The White Island

 A Foreword to the re-publication of The White Island

It is now more than thirty years since Gavin Maxwell died in 1969 and forty years since he published the lyrical account of his life with otters in his West Highland retreat Camusfearna, of Ring of Bright Water fame. In the 1960’s and ‘70s that book was to sell two million copies and result in a feature film starring Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers, making Gavin Maxwell a household name throughout Britain and America.

 The intervening decades have brought sweeping changes to the Highlands and Islands; indeed many aspects of the Highlands Gavin loved and wrote about now barely exist. The wild, remote, largely electricity and radio-free mountain fastness of the West Highlands, where nature held control and man eked a precarious existence from the land or sea, in a world cut off from mainstream Britain, has now been opened up and exposed to the market forces of tourism, development and expansion.

Gone are many of the twisting single-track roads, and television is now in every home. Skye is no longer an island; the modern traffic sweeps past high above (and I am sure for the most part unaware of) Gavin’s last home, the lighthouse cottage on Kyleakin Island, The White Island, is now deserted and virtually lost beneath the concrete colossus of the bridge. Depopulation has ceased and huge expansion has engulfed the Highland capital, Inverness. European structural funds, telecommunications and the materialist values of the romantic idyll Gavin described so upliftingly in four books, and jerked its people sharply into line with the rest of the modern world.

These years have also witnessed a sea-change in public perception of the environment and wildlife. It is inconceivable that in 1969 the general public would have been even remotely interested in the natural world around us; in Gavin’s own words:
 “…a strange and wonderful world in which all our emotions find intense reflection. Perhaps it is the lost world of childhood, of the individual or the race – vision undimmed, sense of wonder unconfined…like a splendid cave drawing, telling as much of man as of beast, and leaving us in awe of each.” 
 
  John Lister-Kaye
  House of Aigas, 1999

Extracts from the book

Fresh Hills and Outer Air

P23 - P25

The ferry quickly bored accross the seaway and its engines were grinding astern again to slow up for the Kyleakin slip-way long before I realized we were that close. Kyleakin, it seemed was asleep too. The slipway was deserted and I edged off the heaving vessel and on to terra firma. Skye is the largest Hebridean Island and has very varied scenery, but the arrival point at Kyleakin is among the most picturesque. There were three coastal fishing vessels tied up to a timber jetty beyond the ferry slipway, and an assortment of dinghies and smaller fishing boats in the tiny sheltered harbour. The few shops and hotels are new and smart, products of the tourist tide, but around these sit the squat white cottages belonging to a remote era. In the bright sunlight it was a most harmonious scene and I was happy to creep along the empty road peering into windows and doorways as I passed.  

I had been forewarned that the usual procedure for guests arriving at Kyleakin was to locate the only telephone kiosk and phone over to the island to make their arrival known, whereupon a boat would be sent across. I found the kiosk without difficulty and parked beside it. I was now less than half a mile from the lighthouse island and could see it and the house clearly. I entered the kiosk and dialled the number. The response was immediate. A familiar voice reiterated the number I had just dialled.
"Gavin,' I started 'it's John and I'm at...'
'Yes, yes I know. I've got the telescope on you and I can see you clearly. I'll send Andrew across in the dinghy right away. See you in ten minutes, cheerio.'
"Oh... um ... yes, thank you...' I stammered, but I was too late; the voice on the other end had gone. I was a little unnerved by the realization that my every move since I had boarded the ferry at Kyle had been closely observed from the island house; it looked so ingenious too, just a low, white house, not an observatory. 
I learned later of a similar occasion when a junior member of Gavin Maxwell's staff telphoned the island from the Kyleakin kiosk to report that he had arrived back from his mission. The conversation ran thus:
'I've just arrived back, will you send a boat for me, please?'
Then came the curt reply from the island: 'Yes, I will - when you stop picking your nose!'

I parked the car and walked down to the beach with my two heavy suitcases and a bundle of paraphernalia slung round my neck: cameras, field glasses, light meter, and my haversack - that most valuable accoutrement whose contents have on more than one occasion caused me to be labelled the eccentic naturalist. It is in fact a multi-purpose bag in which I keep all the tools of a field naturalist: collecting bottles and tubes, lenses, polythene bags, string, scissors, forceps and penknife, as well as medical supplies like sticking plaster, bandage, midge repellent, brandy flask and a selection of odds and ends which cover any unlikely contingency: a measuring tape, corkscrew and an envelope, paper and pencil. That old webbing bag has proved its worth many times.

I dumped my belongings down on the beach and sat on a large flat stone to await the boat from the island. The sea was calm and in places where no current ran it lay shimmering like glass. At its edge there was the gentlest movement, tiny wavelets lapping the shingle at my feet. The air was so still that I could hear the hum of the dinghy's outboard engine even before it left the island jetty. It appeared suddenly from behind the island promontory like a mouse from its hole and headed out into the seaway, a speck on the water with a curling white wake peeling away from its bows. The seaway was dotted here and there with little groups of guillemots and gulls which rose hurriedly to settle again well clear of the dinghy's path.

The beach shelved away quickly below me and I could see the transition from the crystal shallows at my feet to the vivid green of deeper water a few yards out. Down there I could see oar-weed and sea-tangle waving, an effortless, sinous motion. The whole scene was so peaceful that with the warm sun on the back of my neck I was tempted to close my eyes and doze. I stood up and stretched and walked a little way down the beach. The island and its stout white sentry were reflected full length in the shimmering deeps at its foot, and behind it the imposing hulks of Raasay and Scalpay stretched dim and blue to the horizon. The sky was bright blue, the first I had seen for many weeks, and whisps of cirrus cloud hung like tufts of cotton wool. The impression after months of storm and wind ran deep and, although I have now seen this water lashed by a hundred-mile-an-hour gale into raging fury with fifteen-foot waves pounding in savage thunder against the lighthouse, that image of tranquillity remains in my mind.

 Hospital

P71 - p73

‘Come on in,’ he said with a grin. ‘Sorry about the smoke. I suppose we’d better open a window.’
I struggled with the window and by opening the top half and holding the door open for a few moments we managed to disperse most of the smoke into the corridor. Gavin tugged at his beard. ‘If the man in the next ward hasn’t got lung cancer already, he’ll get it now,’ he laughed. That turned out to be the cruellest piece of dramatic irony I have heard.

Gavin was a compulsive cigarette smoker; at one period he smoked up to eighty cigarettes a day – an excess he publicized with masochistic pride. Kyleakin Island was the only household I have ever know which could boast of a box of cigarettes beside the lavatory and the bath. There were in fact boxes of cigarettes and ash-trays beside every bed in the house and within reach of every chair, sofa or stool. Several years before, when I first visited his famous house at Sandaig, I remember emptying the ash-trays in Gavin’s study at the end of the house. Their contents, the discarded residue of two day’s smoking, half filled a medium sized waste-paper basket.

He had dismissed lung-cancer as the cause of his ill-health.  He had, in fact, been cleared of the suspicion of it in 1967, as he described in his last book, Raven Seek Thy Brother. Subsequent check-ups had also proved negative. I accepted his own conviction at that stage without question. I knew he had had an extraordinary medical history throughout his life, starting at the age of sixteen with a rare blood condition from which he nearly died, Purpura Haemorrhagica – an illness which privileged him with a memorable visit from Lord Horder, the King’s physician.

More recently he had contracted an alarming variety of rare diseases indigenous to the many unwholesome quarters of the world in which he had travelled. Internal injury and ulceration were also on the list, and it was this last which he suspected to be the cause of his present discomfort.
At the best of times he was a difficult patient. In hospital he liked to entertain his friends as generously and lavishly as he did at home; and the necessary accoutrements, a table crowded with bottles and glasses and endless packets of cigarettes for his own consumption as well as his visitors’, were conspicuous additions to the room’s austere equipment. On one occasion some years before, he had become quite seriously ill at Sandaig – which could hardly be described as the most accessible or suitable house for medical treatment – and to go into hospital in Inverness as soon as possible. It took many hours of persuasion before Gavin agreed to accept this obviously sensible advice. 
 ‘Oh, but I’ve got some friends coming on Thursday,’ he argued, ‘and so-and-so is coming to stay for a week from next Saturday, so I can’t go until he’s gone. And then I’m off to North Africa on Tuesday week, and I can’t delay that. Oh, and there’s a company meeting in London the day before my flight and that can’t possibly be cancelled. I really don’t see how I’m going to fit this hospital visit in.’ And so on until the doctor was biting his lip in exasperation.

Now, as I poured myself a drink and pulled a chair up to his bedside, I could see that the hospital staff were not having an easy time.
 ‘How do you get away with this?’ I asked, waving my hand at the array of bottles and cigarettes.
 ‘They’ve given up protesting,’ he replied with an angelic look. A look which is in fact not easily described because, following an attack of acute conjunctivitis in the Sahara whilst working on his book Lords of The Atlas, Gavin habitually wore dark glasses so that the expression in his eyes, which was often far from angelic, was invariably concealed. Yet he contrived, by raising his eyebrows above the rim of his glasses, and by placidly stroking and curling the end of his Saudi Arabian styled beard, to look angelic. His beards which were periodically removed and re-grown, were subjects of perpetual attention. In and around them he built many mannerisms, and it was often possible to detect his mood and even his train of thought by the way he stroked, pulled at or curled their pointed ends. He was a man of impeccable grooming and he kept his beards perfectly trimmed, never a whisker out of place. His hands too were to me a source of envy and admiration. He had small neat hands, almost white with cleanliness; often out of place, I thought, in the midst of boats and ropes, out-board engines and gunnels sticky with fish-slime, when everyone else’s were suitably soiled. But it was his beards which occupied the greatest attention, and the photograph reproduced on the back cover of the first edition of Ring of Bright Water, in which he wears an earlier more rounded beard, was one of his favourites. Sometimes when friends were trying to date accurately events in his life he would ask, ‘Was I bearded then, or not?’ as if he maintained some tabulated mental chronology marked off in bearded and unbearded eras.

The Journey Home                                            

P107 – P109

On Saturday 6th I returned to the island, and when on the following morning I answered the telephone to Richard Frere I could find nothing to say. I remember only his opening words: ‘The news from the hospital is the worst possible…’ The rest of that conversation is lost among a hundred confused reactions which whirled around my brain. I do not even remember breaking the news to Donald, although I must have done so within minutes of replacing the receiver. My diary records nothing. We can have spoken little as there was nothing to say, and, for a few hours, the island was quiet except for the continuous rustling of the sea and the wind endlessly shifting around us.

The nightmare which followed was to rage for thirty-six continuous hours before the world’s thirst for confirmation of the tragedy began to abate. By midday I had answered the phone to seven national daily newspapers, a B.B.C. News Department, the local police who in turn had been receiving an incessant stream of inquiries and many sympathetic friends in neighbouring towns and villages who had heard the first news reports. I sat at the telephone all afternoon without a break, and after the evening radio and television announcements the stream of telegrams began; messages of commiseration and sympathy, many from personal friends, many more from distant acquaintances whose names were unknown to me, and the vast majority from his reading public. Late into the night the phone still rang, and in the small hours of the morning as I lay on my bed snatching what little sleep I could, I reached out to answer crackling, trans-Atlantic calls from Americans, strained faltering voices, some scarcely audible or intelligible, who had felt impulsively moved to contact Gavin’s home or his family.

The culmination of that nightmare came ten days later when a small party of family and friends gathered at Sandaig for the interment of his ashes. It had been his wish that they should be returned to Camusfearna, the bay of the alders, where he had passed his happiest days. The ruins of the house had, perhaps not ironically, been bulldozed flat on the eve of his death. Only a scar of bare earth marked the site and it was there, in the peaceful sound of the waterfall and the murmur of the sea, that he was finally laid to rest.

Before the short service at Sandaig we gathered for lunch at Eilanreach, the Highland home of Judith, Lady Dulverton, Gavin’s neighbour and close friend. Some had travelled far and a pause for refreshment was welcome before the long walk down to Sandaig. It was a hot September day. As we climbed down the winding footpath which many of us had traversed before, and as the bay and the chain of islands came into view, a hundred memories of that walk on other occasions – in rain, hail, blinding snow, and in sunshine brighter than that day – must have stirred.

Of Gavin’s immediate family, Eustace and his sister Christian were present; his elder brother, Sir Aymer Maxwell, was unable to come from his home in Greece. Jimmy Watt, the original otter keeper who had run the establishment at Sandaig for so many years, was there and so was Terry Nutkins. Robin McEwan of Marchmont, Gavin’s close friend and the artist who had contributed so many drawings to Ring of Bright Water and later books; Dr Tony Dunlop, Gavin’s doctor and friend from Glenelg; Bruce Watt, who had been skipper aboard Gavin’s shark-fishing boat after the war, and had had many associations with him since; Kathleen Raine, the poet whose verse had adorned the pages of several of Gavin’s books and whose poem Year One had provided the title ‘Ring of Bright Water’; Richard and Joan Frere; Michael Cuddy, who had managed Gavin Maxwell Enterprises before Richard; Lady Dulverton; Mr and Mrs MacKenzie from Kyle House; Donald, Willie and myself from Kyleakin; and a few other friends gathered one by one around the bare patch of earth which had been Camusfearna. The open air service was short and at its end a carpet of flowers, which Terry Nutkins had designed and which he had made, was placed over the spot where Gavin’s ashes were laid. It consisted of pinks with a single otter made of white carnations at its centre. The simple ceremony marked the tragic ending of a saga and the beginning of a legend.

Reviews

“The White Island” ‘is also a tribute to the uniqueness of Gavin Maxwell himself, another fitting chapter in the “Ring of Bright Water” legend.’

The Anniston Star 8C
World of books
11 March 1973
B.H.H

‘You might think that Lister-Kaye got into print only because he was a friend of Gavin Maxwell (Ring of Bright Water), but this lovely book does quite well on its own, thank you’.

Chicago Tribune Book World
18 March 1973

‘The story of Maxwell’s last days and what happened to his plans and dreams is told by Lister-Kaye in a charming tribute to the versatility of nature and to the remarkable man who gave back to nature “whatever joy she gave to (him).”’                                                                

The Horn Book Mag
Boston, Mass
October 1973

‘A thoroughly appealing book by a wildlife authority… His (Lister-Kaye’s) remembrances, anecdotes, stories of adventure and work with animals and birds…are wholly engaging.’

Dutton
Time book review
March 1975

‘What a delightful book! I finished it feeling refreshed and happy.’

Dorothy Stickney

“‘The White Island” is also an engaging chronicle of life on a wild, wind-swept island written with charm and a love of nature that Maxwell would certainly have approved.’

Saturday Review Syndicate
Review by John Barkham 

Recommended for further reading are the three original ‘otter’ books by Gavin Maxwell:

1. Ring of Bright Water – Gavin Maxwell,  Longman 1960
2. The Rocks Remain – Gavin Maxwell,     Longman 1963
3. Raven Seek Thy Brother –Gavin Maxwell, Longman 1968

All three have now been republished in one volume:
4. The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy – Gavin Maxwell, edited by Austin Chinn, Viking 2000

Maxwell’s first book about the West Highlands, now republished with a foreword by John Lister-Kaye:
5. Harpoon at a Venture – Gavin Maxwell, House of Lochar 1998

The third and last volume of Kathleen Raine’s autobiography in which she recounts her joy and ultimate crushing sadness of her unrequited love affair with Maxwell:
6. The Lion’s Mouth – Kathleen Raine, Hamish Hamilton 1977

Richard Frere’s amusing account of his work with Gavin Maxwell:
7. Maxwell’s Ghost – Richard Frere, Gollancz 1976

And finally, the official, quite beautifully written biography by his old friend Doug Botting:
8. Gavin Maxwell  A Life – Douglas Botting, Harper Collins 1993