Again, it was nearly ten at night before we ate. My diary records fresh scallops sent across from the island of Canna by its Gaelic-scholar laird, Gavin’s good friend John Lorne Campbell, followed at Terry’s request by what was called ‘a Maxwell bean feast’, prepared jointly by Jimmy and Terry, consisting almost exclusively of Heinz baked beans and a tin of plum tomatoes stirred in with chopped up sausages and some indiscernible leftovers from a previous meal. It looked remarkably like tinned dog food but was surprisingly good and filling. We ate on our knees at the fireside.
After supper Gavin seemed to relax and we had a chance to talk. ‘Wildcats?’ I asked. ‘Are they still around? I would love to see one.’
A snorted ‘Hurrumph!’ and an eruption of cigarette smoke was the eloquent retort. ‘You’ll be lucky. Your chances of seeing one are about the same as catching sight of Moby Dick.’ Then he laughed. ‘In twenty years I have only seen five or six out and about, despite their footprints, the one Jimmy rescued and got stuck in the chimney and the two kittens we tried to raise. They are very secretive, but they’re here all right.’
When I returned to England, with my thank-you letter I sent Gavin a badger skull I had prepared for my own skull collection. A few days later I received a letter handwritten in fountain pen on his expensive, cream vellum Smythson writing paper printed in hand-engraved, die-stamped blood red, just as one might expect from the owner of a great country house, a distinctive hallmark of his aristocratic background. Like his speech, his handwriting was precise, perfectly spaced on the page, never a crossing-out or an altered punctuation, as fluent and elegant as a thoughtfully composed work of art:
That was a kind thought and a most magnificent gift – much appreciated. I should certainly be fascinated to know your secret process for cleaning skulls; I’ve never seen anything so perfect, even in the B.M. with their beetles. My own experiments – burying things and digging them up a year or two later – have been notably unsuccessful. I’m glad you enjoyed your brief visit here – so did we, and hope it won’t be the last; you’re always welcome, but you’ll find the house is usually pretty thorough chaos.
* * *
Four years would drag by before we met again, although we corresponded regularly in a stimulating and for me often unsettling exchange of natural history anecdotes; four years of trying to come to terms with my own unhappy existence in the bewildering and deeply destructive world of heavy industry.
On 18 March 1967, the Torrey Canyon tanker, carrying 120,000 tons of crude oil from the Persian Gulf, ran aground on the Scilly Isles’ notorious Seven Stones rocks – Britain’s first major oil spill. The story ran for many weeks. It was also before we understood the full devastation oil spills always inflict on the marine environment.
Environmental journalists didn’t exist in 1967. The press coverage focused exclusively on the economic damage to holiday resorts on the Cornish beaches where the oil slicks came ashore. I went to see for myself. What I found was profoundly disturbing, far more than had been reported in the papers. Frustrated and angered by what I discovered, I wrote an article for a national newspaper, outlining the horror of seeing so many dead and dying sea birds, seals and, yes, otters, as well as the beaches caked in thick, toxic oil. Gavin Maxwell’s fame as ‘the otter man’ virtually guaranteed that someone would draw his attention to what I had written. Much later he told me that he had been impressed that someone who understood natural history had written about the impact on wildlife. I have often wondered whether that was what triggered the life-changing events that would follow.
Exactly a year after the Torrey Canyon ran aground, an envelope dropped through my Swansea apartment door. I immediately recognised the stylish, precise handwriting in distinctive blood-red ink. I ripped it open. On a small white card with his name and new address printed in red across the top, Gavin had written:
I wonder what you are doing now? I ask this not purely conventionally, but because I have future plans for this island that might be of interest to you. It is a little early to be definite yet, but I am keen to keep in touch as we might possibly co-operate on a small project.
* * *
During the intervening years Gavin’s life had changed dramatically and catastrophically, because, he would later discover and come to believe, he had been cursed in what is perhaps the saddest and most contorted sub-plot to his literary success. In the early, halcyon days of Camusfeàrna (the 1950s), the celebrated poet and literary scholar Kathleen Raine had fallen helplessly and blindingly in love with him – an impossible love that was always destined to end in grief. She saw him as ‘more than soul mate’, above and beyond the romantic. She called him her ‘man of light’ and she would write, ‘It was as though he had come from Eden itself.’ It was an adulation he would never accept, reciprocate or be able to share.
In an extraordinary twist of insensitivity, even of fatal prescience, without her permission Gavin had taken the title for Ring from the first couplet of her poem ‘The Marriage of Psyche, Year One’ (1952): ‘He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water / Whose ripples spread from the heart of the sea . . .’ Without her name, her poem, re-entitled The Ring, is printed in full as an epigraph to the book. He clearly intended his readers to view it as a lyrical eulogy to his beloved otter Mijbil, perhaps even to imagine it was his own work. In reality it was no such thing; it was a love poem, pure and simple, written by a woman utterly consumed by her love for Gavin. It is remarkable that it fits both causes so neatly – otter eulogy and requiem to an impossible love. It is only in the last two lines that a hint of the truth reveals itself: ‘Or gathers cloud about an apex of gold, / Transcendent touch of love summons my world into being.’
It is also telling that in none of the hundreds of editions of the book, no authorial credit to Kathleen Raine appears on that page, nor any mention of her in the text of Ring or its sequels, despite the singular truth that she was central to the story of Mijbil and Gavin’s early days at Camusfeàrna – so central, in fact, because she had been the cause of Mij’s death by disobeying Gavin’s instructions. She had allowed the otter to escape and swim out to sea while she was looking after him during Gavin’s absence in London. A roadman had killed Mij with a pickaxe, crushing his head, although the full story of his demise took some days to emerge. She never forgave herself for this tragedy and it would condemn her relationship with Gavin to the dark chill of betrayal. It is probably the case that, despite ostensibly not blaming her, deep down he was never able to forgive her either. Her name only appears buried amongst others in the formal Acknowledgements page.
That their turbulent intellectual friendship recovered at all, and staggered uncomfortably on for several years, is a startling testament to both the depth of her devotion and Gavin’s generosity of spirit and, perhaps, fatalism. Immediately after Mij’s death he left Sandaig – ‘I missed Mij desperately, so much so that it was a year before I could bring myself to go to Camusfeàrna again.’ He departed the country altogether, immersing himself in his researches in Sicily. Yet their friendship did repair sufficiently for Kathleen to return to Sandaig many more times, almost always when Gavin was away – for him a house-minding convenience and for her a hopeless search for atonement.
Ultimately their relationship would almost inevitably founder completely when she made a devastating error of judgement. Some years later she asked him to read an early draft of the manuscript of what would be the last of her three volumes of autobiography, The Lion’s Mouth (finally published after Gavin’s death in 1977). She had sought his approval because so much of her story revolved around his own and she was desperate to achieve a reconciliation. It was a terrible mistake. An early passage related an incident from back in the early days before Mij’s death. She revealed that she had roundly cursed him on the Camusfeàrna rowan tree when her love for him became oppressive and she refused to let go. Not only was he incapable of reciprocating her heterosexual adoration, but, never good at negotiating conflicts, Gavin had re
sented it angrily when her doting presence collided with his gay relationships.
In July 1956, only a month after Mijbil’s arrival at Camusfeàrna, but time enough for Kathleen to have become utterly entranced by the otter, Gavin had asked her to look after Mij while he was away. She had been staying on her own at Sandaig, blissfully happy and loving every minute of bonding with the otter. She had come to view Mij as the living link that united her with Gavin, a bond both spiritual and temporal, and would write later in her autobiography: ‘Such was my sense of kinship with him that I . . . imagined that in some former life we had been brother and sister.’
Gavin had written from London asking her to vacate Camusfeàrna in advance of his arrival and remove to Tormor, the house of mutual friends nearby. Clearly he didn’t want to see her and wanted her out of the way, but had omitted to mention that he was coming with a boyfriend. Blinded by infatuation, Kathleen ignored him. Instead she filled the house with wild flowers, shells and stones from the shore, ‘fairy gold for him to find’ – the adoring woman’s welcome at the door.
When late that evening Gavin and his friend arrived and found her still in residence, he was furious. After a blistering row he cruelly banished her from the house. On her way to cross the burn, through her tears she had placed her hands on the rowan tree and cried out into the darkness: ‘Let Gavin suffer in this place as I am suffering now.’
Her extraordinary folly in revealing her curse to him, albeit years after the fact, became the final, tragic and catastrophic rupture of what had been a bountiful union of minds and spirits of two extremely gifted intellectuals, both deeply engaged with nature and literature, and one from which neither party would ever fully recover. Kathleen’s deep-rooted bitterness would finally overflow into a long sequence of tragic poems entitled On a Deserted Shore, which she chose not to publish until 1973, four years after Gavin’s death.
Looking back down the years of disasters, Gavin suddenly saw and readily chose to believe that Kathleen’s curse had been the cause of everything that had gone wrong, as indeed did she, writing in her own autobiography: ‘Such an invocation cannot be revoked . . . and awaken[s] forces beyond human control.’ The significance of the rowan tree, a deeply symbolic tree in Highland folklore, was well known to both of them and had often featured in some of her finest poetry written at Sandaig: ‘And yet I have . . . tasted the bitter berry red.’ Gavin also chose to entitle the first chapter of Ring’s second sequel, Raven Seek Thy Brother (1968), ‘The Rowan Tree’ – ‘the magic tree . . . round which is centered so much Gaelic superstition . . . infinitely malignant if harmed or disrespected’ – and to make her curse and what he saw as its consequences the principal theme of that book.
Raven Seek Thy Brother and its prequel, The Rocks Remain (1963), are a sorry catalogue of accidents and disasters, finally shattering the idyll of Ring, following on from the murder of Mij: his Mercedes roadster stolen and crashed beyond repair; an expensive libel suit against him; Edal and Teko turning savage and severely injuring Terry Nutkins and another guest; hitting a rock and sinking his motor launch Polar Star; a crash in his Land-Rover from which he suffered a deep vein thrombosis in his foot; the gradually gathering storm clouds of financial collapse. Then, on 21 January 1968, the whole Camusfeàrna site went up in smoke in a devastating house fire, entirely gutting the building and its extensions, and destroying most of his possessions. It killed Edal, the second otter of Ring and certainly the most famous otter in the world. Gavin had been lucky to escape with his life, but even that luck was short-lived. Little more than a year later he would be diagnosed with terminal cancer. If it was a curse, it was possessed of a deep and acid vengeance. ‘You are a destroyer, Kathleen,’ he had told her at their final meeting. She would never forgive herself or recover peace of mind.
The fire had forced him to move to the lighthouse keeper’s cottage on Eilean Bàn, the principal island in an archipelago of small islets and skerries lying midway between Kyle of Lochalsh on the mainland and Kyleakin on the Isle of Skye, and on which the Stevenson lighthouse stood guardian over the fast-flowing narrows. But, curse or no curse, he had also been busy, publishing the two sequels to Ring, as well as pursuing his career with a major work on Morocco, Lords of the Atlas: The Rise and Fall of the Berber House of Glaoua (1966), a classic of travel writing to this day. He had also published a commissioned book under the auspices of the World Wildlife Fund, entitled Seals of the World (1967), which had triggered the idea of a handbook of British mammals.
Despite the many personal difficulties so graphically documented in those sequels, to a young and unworldly outsider like me little had changed. I knew nothing of Kathleen Raine and no more of the curse than I had read in Raven Seek Thy Brother, dismissing it as fanciful at best and creative licence at worst. Not being superstitious by nature, and with no reason to believe it or not, I paid it no attention. Gavin was still a very famous author and his enthusiasm and productivity appeared undimmed. Now, with characteristic and Promethean zeal, it seemed that he was planning some new and exciting venture on Eilean Bàn and a new book on mammals.
* * *
That small white card had changed everything in an instant. My mind was whirling like a windmill, lifting off, levitating out of the mundane reality of my dreary job and the despondency – no, worse than that, depression – that had been dragging me down for months and was slowly eroding my soul. I read the card a hundred times. What? What ‘small project’? What can he mean, ‘be of interest’? Interest in what he’s up to? Or interest in ‘future plans for this island’? And why me? Me, a relative stranger half his age, an acquaintance of only a few years, living 600 miles away – and what plans might we ‘possibly co-operate on’? What on earth could this famous author mean? This household name, this man of otters and islands and stags and wildcats in the far-flung wilds of Scotland – what could he possibly mean?
I have that card in front of me all these decades later. Holding it brings back to life those soaring emotions, the thumping heart, the sudden surge of hope, the sleepless nights and the turmoil I had been in for months, then so recently re-intensified by having travelled down to Coto Doñana and collecting my mother from the Palacio. Her words came winging back to me once again: ‘Why don’t you stay here for a few days and try to see some of the wildlife?’ and ‘I hope you can join expeditions like this one day.’
By 1968 I had managed to see most of such wildlife as the English countryside supported, but certainly no wildcats, and had definitely been no part of any expeditions to exciting places. Ring of Bright Water and its kaleidoscopic rainbow of red deer, golden eagles, otters, dolphins, killer whales and seals and, yes, wildcats too was still a pipe-dream a million miles away from the toxic smoke belching from the blast furnaces and hot mills of the South Wales steel industry – a trap I’d carelessly fallen into like a mouse in a bucket. The omnipresent pollution of industry nagged like toothache, adding to my expanding wreath of desolation. I longed for escape, existing in a cloying spiral of frustration, imprisoned within the slippery walls of economic necessity, dismally struggling to comply with family expectations, desperate to leap free but seeing no prospect of it, falling back over and over again. Suddenly, one small postcard had thrown me a lifeline.
23
Great hopes, dire straits
‘Come and stay and we can talk it through. Come tomorrow.’ Gavin’s response to my telephone call was characteristically eager and typically unrealistic. I had a job. I couldn’t just drop it and vanish for a week. Not just like that. I had to ask for leave, make sure my thirteen-year-old car was up to a 1,200-mile round trip. I had other plans, engagements, responsibilities. Could I even afford to? What about my rugger club training sessions, my girlfriend, and my Labrador puppy, Max, just acquired? I may have been miserable, but I did have a life. Yet that’s exactly what I did. I dropped everything, threw some things into a bag and left that night. I drove north without stopping. Max came with me in a cardboard box. By dawn I was i
n the mountains of Glencoe.
March 1968 was memorable for a once-in-a-decade fling of the Gulf Stream. For three weeks, it streamed balmy sub-tropical heat from the Azores into the west coast of the Highlands, T-shirt weather, sea-swimming weather, a false spring more like Greece than a Scotland with snow still pink-tinting its high corries. As I crossed to the Isle of Skye on the morning ferry the seaway was Aegean, a shimmering oily calm dotted with black guillemots and eiders bobbing gently on the tide. Cormorants flapped past, bee-lining out to sea, while high overhead in a squinting blue too hard and bright to bear I could hear the rapid staccato calls of red-throated divers echoing from the hills.
Gavin had moved into the two freshly converted semidetached light keepers’ cottages on Eilean Bàn, now morphed into one very adequate bachelor house. I had just read Raven Seek Thy Brother, his latest and last sequel to Ring, in which he recounts the succession of disasters that had befallen him, apparently as a direct consequence of Kathleen Raine’s curse. The book had catalogued them all and included a sketch of the burnt-out house, of the wording for the bronze memorial to Edal the otter ‘Whatever joy she gave to you, give back to nature’ – and photographs of Kyleakin Island. But the new house was still a surprise. Not what I expected.
In startling contradistinction to the fish-box furniture and beach-combed jumble of Camusfeàrna, his new abode was grandly appointed and furnished in the manner of the opulent country houses of his aristocratic background, a reversion to type perhaps, as an intentional escape from Kathleen Raine’s curse and the trauma of the Ring years, but more likely a reaction to the dramatic change in his circumstances and a desperate clinging to familiarities while the fabric of his life unravelled.
The Dun Cow Rib Page 29
