Robert Louis Stevenson and Others

#356 Prompt (1,950 words)

Tell a story through messages in any form, such as snail mail, email, voicemail, text, diary entry, interview, newspaper classified ad, or carrier pigeon.

Robert Louis Stevenson and Others

by Graham Bathgate

With his doctor Graham shares some memories of Robert Louis Stevenson and other writers. His doctor is an interested listener and interviewer.

Doc: How has your week been?

Graham (Gee): It has been a helluva week! I’ve been writing about my pet hates, finding the activity and the subject both revealing and therapeutic. I’ve got quite a few.

Doc: I’m sure you have. It must be good to get them off your chest and on to the page. Let me read them sometime.

Gee: I can let you have a few now, just to get us underway with this session, because I’m sure you have your own plans for us today.

Doc: Just a few would be fine.

Gee: Well, you reminded me of one with your question about my week. Have you ever experienced how checkout people and other servers ask you how your day has been so far? Recently I got it at 10.30 in the morning! I always feel like saying, “I’ll come back at 4.30 and let you know all about it.” I never say that, because I’m generally polite and chatty with essential servers. They have to do a rough job for not much. Then there are people who earn heaps of money because their job is deemed worthy or they’ve studied or been born into it or whatever.

Doc: What would you do about that kind of inequity … er, inequality, I should say.

Gee: Yes, you should indeed. But I’m not sure I could distinguish these words easily.

Doc: Well, as a medical person talking about health, I would say that inequality in health describes something as just being different in general, while inequity is more specific, you’re saying that something should be fixed. You can say there’s inequality in pay between men and women, a general description of a situation, but inequity says this is wrong, and pinpoints the bad thing.

Gee: You should have been a teacher, doc! I think I can almost understand your elucidation there. Now where were we?

Doc: Oh, your pet hates!

Gee: Good one! Here are a few for your edification: unnecessary noise, people moving slowly, assuming my age is over 65 (which it is but let’s not go there!), incorrect speaking by professionals, drivers getting upset, and people not recognising someone in need.

Doc: All right, perhaps your pet hates could be examined more closely another day for the good of your soul.

Gee: (Surprised) Oh, I was just getting warmed up!

Doc: Another time I’m sure. Now, you’ve told me about your happy childhood, living in the countryside, a healthy upbringing and reading lots of good books. Who was your favourite author?

Gee: Well, my mother had a collection of John Buchan novels, I really enjoyed them. You’ll know “The Thirty-Nine Steps” I’m sure. Then there were the Sherlock Holmes stories, I read heaps of them. Funny that they were both Scottish writers, pure coincidence. So here’s another one: RLS.

Doc: Sorry, I know I should know who that is, but I’m just a medical doctor.

Gee: So was Conan Doyle, but I’m talking about Robert Louis Stevenson.

Doc: Ah, RLS, the initials. I believe Stevenson is often quoted, his quotes are famous. In fact, I know one: “It’s better to travel than to arrive.”

Gee: Actually, to be more accurate, keeping to the way Stevenson wrote it, it’s “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour”.

Doc: Well, I stand corrected, thank you. I wouldn’t have expected anything less from someone who took a course in Scottish Literature, even if it was way back a bit.

Gee: An interesting thing about Stevenson is he wasn’t a physically strong man, suffering ill health most of his life. In fact, on doctor’s orders to treat his tuberculosis he left Edinburgh to escape its miserable, cold, damp winters. He spent the last four years of his short life in Samoa. However, he managed a fair bit of other travel in spite of the poor health. One of the greatest things he did, to my mind, was walking the Cevennes in the South of France, with a donkey. He wrote all about it in “Travels with a Donkey”, which should be a mule, the creature he was sold before his trek.

Doc: Perhaps calling it a donkey was more appealing, but I should say quite a romantic undertaking to walk hills with a mule.

Gee: Stevenson was probably a loner. Suppose he had to be to write the way he did. One thing’s for sure, walking the Cevennes was a far cry from his Edinburgh childhood which he recalled sharply in his poems for children, especially one I remember having read to me when I was a child, and that was “The Lamplighter”. Here are a few lines about the old lamplighter, Leerie lighting the lamp outside the boy Stevenson’s window, old gas lamps in those days. My mother often read it to me. I can hear her now:

For we are very lucky,

with a lamp before the door,

And Leerie stops to light it

As he lights so many more,

And oh! Before you hurry by

With ladder and with light;

O Leerie, see a little child

And nod to him tonight!

Doc: Lovely one for children, but a new one to me. He had a light touch, so to speak. Stevenson obviously means a lot to you, his writing giving you solace. He’s been like a companion to you through life, right?

Gee: Well, yes, up to a point. Living in the deep countryside I had to make friends with books and writers, with fine writing, good stories, lovely poems. My childhood companions, as you say.

Doc: What other writers did you like?

Gee: Oh, John Buchan, Jack London, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, also I remember “King Solomon’s Mines” by Rider Haggard! Great name, eh?

Doc: Your favourite was Stevenson?

Gee: I would say so, maybe equal with Jack London who lived his short life in California when he wasn’t sailing the high seas. Stevenson was a bit of an adventurer, too, travelled a lot, as I said. Jack London died in 1916, RLS died in 1894, a bit before my time. However, I did manage to get physically close to him. His family home in Edinburgh was up for sale in the late 1960s and I paid a visit as if I was a potential buyer, but no chance in my early twenties of making a purchase, just wanted to imagine RLS being there, looking out the same windows, the same views through the eyes of the great writer. I like doing that kind of thing.

Doc: The power of the imagination. Tell me about his home.

Gee: It was a lovely place on three or four floors, full of light, with its own gardens at the back. It was obvious the family had been well off. His father Robert Stevenson was an engineer, famous in Scotland at least for building the Bell Rock Lighthouse off the east coast. I think Robert Louis was supposed to follow in dad’s footsteps but he took Law for a time at university. But back to the great writer and his home from age five for 23 years. The great writer’s home was from age five to 23 years old. It was in Edinburgh’s beautiful Georgian New Town, where the family moved to in 1856.

The house consisted of nine living spaces on the ground, first and second floors, as well as a double basement. The ground floor consisted of hallways, a library, a dining-room and kitchen. The first and second floors had a drawing room and five bedrooms. The basement had a sitting room, bedroom, a large kitchen, three large store-rooms and two wine cellars. It was a substantial house!

Doc: Interesting, very interesting. How much did they want for it?

Gee: Offers over 21,000 pounds were invited. I don’t know how much it went for but it would be around that sum. Interesting to note that amount in today’s money is close to half a million pounds. The house has been sold a couple of times over the decades and the present owners have turned it into a kind of memorial to Stevenson. You can go there and have dinner in the same dining room as RLS occupied.

Doc: So you saw the same views out the windows as Stevenson did long ago?

Gee: Oh yes! I can remember feeling that powerfully, thinking of him seeing those gardens, hills and sky. There was an amazing thing in the gardens: they contained a pond with a tiny island, surely the inspiration for “Treasure Island”. Also I learned that the lamps on the outside of the house were the originals, so the lamplighter poem came to mind.

I’m reminded now of my cousin, Billy, who plays great old Rock’n’Roll for a living. He wrote a stage performance on Stevenson and his works, putting on the show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It was called “Flowers in the Rain”. I’ve got the T-shirt!

Billy used an actor, playing the part of the writer, dramatising some scenes from the novels, and he managed to acquire the services of a big nob Edinburgh comedian and TV personality, Ronnie Corbett, to do some of the readings and the linking commentary. He appeared for free just for the première, which was sold out! Overall it was telling the story of Stevenson’s life and times, a fine musical homage in song. I couldn’t go to see the show because I was living overseas in Japan at that time in 1985. Actually I was not so far away from where Stevenson died.

Doc: Interesting, where was that again?

Gee: Samoa. He died there, was buried there. I’d love to go to his grave someday. He wrote a poem for his gravestone, suitably called “Requiem”. Here we go:

Under the wide and starry sky

Dig the grave and let me lie;

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

Doc: That should probably go at the end of our conversation.

Gee: Good idea! There’s a fine museum in Edinburgh dedicated to Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns and of course, RLS. I can’t recall if it was there in the late 1960s but

it would have been oft frequented by an American eccentric in our Scottish Literature class. Believe it or not, he paraded around the university dressed like Robert Louis Stevenson. He came into classes wearing the Stevenson garb.

Doc: Good grief, that’s dedication, or as you say eccentricity. What did he wear?

Gee: Well, I can’t recall everything but one garb stood out. He wore what Stevenson decked himself in to visit the whore houses of Edinburgh. The prostitutes all knew him and had a nickname for him, “The Green Velvet”, because of the fine green jacket he wore. So the American had a green velvet jacket with lined edges and cuffs, a white shirt and roughly knotted neckerchief, and I think also a fine black walking stick and shiny black boots. I must look into the dress of that time to jog the old memory.

Doc: Time is not standing still, I’d love to hear more next time.

Gee: I’ll look forward to it, doc. You should too, because I’ll tell you about “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”.