Island of Dreams

by Dan Boothby

  The next morning I came across more mauled corpses. The idea of a wildcat living on the island was flattering (they’re extremely elusive and shy), but a trip into Kyle and a ‘LOST’ notice in the window of the supermarket revealed the nature of the beast.

  I telephoned a young woman in the village, who squealed with joy before bursting into tears. She arrived swiftly at the gate of the island clutching a large wickerwork cage and the arm of her sister. I left them alone to wander the island and withdrew to my room with a book. After an hour or so there was a knock on the door. The woman stood clutching the cage. I bend down to peer inside. A very fat ginger tomcat yowled and hissed, raised a claw and spat at me. The young woman remained tearful.

  ‘It must have been just so terrible for him,’ she mewed, ‘lost in all those brambles and alone in the freezing cold without any food or milk.’

  I told her about the slaughtered voles. ‘I’ll bet he had a wonderful time,’ I said. ‘And he definitely ate well.’

  ‘But he’s so miserable. Look!’ she sobbed, holding the cage on high. The spitting psychopath snarled and clawed at the bars of his cage. ‘Just you let me get out of here so I can rip your head off,’ was the look on his face.

  That afternoon a short, olive-skinned man in his mid-fifties, immaculately dressed, almost regimental in his bearing, stood waiting at the gate for a tour. There was only him that day.

  ‘Come to look at the lighthouse,’ he said.

  We meandered down the path past the bothy to the Long Room and I began my talk on the history of the island and the Trust and Maxwell. After a few minutes I could see the man was getting impatient.

  ‘Are we going to see the lighthouse next?’ he said. I locked up and took him down the cobbled path to the lighthouse, and shortly we were standing out on the balcony, gazing over the island and the sea. The man looked relaxed now. He breathed in deeply, sighed, straightened up.

  ‘The tower and gangway are in a bit of a sorry state, I know,’ I said. ‘The big hope for us is the National Lottery Heritage Fund. We’ve applied to them and other charities for funding and if we get it we can renovate the lighthouse. We should be hearing back from them soon.’ And if the applications were turned down, I knew, we wouldn’t be able to renovate the lighthouse and the Trust would continue to struggle for its survival.

  And I had been taking stock of my own situation. My savings were running low and I’d no money coming in. I’d been living on a shoestring for years and I was getting fed up with always being broke, dodging around, everything being second hand; of buying richer people’s cast-offs, picking up what others dropped. I was sliding towards my forties and still hadn’t any of the trappings expected of a successful modern man. Where were the wife and kids, the house and garden, the career path and a snug, steady income? All these had passed me by, while friends of my own age were now deep into familydom, safe within the walls of their chosen career, drawing a salary that increased incrementally year on year. They had pension plans; I owned a pallet-load of books in a barn somewhere down south and that was about it. Old friends and I were drifting apart, and whenever we spoke on the telephone a noticeable gulf had opened up between us.

  ‘I used to be a lighthouse keeper, you know,’ the man said. ‘On the Gower in Wales at the end. But I moved around too. All over, I went. Loved it, I did.’

  The man leant back against the railings. ‘It was a good life, lighthouse keeping, and they looked after you. Job for life, I thought.’

  We climbed back down the lighthouse stairs and stood yakking on the gangway under a light drizzle. I asked the man where he worked now, now that there were no more lighthouse keepers left.

  ‘Work in a dog-food factory just outside Swansea, I do,’ he said, ‘Hate it, I do.’

  We walked on round the island in the rain.

  Workcrew Wednesdays went and came. The day I’m remembering, Marcus was away over the other side of the island flame-gunning the paths. John the chairman was hacking at the brambles with his long-handled scythe. I had a tour of one – a handsome grey-haired woman in a blue and white polka-dot dress. She wore large, gold hoop earrings and was one of those rare people who possess a butterfly mind, and it had been a long tour because we had found so much to talk about. We were leaning against the lighthouse wall in the mid-afternoon sun, enjoying the warmth of the day and the meeting of minds, looking across to Kyleakin Beach, discussing the Trust, the island, life, and Maxwell. I’d been rereading Botting’s biography.

  ‘In the end,’ I said, ‘you could make a case that he chose to live in such inaccessible places because of his sexuality. Remote, difficult to get to, away from prying eyes. He could bring whomever he liked up here and no one could see what was going on. And all those winters in Morocco . . . He wouldn’t have been the first or the last to go there looking for young men. Don’t you think Maxwell’s homosexuality provoked the way he lived his life?’

  In these modern times we tend to forget that up until 1967 homosexuality was illegal in England and Wales, and remained illegal in Scotland until 1980. A homosexual stayed in the closet to stay out of gaol and out of the press. There’s a passage in Richard Frere’s book about an evening in the lighthouse cottage. Frere had gone across to the island on company business and while there witnessed Maxwell raging at Andrew Scot, upbraiding him for misdemeanours both real and imagined. Scot was sent to his room. Cutting the uneasy silence that followed, Maxwell said to Frere: ‘Can you not understand? That boy will destroy me.’ When I had first read that, I’d thought Maxwell must have been raving, deluded, paranoid. He was unhappy and isolated. The Sandaig fire had recently destroyed almost everything he owned and, although he didn’t know it, he was critically ill and only months away from the grave. Almost the only thing he had left was his reputation.

  Maxwell wasn’t keen on Andrew Scot making friends in the villages or spending too long away from the island. Because he was terrified Scot might go gossiping and let the cat out of the bag? Scot would have seen and heard a lot, been privy to some of Maxwell’s secrets while living with him. It is no wonder that Maxwell became paranoid after relations broke down between Scot and him.

  ‘Perhaps it was well known up here anyway,’ the woman said, ‘Maxwell’s sexuality.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  The woman thought for a moment. ‘I think too much emphasis is placed on a person’s sexual persuasion these days. Why should it matter what anyone “is”? Also, it was a very different world forty years ago. When I was a young woman, if a man kissed me I thought it was because he liked me, I didn’t know it meant he wanted to go to bed with me. We were much more innocent back then.’

  Sometimes, on tours, I’d stand with a group of visitors in the Long Room in front of the photographs of Maxwell, chatting about his life, and someone would pipe up, ‘So he never married then?’ and someone else might smirk and there’d be whispers.

  ‘Homosexuality was as common then as it is today,’ the polka-dot butterfly woman said. ‘It’s always been there. Criminalizing something just sends it underground. A lot of homosexuals sublimated their urges in those days – shut themselves away in the priesthood or became schoolmasters or dons.’

  ‘And look what’s come bubbling up to the surface as a result of that,’ I said.

  The woman grimaced. ‘So much, then, for trying to run away from what you are. As for whether he was the other thing . . .’

  ‘It lingers around him, boys.’

  ‘Not everyone acts on their urges or, for that matter, their inclinations. I don’t know whether Gavin Maxwell wanted to corrupt young boys or not. I know there’s always been the whispering, but if he had been a paedophile I think there would have been accusations of impropriety or sexual abuse by now. The rest, unless someone comes forward, is speculation and innuendo.’

  Perhaps Maxwell just liked having teenagers around him, much as a certain kind of heterosexual male will be more likely to employ a pretty young woman over one who is losing
her looks and has a more jaded view of the world and of him. Maxwell always remained a bit of an adolescent himself, part of him always stuck at sixteen. And teenagers are cheaper to employ, and more biddable than adults.

  Maxwell was also involved with Braehead Secondary School in Fife. The coeducational school’s progressive headmaster, R. F. Mackenzie, was a firm believer in and proselytizer for the importance of outdoor pursuits (mountain climbing, sailing, etc.), as opposed to organized competitive sports, as part of a rounded education. Maxwell supported Mackenzie’s theories and wrote in his introduction to Mackenzie’s Escape from the Classroom:

  [R. F. Mackenzie] believes that intimate contact with the countryside, as part of a term’s curriculum, can build and sustain a child’s personality despite parental and other disorders of background.

  . . . In nature a child senses an order and security often lacking in his home surroundings, and thus becomes part of a unity elusive in urban upbringing.

  In the early 60s Maxwell had groups of Braehead schoolchildren and their teachers down at Sandaig exploring the sea and hills around. Maxwell’s schooldays had been unhappy and he hadn’t much belief in traditional teaching systems. He was interested in people and he was interested in pedagogy and comparative psychology.

  For many years Maxwell supported financially Ahmed ben Lahsen Tija, a young Moroccan he had employed as a guide, translator and companion during his winters in Morocco, and who had helped him research and illustrate Lords of the Atlas. For over a decade, Maxwell also sponsored a Sicilian who, in the 1950s, had helped him with research for God Protect Me from My Friends and The Ten Pains of Death. (Maxwell put this man – who referred to him in his letters as padrino ‘godfather’ – through medical school and only discontinued support in 1966, when he was staving off bankruptcy.) Does there necessarily need to have been something sinister behind Maxwell’s association with teenagers?

  Jimmy Watt was fifteen and about to leave school when Maxwell interviewed him in 1958. Jimmy remained in Maxwell’s employ until he was twenty-two years old. He remained close until Maxwell’s death, and spoke of him as a father figure. Terry Nutkins’s story is stranger. He went to live at Sandaig full-time in the Easter of 1961, as a thirteen-year-old. Maxwell became his legal guardian, with the consent of Terry’s parents, and gave written assurance that he would provide the boy with three hours of schooling a day. These days such an arrangement almost certainly would not be allowed. As my polka-dot friend said, we were much more innocent back then.

  When I was fifteen and first read Maxwell’s Camusfeàrna books I saw nothing odd about a middle-aged man living with a couple of teenage boys, otters and dogs in a place that was a cross between an Outward Bound centre and a zoo. In fact it seemed perfect and I wished I could have been part of it, living with them. What a wonderful world for a teenage boy, I thought. Only now does it strike me how strange it was for a man (whatever his sexual preference) to employ young teenagers to go and live and work for him in a house miles away from others. It seems bizarre now, and highly suspect to a mind that has lost its innocence residing in much more suspicious, amoral and knowing times. I have never come across a similar setup. A fog of uncertainty can only be dispelled by facts. Whether in reality there was anything untoward going on only the otter boys know for sure, and the men they are now haven’t mentioned anything. I would have thought that if either of these men associated Sandaig with dreadful events during their boyhood they’d have wanted to get as far away from the place and its associations as possible. Yet once they left Sandaig, after making lives elsewhere, when they were in a position financially to do so, they returned. Today, Jimmy Watt lives within sight of Sandaig, and Terry Nutkins, until his death from leukaemia in September 2012, lived with his brood only a mile or two away from that place.

  On 26 July, surrounded by a royal-blue sea lit by a bright orange sun in a royal-blue sky, Pete and I were idling in a warm breeze gossiping. We were standing side by side in front of the cottage, each partly listening to the bletherings of the other, but mostly taking in the goings-on in the villages across the water and scanning for boats, otters, dolphins and interesting birds. Pete was deep into a bafflingly tedious explanation as to why he’d not be able to take his next tour and could I do it for him, when the pretty Hebridean Princess cruise ship swept out of the Kylerhea Narrows and steamed towards Kyle of Lochalsh. In itself, this was not so noteworthy an occurrence – the ship was a regular visitor to these waters. But when a hulking battleship-grey gunboat and a swarm of police launches hove into view Pete and I were forced to stop wittering and get a hold on the situation.

  ‘Binoculars,’ Pete ordered.

  I fetched binoculars.

  ‘Didn’t I hear somewhere the Queen was hiring the Hebridean Princess to cruise around the Western Isles like she did in the old days?’ Pete said.

  ‘Before they got rid of the Royal Yacht?’ I said. ‘I’ve seen it on the quayside in Edinburgh, going nowhere.’

  ‘They’re mooring up in Kyle.’

  ‘The gunboat isn’t.’

  The gunboat steamed towards us. I studied it through the binoculars.

  ‘HMS Argyll,’ I read. ‘I can see civilians wandering about on deck and . . . men with guns.’

  Four police launches bobbed around at a not-so-discreet distance from the Hebridean Princess. The cruise ship tied up and lowered a gangway onto Kyle quay. I noticed that a couple of brown shipping containers had been placed in such a way as to shield from view the gangway as it stretched from ship to shore.

  I turned the binoculars on the gunboat as it powered towards the island and sped by, pushing a foamy sea out in front of it. The men with guns – soldiers with fingers on the triggers of high-velocity rifles, strutting up and down the decks – made it all seem less of a lark, less of a jolly summer jaunt. A man in a uniform with peaked cap trained his binoculars on me. I raised an arm and waved. No one on the ship waved back.

  Pete snorted. ‘The royals’ve probably stopped for afternoon tea or something in Kyle. So, can you do Thursday for me?’

  Pete sloped off to his car and to the sound of crashing gears and painfully high revs bullied it back over the bridge. I locked up and walked into Kyle.

  ‘The usual?’ the barmaid said as I stepped in.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Did you see? They’re here waiting on Prince Charles and Camilla driving down from somewhere.’

  Sitting with your drink on the sofas in the bar of the Lochalsh Hotel you can look over to Kyle Harbour and the train station and across to Kyleakin and Skye. I lounged and awaited the arrival of the Heir Apparent and his wife.

  ‘They’ve been asking at the harbourmaster’s for fresh langoustine and lobster,’ the barmaid whispered on one of my return visits to the bar.

  I drifted back to the island and sat on the bench outside the cottage beneath a dying afternoon sun and waited, binoculars at the ready. The bridge cast its afternoon shadow over the cottage. A fleet of immaculate Range Rovers swept in tight formation onto Kyle Quay and disappeared behind the brown shipping containers. Almost immediately the Hebridean Princess slipped her moorings and headed towards the island. The police launches buzzed busily around the mother ship. As the Hebridean Princess passed the island I scrutinized the decks but there was no one to be seen. A policeman on one of the launches stood at a railing and seemed to want a game of who can stare longest. I didn’t bother waving. I lowered my binoculars. Up on the bridge, police cars with their blue lights flashing milled around, presumably to prevent rogue Native children lobbing stones.

  I jogged across to the west side of the island. It was late now, the sun falling into the sea. A grey mist lurked all along the shoreline of Raasay, ten miles away, and I could make out the bulk of the gunboat, its grey hull fading in and out, almost invisible in the murky haze. I clambered over rocks and plonked down on a handkerchief-sized patch of grass beside the crunched-up remains of a crab. The royals sailed away to the north-west, into th
e sunset, heading for the Outer Hebrides. The police outriders attended them. The grey protector edged out of the mist and joined the convoy. I, on my rocky islet, sat on until I grew cold, with only the night and an uncertain future to sail into.

  The following day, a Workcrew Wednesday, Marcus and I spent the day with pickaxes and crowbars hauling out boulders to plant saplings. Only a very thin layer of sphagnum moss and peat covers the bedrock of the island. When Marcus left as usual at 4.40 p.m. I set about making a woodpile under the bridge and scattering dead bracken and brambles over it. I was resting from my labours, and remembering a visitor telling me that for him the West Highlands were ‘a preview of heaven’, when a man of medium height with short grey hair came walking up the path. As he came closer I spotted an embroidered Highlands and Islands Council logo on the blue fleece he was wearing. My first thought was that someone had observed me piling up logs under the bridge and instead of appreciating the fine habitat I was creating for pine martens and other interesting creatures, had phoned the council to report a pyromaniac.

  ‘Hello,’ the man said.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  There was a pause. I wasn’t sure whether this was a ‘trespasser’ situation or the, albeit stilted, beginning of a stern reprimand I probably deserved for stacking highly combustible materials under a public right of way.

  Then the man said: ‘I’m Donald Mitchell. I—’

  ‘Oh!’ I said and a knot tightened in my stomach because I knew exactly who he was.

  I’d only ever seen photographs of him: battling with the wheel of a boat in a gale in 1969; sitting at a table in the sun outside the lighthouse cottage with John Lister-Kaye and Jimmy Watt and a scramble of dogs. Young. They were all young then. If Donald Mitchell was seventeen in those photos, he would have been in his mid-fifties that afternoon he jumped over the wall and strolled up to me. In The White Island, Lister-Kaye’s book, Donald will always be seventeen, even when we have all passed away.