Island of Dreams

by Dan Boothby

  ‘Lovely,’ Sandy said. ‘I leave mackerel out for one that comes onto the pontoons down by Ebb ’n Flow. It doesn’t seem to mind the dog, teases him in fact.’

  We walked up to the cottage and I showed him what needed doing in the house.

  ‘An old house like this stuck out in the middle of the sea is bound to have damp. Really, that exterior wall wants repointing. It’ll need scaffolding, a proper builder’s job. But I’ll come across bright and early tomorrow and make a start on the interior.’

  A week later he came by to drop off some plasterboard and told me he’d be ‘back in a bit’. I didn’t see him again for a month.

  I visited Sandaig for the second time in 1987. I hadn’t been back since the midge-marred 1985 visit with Dara. Now I was eighteen and something of a drug-taker (a phase – most teenagers go through it; my own childhood among commune-dwelling hippies almost necessitated it), and I had the perfect job for a pothead: working the nightshift in a chocolate factory. I could sleep all day, smoke dope in the evenings with my stoner friends and float into the factory for ten. The work was totally mindless, the machines on the shop floor thumped to the rhythm of any pop song I wanted. And as the mists of my evening’s toking cleared and the extreme hunger that was a side effect came on, I found myself somewhere better even than a sweetshop – the place where sweets were made. The whole huge building was chock-a-block with chocolate-based product, ice-cold and straight off conveyor belts. I’d clock off at seven and shamble back to the flat to get stoned again before lapsing into a ten- to twelve-hour coma. Fair heaven. The wages were good too.

  That chocolate-factory autumn, before the first frosts began, I filled a Tupperware box with magic mushrooms, which pop up all over the place like pixies at that time of the year. I wanted to trip somewhere formidable, somewhere profound – not slumped in front of a muted TV listening to Pink Floyd, or staggering about in flat fields with inches of mud stuck to the treads of my second-hand paratrooper boots. Sandaig, to my mind, was ideal.

  I had bought a little white van. My flatmate Dominic was keen to come along for the ride. He’d never seen Scotland. And I had that boxful of magic mushrooms.

  We took the road north out of Norwich and kept going. The North-east was icy cold, a Siberian wind skating in off the North Sea. We headed over the border and on into the glens. At Spean Bridge we stretched our legs and I breathed in once more that mossy, peaty, mildewed air of thousands of acres of freedom. We drove through Glencoe in mist and reached Glenelg long after dark. The pub closed, I drove to the lay-by at Tormor and we slept in the back of the van.

  Cold and condensation woke us early. We swallowed forty magic mushrooms each, trekked down to Sandaig and as we approached Maxwell’s grave the sun stood clear of a cumulus cloud. I took it as a gesture of welcome.

  I showed Dominic the cairn beneath the dying rowan.

  ‘I feel a bit sick,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, me too. They’re taking effect.’

  ‘Come on. I’ll show you the waterfall.’

  Later, as we were walking across the strand to the islands, rain clouds rolled in from Skye and the wind picked up, snapping short waves onto the beaches. There was that sudden chill to the air, that inhalation before rage.

  Dominic looked up at the sky and turned to me.

  ‘Après moi . . .’ The rain fell in dollops. The only shelter was the old barn. We splashed across the burn and sprinted past Maxwell’s grave. Rain and then hailstones thundered down on what remained of the barn’s corrugated roof. A filthy disembowelled mattress lay in a corner, and scattered about on the concrete floor were rusting tin cans and the leftovers of a meal of mussels and crab.

  Some old tramp must have stayed here. Or who?

  We were soaked through and cold.

  Dominic slumped down on the cold concrete, stretched out his legs and wrapped himself tight in his khaki ex-army jacket. He pulled out a tobacco tin and set about rolling a cigarette.

  ‘We can get a fire going,’ I called out over the bashing on the roof. I took out my wallet, pulled out an old train ticket – from the last trip I’d made to see my family; the till receipt for a book; a library card; a photograph of two of my sisters on a beach in Morocco. I scrunched these things up and placed them on the floor. I plucked stuffing from the mattress, laid some still-dry leaves and twigs on top. But I’d lost a lot of clarity. My sisters, holiday smiles in the sun, looked up at me from the tinder on the floor. They, and home, felt far away, fragmented and unreachable. The rain and hail banged down on the roof like hammer blows while the wind worked its way under it, worrying at the nails that held the corrugated sheeting to the joists, rattling, gnawing, shaking, slamming. We weren’t wanted here.

  I juggled with matches and set light to the photograph and the ticket but the flame sputtered in the draft and went out. There were only a few matches left. Dominic asked me not to use any more. I asked for a cigarette and sat down opposite him.

  ‘This’ll stop soon,’ I said. ‘Listen. The rain’s starting to die down already.’

  Dominic took a drag on his cigarette, held out a hand for the tobacco tin. ‘Why did we come here?’

  I told him the story of Gavin Maxwell and the books he’d written and how they had seized me; how I wished I’d met him and come to live at Sandaig with him in the black-and-white photographed world of his books, exploring the wild coastline in boats, meeting the remarkable people he knew – people like Peter Scott (conservationist, ornithologist, and son of Scott of the Antarctic), James Robertson-Justice (bombastic, charismatic actor and falconer), Wilfred Thesiger (explorer of the Empty Quarter, author of Arabian Sands), David Stirling (founder of the SAS), assorted diplomats and spies, journalists, Algerian freedom fighters . . . the sort of people I thought I’d like to meet. How he’d lived adventurously, independently, with aristocratic panache. A risk-taker.

  I spoke with enthusiasm and we smoked in an effort to keep warm and I don’t think Dominic knew what I was going on about at all. Then the rain stopped and we went outside.

  We traipsed through wet rushes and bog myrtle and followed a sheep path up a hill. The ragged clouds lifted and blew away and from the top of the hill we had a fine view across the Sound of Sleat to the great brooding wall of Skye.

  I looked away to the boulder where Maxwell’s ashes lay. Sandaig was an isolated, intense arena. The silence and the violence and the beauty and ferocity of that place frightened me that day. A heaven can so easily become hell.

  We sat on lichened rocks and watched the sea, the Sound like a vast green swimming pool, so calming, the waves marching up the channel towards Kylerhea. We sat on the hill for a long time, the wind gusting through the blackberry bushes and the squall-ravaged, spindly, stunted trees. Then the wind abated a little and the rain returned, spotting hypnotically on the sea below us.

  On the way back to the van, the hissing of light rain a live-wire hum in my head, I picked some blackberries to eat and placed one on the boulder for Maxwell’s ghost. As we trudged back up the track to the road I tried to picture home and family and friends, but nothing came. There was only the now, and only this. When we reached the van I climbed into my sleeping bag and tried to sleep but sleep was evasive, my mind filling with psychedelic, kaleidoscopic swirls, endlessly turning and merging. Dominic sat in the passenger seat of the van, smoking and silent, and rain clattered gently on the roof.

  I visited Sandaig often after that, sometimes hitching up there, driving when I had money to run a car, but always alone; the visits punctuation marks in my life. I swam, and explored the islands and found a way to the upper reaches of the burn, where there are other waterfalls and brighter, less soulful stretches of water. I bought provisions from the Glenelg shop and drank in the now poshed-up pub, even on Sundays – which, over the years, even in the West Highlands, had become less special. I collected wood and cooked my suppers on a fire and retired to my tent when it rained. The weather is always against you at Sandaig, and it is a hard
place in which to exist for long under canvas.

  Year by year things changed, as Nature reclaimed what was hers. Dara and I had found the rusting remains of the boat trailer of Maxwell’s launch, the Polar Star, among undergrowth by the wall by the burn. This disintegrated to dust and four perished tyres. The twisted shell of a steel boat hull that I had first spied with a magnifying glass in one of the photographs in The Otters’ Tale sank further into the beach at the mouth of the burn. The rowan tree by Edal’s cairn – the rowan of the curse – rotted to nothing while the larch tree matured. The roof, and later the walls, of the barn where Dominic and I had sheltered collapsed. Only the totems placed around the plaques of the two gravestones remained, forever being blown away by the wind and replaced anew by fans.

  And always, on my visits, I found the croft well maintained and trim-looking – whitewashed, telephone line intact, an outside tap, a stack of fish boxes covered and pegged down nearby – but never occupied.

  I still didn’t quite know why Maxwell appealed to me so strongly. I hadn’t pulled the books, or myself, apart then. But he kept coming back to haunt me. It was as though he had his own little shrine in my head. I’d forget about him, move along in life and then, out of nowhere, in a dream (I would be at Sandaig and everyone from the books would be there, except Gavin Maxwell, who was always away, absent, unavailable to see me) or a moment of emptiness, there he’d be, back on my mind again. I guess that is how obsession is.

  As I became a little more informed about the ways of the world, I trawled library archives for books and articles about Maxwell. I viewed documentaries about him. I bought signed copies and first editions of his books. And I discovered that Maxwell’s friend, Raef Payne (‘the Eton schoolmaster from Wales’), rented the croft down at Sandaig. I sifted telephone directories covering Wales and shook out an address and phone number. I wrote to Raef asking, baldly, if I could stay in the croft sometime. In the directory for the Highlands and Islands I found the phone number of the croft. Once or twice I dialled to listen to it ringing. I pictured the bell by the guttering above the tap, clattering away hundreds of miles away to the north, across the emptiness, disturbing the peace of a still evening, or drowned out by the din of a gale, the roar of the waterfall, the crying of gulls. I couldn’t say why I telephoned. No one ever answered. And if someone had (‘Glenelg 266. Hello . . . ?’), I’d most likely have slammed down the receiver in a panic.

  I continued working at the chocolate factory until I had saved enough money to travel, then quit. I went abroad, stayed out till I was broke, returned to England and found myself another dead-end job, saved up again, went abroad again. Again and again. I hitched across Europe and down through Morocco, sailed into storms and out again. I was like a hamster on a wheel, going nowhere. On a trip to India I smoked so much dope I lost all sense of perspective, and when I got back to England I stopped taking drugs. I went back to school, then on to university to study Arabic.

  Douglas Botting’s biography, Gavin Maxwell: A Life, was published in 1993 and I bought my copy in London on my way out to Damascus, where I was to spend a year as part of my degree course. The biography was a dense, meaty read – revealing, yet misty in parts. (After writing it, Botting said how humbling it had been, seeing another’s life mapped out before him – the struggles and triumphs, how a life can be.) I read the book twice over, in my tiny room in Damascus down a little alleyway off The Street Called Straight, oblivious to the heat and dust and the calls to prayer. It fleshed out the bones of the potted biographies I’d read in the Coles’ and York’s student study guides for Ring of Bright Water, and aspects of Maxwell’s character hinted at in Maxwell’s Ghost and The White Island. And afterwards I felt less in awe of its subject. When the internet arrived a few years later, I trawled it for mention of Gavin Maxwell and the others in the myth. I moved to London and got a ‘proper job’ for a time. Then quit.

  I fell over, many times, and learnt that it’s best to relax into a fall and to roll with it. You get hurt less that way.

  Sandy Wood kept his own time. That was obvious. His work schedule was erratic and he’d turn up on the island at any time of the day or night to get on with the repairs.

  ‘When I take a job on,’ he told me, ‘I like to achieve perfection, and that takes time.’ It took him six weeks to replaster one wall and replace a strip of plasterboard in the Long Room, but I didn’t mind and I don’t think the trustees did either. Especially after Sandy told them he’d decided to do the repairs for free, to help a good cause.

  Over those weeks we became friends. Skivvying for Sandy – fetching and carrying while he got on with the more skilled work – allowed me to get to know him, though only a little, for he rarely discussed his past.

  ‘I’ve got plans, though,’ Sandy told me one evening as we sat in my room drinking wine. ‘Ebb ’n Flow is going to make a brilliant sail-training vessel for handicapped kids, disabled and that. She’ll be a ketch. The Forestry Commission are saving a couple of good straight sitkas I found for the masts, they’re practically giving them to me. I’ve got most of what I’ll need for the conversion stacked up on deck under the tarp, it’s just a question now of getting the time and some fine weather to crack on. I really want to get started.’ He sipped his wine and stretched out his legs to wiggle wet-socked toes in the warmth coming off the space-heater.

  Sandy didn’t look in a rush to crack on with anything, let alone his dream boat.

  ‘What’ll you tackle first?’ I asked, and gagged as I gulped down more of the vile wine Sandy had bought us. (‘Lidl’s cheapest!’ he’d said proudly when he’d handed me the bottle.)

  ‘Rip out all the old fishing gear – the derrick, net-shooter, drum, all that – and sell it for a packet to a scrappy I know.’

  These were huge, hefty, industrial-sized pieces of cast iron that would need cutting from the deck with an acetyl-ene torch and craned onto a lorry. It was questionable whether Fisherman’s Wharf would be able to take the weight of a lorry, a crane and all the scrap.

  ‘After that the wheelhouse’ll go. Then I can start on the decks.’

  ‘Ebb ’n Flow is a dog,’ I said. In vino veritas.

  Since my first tipsy visit to Sandy’s boat I’d gone there again, in daylight, and although he’d never allowed me below decks, I’d managed a peek into the wheelhouse. It was overflowing with junk, just as the decks were piled with junk, or what looked like junk to me. I told him so.

  ‘Oh, but it’s all useful stuff,’ Sandy assured me, pulling steaming socks away from the heater. ‘I’ve been collecting since I bought Ebb ’n Flow a couple of years back. There’re skips all over these isles just filled to the gills with plunder. People chuck out any old thing these days. It’s a crime. Just last month I got a whole zinc kitchen unit they were throwing away at the youth hostel. It’ll be perfect for the galley and shower unit. Cost a fortune new, it would.’

  ‘Ebb ’n Flow will never be seaworthy,’ I said. ‘Her engines are shot, her hull’s a sponge. She’s sinking as we speak. And some of that timber you’ve got under the tarpaulin is riddled with woodworm. The generator I saw looks like it’s been pulled out of the sea. It’s all corroded. There’re barnacles on it. Tow her to a beach and set her on fire, Sandy. Start again. Buy something that’s worth something.’

  Sandy shook his head.

  ‘It’s all good stuff. I’ll need it when I convert the boat.’

  But I’d seen this before. The father of one of my sisters (my family tree is exceedingly complicated and too multifaceted (and -fathered) to go into here) had the same illness – hoarding, the need to surround oneself with piles of possessions, stuff, useful and duff. It was more than being ‘a collector’, or the inability to say no to a bargain. The accumulation of other people’s cast-offs filled empty days. Last month’s finds were soon buried beneath this month’s treasures, with everything getting compacted into a stew of decomposing, disintegrating, moth-eaten, forgotten-about, now-where-did-I-put-it crap.
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  ‘Well, if you need a hand with the conversion, I’m keen to help,’ I said. ‘It’d be good to learn boat building.’

  Sandy nodded enthusiastically, ‘Once she’s converted to sail, after a few seasons with the sail-training, I’m going to take her down to New Zealand. It’s a wonderful country.’

  Sandy had never been to New Zealand, never been abroad. He was, I reckoned, in his late fifties, although when I’d asked him his age he’d dodged the question, as he dodged any enquiry into his past.

  ‘Well, how old are you?’ he’d asked me instead.

  ‘Thirty-six.’

  ‘So’m I.’

  ‘Come off it, Sandy,’ I’d said. ‘I reckon you’re . . . fifty-eight, maybe fifty-four . . .’

  But Sandy had just smiled and changed the subject.

  ‘When are you starting work on Ebb ’n Flow?’ I asked, pouring more poison into his glass.

  ‘I have to find a lock-up somewhere to store all the gear off the decks. It needs to be a very secure place though. Some of the gear is very valuable.’

  I couldn’t believe anyone else would ever want any of it.

  ‘They’ll take anything round here,’ Sandy said. ‘I had some bits taken the other night, bits of wood and that. I know who it was.’ He frowned. ‘Useful bits I was saving. They’d have been just right for shelving, and making bunk beds in the cabins.’

  Months later I was still trying to chivvy him along.

  ‘I’ve got almost everything I need now,’ he’d tell me, ‘I just need a place to store it so I can clear the decks, a lock-up or a garage in the village . . . has to be nearby though . . . otherwise it’ll take months just moving it off the boat.’