When we were children, my Great Aunt Ella used to send us, her horde of South African nieces, lovely little gold-embossed leather-bound copies of Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson books as gifts each year. Far away from us in Scarborough, she may have lost track of what she'd sent before, and there was some duplication over the years, but we never minded. We loved that these were not 'childish' gifts and opening that package and dividing up the beautiful slim books was always a delight. I'm just sorry that my stash of them is back home in South Africa and not on a shelf within arms' reach in my study.
I have been unable to resist duplication of course, especially when confronted with old second hand editions, and have Kidnapped again,Virginibus Puerisque (a title which always fascinated me with its strangeness), a dinky hardback copy of The Pocket RLS (‘Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson’) which I bought with some of the pages still uncut, and the gift of a beautifully boundFamiliar Studies of Men and Books.
My older sisters, especially Mary Lou, used to read to me and I remember snippets of the flight across the heather in Kidnapped, and the pleasing echo of Scottish place-names. But most of all I remember watching the film – whichever adaptation it was. I can't remember anything else about it, not even whether it was colour or black and white (the way memory re- or de-colours things) but what remains vivid is the tension as David Balfour mounts the perilous stairs of the tower in the House of Shaws, watched by his treacherous uncle Ebenezer Balfour – and then, in the flickering candlelight, almost meets his end as the half-built stairs simply cease. That lurching moment, the near-plunge down the tower has sometimes echoed in dreams since. My early Vertigo moment.
My father, like RLS, had 'a weak chest' and as a Scotsman also loved the books and the poetry. RLS's poem in A Child's Garden of Verses, 'The Land of Counterpane' had particular echoes for a sickly boy and asthmatic man. 'When I was sick and lay abed/I had two pillows at my head' are lines that bring reminders of my white-bearded father sitting propped up with a cup of tea and a book during some bout of bronchitis later in his life, but also make me think of the imaginative boy who, laid up in bed for weeks, wrote an entire history of 'his' Scottish island. A real uninhabited one (but I can't recall which), which he claimed and named 'Dixonia'. We have one surviving notebook from his childhood project, recording details of 'population' and ‘government’, in his already characteristic spidery hand, and he too 'sometimes sent his ships in fleets/All up and down among the sheets;/Or brought his trees and houses out,/And planted cities all about.'
