I have very distinct memories of reading Maxwell's famous "Ring of Bright Water", many years ago while sitting in the Arizona Desert. The intensely dry heat, the crumbly sand between my toes. the desert insects and the bold cacti, formed a strange accompaniment to Maxwell's easy prose, as he spoke of his life with otters, and the sea, and the lush green rain-soaked western isles of Scotland. I remember the book as disarmingly charming, whimsical - and creating in me a strange longing for the familiar shapes of Scotland; and for the sensation of cold rain on my face.
I picked up The House of Elrig, Maxwell's memoir of childhood, simply having enjoyed his other work so much. Although undoubtedly the work of the same writer, there is a vast world of difference between the two volumes. Bright Water is hugely enjoyable, and while it references a unique lifestyle - it does so in places I know, and takes place not that long before I was born. The House of Elrig, on the other hand seems to come from another time and place quite outside my experience, or really my understanding. That's not really the biggest difference though, which is that while Bright Water is delightful; The House of Elrig, I found if anything, slightly disturbing.
My initial impression of the book was that it was a window into a world I knew nothing about. I hadn't realised that Maxwell was of such aristocratic stock, and that he had grown up in a mansion in Galloway. The early stories are all of grouse-moors, tweed-clad shooting parties, servants, ghillies and roaming the estate in the company of a bizarre cast of eccentric titled relatives; some of whom I have stumbled across in history books, as they were members of various cabinets in Westminster governments between the wars. His yearly commute between great houses around the country, was described in detail - and something I found most odd.
Strangely, Maxwell dwells little on the absence of his Father, who was killed in the opening salvos of the First World War. He tries to explain that this absence was simply his childhood normality, and that he thought little of it - other than seeing the physical memorabilia in the home. Yet - the absence of his father seems to be the unspoken central theme of the book, whether he intended this or not. His oddly intense relationship to his mother, was the first sign of this; followed by the separation from her for boarding school which reads almost like a bereavement. This reads like the start of a psychcologists case-study.
I found the descriptions of the English public schools of the mid-Twentieth Century very weird indeed. As the product of a weak comprehensive education, I sometimes looked in envy at the perceived advantages of the exclusive education of the privileged elites who lived in our town. Maxwell's reminiscences of anxiety, loneliness, rituals and a veritable cast of misfits or weirdos amongst staff; make me think that Abbotsford Comprehensive, wasn't so bad after all. Maxwell's descriptions of what passed as 'sex education', which mostly amounted to veiled, incomprehensible warnings against masturbation; are beyond dreadful, and maybe as embarrassing to read, as they were for young Maxwell to endure. Maxwell's search for a father-figure amongst older boys, teachers, and uncles, again almost unacknowledged, seems to also be a profound, and unsettling subject in the book. He hints at, but simultaneously denies, that there was a sexual element to these relationships. It's hard to say whether he is inviting the reader to read more that he says into his words or not - what we can certainly say is that some of this (such as secret nighttime meetings with a teacher), would be absolutely in breach of current standards of child protection. His later teenage obsession with his sexual awakening might not be anything unusual, but he writes about it with a curious candour, perhaps telling us more than we might want to know in what sounds like catharsis.
While school was often miserable, Maxwell projected most of his longings on The House of Elrig, which represented belonging, freedom, home and the opportunity to spend time with animals (keeping them, killing them, catalogue-ing the, and drawing them). This love of animals which would so much shape his later life was formed here, in the Galloway Hills. The suspicion that he was more at ease with animals than people is also never that far from the surface of the narrative. School life came to an end after a life-threatening illness almost took him, as a seventeen year old. He was administered the last-rites as Henoch's Purpura gripped his adolescent frame, and internal bleeding sapped his energy. Surprisingly, he survived - despite the misdiagnosis of his birthmarks as ecchymoses by the celebrated Dr, Lord Horder! (Many readers of this blog will have come across Horder from the biography of Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the noted Welsh preacher, who was Horder's assistant prior to his Christian ministry).
Lurking in the background throughout this strange tale is the family religion of the Maxwell and Persies. Maxwell makes frequent references to this, but doesn't name the sect in question until the very end of the book. What we learn is that his family, while happy to attend mainstream churches when away from home, were ardent adherents of a Christian group which was tight-knit, and specialised in producing ecstatic experiences, trance-like states, and strange prophetic utterances, in their congregations; they required members to pray from their incomprehensible prayer-books, and frowned upon such things as contraception. While basically orthodox in their core Christian theology, their innovation was an insistence that they were the restored supernatural New Testament Church, and their leaders Apostles. Bear in mind that this was home life, while starchy, formal, rigid stiff-upper-lip Anglicanism was Maxwell's term-time experience. No wonder, he found the whole thing mistifying! Only at the end of the book does he reveal that "our church", was the Irvingites (formally the Catholic Apostolic Church), a very eccentric and now defunct sect, which in some ways pre-figured contemporary Pentecostalism.
Finally, it's rather a sad book. Maxwell appears as a shy, embarrassed, confused, insecure, unwell young man who longed to go back to Elrig and ascend the moors. The glaring absence of his father seems to be the great elephant-in-the-room (or is that the elephant on the page), which would make Maxwell, another victim of the Great War. Although the book ends, with Maxwell and a friend, roaming the Elrig estate, it's hard not to imagine that the road ahead will not be easy for this youngster, after all that the War, the dreadful schools, the strange people, inflicted upon him.
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