Ring of Bright Water. Gavin Maxwell
by some very tasteful material from Primavera, holds shirts and sweaters in my bedroom, and looks entirely respectable. The art of fish-box furniture should be more widely cultivated; in common with certain widely advertised makes of contemporary furniture it has the peculiar advantage that one may add unit to unit indefinitely.
There came a time, in my second or third year at the house, when I said, ‘There’s only one thing we really lack now – a clothes-basket,’ and a few weeks later a clothes-basket came up on the beach, a large stately clothes-basket, completely undamaged.
Whether it is because the furnishings of these rooms have grown around me year by year since that first afternoon when I entered the chill and empty house, each room as bare as a weathered bone, or because of my deep love for Camusfeàrna and all that surrounds it, it is to me now the most relaxing house that I know, and guests, too, feel it a place in which they are instantly at ease. Even in this small matter of furniture there is also a continuous sense of anticipation; it is as though a collector of period furniture might on any morning find some rare and important piece lying waiting to be picked up on the street before his door.
There is much pathos in the small jetsam that lies among the sea-wrack and drifted timber of the long tide-lines; the fire-blackened transom of a small boat; the broken and wave-battered children’s toys; a hand-carved wooden egg-cup with the name carefully incised upon it; the scattered skeleton of a small dog, the collar with an illegible nameplate lying among the whitened bones, long since picked clean by the ravens and the hooded crows. To me the most personal poignancy was in my search one morning that first year for a suitable piece of wood from which to fashion a bread-board. A barrel top would be ideal, I thought, if I could find one intact, and very soon I did, but when I had it in my hands I turned it over to read the letters ISSF, Island of Soay Shark Fisheries – the only thing the sea has ever given me back for all that I poured into it during those five years of Soay.
Some pieces of jetsam are wholly enigmatic, encouraging the most extravagant exercise of fantasy to account for their existence. A ten-foot-long bamboo pole, to which have been affixed by a combination of careful, seaman-like knots and the lavish use of insulating tape three blue pennants bearing the words ‘Shell’ and ‘BP’; this has exercised my imagination since first I found it. A prayer flag made by a Lascar seaman? – a distress signal, pitifully inadequate, constructed over many hours adrift in an open boat surrounded by cruising sharks or tossed high on the crests of Atlantic rollers a thousand miles from land? I have found no satisfactory solution. Two broom handles, firmly tied into the form of a cross by the belt from a woman’s plastic macintosh; a scrap of sailcoth with the words ‘not yet’ scrawled across it in blue paint; a felt Homburg hat so small that it appeared to have been made for a diminutive monkey – round these and many others one may weave idle tapestries of mystery.
But it is not only on such man-made objects as these that the imagination builds to evoke drama, pathos, or remembered splendour. When one is much alone one’s vision becomes more extensive; from the tide-wrack rubbish-heap of small bones and dry, crumpled wings, relics of lesser lives, rise images the brighter for being unconfined by the physical eye. From some feathered mummy, stained and thin, soars the spinning lapwing in the white March morning; in the surface crust of rotting weed, where the foot explodes a whirring puff of flies, the withered fins and scales hold still, intrinsically, the sway and dart of glittering shoals among the tide-swung sea-tangle; smothered by the mad parabolic energy of leaping sand-hoppers the broken antlers of a stag re-form and move again high in the bare, stony corries and the October moonlight.
Comparatively little that is thrown up by the waves comes ashore at Camusfeàrna itself, for the house stands on a south-facing bay in a west-facing coastline, and it gains, too, a little shelter from the string of islands that lead out from it to the lighthouse. To the north and south the coast is rock for the most part, but opening here and there to long gravel beaches which the prevailing westerly gales pile high with the sea’s litter. It is a fierce shoreline, perilous with reef and rock, and Camusfeàrna with its snow-white sand beaches, green close-cropped turf, and low white lighthouse has a welcoming quality enhanced by the dark, rugged coastline on either side.
It is a coast of cliffs and of caves, deep commodious caves that have their entrances, for the most part, well above the tides’ level, for over the centuries the sea has receded, and between the cliffs the shingle of its old beaches lies bare. Until recently many of these caves were regularly inhabited by travelling pedlars, of whom there were many, for shops were far distant and communications virtually non-existent. They were welcome among the local people, these pedlars, for besides what they could sell they brought news from faraway villages and of other districts in which they travelled; they fulfilled the function of provincial newspapers, and the inhabitants of wild and lonely places awaited their coming with keen anticipation.
One of these men made his home and headquarters in a cave close to Camusfeàrna, a man who had been, of all improbable professions, a jockey. Andrew Tait was his real name, but as a deserter from the army he had changed it to Joe Wilson, and Joe’s Cave his erstwhile home remains, even on the maps, though it is many years past since an angry people lit fires to crack the roof and banish him from that shore.
Joe was popular at first, for he was a likeable enough man, and if he and his cave consort Jeannie had never heard the wedding service a cave was perhaps safer than a glass-house if there were any stones to be thrown. Such pebbles that came his way seem mainly to have been on the question of his desertion. Jeannie was no slut nor Joe a slum-maker, and their troglodyte life was a neat and orderly affair, with a clean white tablecloth laid over the fish-box table for meals, meals that were of fish and crustaceans and every manner of edible shell. They walled in the front of their cave and built steps from it down to the sea, and even now the little runway where they drew up their boat is still free from boulders.
Only one thing marred their littoral idyll; both Jeannie and Joe were over-fond of the bottle. Jeannie held the purse-strings, and despite her own indulgence she was the wiser of the two. She would spend so much on drink and no more, but every time the two drank they quarrelled, and when Joe got past a certain point he would fight her for the money.
One night they had, as was their custom, rowed the four miles to the village pub, and there they began to drink in company with another pedlar, a simpleton, named John MacQueen, whom people called The Pelican. The Pelican was a player of the fiddle, and together they stayed late at the inn, bickering and drinking to the music of his strings.
What followed no one knows truly to this day, but it was the end of their Eden, the end of Jeannie and of Joe’s Cave. Joe returned to the village in the morning proclaiming over and over again that Jeannie was ‘Killt and droont, killt and droont.’ Their boat was washed up ten miles to the south, half full of water, and in it was the dead body of Jeannie; the pocket of her skirt had been torn off and there was no money about her. Police came from the nearest township, but though local feeling ran high against Joe and The Pelican the details of Jeannie’s death remained unsolved, and no charge of murder was brought against them. It seemed clear that Jeannie had been knocked out before she drowned; some, those who stood by Joe, said that she had fallen into the sea after a blow and then drowned; others that Joe and The Pelican had beaten her senseless in a drunken rage, had half-filled the boat with water, and then set Jeannie adrift to drown.
Whatever the truth, the people of the neighbourhood – if such it could be called, for Joe had no neighbours – believed that they had a monster in their midst; they came and built great fires in his cave, and set ablaze the heather of the hillside above it, so that the heat split the rock and the outer part of the cave fell, and Joe was left a homeless wanderer. He died years ago, but on the floor beneath the fire-blackened rock still lie small relics of his life with Jeannie, mouldering shoes, scraps of metal, a filigree tracery of rusted iron that was once a kettle. Above, on the ledges that formed the cornice of his dwelling, the rock-doves have made their homes, and their feathers float down upon the ruined hearth.
Pedlars of the traditional type were rare by the time I began to live at Camusfeàrna; their place had been taken by Indians, often importunate, who from time to time toured the roadside dwellings with small vans full of cheap materials. The local inhabitants, unused to high-pressure doorstep salesmanship, mistook these methods for affrontery;