Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Only Teko was now left of the denizens of the Camusfeàrna idyll. Of this lone animal’s fate Donald Mitchell, who was John Lister-Kaye’s assistant at the Kyleakin Island zoo park, later wrote:

  The night after I heard of Gavin’s death, while I was attending to Teko, I realised that there was now little future for the otter – the man who loved him had died, and the animal’s future was bleak. That night, standing on top of the island looking up at the multitude of stars, I made a silent prayer to Gavin to take Teko – I felt strongly it would be right. Only a few days after Gavin’s ashes had been laid to rest in the ground, and exactly two weeks after his death, Teko disappeared and was later found dead at the bottom of his pool. It was presumed at the time that he had drowned after suffering an epileptic seizure while swimming. I felt this was very odd – an otter drowning? Ever since then I’ve had a strange feeling that Gavin’s ‘spirit’ did return to take Teko with him. Who knows?

  Teko was buried at the foot of a great boulder on the top of the White Island and his name was carved into the face of the rock above his grave: ‘TEKO 1959—69’. A lonely but appropriate memorial, surrounded by sea on all sides, to the last of the Ring of Bright Water otters.

  And so it was ended. In the short space of twenty months everything had vanished, swept away as if it had never been: the man, the otters, the house, the vision of Camusfeàrna. Only the ring remained, the waterfall ceaselessly tumbling, the burn winding round to the sea.

  Avalon was lost. Or was it, then, truly gained at last?

  * To the question of whether Gavin’s death was due to suicide, euthanasia or natural causes was later added (in circumstances which would undoubtedly have given Gavin himself cause for prolonged laughter) a fourth possibility. In September 1991 the police on Skye received an allegation, emanating from California, to the effect that Gavin had been murdered by a blow on the head. It was only when Richard Frere presented conclusive evidence to the contrary that the police abandoned the difficult plan of exhuming Gavin’s cremated remains for forensic tests.

  The Watcher at the Door

  All through the night I watched the ruined door,

  Intent, as gamblers watch the fall of dice;

  Awaiting verdict, prisoner at the bar.

  Shadows crossed it, once I heard a voice.

  At dawn a mountain hind emerged alone,

  Quick step and sure as with some purpose known,

  Some will that animated the unmarrowed bone,

  For through her ribs I saw the lichened stone.

  At noon a naked form was there;

  A watcher, indistinct, began

  To follow as it turned and ran

  Seaward over the shore.

  At dusk a broken wheel appeared

  Held by a hand I could not see,

  And I knew that someone whom I feared

  Had discovered an empty room in me.

  GAVIN MAXWELL (1951)

  EPILOGUE

  What infinitely precious thing

  Did we seek along the shore?

  What signature,

  Promise in pearly shell, wisdom in stone?

  What dead king’s golden crown, tide-worn,

  What lost imperishable star?

  KATHLEEN RAINE, On a Deserted Shore

  In the spring following Gavin’s death I set off on a six-thousand-mile circumnavigation of the coastline of Britain as a member of a conservation project called Operation Seashore. The weather had been unkind at the start, and we sailed northwards along the east coast in blizzards and icy rain all through April and into May. Only when we had reached our most northerly position and passed through the much-feared tide rips of the Pentland Firth – the so-called ‘Merry Men of May’ where the North Sea meets the Atlantic – did the weather at last turn benign.

  For a month we nosed along the north coast of Scotland and down through the Hebridean Sea beyond Cape Wrath. The sun beat down on us, daylight hardly ended, and we turned as brown as buccaneers. We had three tenders with us on our motor yacht – a small dinghy and two inflatables; with these we periodically abandoned our mother-ship and scurried off to explore the scatter of rocks and islands beyond our bow. Throughout the long hours of daylight we motored and rowed to hidden coves and rock-guarded islets looking for bird colonies and sea caves and whatever we could find, the boat’s bow butting the swell of the plankton-green sea, the gulls in our wake screaming above the bubbling of the outboard’s exhaust. Rocks and islets, shimmering in the sun, appeared insubstantial, atomised. Dark torpedo shapes nosed through the crystal water towards the weedless rocks – salmon, maybe, or sea trout.

  So we nosed our way south towards the Isle of Skye, past the clamorous cliff-face bird slums, the seals basking on the rocks, the buzzards wheeling on stiffened wings between the basalt crags, the ocean swell exploding in the sea caves with a gunshot boom, and finally, on Midsummer Day, the last day of the halcyon spell of anticyclonic calm that had blessed our voyage through the Hebridean Sea, we crept between Scalpay and the Crowlin Islands and entered the Narrows of Skye at Kyle Akin. And there stood the White Island just as I had remembered it, the stubby lighthouse proud on its rock, and the house huddling close under the low, rocky ridge.

  I lowered a boat and paddled ashore, and walked up to the house. Three young men who were strangers to me were dismantling that grand interior where Gavin and I had once talked of the past and the future, of hopes and dreams, long into the small hours. The Icarus stood against the mantelpiece waiting to be crated up. Wordsworth’s desk had already gone, and Sir Walter Scott’s settee, too. I had the feeling that I had stumbled on to the set of a play that had ended its run; the actors had departed and now the props were being bundled up and carried away. The two deerhounds, Dirk and Hazel, looking listless and decrepit, staggered to their feet and stared at me blankly. Owl, I gathered, had found a foster home in Devon and her wing had mended. Most of the other birds and animals had long gone, together with their keepers. A young drama teacher by the name of Ian Alexander, who had met Gavin the previous summer and stayed at Sandaig while he repaired the Polar Star, had bought Kyleakin Island not long after Gavin’s death, hoping against the odds that he could keep alive the concept of the Gavin Maxwell Wildlife Park. But the White Island that day struck me as chill and forlorn; even the ghosts had gone, and I was glad to row back to the yacht and raise anchor and sail on until, with a sharp turn south into Kyle Rhea, the island was lost to view and to memory.

  The sky that day was of the purest royal blue – not a cloud, not a hint of rain, the barometer as steady as a rock, the air pungent with the warm land smells of bog myrtle and young fern. A kind of festive spirit overtook us. For me, it was as if I were entering the region of a half-forgotten dream; for as we advanced down the Sound of Sleat towards the open sea the component parts of the landscape began to resolve themselves into a once-familiar scene. Ahead lay the Isle of Eigg, and craggy headlands sliding into the position in which I had remembered them. On the port bow rose a small white lighthouse on a little island of rock and moss where wild sea otters used to have their holts. Perhaps they did still. I searched the sea through field glasses, but saw only the shearwaters scurrying low over the water, angling their wings to the crests and hollows of the waves as they followed the contours of the ocean.

  We turned past the promontory of the furthest island and entered the bay. I recognised it, of course; I remembered every rock and tree of it. It was Camusfeàrna. Someone put out an anchor and it sank through the translucent water and threw up a puff of sand as it hit the bottom. We dropped an inflatable over the side and I climbed down into it with our Australian skipper. The frothy white line of our wake led to a tiny bay and a beach of dazzling white sand. As I leaped ashore, the skipper said: ‘Nice little old spot.’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, and added: ‘I’ve been here before, you know.’

  It was here that for one long winter I had held fort against the storms, with two otters for company and driftwood
for fire. Now it was hot and still, yellow flag iris blazed in a patch of damp bog, bright orange lichen glowed on the grey rocks; the burn was almost dry after a month of drought, the waterfall only a whisper of its former torrential self. The place was more beautiful than I had remembered it, but it had changed beyond recall.

  The house had gone, obliterated so completely that there was little indication it had ever existed. Not a brick or a tile was left; just a square patch of fine rubble and sand on which the grass and nettles were already spreading. I drew my foot through the rubble but no fragment of the past came back to me. A large block of unhewn stone marked the spot where Gavin’s ashes had been laid to rest. Near the burn stood a small stone cairn where Edal was buried, surmounted by a brass plaque with words inscribed by Gavin in commemoration of her: ‘Whatever joy she gave to you, give back to nature.’

  I crossed the burn and walked up the steep track down which I used to carry potatoes, fuel and other supplies, lurching into the wind on fitful black nights. It was still a hard climb up the first stretch and I paused to get my breath back at a kind of natural platform where the track bent sharply left. I looked down. The boat rode quietly at anchor in the bay; sounds of laughter drifted up to me – a radio playing, a splash as someone dived off the stern. I turned to climb higher and, as I did so, I caught sight of something curious and yet oddly familiar. In the very centre of a flat, grey rock, for all the world like some kind of votive offering or portent, lay a black animal dropping, still fresh in that hot sun. I looked at it and at once recognised the ground-up fishbone texture. An otter had preceded me up this track. It must have scampered ahead of me only a few minutes before, paused at the same spot as I had and left this memento on the rock.

  I was suddenly immensely glad. I called out in the silence, uttering my poor imitation of a range of otter cries, but no grey-brown shape came bounding through the bracken towards me, I saw no furry round muzzle peering quizzically over the long grass, heard no chirruping response. I had hardly expected to. But I was grateful for that simple assurance of the continuity of life at Camusfeàrna. Years before, the wild sea otters in the bay had used the house as a place where they could drop by for an egg or an eel on hunting trips away from home. And now, in spite of everything that had subsequently happened here, it was clear that otters still roamed the shores and hills of Camusfeàrna, that in the end nothing had changed, the wilderness prevailed, only time had happened. It was an affirmation.

  I turned back and with a lighter heart retraced my steps towards the sea and the westering sun.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Janet Adam-Smith (Mrs Carlton); Ian Alexander; Michael Alexander; A.G. Archer; Colonel James M. Ashton; Penelope Biggs; Colin Booty; Beryl Borders; Michael Bott and the University of Reading Archives Department; Ion Braby; Richard Branson; Patrick Brodie; Hamish Brown; Rupert Bruce-Mitford; Charles and Brigid Burney; Lieutenant-Colonel The Lord Burnham, JP, DL; John and Viv Burton; John Butters; Mrs Cameron-Head; Archie Campbell CMG; Elias Canetti; Mrs Capel-Cure; Suzanne and André Charisse; George Clarke; David Cobham; Mark Cocker; Dominic Cooper; Alan Cormack; Rupert Corry; David Cox; Dr Peter Crowcroft; Michael Cuddy; Marie Curry; Richard Curtis; The Right Honourable Earl of Dalhousie, Kt, GCVO, CBE, MC, LL.D; The Countess of Dalhousie; Natalie Davenport; Gwenda David; John Davies OBE; Del and Mary Davin; Lady Patricia Dean; Anthony Dickins; R.Q. Drayson, DSC; Lord Dulverton, CBE, TD, DL; Dr Tony Dunlop; Dr Bob Earll; Hetta Empson; Rede Fitzgerald-Moore; Joan and Richard Frere; David Gascoyne; Tex Geddes; Monk Gibbon; Morag Gillies; Phillip Glasier; Lady Hersey Goring; Jesse Graham; Carol and Francis Graham-Harrison; Colonel Iain Grant; Lady Tulla Gubbins; Philippa Gugen; Dr Christopher L. Hall; Michael Halpert; Bruno de Hamel; Lady Elizabeth, Duchess of Hamilton; Dr Walter Hamilton; Lavinia and David Hankinson; Audrey Harris; Duff Hart-Davis; Sir Rupert L. Hart-Davis; Dr Havard; John K. Hay; Fiore de Henriquez; Hertford Society, Hertford College, Oxford; Andrew and Margaret Hewson; John Hillaby; Professor Matthew Hodgart; Stanley Hodgkinson; Jacky Hone; Patrick Howarth; Patrick G. Hunter; Elspeth Huxley; Major Ronald Ingleby-Mackenzie, JP; Dr Hamish Ireland; Margaret Jackson; Peter Janson-Smith; Colin Jones; Oliver Graham Jones; Peter Kemp, DSO; John Frere Kerr; Tony Kilmartin; Raymond Knight; Gavin Lambert; Reginald and Mrs Lamm; T.A. Landry; R.D. Lea; Derek Leach; Patrick Leigh-Fermor; Sir Anthony Lincoln, QC; Marjorie Linklater; Magnus Linklater; Sir John Lister-Kaye; Longmans, Green & Co.; Dr John Lorne Campbell; Alastair Macdonald; Dr James L. McDougal; Lady Brigid McEwen; John McEwen; Colin Mackenzie, CMG; John MacLaughlin; Donald John MacLennan, MBE; Constance McNab; Jack Macrae; Lady Marjorie Marling; Barbara Mattheson; Dr Harrison Matthews, FRS; Sir Michael Maxwell, Bart; Donald Mitchell; Robert F. Mole; W.G. Morison; Giuseppe Moro; Annabelle Morton; John Mowat; Michael Murray; Pat Nash (née Bachelor); Dr John Nesfield; Daphne Neville; Philip Ninds; Terry Nutkins; Ron Parker; David Tree Parsons; Raef Payne; Hamish Pelham-Burn; Stanley Peters; Margaret Pope; Michael Powell; Kathleen Raine; Katie Rigge; Chris Riley; Lady Elizabeth, Countess of Scarborough; Scots Guards Records Office; Michael and Cherry Scott; Sir Peter and Lady Philippa Scott; Barrie and Pat Shaw; Vera Shaw Stewart; S.J.H. Sherrard; Colonel Cuthbert Skilbeck; Anthony Smith; W. Gordon Smith; Special Forces Club; Terence Spencer; Brian Stephan; Irene Stirling; Magda Stirling; John Stockwell; Stowe School and Old Stoic Society; Eddie Strutt; Lady Joan Stuart-Smith; Wilfred Thesiger, CBE, DSO; Dr Chris Tidyman; Christopher Turner (Headmaster, Stowe School); Lisa van Gruisen; Graham Watson; Jimmy Watt; Philip Wayre; Sir Peter Wilkinson, OBE, DSO; Jane Williams; Richard and Anne Williamson; John Winter; Justin Wintle; Christopher M. Woods (SOE Advisor, Foreign and Commonwealth Office); Gavin Young; Professor Christopher Zeeman, FRS, Principal of Hertford College, Oxford.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  BOOKS BY GAVIN MAXWELL

  Harpoon at a Venture (US title Harpoon Venture), 1952

  God Protect Me from My Friends (US title Bandit), 1956

  A Reed Shaken by the Wind (US title People of the Reeds), 1957

  The Ten Pains of Death, 1959

  Ring of Bright Water, 1960

  The Otters’ Tale, 1962

  The Rocks Remain, 1963

  The House of Elrig,1965

  Lords of the Atlas, 1966

  Seals of the World, 1967

  Raven Seek Thy Brother, 1968

  BOOKS REFERRING TO GAVIN MAXWELL

  Adams, Richard, The Adventures of Gavin Maxwell, n.d.

  Alexander, Michael, The Reluctant Legionnaire, 1956

  Blakey, Joseph, Coles Notes: Ring of Bright Water, 1972

  Botting, Douglas, Wilderness Europe,1976

  — Wild Britain,1988

  Brown, Mick, Richard Branson: The Inside Story,1992

  Channon, Paul, The Natural History of Otters,1985

  Cocker, Mark, Loneliness and Time: British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century,1992

  Frere, Richard, Maxwell’s Ghost,1976

  Geddes, Tex, Hebridean Sharker, 1960

  Hamilton-Hill, Gordon, SOE Assignment, 1973

  Knighton, C.S., Kyleakin Lighthouse: A Short History, 1982

  Lister-Kaye, John, The White Island, 1972

  Mackenzie, R.F., Escape from the Classroom, n.d.

  Milne, Alasdair, The Memoirs of a British Broadcaster, 1988

  O’Connor, P. Fitzgerald, Shark-O!, 1953

  Powell, Michael, Million-Dollar Movie, 1992

  Raine, Kathleen, The Lion’s Mouth, 1977

  — Collected Poems 1935–80, 1981

  Randall, Deborah, The Sin Eater, 1989

  Scott, Peter, The Eye of the Wind, 1961

  Thesiger, Wilfred, The Marsh Arabs, 1964

  — Desert, Marsh and Mountain: The World of a Nomad, 1979

  Tomkies, Mike, Between Earth and Paradise, 1976

  Watkins, Anthony, The Sea my Hunting Ground, 1954

  Watson, Graham, Book Society, 1980

  West, Nigel, Secret War: The Story of SOE, 1992

  Young, Gavin, Return to the Marshes, 19
77

  ARTICLES – SELECT LIST

  Anderson, Marshall, ‘Camusfeàrna Revisited’, Glasgow Herald, 10 February 1990

  Botting, Douglas, ‘The Man who Wrote Ring of Bright Water’, Sunday Telegraph, September 1985

  Crumley, James, ‘Deep Waters: The Story of Gavin Maxwell’ Scotland, on Sunday, 26 May 1991

  Dickins, Anthony, ‘Gavin Maxwell: A Postscript’, London Magazine, September 1976

  Frere, Richard, ‘Ring of Bright Memory’, Scotsman, 8 April 1989

  MacLeod, John, ‘The Ring that Became a Vicious Circle’, Scotsman, 2 June 1990

  Rogers, Byron, ‘Back to Paradise’, Radio Times, 8 September 1979

  SOURCE NOTES

  CHAPTER 1

  The House of Elrig

  Correspondence and interviews: Gavin Maxwell (Kyleakin 1968); Sir John Lister-Kaye; Sir Michael Maxwell, Bt.; Lady Mary Maxwell (via Lavinia Hankinson); Elizabeth, Duchess of Hamilton; Cherry Scott; Dick Curtis (letter to Cdr Burney)

  CHAPTER 2

  The House of Elrig

  Correspondence and interviews: Gavin Maxwell op.cit.; Anthony Dickins; John Nesfield; John Hay; Ion Braby; Col. James M. Ashton; Patrick Brodie; A. G. Archer; Christopher Turner