by Dan Boothby
A well-beaten path led through long grass to a telegraph pole and a shoulder-high boulder. There was a small brass plaque cemented to the rock: ‘Beneath this stone, the site of Camusfeàrna, are buried the ashes of Gavin Maxwell.’
Offerings had been placed around this plaque too.
Between the boulder and the sea were dunes covered with marram grass and, beyond, a long stretch of sandy beach. In the lee of the conifer-covered hillside that we’d descended, and almost set into it, was the ‘croft’. It had recently been painted, and there were electricity and telephone wires leading to it. The windows and the low doorway had metal shutters locked in place over them, making the croft impregnable. Black plastic piping ran from the direction of the burn to feed water to a tap wired to a post. Wooden fish boxes had been stacked nearby and covered with a pegged-down tarpaulin. A gargantuan wooden beam lying on cropped grass under one of the windows formed a natural bench, and I caught a glimpse of my projected future self sitting on it, living in the croft, alone or in company, no matter, and writing – just like Gavin Maxwell did.
We walked along the fence under the hillside. There was a barn, its stone walls crumbling, its corrugated-iron roof close to collapse. We came to a gap in the fence and from the roar I knew we’d found the waterfall.
Maxwell had written a lot about that waterfall, and it was by the waterfall that much of Ring of Bright Water was written. Maxwell wrote that he considered the waterfall to be the soul of Camusfeàrna and ‘if there is anywhere in the world to which some part of me may return when I am dead it will be there.’
Dara and I slipped on mossy rocks on the path to the waterfall. Water crashed, drowning out all other sounds. Tree trunks, washed downstream by past torrents, lay stranded across its lip, damming the burn below. The barren, leafless conifers blotted out the sun. The waterfall roared in its gloom. I felt watched. A trespasser. If a place can have a soul then Sandaig, I think, has a troubled one.
We pitched our tent out of the way of the midges and cattle, on an outcrop of rock that had a shallow basin of turf at the top of it. We gathered driftwood – mostly wooden fish boxes (there were many back then) – and lit a fire to dry our things. The tide ebbed and uncovered a causeway of fine white sand. The black cattle, their heavy nasal sighing carrying across the water, lumbered through the shallows to browse the grassy islands beyond. Oystercatchers and ringed plovers and turnstones sped away from them, piping and peeping along the sands.
We stayed a week down at Sandaig. We paddled in the bays and caught crabs to grill on a grate over the fire. We waded through fat fronds of kelp in a transparent sea to the furthest island, where there was a Lilliputian, and locked, lighthouse. We watched yachts anchor for the night in the bay before sailing away in the morning to leave us alone again. A young Frenchman came to camp for a couple of days. He’d read Ring of Bright Water and had worked out from the book how to find Camusfeàrna (and packed up and left sooner than he’d intended because of the midges). We frightened ourselves by sticking our heads under the icy flow of the waterfall, the cascading water blinding and deafening us to the dread presence we both felt watched us there. We bathed in its deep dark pool. We sat to admire the gulls twist and cry and cavort; we watched seals bob and loaf and raise their dog-eyed heads to the heavens, and mistook them for otters because that was what we wanted them to be.
We spent hours lying in our sleeping bags in the tent playing cards, bellowing to make ourselves heard over the din of downpours and squally winds slapping and shaking the sides of the tent. We waited impatiently for bad weather to pass so that we could light a fire and cook.
One evening after the birds had gone to bed, apart from the sea kissing the shoreline, there was silence and stillness all around. No wind. Complete and utter peace. As darkness fell, sprawled by the fire, I told Dara about the curse.
‘. . . and she cursed him on that rowan tree, the one we saw that’s dying down by Edal’s cairn.’
‘But she was a poet, Kathleen Raine,’ Dara said.
‘She believed she had occult powers.’
‘I don’t believe in all that stuff.’
‘She was in love with him. She believed they were soul mates. He took the title of Ring of Bright Water from one of the poems she wrote him while staying down here alone with Mij.’
‘How did she do it?’
‘It was a wild night.’ I intoned, ‘Gavin Maxwell and she had quarrelled, violently, “and she had put her hands upon the trunk of the rowan tree and with all the strength of her spirit she had cursed me, saying, ‘Let him suffer here as I am suffering.’ Then she had left, up over the bleak hillside.” ’
Dara chucked a fish box on the fire. ‘And you reckon it worked?’
‘Listen: Mij was killed near here by a road mender soon after. Gavin Maxwell had a car smash that left him lame, his health deteriorated, his marriage failed, he became practically bankrupt. Then the house burned down and Edal was fried alive in the inferno. Gavin Maxwell lost almost everything in that fire. He moved to Kyleakin Lighthouse Island. Eighteen months later . . . he was dead. Think about it. That rowan over there is like a spent force, its badness all used up. That’s why it’s dying.’
‘I’ve just realized,’ Dara whispered, ‘Edal’s cairn and Maxwell’s rock – they’re graves.’
‘What about ghosts?’ I said. ‘Do you believe in them? I think ghosts are people who don’t know they’re dead.’
Maxwell’s rock – the site of the house – was just across the burn from us. Before Gavin Maxwell and the others lived in it, there were lighthouse keepers and their families living there.
‘Gavin Maxwell wrote about there being a poltergeist in the house,’ I said. ‘He experienced ghostly activity in there at first hand. He also wrote about a murder that took place in one of the caves just down the coast. Before the Highland Clearances there were houses all around here. You can still see the bumps in the ground where they were. People would have died down here – of old age, famine, drowned while out fishing. Now there’s nothing. Just us.’
‘Where did you get all this?’
‘The books.’
The fish box caught fire and a tower of flame leapt into the air with a whoosh, lighting the rocks and sea around us.
‘I didn’t say anything earlier,’ Dara said, ‘but this morning when I was getting water from the burn I saw a man walking along the beach by the croft. He had a dog with him but it wasn’t like a normal dog. It was small and black and it had a long flattish tail. And it didn’t move like a dog. I only saw them for a second. I bent down to fill up the billycan and when I looked back they were gone.’
‘The waterfall scares me,’ I said.
‘I think they might have been spectres.’
‘Did you really see someone down there this morning?’
‘I wouldn’t camp down here on my own, would you?’
We lapsed into silence and stared into flames. Beyond the threshold of light around us was utter darkness. Uncertainty, then fear, crept over us like Nosferatu creeping up the stairs. We retreated to the tent on the rock, where we had an all-round view and where no one and nothing could get at us.
We walked back over the hills to Glenelg to buy more supplies and to visit the dingy, smoke-stained pub. We ate lunch and played pool and were served, begrudgingly, beer. Burly, unsmiling men sat at the bar and crowded us out when we ordered. Did they remember Gavin Maxwell? Had they liked him? Was one of those men the one that killed Mij? But I asked them nothing, as we were silently told that the likes of us were not wanted here.
Returning to the sea and seclusion of Sandaig we came across a couple of pensionable age standing by Maxwell’s grave.
‘You’ve made the pilgrimage too, have you?’ the woman asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Dara.
‘It’s lovely down here,’ said the man.
They knew a lot about Gavin Maxwell. ‘And have you read The White Island and Maxwell’s Ghost ?’ the woman
asked.
I hadn’t. I knew that Raven Seek Thy Brother was the last book Maxwell ever wrote. A fire destroyed the house at Sandaig and then Maxwell moved to Kyleakin Lighthouse Island. He died a year later, aged fifty-five. The end. That was all I knew. Sixteen-year-olds lack a certain nuance in their thinking.
After Sandaig burnt down, the couple told me, Maxwell had hit on the idea of establishing a wildlife park on Kyleakin Lighthouse Island. ‘Come and visit the island home of a famous author and view his private collection of Scottish fauna.’ The other otter, Teko, had survived the fire and was to be, along with Maxwell himself, the star attraction. Maxwell employed a young naturalist, John Lister-Kaye, to supervise the project, but died before the wildlife park was finished. After Maxwell’s death, Lister-Kaye had stayed on in the Highlands to write The White Island, about his time living at Kyleakin.
Maxwell’s Ghost was by Richard Frere, who converted the lighthouse cottages and later became Maxwell’s business manager and trusted confidant, one of the few who could reason with Maxwell and calm him down.
‘That one especially will tell you a lot about Gavin,’ the woman said. ‘He was a very mixed-up man.’
‘They’re not too keen on him in the village,’ the man said. ‘Never were. The man Gavin accused of killing Mij still lives there actually.’
‘Big Angus?’
‘I’m not sure that’s his real name,’ the man said. ‘The lady in the shop told us he never touched Mij and that Gavin had a grudge against him about something else. She said to us: “That Gavin Maxwell with his books has made that man’s life a misery.”’
The couple told me that the croft I coveted was owned by a master at Eton, who lived in Wales and used it only occasionally.
‘Look at this place, so desolate and abandoned now, and yet his books about Sandaig are full of incident,’ the man said.
‘You’d never believe it,’ the woman said. ‘It’s a little like after the waiters have cleared away a table in a restaurant. You’d never know that just a few moments ago there’d been a couple sitting there having a blazing row.’
‘We’re soon cleared away,’ the man said.
The woman looked down at the plaque on the boulder. ‘Aren’t these offerings of flowers and shells and things . . . odd? Gavin touched a nerve, didn’t he, and got on more than a few people’s nerves. I’m not sure what he would have made of these.’
‘A moody man,’ I said.
‘An unhappy man,’ the woman said, ‘with secrets.’
I wondered if they had known him, for they had called him Gavin, but before I could ask they had waved and were walking away.
Dara and I were getting on each other’s nerves. We ran out of firewood. It was Dara’s turn to get more.
‘If you want it, you get it,’ he said.
‘But it’s your turn.’
Dara said nothing.
I stomped off across the burn. It was running high from an incoming tide and the day’s rain. I stumbled on the loose rocks, soaking my socks and trouser legs. Each time we’d collected driftwood we’d had to search further along the shore. By the time I’d lugged as much driftwood as I could carry back to camp I felt done in, beaten – by the weather, the midges, by Dara’s moodiness and by the cold and damp and the sheer isolation of Sandaig.
‘Perhaps we should leave tomorrow,’ I said.
I eyed the croft and wished I was in it.
‘Good idea,’ said Dara.
Dara talked all the way to Glenelg about the humungous meal he was going to order in the pub.
‘Real food and loads of beer. And maybe a whisky chaser. Gavin Maxwell liked his whisky, didn’t he? Let’s drink a drink to him.’
We were underage, but silly laws like that didn’t seem to apply up there.
When we got to the pub, the doors were locked and the lights were off. We walked down the road to the shop but that was closed too.
‘Sunday,’ I said.
‘I know,’ Dara said, ‘but pubs don’t shut on Sundays.’
A man was standing in the road. We went up to him.
‘It’s a Sunday,’ he said.
‘We know,’ we said.
‘Well then!’ he said, as if that put an end to the matter.
‘Will the pub be open later?’ Dara asked. ‘This afternoon? Tonight?’
‘Are you daft? Am I having to spell it out? You’ll NOT be getting served on the Sabbath!’
‘We only want to buy food,’ I said, but the man was striding away, shaking his head.
Bitten half to death by midges, we hastily erected the tent beneath dripping trees on the outskirts of Glenelg and lay silently fuming in our sleeping bags, counting down the hungry hours until we could away to a place with shops and cafes, where we could find a coach to take us south, where nature had been tamed, the weather was clement, and where Sundays weren’t very special any more.
I remember the ride in the post bus the next morning. I remember a big man gripping the steering wheel in one fist while smashing the windscreen with the other, trying to kill a fly that, he informed us, had been trying his patience all morning. I remember my fear mixed with admiration of a man who could drive so carelessly yet so accurately along the single-track roads and spindly bridges over the Ratagan Pass to Kyle of Lochalsh. There was no Skye Bridge back then. Ferries ran the half-mile of sea between Kyle and Kyleakin. I may have asked about getting across to the island, but it was private property. We caught a coach to Glasgow and took a night train south, our carriage filled with Scots, already homesick, drinking and singing their way down to London.
All my life I’ve read books, like a dervish turns circles, constantly, unremittingly. I lose myself in a book until my eyes bleed (figuratively speaking, of course) and still I read on, projecting myself into adventures, other people’s stories. Yet all that first summer on the island I never finished a book. I was too busy, too preoccupied, always learning something new. Someone might arrive on the island at any moment. I had work to do and people to see and by the end of each day I’d be exhausted by the demands of the island and the sea air. It was all I could do to cook a meal before falling into dreamless sleep. For once in my life I knew what it was to have purpose. Up until then, my life had been goal-orientated, which is all very well, but once you achieve a goal, or fail, what then? Set yourself up with another? Set yourself up to win, or lose? Over and over? I took tours of the island, chopped and cleared, tidied and cleaned. It was very pleasant to feel like a home-owner, house-proud. Island-proud.
And I couldn’t settle to write anything either. I needed long, uninterrupted stretches of time and a kind of boredom that came from loneliness and a lack of interest in the people and places around me. People kept saying, ‘Oh, the island must be a wonderful place for writing, all that solitude.’ And the island appeared to be the perfect writer’s retreat – an inspiring view, the tranquillity, the ‘splendid isolation’, a place to lock oneself away. But there was always something else I could be doing. The island was a project without end. The book I’d begun in India remained locked up in my laptop. Not forgotten exactly, but dormant.
Beyond our northern land of sea and rock and sudden squalls, the busy world south of us still turned. The earth spun and the summer moved on; the days shortening, the nights growing incrementally colder. The moon waxed and waned and the island expanded and shrank with the tides. Sometimes it seemed so small when the sea crowded its shore; and at others so big when a dead low tide revealed the sandbanks and shoals around it. The island changed continually.
I was always stopping to look in those days, looking through binoculars, as I circled the island time and again. I’d read how lighthouse keepers, having plenty of time on their hands, made a habit of walking ever so slowly around their rocky islets in order to notice everything, the infinitesimal changes that all add up to the totality of a turning cycle of seasons. On wet days I’d sit on a chair in the lobby with the door open, alive to all the movement amidst the sti
llness around me – the birds and animals and humans, the sea lapping, rising, falling, crashing. And at night I’d walk the island along moonlit paths, as vast container ships, the reflections of their deck lights flickering on wavelets, passed me by on their way to who knew where.
During those first months on the island, I was often reminded of an interactive computer game I used to play at university. The game, Myst, unfolds at its own pace. The player is alone on an island of deserted buildings and unpeopled paths. There’s a lighthouse, a hut in a forest, a clock tower, a library, a wrecked ship on a beach. Nothing by way of explanation – no backstory, no instruction – is given to the player; there are no obvious goals or objectives, no enemies or threat of death. The player is left to explore the island, the scenery, the buildings and books. The soundtrack to the game is important, for it holds clues. As you travel around, you hear the sea, gulls, the wind; the squeak of rusty hinges, the turning of the pages of the books in the library, the roar of a furnace in a boiler room. The history of the island is revealed and the puzzle is solved through patience, observation and logic (and, in my case, a website that walked me through when I ran out of ideas). You find clues, discover hidden rooms.
I strolled the island at low tide and high, beneath blue skies by calm seas, in gales and in hissing rain. I stood by the lighthouse when waves bashing into its base ricocheted clouds of spray high into the air, and spindrift blew ashore to spatter the ground all around me. Gulls hovered above me. The soundtrack to my days was of wind on water, wind in my ears, the crash of waves and the cries and babble of birds. There was a notable lack of human chatter. Like Myst, the island drew me in and immersed me in its world. Here, too, in the real world, I was looking for clues, memories, mementoes. I explored and rooted around. I came to know every inch of that island. But sometimes I wondered what it was I had come there expecting to find.
The island was practically self-sufficient. If I found myself in need of, say, a bracket to fix the split in the door of the hide, or paint or filler, or a plank of wood or tools, screws, nails, bolts, a Petri dish, information to help identify a newly discovered plant or insect, I had only to root around or wait a day or two for inspiration before I’d find what I needed. Or something I could refashion to fit my purpose. I was always coming across things and thinking, Could be useful. I’ll put it up in the bothy.
