Adored by otters, cursed by women
MEMOIR
ISLAND OF DREAMS: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF A REMARKABLE PLACE
by Dan Boothby (Picador £14.99)
ONE day, in 1984, the teenage Dan Boothby found a book, mis-shelved in the natural history section of his local library, entitled Raven Seek Thy Brother. In his own words, ‘it grabbed me and haunted me and pulled me headlong into obsession’.
Its author was Gavin Maxwell, even better known for Ring Of Bright Water, his tale of man and otter, and writer of half-adozen other books, all of which Boothby duly read. His obsession deepened.
Two decades passed and Boothby, in retreat from a nomadic, unsatisfying life as a writer of guide books, was offered what seemed his ideal job.
He became warden of Kyleakin Lighthouse Island, Maxwell’s last home before his death from cancer in 1969. ‘All around me,’ he writes in this evocative account of his time on the island, ‘ was everything I’d dreamed of: mountains, boats, islands, the sea, and Gavin Maxwell’s old haunts’.
The locals were not all as keen as Boothby on the area’s most famous former inhabitant. ‘Not a Maxwell nut, are you?’ one asks warily. ‘We get lots of those here.’
‘No,’ Boothby replies rather unconvincingly.
In truth, of course, he sounds exactly like one. Plenty of us have read Gavin Maxwell’s books as adolescents and been impressed by them.
Not so many have been sufficiently obsessed by the author to haunt the West Highlands intermittently for two decades in search of reminders of his life.
Maxwell was undoubtedly a fascinating, contradictory man. Plagued by lifelong ill-health, he turned himself into a man of action (he worked for the Special Operations Executive in World War II) and an explorer of the planet’s wild places.
He earned a fortune from his writings and yet was constantly short of money. He could be gregarious and a great conversationalist yet chose to live much of his life in isolation.
Handsome and attractive to women, he seemed to prefer the company of the teenage boys he hired to look after the otters which had made him famous.
The poet Kathleen Raine fell in love with him. Her verse provided him with a title for the bestselling Ring Of Bright Water. They had a tempestuous, difficult-to-define relationship.
During one blazing argument, she stormed off into the Highland night and laid a curse upon him, placing her hands on the trunk of a rowan tree and crying out: ‘Let Gavin suffer, in this place, as I am suffering now.’ Both Maxwell and Raine came partly to believe in the power of the curse. Certainly, his life went downhill in the years to come.
He had a car smash that left him lame, his health deteriorated, a short-lived marriage was a disastrous failure and he lost nearly everything he owned in a fire. One of his beloved otters perished in the inferno. He moved to Kyleakin Lighthouse Island and 18 months later he was dead himself.
Oddballs and eccentrics now pitch up at the island to take the tours of it that Boothby leads. Some are fellow Maxwell nuts; some are not.
One man grows impatient of all the talk of otters and demands to be taken to the Kyleakin Lighthouse. He turns out to be a former lighthouse-keeper, now reduced to working in a Swansea dog-food factory and nostalgic for his days tending the light.
The island’s ghosts — it has a reputation for being haunted — prove disappointingly easy to explain. Flickering lights are no more than reflections from the village across the water.
Ghostly mutterings in the night are not voices of the Gael and Viking undead but the sound of the wind in the bracken.
HOWEVER, real echoes of the past remain. During a rainstorm the letters J. CURRIE emerge on a smooth patch of rock ‘like a message in invisible ink declaring itself’.
Boothby’s research shows that they were carved there by an assistant lighthouse-keeper in the 1870s and only reveal themselves in the wet.
Boothby develops intense feelings about the island he calls home for two years, becoming ‘as emotionally involved with the island as with a lover’, and he succeeds in conveying them.
His book is a lively, often funny tribute to the place and to the people he meets there. In the end, obliged unwillingly to leave for financial reasons, he seems to be rather less of a Maxwell nut.
At the very least, he has gained a new perspective on his obsession. Island Of Dreams shows him emerging from the shadow of his hero to become a gifted writer himself.