ISLAND OF DREAMS
Island of Dreams is a memoir about my time living on a tiny lighthouse island on the western seaboard of the Highlands of Scotland. It is about the natural and human history that surrounded me there, about the naturalist, traveller, 'otter man' and author of Ring of Bright Water, Gavin Maxwell, and about the quest for a mentor and a home.
The book was written along the way: in Rishikesh-Puri-Madras-Pondicherry-Llanystumdwy-Malacca-Krabi-'Burwell', over 360 days between 2008 and 2012. I am happy with it. It says what it needs to say. It's a good book, a quick read it seems, and puts some people in mind of William Fiennes' The Snow Geese.
To commemorate Gavin Maxwell (d.1969), the original opening sections (the published version is slightly different) I lay here, free, gratis and for nothing, at your feet.
At the bottom of this webpage are a few sound and film clips of Gavin Maxwell, taken from Youtube. For the interested, I think you will find them very interesting.
** There is a lively Gavin Maxwell Society operating out of facebook.
** You can rent the lighthouse keepers' cottage on the island any time you like.
*** Scotland on Sunday printed a piece on Gavin Maxwell by Dani Garavelli on 22.VI.2014
*** The Island Review published an extract as Soay: The 8-Shaped Shark Isle on 23.V.2014
*** Caught by the River published an extract in 'An Antidote to Indifference' in May 2014
*** The Island Review published an extract, Gavin Maxwell's Island, on 16.XII.2013
The book was written along the way: in Rishikesh-Puri-Madras-Pondicherry-Llanystumdwy-Malacca-Krabi-'Burwell', over 360 days between 2008 and 2012. I am happy with it. It says what it needs to say. It's a good book, a quick read it seems, and puts some people in mind of William Fiennes' The Snow Geese.
To commemorate Gavin Maxwell (d.1969), the original opening sections (the published version is slightly different) I lay here, free, gratis and for nothing, at your feet.
At the bottom of this webpage are a few sound and film clips of Gavin Maxwell, taken from Youtube. For the interested, I think you will find them very interesting.
** There is a lively Gavin Maxwell Society operating out of facebook.
** You can rent the lighthouse keepers' cottage on the island any time you like.
*** Scotland on Sunday printed a piece on Gavin Maxwell by Dani Garavelli on 22.VI.2014
*** The Island Review published an extract as Soay: The 8-Shaped Shark Isle on 23.V.2014
*** Caught by the River published an extract in 'An Antidote to Indifference' in May 2014
*** The Island Review published an extract, Gavin Maxwell's Island, on 16.XII.2013
Prosecuting Counsel: ‘Do you wish to comment on the statement you have signed?’
The Fool [hanging by his foot from a rope]: ‘All is true, milord, as remembered.’
From Truth or Consequences, P.F. Standhope, 1914
The Fool [hanging by his foot from a rope]: ‘All is true, milord, as remembered.’
From Truth or Consequences, P.F. Standhope, 1914
Prologue: The Dreamer
When I was fifteen years old, on a half-term break from boarding school, I came across a mis-shelved book in the natural history section of the local library entitled Raven Seek Thy Brother.
I pulled down the book, perhaps, because of the ‘Raven’ in the title. I admired ravens and the rest of the crow family, although I had reservations about the magpie for it is an opportunist thief and a cad. But on the whole, corvids are the brightest, longest-lived and most inquisitive of all British birds. Even the ugliest – the rook, with its baggy trousers and crone’s nose – has a certain raggedy-arsed charm.
The spine of the book was black gloss with the title, publisher and author’s name picked out in bold white capitals. It caught the eye. On the front cover, the author’s name and the title – also in bold white capitals on black – topped and tailed an illustration of a white house with a slate-grey roof standing in isolation in a rough field of grass. The window frames and front door were a pale Mediterranean-blue. A rosebush climbed up the front of the house, a low wooden fence encircled it. There was a small lean-to shed, tools had been left lying on the grass; there was a ladder, a water butt, a wooden garden gate. The door of the house was ajar.
Behind the house were mountains, sheep grazing, a rocky outcrop on a sandy beach, a patch of sea. The sky was a menacing grey, but amidst the murk there was a sliver of pale blue and there, passing that shard of brightness above the lonely house, a raven flew. The romance of such a place: of mountain, sea and rock, vivid colour and violent sky; its remoteness and beauty, evoked a powerful yearning in me, so opposite was it from the flat, tamed, featureless and often muddy land where I lived.
I opened the book and flicked through its pages. It had been published in 1968 – some sixteen years before I found it – and was the last in a trilogy about the house and its environs, which the author called Camusfeàrna, the Gaelic for ‘The Bay of Alders’, on the western seaboard of the Highlands of Scotland. Black and white photographs accompanied the text: of a sitting room cluttered with books and pictures and otters, creels hanging from the ceiling and tins of food stacked on shelves like Scott’s hut in the Antarctic; photographs of the surrounding hills, of a broken-down Willys jeep on the track above the house, of lighthouses and islands backed by snow-capped mountains, of boats and dogs; Icelandic ponies and whaling stations and frozen waterfalls; photographs of boys the same age as I was playing with otters.
The endpapers were pen and ink sketches of an otter swimming, turning somersaults, flowing. The inside flap of the dust jacket had a short biography of the author, Gavin Maxwell, and a photograph of him – a middle-aged man, asleep in a rickety armchair with an otter on his lap.
When I was fifteen years old, on a half-term break from boarding school, I came across a mis-shelved book in the natural history section of the local library entitled Raven Seek Thy Brother.
I pulled down the book, perhaps, because of the ‘Raven’ in the title. I admired ravens and the rest of the crow family, although I had reservations about the magpie for it is an opportunist thief and a cad. But on the whole, corvids are the brightest, longest-lived and most inquisitive of all British birds. Even the ugliest – the rook, with its baggy trousers and crone’s nose – has a certain raggedy-arsed charm.
The spine of the book was black gloss with the title, publisher and author’s name picked out in bold white capitals. It caught the eye. On the front cover, the author’s name and the title – also in bold white capitals on black – topped and tailed an illustration of a white house with a slate-grey roof standing in isolation in a rough field of grass. The window frames and front door were a pale Mediterranean-blue. A rosebush climbed up the front of the house, a low wooden fence encircled it. There was a small lean-to shed, tools had been left lying on the grass; there was a ladder, a water butt, a wooden garden gate. The door of the house was ajar.
Behind the house were mountains, sheep grazing, a rocky outcrop on a sandy beach, a patch of sea. The sky was a menacing grey, but amidst the murk there was a sliver of pale blue and there, passing that shard of brightness above the lonely house, a raven flew. The romance of such a place: of mountain, sea and rock, vivid colour and violent sky; its remoteness and beauty, evoked a powerful yearning in me, so opposite was it from the flat, tamed, featureless and often muddy land where I lived.
I opened the book and flicked through its pages. It had been published in 1968 – some sixteen years before I found it – and was the last in a trilogy about the house and its environs, which the author called Camusfeàrna, the Gaelic for ‘The Bay of Alders’, on the western seaboard of the Highlands of Scotland. Black and white photographs accompanied the text: of a sitting room cluttered with books and pictures and otters, creels hanging from the ceiling and tins of food stacked on shelves like Scott’s hut in the Antarctic; photographs of the surrounding hills, of a broken-down Willys jeep on the track above the house, of lighthouses and islands backed by snow-capped mountains, of boats and dogs; Icelandic ponies and whaling stations and frozen waterfalls; photographs of boys the same age as I was playing with otters.
The endpapers were pen and ink sketches of an otter swimming, turning somersaults, flowing. The inside flap of the dust jacket had a short biography of the author, Gavin Maxwell, and a photograph of him – a middle-aged man, asleep in a rickety armchair with an otter on his lap.
I closed the book and caressed its glossy cover as I continued my tour of the library, trawling for other books – other worlds – to escape into. My brother, sisters and I had been brought up to all intents and purposes fatherless, and for the first four years of my life we had lived with our mother in a Gypsy caravan by the side of various roads. Eventually we had moved on to a commune in Norfolk and then a series of isolated houses surrounded by flat arable farmland and potholed tracks. I was growing up with most of my mind sunk into books and at fifteen, although I had no idea of what I wanted to be, I devoured books about travelling the world, sailing in small boats, living in out-of-the-way places, natural history, and writers’ lives. I read few novels; I was after facts. But at that age, among much else, I had yet to discover that all writing, even non-fiction and the autobiographical, is a blend of the blandly real and well-judged lies.
After reading Raven Seek Thy Brother over a night and a day I asked my family and friends if they knew anything about Gavin Maxwell. They had heard of his first book about his Highland home, Ring of Bright Water, but knew nothing else about the man. Scotland was never on our map as a holiday destination – it was too far away and too hilly for trips out with the horse and wagon. In those days, which seem so far away now, before internet search engines and online encyclopaedias, there were no quick answers. A researcher had only the library, the telephone and the letter. I went back to school when half-term ended and trawled the school library and found The Otters’ Tale – a book Maxwell had put together for children in 1962. It is a large format book, an abridgement of, and in parts an expansion on, Ring of Bright Water, and it contains a great many photographs: mainly of the otters Mij, Edal and Teko, but also of Camusfeàrna, of Maxwell himself, and of the boys Jimmy Watt and Terry Nutkins, who had lived with Maxwell and looked after the otters. I went through the photographs in The Otters’ Tale time and again, scrutinising the backgrounds with a magnifying glass to see what extra details I could glean from them.
Later that year flu swept through the classrooms and dormitories of my school and I found myself washed up on the languid atoll of the school sickbay. Away from the grind of boarding school life, my fellow refugees and I lazed in our beds while nurses in blue pinafores came round at intervals to dole out Paracetamol and orange juice and meals on trays. And in the sickbay bookcase I discovered a copy of Ring of Bright Water, which I rush-read before being cast back into the surf of school. Lyrical and jocular for the most part, Ring of Bright Water is about beginnings, and it is a far brighter, lighter book than Raven Seek Thy Brother.
When school ended, I bought with my pocket money a paperback of The Rocks Remain, the second of the Camusfeàrna trilogy. In it Maxwell continued the story of life down at Camusfeàrna, but much of the book is taken up with Maxwell’s travels, his marriage, and winter sojourns in Morocco. Raven Seek Thy Brother was an altogether darker book – about the end of a dream. Maxwell called it a true sequel to Ring of Bright Water, and in it he ascribes a curse laid upon a rowan tree at Camusfeàrna for turning everything sour. Raven Seek Thy Brother is a brooding, blaming book, full of self-pity and loss and foreboding, a requiem to a lost idyll, and it grabbed me and haunted me and pulled me headlong into obsession: with the man who wrote it, and the world he described. And I hankered after the outward bound life those boys in his books were living. I was a shy, solitary child. I wanted to be one of them.
In the epilogue to Raven Seek Thy Brother Maxwell wrote,
“In the small hours of 20 January 1968, fire swept through Camusfeàrna, gutting the house and destroying everything that was in it.”
The otter, Edal died in the fire and Maxwell lost almost everything he owned. In the foreword, he wrote:
“… with the necessarily precise placing of the two lighthouses of Ornsay and Kyleakin it will be obvious to any interested reader that Camusfeàrna is Sandaig, by Sandaig Lighthouse, on the mainland of Scotland some five miles south of Glenelg village.”
Gavin Maxwell, Kyleakin Lighthouse Island, July 1968
I got out the family atlas and tracked down Glenelg, Sandaig, and the lighthouse islands of Ornsay and Kyleakin, and that summer of 1985 – the summer of Live Aid – in a house surrounded by flat fields, I dreamt up a journey to mountains.
After reading Raven Seek Thy Brother over a night and a day I asked my family and friends if they knew anything about Gavin Maxwell. They had heard of his first book about his Highland home, Ring of Bright Water, but knew nothing else about the man. Scotland was never on our map as a holiday destination – it was too far away and too hilly for trips out with the horse and wagon. In those days, which seem so far away now, before internet search engines and online encyclopaedias, there were no quick answers. A researcher had only the library, the telephone and the letter. I went back to school when half-term ended and trawled the school library and found The Otters’ Tale – a book Maxwell had put together for children in 1962. It is a large format book, an abridgement of, and in parts an expansion on, Ring of Bright Water, and it contains a great many photographs: mainly of the otters Mij, Edal and Teko, but also of Camusfeàrna, of Maxwell himself, and of the boys Jimmy Watt and Terry Nutkins, who had lived with Maxwell and looked after the otters. I went through the photographs in The Otters’ Tale time and again, scrutinising the backgrounds with a magnifying glass to see what extra details I could glean from them.
Later that year flu swept through the classrooms and dormitories of my school and I found myself washed up on the languid atoll of the school sickbay. Away from the grind of boarding school life, my fellow refugees and I lazed in our beds while nurses in blue pinafores came round at intervals to dole out Paracetamol and orange juice and meals on trays. And in the sickbay bookcase I discovered a copy of Ring of Bright Water, which I rush-read before being cast back into the surf of school. Lyrical and jocular for the most part, Ring of Bright Water is about beginnings, and it is a far brighter, lighter book than Raven Seek Thy Brother.
When school ended, I bought with my pocket money a paperback of The Rocks Remain, the second of the Camusfeàrna trilogy. In it Maxwell continued the story of life down at Camusfeàrna, but much of the book is taken up with Maxwell’s travels, his marriage, and winter sojourns in Morocco. Raven Seek Thy Brother was an altogether darker book – about the end of a dream. Maxwell called it a true sequel to Ring of Bright Water, and in it he ascribes a curse laid upon a rowan tree at Camusfeàrna for turning everything sour. Raven Seek Thy Brother is a brooding, blaming book, full of self-pity and loss and foreboding, a requiem to a lost idyll, and it grabbed me and haunted me and pulled me headlong into obsession: with the man who wrote it, and the world he described. And I hankered after the outward bound life those boys in his books were living. I was a shy, solitary child. I wanted to be one of them.
In the epilogue to Raven Seek Thy Brother Maxwell wrote,
“In the small hours of 20 January 1968, fire swept through Camusfeàrna, gutting the house and destroying everything that was in it.”
The otter, Edal died in the fire and Maxwell lost almost everything he owned. In the foreword, he wrote:
“… with the necessarily precise placing of the two lighthouses of Ornsay and Kyleakin it will be obvious to any interested reader that Camusfeàrna is Sandaig, by Sandaig Lighthouse, on the mainland of Scotland some five miles south of Glenelg village.”
Gavin Maxwell, Kyleakin Lighthouse Island, July 1968
I got out the family atlas and tracked down Glenelg, Sandaig, and the lighthouse islands of Ornsay and Kyleakin, and that summer of 1985 – the summer of Live Aid – in a house surrounded by flat fields, I dreamt up a journey to mountains.
I: Summer Daze, 2005
Twenty years later, I received an email.
To: Daniel Boothby
From: The Kyleakin Lighthouse Island Trust and the Bright Water Visitors’ Centre
Sent: 8 June 2005
Subject: Kyleakin Lighthouse Island
Dear Mr Boothby,
We had a meeting of the trustees yesterday and would like to thank you for your offer of help. As it happens it is our intention to find a part-time warden/caretaker who, in return for some work on the island and with visitors, would have accommodation on the island rent-free over the summer season. (We are open from Easter until the end of October.) At our meeting last night it was agreed that, subject to certain conditions, you might be the right person.
We have put a galley kitchen in the spare room of the lighthouse cottage. We have had to let the main part of the cottage for financial reasons but feel that, especially now that the tolls on the Skye Bridge have been removed, the island needs a permanent presence for security reasons as we wish to keep it as undisturbed as possible to enable the breeding otters and other wildlife to remain there. The room is quite large, and completely self-contained so that paying holiday-makers can continue to have private accommodation in the main part of the cottage.
The work involved would be mainly keeping an eye on the island and to carry out simple gardening tasks – cutting back the ever-invasive brambles from the pathways, occasionally taking small groups of people on a tour of the island, and ensuring the hide was kept clean and tidy, plus any other minor works that we felt needed doing from time to time.
If this appeals to you, I would be grateful if you could contact me as soon as possible.
Yours sincerely,
Janet Browning (Mrs)
Director – The Kyleakin Lighthouse Island Trust
I had met Janet Browning the previous October when, seeking shelter from a grizzly afternoon of West Highland rain, I had looked in on the Bright Water Visitors’ Centre in Kyleakin. After I’d pushed open the door and shook some of the rain off me onto the doormat, a woman of about fifty with a drawn, pinched face had come through a doorway at the back of the room and bustled about behind a mock-driftwood counter. I squelched around the overheated and stuffy room, dripping warmed-up rain onto polished pine floorboards. I was the only visitor. Double glazing on several of the picture windows had failed and condensation partially obscured the views of the harbour, surrounding sea and hills. Charts and posters and information boards lined the walls – how to tell a whale from a dolphin and chalked dates and locales of recent sightings, a spotter’s guide to seabirds, how to become a young ornithologist. A raised sandpit contained painted wooden animals and model fishing boats, there was a large plywood cut-out of the lighthouse and photographs. Silent footage of an otter with cubs gambolling along rocks and seaweed played on a loop on a TV. I stuck my hand into wall-mounted wooden cubes with holes in them and felt a plastic crab, a rubber starfish, dried seaweed and sea shells. A corner of the room was devoted to Gavin Maxwell – a desk with a fan of his headed notepaper laid under glass, copies of his books, an album of photographs of Maxwell and the boys and the otters, of Camusfeàrna and the Lighthouse Island, and a facsimile of the handwritten first chapters of Ring of Bright Water. Part of the room was given over to the sale of toys and trinkets, souvenirs – the usual Highland-themed tat. ‘Highland tunes’ filled the silence. There was a strong smell of damp.
I knew all about the Bright Water Visitors’ Centre and Kyleakin Lighthouse Island, and the Kyleakin Lighthouse Island Trust. And I had visited this room and the tiny eight-and-a-half-acre island several years before, when it was all shiny brand new.
‘How are the fortunes of the Trust?’ I had asked the woman behind the counter and she looked up and was eager to tell me her troubles. Funding had dried up, visitor numbers were down and the income from island tours and shop sales was meagre, Janet Browning had told me. The Trust’s overdraft kept increasing. There hadn’t been a resident warden on the island for two years and she worried about security. She told me she lay awake at night fretting about the future of the Centre and the Trust.
I had listened, offered suggestions, agreed and wanted to help – both her and the Trust. But as always I was in transit, circling, en route to somewhere else, looking for but never finding the perfect place to land.
A week later I flew to India to sit out the Northern winter and to work on a book I had provisionally entitled Travels. It was to be about my life up to that point: about what it is to be a stray, to cast oneself adrift time and again from the pontoons of family, friends and a steady occupation, to see where one ends up. I had been drifting for more than twenty years by then, and I wasn’t so sure it was such a fine and free thing to do anymore.
One day in December, procrastinating, pondering my next move, surfing the internet, I googled “GAVIN MAXWELL”. It was something I did periodically to see if anything new came to light. Among the results was a link to the website of the Kyleakin Lighthouse Island Trust and it set me thinking. I went back to my typing and dreaming in Madras, and at the end of April returned to England with a completed first draft of my book.
At the beginning of May I sent Janet Browning an email. Would the Trust like a volunteer to help out in the Bright Water Visitors’ Centre or on the Lighthouse Island over the coming summer season? I wouldn’t want paying, just a place to stay, free of charge if at all possible. Several days later I received a reply. More emails followed. Then I got the news I’d been hoping for.
***
You drive up from the South and reach Glasgow and think you’re near but you’re not even close. You drive on, through the shabby-grand, second-city streets and out to a landscape untamed and open. You edge the car around Loch Lomond – skirting those bonnie banks – and catch flashes of quicksilver and blue through fir trees and crash barriers and over low stone walls. On, on, four hours of gunning the engine further on; over Rannoch Moor and down through haunted Glen Coe, past the lump of Ben Nevis (if you are lucky and it’s a fine cloudless day) and through Fort William; over the Spean River and the Caledonian Canal, past the Cluanie Inn and the Five Sisters of Kintail, until by Eilean Donan Castle in Dornie you glimpse it. There, at last, at the mouth of Loch Alsh, sitting beneath the sleek, grey stretch of the Skye Bridge. The tiny lighthouse island. The windows of the cottage wink, the Cuillin Mountains rise massive and disinterested behind. Another forty minutes and you’ll be home. You swing the car around the end of the loch and on down the hill into Kyle. Only half a mile to go now, past the railway station, past the slipway where the Skye ferries used to dock, past the old tollbooth and up the incline of the approach road. You slow, pull into the lay-by beside the gate in the otter-wall, and switch off the engine. Because you’ve arrived.
To an American or anyone from a ‘big country’ the distances involved would appear minuscule, but to a Briton, who believes his country to be of a manageable size, seven hundred miles is a very long way indeed. I had driven for fourteen hours and by the time I was on the final furlong up onto the Skye Bridge my car was coughing and kicking like a sick horse. I was amazed, frankly, that the car, brought for less than a song from a ferret of a man in a pub in West Wales (‘I’ve found just the thing you’re looking for, mate. I’ll fix it up for you,’), had made it at all. I got out of the car and the damp clean odour of the Highlands and the silence hit me like a dose of salts. It was already late on this June summer evening but this far north the sky was still bright. I walked, stiff from the extreme drive, up onto the span of the bridge to look down on my new home. I was above the island up there, above even the lighthouse; a speck of humanity thirty metres above the sea. To the south-east lay Loch Alsh and the two villages – Kyle of Lochalsh on the mainland and Kyleakin on the Isle of Skye. Behind me, and to the north-west, the Inner Sound led out to the open sea.
Janet Browning had mailed me a set of keys, a hand-drawn map of the island and instructions. I slotted a key into the lock on the gate, bumped my shoulder to rain-swollen wood and lurched through onto a pathway of pale grit. A rowan – the witches’ tree of the Hebrides, its berries still green – loitered nearby. I squeaked the gate shut and crunched to a crossroads where another rowan – this one dead and rotting – clutched a crow’s nest leaking wisps of wool. The massive bulk of the Skye Bridge leered over the island behind me like a bramble tendril, one end rooted on the Mainland, the other on Skye. I walked on past a small stone building standing on a honeysuckle-strewn bluff and came to the lighthouse cottage.
I tried another of the keys in a half-windowed door in the gable end and found myself in a room that smelt of mould and long disuse. There was a wardrobe, a sofa-bed, a TV on a chest of drawers, a table and an armchair. A galley kitchen. A seven-foot-high fridge-freezer towered in a corner. Everything in the room had seen better days. The floor had been raised and there was a step down onto a square of the original stone floor, patterned with sweat stains from rising damp, by a doorway. The door opened to a lobby and a shower cubicle. Coats and knitted scarves and a Hi-Vis puffer jacket hung on pegs in the lobby above a pair of paint-spattered yellow sea boots and a chaos of cleaning equipment. A poster of an otter was pinned to one of the off-white walls. Another door opened to the front of the cottage. Like a house sitter, I had that sweet desire to peer and pry and poke around, but the door to the rest of the house was locked and I hadn’t been given the key.
The fridge-freezer in my room clicked and began to hum loudly. I went back into my new home and looked out the half-windowed door back up the path to the brown and grey mountains beyond and for the first time in my life felt the heady rush of home-ownership.
The sun was setting as I strolled with a very light step back up the path to the car. The western sky over the Inner Sound was aflame and a rusty cloud shaped like an angel was heading north on light airs. I ferried my belongings to my room then went to sit on a rain-warped bench at the front of the cottage to take in the view.
Janet Browning had mailed me a set of keys, a hand-drawn map of the island and instructions. I slotted a key into the lock on the gate, bumped my shoulder to rain-swollen wood and lurched through onto a pathway of pale grit. A rowan – the witches’ tree of the Hebrides, its berries still green – loitered nearby. I squeaked the gate shut and crunched to a crossroads where another rowan – this one dead and rotting – clutched a crow’s nest leaking wisps of wool. The massive bulk of the Skye Bridge leered over the island behind me like a bramble tendril, one end rooted on the Mainland, the other on Skye. I walked on past a small stone building standing on a honeysuckle-strewn bluff and came to the lighthouse cottage.
I tried another of the keys in a half-windowed door in the gable end and found myself in a room that smelt of mould and long disuse. There was a wardrobe, a sofa-bed, a TV on a chest of drawers, a table and an armchair. A galley kitchen. A seven-foot-high fridge-freezer towered in a corner. Everything in the room had seen better days. The floor had been raised and there was a step down onto a square of the original stone floor, patterned with sweat stains from rising damp, by a doorway. The door opened to a lobby and a shower cubicle. Coats and knitted scarves and a Hi-Vis puffer jacket hung on pegs in the lobby above a pair of paint-spattered yellow sea boots and a chaos of cleaning equipment. A poster of an otter was pinned to one of the off-white walls. Another door opened to the front of the cottage. Like a house sitter, I had that sweet desire to peer and pry and poke around, but the door to the rest of the house was locked and I hadn’t been given the key.
The fridge-freezer in my room clicked and began to hum loudly. I went back into my new home and looked out the half-windowed door back up the path to the brown and grey mountains beyond and for the first time in my life felt the heady rush of home-ownership.
The sun was setting as I strolled with a very light step back up the path to the car. The western sky over the Inner Sound was aflame and a rusty cloud shaped like an angel was heading north on light airs. I ferried my belongings to my room then went to sit on a rain-warped bench at the front of the cottage to take in the view.
The summer solstice – the longest day of the year – was a week behind me and all around me was everything I’d dreamed of: mountains, boats, islands, the sea, and Gavin Maxwell’s old haunts. I was entering the myth that had gripped me all those years ago as a boy.
* * *
The beginning of the Maxwell myth goes like this:
A man in his forties, a writer, a painter, a naturalist – a poet – spends part of each year living in a remote lighthouse keepers’ cottage on the western seaboard of the Scottish Highlands. Camusfeàrna, he calls this place, ‘the Bay of the Alders’, and he has been coming here since he was first offered the lonely house on its isolated promontory after the Second World War by an old friend from university days. The nearest village is five miles away, by rough footpath up mountainside and down unmetalled road, though it is a little closer by sea. The writer retreats to the house, alone but for his beloved dog, Jonnie, to write and to explore the wild surrounding land and sea where life is harsh and elemental. Then Jonnie dies, leaving the writer feeling bereft and doubly alone. He grieves, and casts around for another companion to keep him company in his solitude – an animal – for other humans, with their complications and demands, have only ever brought the man sadness.
He has a book to write, and in 1956 accompanies Wilfrid Thesiger, that craggy-faced, hard-as-nails explorer of the Arabian Sands, to the marshlands of Southern Iraq to gather material for what will become A Reed Shaken by the Wind. Some of the Marsh Arabs keep otters as pets and during his last days in Iraq the writer is handed an otter cub. He takes the cub with him to London, where he keeps a studio flat. The cub, Mijbil, grows and proves to be an amusing, intelligent and loving pet, though always fiercely independent, always part wild, and too boisterous for the cramped London flat. The writer – charmed, and no longer lonely – takes the otter to his Highland home where Mijbil delights in the surroundings, swimming free in the burn and the sea. And the writer delights in the antics of Mijbil – a wild creature that has accepted him as his friend and holds so much more fascination than a faithful, obedient dog. Mij is unique, and what’s more he is of a subspecies of otter previously unknown to science. Mijbil’s genus is named by the scientific community after the man who discovered it. Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli: ‘Maxwell’s Otter’.
Idylls are merely episodes. Mij is a constant distraction. The writer must work and travel. He asks the poetess Kathleen Raine to look after Mij at Camusfeàrna while he returns to London and the writing desk. Raine is as enamoured of the Highlands and as charmed by Mij as the writer. She also harbours a deep love for the writer. To be allowed into the sanctity of his home, for her, is a balm. She writes poetry to him, she leaves love tokens for him to find, she loves the otter as she loves him.
But Mijbil wanders, as wild territorial animals do. He roams further and further from Camusfeàrna and one day he disappears altogether. The poetess searches frantically, fearfully, guiltily. In the Highlands, the writer had warned her, wild otters are considered by the crofters to be vermin and are killed. Mij must wear a harness, always – to signal he is pet, not wild. But Raine had removed Mij’s harness and Mij strayed, too far, and was killed, chopped with a spade by a road mender from the village.
The writer returns from his travels, forgives Raine (who for the rest of her life can never forgive herself), but is once more bereft. He casts around for another otter for he has fallen in love with Mij’s kind and one day, sitting over a whisky in the bar of a hotel in Kyle of Lochalsh, he spies a man and a woman walking with an otter on a lead. He rushes from the bar to intercept the trio, gabbles. The couple, on holiday from a posting in Nigeria, are looking for a home for their pet otter, Edal. This is how fate works. They agree to let the writer take Edal. Jimmy Watt, fifteen years old and recently left school, is employed to look after the otter and to manage Camusfeàrna in times of the writer’s absence. The summer of 1959 arrives, there is an otter about the remote house once again and almost unthinkingly one day the man sits down at his desk and begins to write the story of Camusfeàrna. With lyrical precision he describes the wild seas and wide-open lands of the far north, so far away and so removed from the drab, clamorous cities of the South. And he tells the life and death story of Mijbil, and of his fateful finding of Edal, otters, companions, that have brought him so much joy.
Utopian literature was popular in the 50s and 60s. Books featuring wild places and living-with-wild-animal books were ‘in’. T.H. White’s The Goshawk had been published in 1951 and Michaela Denis’s Leopard in my Lap appeared in 1954. The Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz published King Solomon’s Ring and Man’s Best Friend in the mid-50s, and Gerald Durrell’s classic My Family and Other Animals came out to acclaim in 1956. Rowena Farre’s purely fictional ‘autobiography’ Seal Morning, about a Highland childhood and a trumpet-tooting pet seal, had been a huge best-seller in 1957, as had Lillian Beckwith’s 1959 comic novel The Hills is Lonely, about the goings on of a village on the edge of the Isle of Skye. Joy Adamson’s Elsa-the-lioness book, Born Free was on its way. There was something in the air.
Ring of Bright Water, charming, erudite, humorous and escapist, lavishly finished with photographs and drawings, was published in 1960 and instantly struck a chord. The book was a top best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic, a UK Book Society non-fiction choice and an American Book of the Month Club choice. In its first year of publication 100,000 hardback copies were bought. (To date two million copies have been sold, and that doesn’t include the myriad foreign language editions.) Ring of Bright Water was number 10 in the American book industry’s Publishers’ Weekly list of best selling books of 1960. What Maxwell achieved with that book (his fifth) is a writer’s dream. He became rich, and famous.
But…
The beginning of the Maxwell myth goes like this:
A man in his forties, a writer, a painter, a naturalist – a poet – spends part of each year living in a remote lighthouse keepers’ cottage on the western seaboard of the Scottish Highlands. Camusfeàrna, he calls this place, ‘the Bay of the Alders’, and he has been coming here since he was first offered the lonely house on its isolated promontory after the Second World War by an old friend from university days. The nearest village is five miles away, by rough footpath up mountainside and down unmetalled road, though it is a little closer by sea. The writer retreats to the house, alone but for his beloved dog, Jonnie, to write and to explore the wild surrounding land and sea where life is harsh and elemental. Then Jonnie dies, leaving the writer feeling bereft and doubly alone. He grieves, and casts around for another companion to keep him company in his solitude – an animal – for other humans, with their complications and demands, have only ever brought the man sadness.
He has a book to write, and in 1956 accompanies Wilfrid Thesiger, that craggy-faced, hard-as-nails explorer of the Arabian Sands, to the marshlands of Southern Iraq to gather material for what will become A Reed Shaken by the Wind. Some of the Marsh Arabs keep otters as pets and during his last days in Iraq the writer is handed an otter cub. He takes the cub with him to London, where he keeps a studio flat. The cub, Mijbil, grows and proves to be an amusing, intelligent and loving pet, though always fiercely independent, always part wild, and too boisterous for the cramped London flat. The writer – charmed, and no longer lonely – takes the otter to his Highland home where Mijbil delights in the surroundings, swimming free in the burn and the sea. And the writer delights in the antics of Mijbil – a wild creature that has accepted him as his friend and holds so much more fascination than a faithful, obedient dog. Mij is unique, and what’s more he is of a subspecies of otter previously unknown to science. Mijbil’s genus is named by the scientific community after the man who discovered it. Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli: ‘Maxwell’s Otter’.
Idylls are merely episodes. Mij is a constant distraction. The writer must work and travel. He asks the poetess Kathleen Raine to look after Mij at Camusfeàrna while he returns to London and the writing desk. Raine is as enamoured of the Highlands and as charmed by Mij as the writer. She also harbours a deep love for the writer. To be allowed into the sanctity of his home, for her, is a balm. She writes poetry to him, she leaves love tokens for him to find, she loves the otter as she loves him.
But Mijbil wanders, as wild territorial animals do. He roams further and further from Camusfeàrna and one day he disappears altogether. The poetess searches frantically, fearfully, guiltily. In the Highlands, the writer had warned her, wild otters are considered by the crofters to be vermin and are killed. Mij must wear a harness, always – to signal he is pet, not wild. But Raine had removed Mij’s harness and Mij strayed, too far, and was killed, chopped with a spade by a road mender from the village.
The writer returns from his travels, forgives Raine (who for the rest of her life can never forgive herself), but is once more bereft. He casts around for another otter for he has fallen in love with Mij’s kind and one day, sitting over a whisky in the bar of a hotel in Kyle of Lochalsh, he spies a man and a woman walking with an otter on a lead. He rushes from the bar to intercept the trio, gabbles. The couple, on holiday from a posting in Nigeria, are looking for a home for their pet otter, Edal. This is how fate works. They agree to let the writer take Edal. Jimmy Watt, fifteen years old and recently left school, is employed to look after the otter and to manage Camusfeàrna in times of the writer’s absence. The summer of 1959 arrives, there is an otter about the remote house once again and almost unthinkingly one day the man sits down at his desk and begins to write the story of Camusfeàrna. With lyrical precision he describes the wild seas and wide-open lands of the far north, so far away and so removed from the drab, clamorous cities of the South. And he tells the life and death story of Mijbil, and of his fateful finding of Edal, otters, companions, that have brought him so much joy.
Utopian literature was popular in the 50s and 60s. Books featuring wild places and living-with-wild-animal books were ‘in’. T.H. White’s The Goshawk had been published in 1951 and Michaela Denis’s Leopard in my Lap appeared in 1954. The Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz published King Solomon’s Ring and Man’s Best Friend in the mid-50s, and Gerald Durrell’s classic My Family and Other Animals came out to acclaim in 1956. Rowena Farre’s purely fictional ‘autobiography’ Seal Morning, about a Highland childhood and a trumpet-tooting pet seal, had been a huge best-seller in 1957, as had Lillian Beckwith’s 1959 comic novel The Hills is Lonely, about the goings on of a village on the edge of the Isle of Skye. Joy Adamson’s Elsa-the-lioness book, Born Free was on its way. There was something in the air.
Ring of Bright Water, charming, erudite, humorous and escapist, lavishly finished with photographs and drawings, was published in 1960 and instantly struck a chord. The book was a top best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic, a UK Book Society non-fiction choice and an American Book of the Month Club choice. In its first year of publication 100,000 hardback copies were bought. (To date two million copies have been sold, and that doesn’t include the myriad foreign language editions.) Ring of Bright Water was number 10 in the American book industry’s Publishers’ Weekly list of best selling books of 1960. What Maxwell achieved with that book (his fifth) is a writer’s dream. He became rich, and famous.
But…
Island/Skye Bridge image used with permission (c) iStock.com/fotoVoyager. Video footage via Youtube.
All other images my own.