A Strange Little Book

The House of Elrig, Gavin Maxwell, Longmans, 1965 (out of print)

In recent months I have been looking to broaden my reading horizons and uncover lost treasure, so I have tried to keep to a self-imposed reading rule of at least one book as mentioned in ‘Slightly Foxed’, the lovely readers’ quarterly.

The first on my list of exploration was ‘The House of Elrig’, the autobiographical account of the early life of Gavin Maxwell.

Gavin Maxwell falls into a special category of the Previously Famous. Looking back into any decade you are likely to uncover writers whose fame has not lasted. Do you remember the storm of controversy and excitement caused by ‘Riders’ byJilly Cooper? Yet she hardly gets a mention now. A particularly well-thumbed copy was in circulation among the adolescent males of South East Essex – and it wasn’t the plot we were interested in. I also recall piles upon piles of Alistair MacLean novels in my grandfather’s house, and little has come of all that writing other than a tame adaptation of ‘The Guns of Navarone’.

So it is with Gavin Maxwell. He was a leader in what I can only label as ‘wildlife stories’, which were an escape for those who wished to have boyish adventures and yet had to stay home and learn how to do quadratic equations. His most important book in this style was ‘Ring of Bright Water’, about a smooth-coated otter that Maxwell repatriated from an adventure in Iraq. It was made into a feature film in 1969, the year that Maxwell died.

‘The House of Elrig’ is dated, but in a pleasant and nostalgic way. Maxwell was born into privilege (his uncle was the Duke of Northumberland) but also difficulty (his father was killed in the First World War when Gavin was three months old). He spent his childhood in a series of smaller English Public Schools, from which he dreamed of escape.

Escape was, of course, back to the family home at Elrig in Scotland. He dreamed of returning for Enid-Blyton-like escapades outdoors, doing what 1930s children liked to do: stealing birds’ eggs, adopting pet owls, eating sandwich picnics, and learning how to shoot.

It is precisely this chronicling of a childhood, which seems so odd to us now, which gives the book its charm. I knew very little about how the children of the wealthy grew up in the 1920s and 1930s. Maxwell details all the eccentricities, characters and foibles of a time before the darkness of the Second World War descended. It is, in fact, lashings of ginger beer and shooting rabbits.

I will not give the game away, but will say that ‘The House of Elrig’ was a pre-cursor to a very colourful and sadly short life. Maxwell did not live to old age, and left no children other than a rather strange adoption of the late Terry Nutkins, he of BBC Wildlife fame.

A strange little book indeed.