I read Tarka the Otter as a child. I was fifteen when I saw Ring of Bright Water in 1969.
Over the passage of time the two have merged in my memory. Until today I would have bet the otter in the film is called Tarka – he is called Mijbil (Mij). Tarka, in Henry Williamson’s 1927 novel, is a wild otter living on the rivers Taw and Torridge in North Devon. Mij, in the film, is bought in a London pet shop and taken by its owner to live as his pet in a cottage on the west coast of Scotland. The film is on YouTube so I will probably watch it again. I will most definitely read Tarka the Otter and Ring of Bright Water – I don’t think I have ever read the latter. To digress, I remember a book about a fox in the same genre but have forgotten name and author.
I was unaware that weeks after I saw the film in 1969 the author of RoBW, Gavin Maxwell, was to die aged fifty-five. Nor did I know Maxwell had brought the real Mij back from Iraq; an otter sub-species subsequently called after him. Nor did I know anything about Gavin Maxwell. A friend has given me one of his non-otter books and there is much to report.
(to be continued)
I also listened to Val Doonican as a child which is a nice link to Ring of Bright Water.
There is a good biography of Gavin Maxwell – Gavin Maxwell, by Douglas Botting, published by Eland.
Top tip, thank you, have ordered a copy.
Would the fox book be ‘Wild Lone’? Or from a similar film era ‘The Belstone Fox’.
ROBW was a set book for my English Literature o’level, & I became quite fascinated by it. Wilfred Thesiger was a friend of his & I believe it was when he was researching the Marsh Arabs that he came across Mijbil. An otter that deprived him of a section of a finger!
Wild Lone published in 1938 sounds the most likely to be found by me at Barmeath. Thanks for identifying it.