by Dan Boothby
‘And . . . ?’
‘I’ve asked around, but there’s nothing going.’
And there never was. Sandy slept with his dog somewhere down in the hold of his sinking, rotting dream, growing older, freewheeling, finding small-scale projects to fill his days; surrounding himself with jetsam, and waiting, just until he found the perfect place to store his stuff so he could clear the decks and begin. One day, I thought, they’ll find him dead in the bilge of his dream with his dog standing guard over all that crap. Sandy Wood was a kind, lonely man. He was my friend, and he taught me to sail.
Around the time Sandy finally completed the work on the cottage (and Sandy’s idea of ‘achieving perfection’ left me scratching my head), the villages started to go into what felt like hibernation. Traffic over the bridge dwindled, coach parties tailed off and the holidaymakers faded away. Yachts no longer came nodding past the island. The Wednesday Workcrew was suspended. The villagers appeared tranquil, prepared for the long winter ahead, their work done, the money brought in. Autumn is a short season in the Highlands.
I spent weekdays making bird boxes to put up in the spring, repairing the weather-tortured bench in front of the house, clearing an area near Teko’s memorial where the lighthouse keepers’ wives had once hung their washing. I did some minor repair-work to the lighthouse and the lighthouse shed. When the weather was very bad I worked in the bothy on my book. I hauled my dinghy high up the slipway and tied it down, secure I hoped from raging winter gales. And in the evenings I reread Gavin Maxwell’s books, and books about Gavin Maxwell.
Gavin, the last of his mother’s brood, was born on 15 July 1914.
Gavin’s father, Aymer, was a Maxwell of Monreith – a baronetcy in Galloway; Gavin’s mother, Lady Mary, was a daughter of the seventh Duke of Northumberland. Both families were adherents of the Catholic Apostolic Church, believing in the imminence of the Second Coming and the restoration of the twelve apostles. Gavin’s delivery hadn’t been straightforward, and it left him with five strawberry birthmarks down the inside of his right forearm and a predisposition to ailments and sickness. Three months after Gavin was born, in October 1914, his father was killed in a German artillery barrage in Antwerp. It wasn’t so much that Gavin lost a father; in truth he never knew one. Lady Mary never remarried and brought up her four children alone, with the aid of attendant servants, tutors, and her very high-powered family.
Lady Mary and her children (a girl and three boys) moved between the House of Elrig on the Wigtownshire moors and family-owned properties in England. The Maxwells weren’t royalty, but weren’t far removed. Gavin and his siblings were brought up at a time when social and class mobility was practically nil. Class rules forbade fraternization (i.e. playing) with local tykes. You had to stick with your own kind. So you were left to wander the big empty parklands, with often only your pets and extended family for company. Such an isolated childhood isn’t the best training for the social minefields beyond the lodge gates.
In 1924, at the age of ten, after being taught by a series of private tutors, Gavin was sent to prep schools (he attended three) and four years later went on to public school (Stowe). Vignettes from this time2 may help you to envisage this child: a senior boy at a prep school advising Gavin, ‘You’ve got to learn to be like other people’; a headmaster’s report on Gavin while he was at Stowe:
[Gavin] appears utterly incapable of any form of concentration. Gavin’s manner suggests the most perfect indifference to what is going on, and he has quite definitely a vein of indolence in him.
A Stowe contemporary remembered him as ‘always looking dreamily out of the window or else sketching in his note-book,’ and added: ‘out of a form of about thirty boys Gavin was invariably twenty-seventh to thirtieth in every subject every term.’
Another described him as ‘just all screwed up’.
Gavin was always away in his head somewhere else, and by his own account made few friends while at school. He was more interested in collecting and looking after the semi-tamed wild animals that Stowe allowed boys to keep. Then, on his sixteenth birthday, Gavin collapsed with severe internal bleeding (later diagnosed as Henoch-Schönlein purpura). He left the school grounds in an ambulance and was to spend the best part of a year convalescing, isolated at home with his mother and sister, and often bedridden for fear that movement would set off the bleeding again. Anthony Dickins, Maxwell’s friend at Stowe and afterwards, opined in an essay he wrote for London Magazine that this ‘reduction to a state of almost total physical weakness and dependence’ acted like a trauma on Gavin’s psyche:
so that one part of his psyche remained, like a gramophone needle in a rut, at an early teenage stage of development, while other parts continued developing normally. It was as if one part of him were constantly seeking a return to complete the missing portion of the story that had ended so abruptly.
And there is a theory that writers (in my view some, but by no means all) are formed from similar protracted and enforced breaks in the routines of their formative years; an exile from the world that expands beyond the norm the interior imaginative life of the individual. And creative writing, especially autobiographical writing (which Maxwell excelled at), is often about imposing order on the past, a reliving and retelling of life as it should have been and not necessarily as it was.
Once recovered, and perfectly naturally for a member of the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ set, Gavin took up, in a big way, stalking, game shooting and wildfowling. In the spring of 1933, after attending a crammer, he went to Hertford College, Oxford to study Estate Management. Being not wildly interested in estate management as a subject (or career), Maxwell attended lectures on zoology, medicine and art outwith his own school of studies. His peers considered him rather aloof, ‘raffish and well-heeled’ (he roared around in a Bentley). He graduated in 1937, with a third-class degree.
Through the law of primogeniture – the system whereby the eldest son inherits all – Gavin’s eldest brother, Aymer, would inherit the Monreith estate, which left Gavin casting around for ‘something to do’.
He worked for a year as a travelling salesman for a small agricultural firm in Hereford. Over the summers of 1938 and 1939, taking up a suggestion by fellow wildfowler (and future conservationist and founder of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge), Peter Scott, Maxwell went to Finnmark in Norwegian Lapland to photograph and study the Steller’s eider duck. Maxwell was stuck on becoming an explorer – to travel to remote places, have adventures and then write about them. A good plan, but he lacked the constitution, both mentally and physically (he was plagued by ill-health all his life).
Maxwell joined the Scots Guards in August 1939. Health problems (a duodenal ulcer, an enlarged heart, beside others) precluded him from active service. He found his way into SOE – the Special Operations Executive – a clandestine ‘secret army’ established by Churchill in 1940 to prepare agents for sabotage, espionage, reconnaissance and resistance operations behind enemy lines.
During World War II, movement north of the Caledonian Canal was restricted. It was a secret country up there. Twenty-five thousand commandos passed through the basic-training centre at Achnacarry House near Spean Bridge. Some of the paramilitary and commando training of SOE agents took place in requisitioned country houses and shooting lodges around Arisaig. Many SOE agents came from the countries that were under Nazi occupation. Each nationality was billeted at a different base: among others, the French at Moeble Lodge, Czechs at Garramor House, Poles at Camusdarach, Belgians at Rhubana Lodge and Norwegians at Glaschoille House on Knoydart. About 3,000 SOE agents trained at these lodges in close combat, fieldcraft, explosives and demolition, and signalling. Then they were sent into Axis territory, where many met their deaths.
Maxwell, with a facility with guns and fieldcraft learnt whilst out stalking, wildfowling and on grouse moors, became a small-arms and fieldcraft instructor.
SOE was meritocratic – it didn’t matter who you were, who you knew
or where you schooled; safe-cracking, burglary and forgery being as important to the cause as straight soldiering. Maxwell’s colleagues were an eclectic, adventurous bunch. He was free of the usual strictures of forces life. He set up home where he wished and kept a lobster boat and a motorcycle. He had a good war.
Now, I realize that biographers sometimes fall prey to the same sin of omission as some statisticians – plucking facts to fit their purpose – but I would like to include here the words of a former SOE colleague of Maxwell’s:
[Gavin] was very witty, very entertaining, very well-bred; and though he could be irritable and prickly, he was usually great to be with and cheered people up a lot.
He was also quite the most neurotic person I have ever met in my life.3
An SOE psychiatrist profiled Maxwell as having a personality perpetually at war with itself, experiencing conflicting emotions and contradictory attitudes. I’m no shrink, but add to this diagnosis Maxwell’s manic-depressive tendencies and the emotional trauma of his year-long convalescence and you’ve a recipe, I reckon, for an artistic, impossible personality.
Before the war had been played out, the SOE training camps were run down. Maxwell was invalided out in November 1944, with the rank of Major. During the summer of 1943 Maxwell had visited Soay – a small isle off Skye – and decided to buy it, planning to earn interest on his investment from feu-duties (land rent) and fishing rights. And by chance he found a future occupation – hunting basking sharks.
Basking sharks are massive – thirty feet and more in length – and the oil in their liver was a valuable commodity once, used in the production of cosmetics and much else. Gavin Maxwell wasn’t the first or the last adventurer to go chasing these behemoths around the Hebrides (and Anthony Watkins and Patrick Fitzgerald O’Connor also wrote books about doing so). Maxwell bought boats, took on Tex Geddes (a fellow SOE instructor – of explosives and boat-handling) and others, and employed the Soay islanders at the processing plant he had built on the island.
The story of Soay Shark Fisheries has been recounted by Maxwell himself in Harpoon at a Venture. It is a well-written book about a short story. By the spring of 1948, after only three seasons, the basking shark venture was over and Maxwell had lost almost all of his capital. He was thirty-four years old.
Retreating to Monreith, broke and, not surprisingly, depressed, Maxwell picked himself up and embarked on a new scheme (all his life his head was full of schemes) – to transform himself into a society portrait painter. Painting, illustration, art, had always been hobbies. He had formidable social connections, access to stately drawing rooms throughout the land. He took instruction and willed himself into his new role, but as Kathleen Raine was to write in a memoir, ‘his paintings were extremely conventional’, and he knew it.
Around this time Maxwell was offered the lease of the house at Sandaig by his friend and Oxford contemporary Anthony Wills (later Lord Dulverton) – of Wills tobacco and cigarettes – who had recently bought the Eilanreach estate, on which Sandaig lies.
Maxwell moved to London, got a few commissions for portraits, and tried to find his way again. He was reliant financially now on his mother and his brother Aymer (who had by this time inherited Monreith and the baronetcy). The collapse of a romantic relationship pulled a final rug from beneath his feet and left him floored. He suffered a nervous breakdown.
The (very sporting) psychiatrist (a Harley Street practitioner, naturally) who treated Maxwell for depression at this time advised him that ‘the best thing to do if you feel like killing yourself is to go off and do something really dangerous.’ So Maxwell took to competitive driving, hurling his 3.5-litre Rolls Bentley around the racetracks of Silverstone and Goodwood.
In August 1949, at a house in Chelsea, Gavin Maxwell was introduced to Kathleen Raine.
Four
STAYING IN
Before I go forward I’d like to take you back, just for a short while, to when I was nineteen, before Botting’s excellent biography appeared and when I still knew so little. For I met Raef Payne, Maxwell’s great friend and the renter of the croft at Sandaig, that September of 1988, at his house, which wasn’t in Wales as I’ve written, but on the outskirts of the partisan village of Llanymynech, which keeps a foot in both camps, sited as it is on the England–Wales border.
I’d hitched across England and Wales to southern Ireland and was on my way back to Norfolk. Eire in those pre-EU days was one of the poorest nations in Western Europe, made up of hospitable and talkative people. I was given lifts by farmers driving their pigs to market and beckoned in by mothers taking carloads of kids to school. A very drunken man on his way home from an afternoon’s drinking stopped his car for me and complained as we swerved along on our way about the impossibly high car-insurance premiums in Eire. ‘They say it is due,’ he told me, ‘to the high number of motor accidents that occur, inexplicably, on our quiet rural roads. I can’t understand it.’
Along the coast roads of south-west Ireland my path kept crossing with that of a fellow hitcher called James, a New Yorker. He seemed eternally tired. We ended up lift-sharing – the one already moving along in a vehicle getting his ‘driver’ to stop for the other if he was seen standing on the side of the road ahead. James kept falling asleep in the vehicles that picked him up. ‘Moving hotels,’ he called them.
On my way to Dublin to catch the ferry home to England, leaving the charmless industrial town of Limerick, I walked backwards, with a raised thumb, for miles. The rain that day was vile. Desperate for a lift, as a motorist advanced towards me I fell to my knees and held up my hands in prayer. The car stopped and I got in.
The driver of the car was an Englishwoman in her thirties. A toddler was strapped into a child’s seat. I asked the woman what she was doing in Ireland and she told me the following story:
‘I originally came to live in Ireland with a man from County Clare I’d met in London, where I’d been working. I’d fallen for his charm and the blarney and he persuaded me to come back with him to Ireland. But our love fell apart, as so many couples’ love does, and eventually I left him. We hadn’t been together long enough to talk babies. I think I was afraid of settling down and so was he.
‘I got my own flat in Limerick City and a receptionist job at the Bauxite factory down on the Shannon Estuary. It was undemanding work, an undemanding life really. But the constant rain got me down and I didn’t feel at home among the Irish, however pleasant and welcoming they may be. I missed home.
‘My dad’s an engineer and at that time he and my mum lived in Zaire, in Africa, where he was working on water projects. I saved money, packed in the job and the flat and flew out to stay with them. I wanted sun and a total change of atmosphere and to be among people who knew me well and loved me. I thought I’d stay in Africa six months or so, relax a bit, sort out some kind of long-term career plan, then go back to the UK.
‘A week after I arrived I met a metallurgist, Paul. We fell in love, got married and ended up staying in Zaire seven years. Last year Paul got offered a job with perks we couldn’t refuse, at the Bauxite factory back here on the Shannon Estuary. I’m very pleased to be back. And it felt like coming home. This feels like home.
‘The Bauxite factory, Limerick, Ireland, the Irish: they’re the same as when I left seven years ago, they’ve hardly changed at all. It’s not about place, or work, or the people around you. Do you see what I mean?’
The ferry from Dublin docked in Holyhead after midnight and I was one of the last foot passengers shooed out into the cold dread night. It was too late to hitch and I couldn’t face unpacking my tent so I found a roundabout outside town and lay on the springy turf to snooze until dawn. It started to rain. I still couldn’t face unpacking my tent so trudged off and found shelter under a boat at the yacht club. At first light I walked back to the road and stuck out my thumb.
I dozed through most of the lifts that morning – catnapping my way through Wales – and awoke in late afternoon near Llanymynech. I got the dri
ver to drop me off and after a short walk came to the driveway of a modest Georgian country house. A sign on the gate stated that members of the Caravan Club were welcomed. An ideal excuse for an introduction presented itself to my mind. I walked up the driveway. A grey-haired man of about sixty was weeding a flowerbed.
‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I saw the sign and wondered if you might have somewhere I could pitch a tent for the night.’ Then for some reason (guilelessness?), I immediately blew my cover: ‘Are you Raef Payne?’
‘I am indeed,’ the man said and straightened up to take me in. ‘I’m afraid we’ve nowhere for tents.’ He paused. I’d been hitching, and camping beside smoky fires, for a week. I didn’t look very tidy. ‘But I could offer you a bed for the night and a bath, if that would be of any use to you.’
I nodded and followed Raef into the hall. Introduction effected, I forgot about the subterfuge; I was tired. ‘I wrote to you once,’ I blurted out to his back, ‘about renting the croft at Sandaig.’
‘Aha!’ Raef said. He turned and smiled delightedly. ‘Yes, I remember. I’m sorry I never replied,’ and he let me down gently, telling me the Eilanreach Estate allowed him the use of the croft on the condition that he only used it himself.
‘And it’s extremely basic inside. You’d do better to rent one of the other houses on the estate. There’s even Tormor, up on the road above Sandaig.’
But fixated as I was on Sandaig, none of the others would do.
Raef offered me a drink and showed me his house. In his study a high bookcase was crammed with Maxwell’s books – paperbacks, hardbacks, foreign editions. Maxwell’s portrait, painted in oils by Raef, hung on a wall.
He had spent almost the whole of his life at Eton – as scholarship boy, as a classics master and seventeen years as a house master. Now he was retired, he told me, ‘on gardening leave’.
