowan-tree,

  You have become your dream,

  Sky, shore, and silver sea.

  I returned to London in time for a memorial service arranged by Raef Payne and Peter Janson-Smith and held on 23 September before a much larger gathering of Gavin’s friends and relatives in the Church of St Paul in Covent Garden. The programme spoke of Gavin’s ‘love of beauty, especially the beauty of the natural world and all its creatures; his gift of sharing this love with others through the artistry of his words; his courage, his humour, his friendship’. At the end of the service, conducted by the Eton Chaplain, a soprano sang the ‘Pie Jesu’ from Fauré’s Requiem, her voice ringing out in the silence, and then fading, leaving only the silence.