LITMIR.BIZ

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Drama – that had been the inspired gift on Lewis’s sixth birthday from his aunt Jane Warden, they talked and daydreamed. ‘This visit of Bob’s was altogether a great holiday in my life,’ Louis recalled later.⁴⁷

      The acute sensibility that made his nights a torment also afforded the child intense pleasures. He loved going to his grandfather Balfour’s house, Colinton Manse, in a quiet village southwest of Edinburgh, where there was a large garden and other children of the family to play with, and his charming, devoted aunt Jane Balfour on call. His happiness there was ‘more akin to that of an animal than of a man’, he thought later:

      The sense of sunshine, of green leaves, and of the singing birds, seems never to have been so strong in me as in that place. The deodar upon the lawn, the laurel thickets, the mills, the river, the church bell, the sight of people ploughing, the Indian curiosities with which my uncles had stocked the house, the sharp contrast between this place and the city where I spent the other portion of my time, all these took hold of me, and still remain upon my memory, with a peculiar sparkle and sensuous excitement.⁴⁸

      The garden was divided up into sections by a large beech hedge and adjoined the church and churchyard. This fascinated and horrified the child, a connoisseur of graves, who imagined ‘spunkies’ dancing among the tombstones at night and the glinting eye of a dead man looking at him through a chink in the retaining wall. The paper mill just upstream from the manse and the snuff mill next to it made a constant sound of industry, which was as much a part of the place’s charm for the child as the birdsong and running water. Stevenson recalled ‘the smell of water all around’, and admitted ‘it is difficult to suppose it was healthful’, an opinion stoutly shared by his wife Fanny, who wrote in her preface to A Child’s Garden of Verses rather crushingly that ‘in any other part of the world [the situation] would suggest malaria’.⁴⁹

      Aunt Jane lived at the manse with her widower father and was Margaret Stevenson’s only unmarried sibling, older by thirteen years and by far the more motherly of the two sisters. She had been ‘a wit and a beauty’ when young, ‘a wilful empress’ whose social and marriage prospects were reversed after some accident left her sight and hearing permanently damaged. She used to say that it was a riding fall that had effected the change, but that was accepted in the family as a euphemism, and the cause was probably a disease such as scarlet fever or typhus. She proved an invaluable matriarch, as Louis recalled with affection: ‘all the children of the family came home to her to be nursed, to be educated, to be mothered [ … ] there must sometimes have been half a score of us children about the Manse; and all were born a second time from Aunt Jane’s tenderness’.⁵⁰ Stevenson had a charming, intensely sensual memory of sitting on the stairs at Colinton when he was a small boy and being passed over, rather than passed by, his aunt descending precipitately in her full-skirted dress:

      I heard a quick rustling behind: next moment I was enveloped in darkness; and the moment after, as the reef might see the wave rushing on past it towards the beach, I saw my aunt below rushing downwards.⁵¹

      Aunt Jane’s good spirits and kindness compensated for grandfather Balfour’s withdrawn and intimidating manner. The Reverend Lewis Balfour was a man of few words, and those mostly broad Scotch, which to his grandson Louis was almost a foreign language. Scotch had been thoroughly displaced in middle-class life by English by the 1850s, but Balfour was of the old school, and only spoke English in the pulpit as a concession to his bourgeois parishioners. Louis guessed that his sermons were ‘pretty dry’, for the minister was an unemotional and unapproachable man. His grandson regarded him with a certain discomfort, and recalled vividly his last sight of the old gentleman at Colinton in 1860, when the boy was nine and his dying grandfather eighty-three:

      He was pale and his eyes were, to me, somewhat appallingly blood-shot. He had a dose of Gregory’s mixture administered and then a barley-sugar drop to take the taste away; but when my aunt wanted to give one of the drops to me, the rigid old man interfered. No Gregory’s mixture, no barley sugar, said he. I feel with a pang, that it is better he is dead for my sake; if he still see me, it is out of a clearer place than any earthly situation, whence he may make allowances and consider both sides. But had he lived in the flesh, he would have suffered perhaps as much from what I think my virtues as from what I acknowledge to be my faults.⁵²

      Colinton was a place of leisure and licence, where Lewis could root through the library unhindered. The child was particularly drawn to the four volumes of Joanna Baillie’s melodramas, since Cummy had always enticingly denounced plays.⁵³ These he approached with such furtiveness that he didn’t so much read them as just let a few wicked words flash into his consciousness before shutting the book up quickly. Murders and murderers, a decapitation, a dark forest, a stormy night; the child took away these strong ideas and spun them together when he was alone into stories probably much more sensational and alarming than Miss Baillie’s originals. He was fond of frightening himself: at home, he used to go at night into the dark drawing room ‘with a little wax taper in my hand … a white towel over my head, intoning the dirge from Ivanhoe, till the sound of my voice and the sight of my face in the mirror drove me, in terror, to the gas-lit lobby’.⁵⁴

      The stolen pleasures of the Colinton library linked directly with his sanctioned obsession, Skelt’s Juvenile Drama. Skelt produced dozens of different printed cutouts for use in children’s toy theatres, ‘a penny plain and twopence coloured’, which Lewis bought in quantity at the stationer’s on Antigua Street. He loved them, not so much because of the potent, transient joy of buying and colouring in a new set of characters or scenes – ‘when all was painted, it is needless to deny it, all was spoiled’ – but on account of the playbooks, with their stirring up of the sense of adventure and romance, the exoticism of the scenes and situations, the heart-stopping allure of the characters, highwaymen, smugglers and pirates:

      What am I? What are life, art, letters, the world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped himself upon my immaturity. The world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world; but soon it was all coloured with romance. [ … ] Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive and infantile art, I seem to have learned the very spirit of my life’s enjoyment; met there the shadows of the characters I was to read about and love in a late future; got the romance of Der Freischütz long ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty Formes; acquired a gallery of scenes and characters with which, in the silent theatre of the brain, I might enact all novels and romances[.]⁵⁵

      The Stevensons and their queer little son, with his unexpressive face and out-of-proportion head, made a close-knit, self-protective trio. Their shared hypochondria became a great comfort to them. When Thomas developed some unspecified complaint and was ordered to take the waters at Homburg in 1862, the family went with him. The next year it was Margaret’s turn to be chief invalid and the destination was the South of France, where they stayed three months, returning through Italy on a splendidly leisurely tour and home via the Alps and the Rhine. All this time Lewis had been off school, but when Margaret was advised to return south for the winter of 1863–64, the Stevenson parents realised that if the boy was ever going to get an education they would have to leave him out of the next health tour. Thomas enrolled him at Burlington Lodge Academy in Isleworth, Surrey, chosen because three Balfour cousins were day boys there, looked after at weekends by the obliging Aunt Jane from her brother’s rented house nearby. It was a well-intentioned scheme, but not a particularly good one. Lewis could only feel the separation from his parents more keenly in a boarding school so far from home (and in a foreign country), however many little Balfours were on hand.

      The twelve-year-old’s letters during his first and only term in Isleworth are full of characteristic touches: his stoicism, his distractibility (several times stopping mid-sentence), his mixed interest

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