by Dan Boothby
‘An odd bunch, weren’t they?’ Sandy said, not really listening. ‘Look, can I use this board here? It’s a bit big but it’d do.’
‘Yes. Whatever you like,’ I said. ‘I’m going to clean this up and put it in the Long Room. It’s a bit of history, a piece of the island’s past. Part of the story.’
‘Well, whatever. But before you do, here . . . give us a hand with getting this board out, will you?’
There were ten of us on the writers’ masterclass – the youngest a gifted teenager from Stornaway, the oldest a septuagenarian ex-teacher from Mull. We read out loud our work, were given writing exercises by a ‘facilitator’, got drunk and grouched about how unappreciated we were. I went for long Heathcliffian walks along the Cromarty clifftops. One of our number – a poet – had received an Arts Council grant to buy her time to write her debut novel. We all wanted an Arts Council grant. Unlike some of us, the poet had real talent and deserved her award. Another had impressive contacts in the world of Gaelic literature – a tiny, incestuous world, we scoffed. Another had contacts in the world of London publishing, but we thought her writing derivative and dull. We bitched about the ‘facilitator’ and talked about plot and character and books, books, books. It is a lonesome business, writing books – stuck at a desk in a silent room all day grappling with inarticulacy and never knowing if what you are writing is any good. How can you ever know? It is a fine thing to meet other writers – the only folk who don’t think you mad or deluded or odd. It was a grand week.
I’d published guidebooks but that didn’t make me an author. Guidebooks don’t count. They’re compiled rather than written. And I didn’t feel like an author. The life of an author was special, and had something to do with acclaim.
I got an hour with the literary agent. I was told right away that Travels was too wordy, ‘too rich’ (meaning turgid and slow). I said I was thinking of writing a comic novel about a dwarf with Asperger’s syndrome, set in London and Marrakesh. ‘A silly thing,’ I offered obsequiously. ‘A trashy airport novel, kind of. Think The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time without the maths, crossed with a Paul Bowles novel.’
‘I’m not sure that we’re quite ready to laugh at dwarves just yet,’ said the agent, ‘or Asperger’s, for that matter.’
‘What about a book about hitchhiking around the world on yachts?’
‘Um . . . It’s not really—’
‘Right, well how about this: I grew up in a hippy commune in the Seventies, so it’s a book about that.’
‘Mmmm . . .’ The agent stared at a point on the wall above my head and muttered words that my ears, made deaf by self-delusion and a ton of hope, failed to catch and my mind interpreted as encouragement.
I still like to think that I wasn’t the only wannabe author the agent chose not to represent that day.
There was a Glaswegian on the masterclass who had out-thought his roots and gone to live up in the Shetlands – those treeless isles of the far north that lie closer to Norway than to Britain. All the Glaswegian’s stories featured road workers hunkered down out of the rain and wind in caravans and sheds on tea breaks, or bending double into gale-force winds and horizontal sleet as they hacked at verges by tarmac roads in the middle of nowhere. They were very funny stories. During our writing exercises I kept hearing a persistent thud-thud-thud-thud in the otherwise silent room. It took me a few days to narrow down where it was coming from.
‘Have you heard that thudding sound?’ I asked the Glaswegian when we were alone.
‘Aye, it’s me. I’ve got an artificial heart valve. Made from titanium and Teflon. Lasts forever, I’m told.’
He was about my age. He’d had a heart attack and been declared dead before the medics managed to massage his heart back to life. He’d nearly died again during the open-heart surgery having the valve fitted.
‘I guess you don’t fear anything any more,’ I said. ‘Not after that. You’ve been to the end of the line, looked over the edge, twice, and come back.’
‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘I live in constant fear, forever imagining the thudding has stopped. When there’s too much noise around me and I can’t hear it I start panicking.’
Back on the island I sat at the desk in the bothy and plotted what I should write next. It’d have to be a real sure-fire best-seller. Sometimes Sandy came across with his dog. Exasperated one day by my whining – about being overlooked and rejected, my lack of success, how I’d never be a real author – he told me to forget about it. ‘Either try harder, or shut up about it and talk about something else.’ As always, he had a point.
In April 1960 Maxwell acquired the male otter, Teko, as a possible mate for Edal. Unfortunately, Edal quickly made it clear that she would kill Teko if given the opportunity (otters are very territorial beasts). Another otter-keeper, besides Jimmy Watt, was required, as the two otters had to be fed, exercised and played with separately. Terry Nutkins, thirteen years old, arrived at Sandaig from London to spend the summer holidays looking after Teko and asked to stay on. Maxwell became Terry’s legal guardian.
Ring of Bright Water was published in September 1960 and Gavin Maxwell became hot property, gaining for the first time ‘a public’. Readers, the media and his publishers clamoured for more outpourings from his pen, more of the same, and money rolled in. Maxwell’s accountant asked him the following year: ‘How can I convince you that the last thing to do is to earn more money?’ A company was created to help defray the heavy tax demands. Electricity was run down the mountain to the house at Sandaig, telephones were installed. From now on Sandaig would be Maxwell’s primary residence and the Paultons Square house in London his pied-à-terre and southern office of Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Ltd.
Best-sellerdom brought improvements to Camusfeàrna in the form of heat and light and hot water, where before there had been damp, oil lamps and primus stoves, cold showers in the burn and a trek out into the night to find a place to poo. A Land Rover track was bulldozed to connect the house with the tracks that wound through the fir plantation above. A wooden prefabricated annex was bolted onto the main house to provide bathroom facilities and more rooms. Best-sellerdom bought freezers and big boats and fast vehicles, but it also brought legions of fans (often twenty or more a day) trooping down to Sandaig hoping to meet the famous author and pet his charming otters; which led to the erection of big red ‘PRIVATE’ signs and barricades, which in turn led to quarrels with the manager of the Eilanreach Estate over Maxwell’s increasingly proprietorial attitude towards, and expansion of, Camusfeàrna. (Maxwell’s tenancy agreement included the house and a small section of surrounding land only. Lord Dulverton refused to sell.) Beneath all this activity the idyllic retreat portrayed in Ring of Bright Water quickly sank. Perhaps as a reaction to this, Maxwell tried (and failed) to buy the island of Soay again.
An otter chews its food with its needle-like teeth, rather than bolting it as a dog does. Maxwell’s first otter, Mij, had been known to nip visitors. The first serious incident involving the Sandaig otters occurred in October 1960 when Edal attacked one of Maxwell’s friends. In May 1961 Teko flew into a rage and attacked a visitor. Three months later Edal attacked another visitor and on 27 August she mauled Terry Nutkins’s hands so savagely that his middle fingers had to be amputated. More attacks by both otters followed. All had to be hushed up – kept from locals and the press – owing to the adverse publicity it would have caused. After Edal went for Jimmy Watt in January 1962, Maxwell decided the animals could no longer be treated as part of the household and Teko and Edal were confined to their pens at Sandaig. The era of keeping otters as pets was over. It must have been a blow for all concerned – humans and otters alike – but such arrangements often fail. Most wild creatures reared by humans revert to wildness upon reaching maturity, however charming, cuddly and tame they have been as babies. The creatures we more normally call pets – cats and dogs – have taken millennia to domesticate (and even they on occasion show their savage side). But
it is a sad irony that Maxwell’s otters so soon became chains around his neck. He couldn’t get rid of them, for he made his living from them. And they had given him so much.
In 1962, aged forty-seven, Maxwell decided ‘to come in from the cold’, as he told his future biographer, and get married. Maxwell’s bride-to-be, Lavinia Renton (the ex-wife of one of his former SOE colleagues and a daughter of the courtier Sir Alan Lascelles), was a friend of long standing and for a very short while after the wedding it seemed things might work out all right. But the demands of marriage were too much for Maxwell. Lavinia was later to remark: ‘[Gavin] never grew up . . . Intellectually he was like Sophocles. But emotionally he was like Peter Pan. He had no idea how to cope with the idea of being loved.’6
Maxwell’s inability to do the right thing, by his wife and by himself, led to another nervous breakdown and ultimately, and very swiftly – within a few months – to separation and divorce.
By the end of 1962 Maxwell’s very cavalier attitude to money meant that he found himself broke again. He bought most things on tick, keeping accounts with tailors and boot makers as well as butchers and garages; he lived high on the hog and never kept track of his spending. He provided generously for the boys at Sandaig, but he built up a complicated empire and staffed it with teenagers (never the most reliable age group). Projects fell behind schedule, debts remained unsettled. He spent the winters ranging across North Africa and preferred it to be believed by all but his inner circle that he was always away, so he could never be called to account. Michael Cuddy, the young secretary of Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Ltd, composed letters to fans, associations, creditors and lawyers replete with excuses and delaying tactics. Maxwell was always ‘in the North’, ‘abroad’, ‘uncontactable’. Maxwell remained on the move, spending, leaving his charmed minions to pick up the pieces in his wake. Kathleen Raine wrote in The Lion’s Mouth: ‘Gavin had another quality which likewise owed, no doubt, to his birth: he had the gift of making us all his slaves. It came naturally to Gavin to initiate adventure, and to assign the parts to those who gladly joined him.’
Adolescents, naturally, refuse to remain in aspic. They mature, tend to resent attempts by parents (including adoptive parents) to control them, and they will inevitably want to fly the nest. Terry Nutkins left Maxwell’s employ in 1963. He told Maxwell’s biographer:
I never played at Camusfeàrna. I was never a boy [there]. From the moment I got on that night train [from London to go up to Sandaig] my life was serious . . . And yet I had so much . . .
Life wasn’t easy – the isolation, the ruggedness of it, all those rucksacks up and down the hill in the rain. There were days when I was absolutely fed up. I used to look at the ships going by down the Sound of Sleat and the scattered houses far away on Skye, and I’d think: ‘They’re all with their families and we haven’t got anything.’ There was an emptiness there, and I used to love it when people came to stay.
But I am grateful to Gavin in many ways. I had a life unlike any other boy in Britain, Jimmy excepted.
After Terry left Sandaig, a series of teenagers was engaged to help Jimmy, but none stayed long. Jimmy Watt stayed (he would eventually leave in 1966), looking after the provisioning and maintenance of the household, the two otters, the assorted vehicles, the boats, and Maxwell when he was there. If you look closely at the photographs in the Camusfeàrna books, Jimmy’s hands are more often than not covered in oil. They remind me of Master Dip the Dyer’s son’s hands in the Happy Families card game; Maxwell’s hands, by comparison, are always immaculate, almost manicured.
Maxwell alighted at Sandaig between travels, and returned there to write the second book in his Camusfeàrna trilogy, The Rocks Remain, in a little over a month. The book, like its predecessor, was a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic and Maxwell used some of the proceeds to buy the two lighthouse keepers’ cottages at Ornsay and Kyleakin. Richard Frere carried out the necessary alteration and renovation of the cottages and his wife, Joan, designed the interiors. The idea was to rent them out to holidaymakers.
In June 1963 Maxwell rolled his Land Rover near Glenelg and as the car turned over, his left foot became jammed in the pedals. Extricating himself, Maxwell managed to damage some blood vessels in his foot so severely that the blood flow became impaired and his foot started to die. In October 1963, while undergoing an operation (a lumbar sympathectomy) to repair the damage, Maxwell caught a hospital bug, which led to further operations and a prolonged period of convalescence. He was incapable of walking far for months afterwards and spent the summer of 1964 lame and housebound at Sandaig, working on two books simultaneously: a memoir of his childhood, The House of Elrig, and Lords of the Atlas, a book charting the rise and fall of a Moroccan Berber dynasty, the House of Glaoui.
A spectre from the past dragged Maxwell further into debt in 1965 when an action for libel was brought against him and his publishers by an Italian involved in the events Maxwell had written about in God Protect Me from My Friends, his 1956 book about the Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano. Maxwell lost the case and was ordered to pay damages as well as costs on both sides.
That August the directors of Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Ltd convened to discuss Maxwell’s finances (i.e. his debt crisis) and recommended that the two lighthouse keepers’ cottages be sold, Teko and Edal sent to a zoo, and Sandaig, which was reckoned to be costing the company £7,000 a year to run, closed down. Maxwell’s answer was, predictably, non-contrite and wayward. He fired his office manager, Michael Cuddy, installed himself as Managing Director of the company and sold the lease of the Paultons Square house.
Money was coming in from the publication of The House of Elrig, the rental of the lighthouse keepers’ cottages, sales of previous books and Maxwell’s other literary pursuits, but nowhere near enough to discharge his debts. It wasn’t just that Maxwell’s spending was out of control; it had never been under control – ever. He was in hock to everyone, including his publishers, and the chickens had finally come home to roost. Creditors pressed for payment. Then Maxwell played his masterstroke. He invited Richard Frere to take over the running of Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Ltd. What he was offering Frere was the managing directorship of a bankrupt company whose sole purpose was to fund the spendthrift pirouettes of a chaotic, manic-depressive genius.
Richard Frere must have been as extraordinary a figure as Gavin Maxwell, for he accepted and set to, it seems, with relish, gradually extracting the company from the quagmire of bills and unpaid invoices. (An Englishman who’d transplanted to the Highlands for, at first, the climbing, Frere wrote several books about his life in the Highlands and led an extremely active and varied life.)
By the time Jimmy Watt left Sandaig in May 1966, Maxwell had been obliged to come to terms with the recommendations of his company directors, and perhaps he felt that Sandaig – Camusfeàrna – had died with the departure of Jimmy. He agreed for Sandaig to be closed down and the otters sent to a zoo.
In July 1966, at a low ebb, Maxwell went to stay at his brother Aymer’s house on the Greek island of Euboea. By chance Kathleen Raine was holidaying at a friend’s house nearby. Raine had been writing a memoir, The Lion’s Mouth. Much of it was about her love for Maxwell, part of it told of the curse she had laid upon the rowan tree at Sandaig all those years ago. One evening Raine and Maxwell met and – strange motives – she gave him her manuscript to read.
The otter attacks, the disastrous marriage, his car crash and lameness, his maladies both mental and physical, the chaos of his life, the crucifying debt, Terry’s departure and Jimmy’s wish to break away from his mentor, the end of the Sandaig idyll . . . Maxwell wouldn’t be the first to look for someone else to blame for personal misfortunes.
That winter he decamped to Tangier for six months and wrote, in my opinion, his best book – Raven Seek Thy Brother.
The Bright Water Visitors’ Centre reopened for the Easter school holidays. One of the trustees took over the running of the Centre and John the chairman g
ot down to some serious form-filling. Applications for funding were completed and posted and we all waited for various august committees to meet, deem the Kyleakin Lighthouse Island Trust worthy, and then send large cheques.
I revised my tour-guide spiel, donned my binoculars and waited at the gate at 2 p.m. every other day for visitors. Pete and I continued to take it in turns to lead the tours. A succession of holidaymakers came to spend a week in the cottage. In the evenings I retired to my room and half-listened to their conversations coming through the walls, the tumbling of pots and pans in the kitchen, their laughter and, sometimes, singing.
People came to the island with their stories, adding pieces to the jigsaw – a man who’d acquired Maxwell’s old Mercedes 300SL Roadster (registration plate number: HOT32) and had stored it away (‘It’s gathering dust in my lock-up, a restoration project, but you know, these things, they take time.’); people came by who had known Maxwell, others who’d heard stories about him: that he’d sired a son by a crofter on Knoydart, that he’d been blackmailed out of a fortune after some homosexual entanglement, that he was bad with animals, negligent, evil (‘That bloody man! He was a cruel, rude bastard,’ one woman from the village spat). A Canadian visitor told me stories of spending the summer of 1970 working for Alexander, the man who bought the island after Maxwell’s death, ferrying tourists across from Kyleakin Beach in a leaky rowing boat to the miniature zoo they’d created. I heard rumours (there were always rumours) that Jimmy and Terry didn’t get on – that there had been jealousy because Maxwell had chosen Jimmy and not Terry as his legal heir, that Terry had gone on to inherit a fortune from Johnny Morris, his co-presenter on the long-running children’s TV show Animal Magic, that Jimmy was a kind and gentle man, that he was a bad man. Visitors came, we stood in the sun and looked down the loch and mused, reflected on life.
