The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [101]
In April 1848, having apparently recovered, Alan set out again, checking stores, lecturing keepers and reading sermons while storm-stayed in Scapa Flow. In August, he landed below Cape Wrath, ‘and climb up the cliff below the lighthouse’, an ascent of over 200 feet up sheer rock. ‘A path is required,’ he noted laconically at the top, ‘for the Cattle to keep them from the cliffs over which they fall.’ In 1849, he began the circuit again. ‘An awful day,’ he jotted in April. ‘A hurricane from the NNE and thick snow all day. Lie in bed all day as we cannot stir and I have a heavy cold from yesterday’s work.’ At Barra Head, he found all the keepers complaining about their health, for which Alan prescribed a dose of reading: ‘I promise to send the keepers some books; Newton, Leighton’s Poems, Meickle’s Solitude Sweetened.’ By the beginning of May, having battled with gales, recalcitrant keepers and his own exhaustion, he noted only that ‘I am very tired and ill.’
Alan’s own account of his illness was erratic. In addition to an endless series of colds, fevers and bouts of flu, he had what was variously described as lumbago, rheumatism, paraplegia and an unidentified aching in his joints that felled him for days on end. Judging from the patches of good health he still enjoyed, the disease was not a fast-wasting one like motor neurone disease, nor the conventional debilitations of rheumatoid arthritis. From Alan’s paralysing symptoms, and from his erratic periods of remission, it seems that the most likely cause was multiple sclerosis. MS, which attacks the myelin sheaths protecting the nerve fibres of the central nervous system, blocking and eventually destroying nerve endings in the brain and spinal cord, is now well known, but was not identified as a separate disease until 1868. Its progress is gradual and insidious, creeping through the body, blurring the vision and weakening the limbs as the nerve endings slowly cannibalise themselves. In the later stages of the disease it can become completely paralysing, and often results in a form of dementia. ‘The patient,’ records one medical directory bleakly, ‘may also suffer from paralysis resembling the effect of a stroke, then eventually fall into a sometimes lengthy coma before dying.’ Even now, treatment is based on staving off the symptoms; MS is still considered an incurable disease. Perhaps the cruellest aspect of it is the hope; the periods when movement and sight return, only to be withdrawn again by a further decline. Alan’s work – slithering round rocks, clambering up cliffs, cold, damp and exhausted, could only worsen a process which had begun long before.
At first, he dealt with the illness by returning home to Edinburgh and seeking treatment from his brother-in-law Dr Adam Warden. With marriage and the duties of the NLB, he had lost the chance to bolt abroad to warmer, easier climates, and so, when the pains became too bad to allow him even to write, he would seek solace or a cure at one of the English spas. He began to scale down his workload a little. He did almost nothing now for the family business and concentrated as much as possible on the less strenuous business of the lights, testing lenses and dealing with paperwork. His brothers picked up some of the slack, but, as the disease crept onwards, Alan could do less and less.
In 1850, Alan’s decline was matched by a further blow. On 12 July, a month or so after his seventy-eighth birthday, Robert Stevenson died. His wife, Jean Stevenson, had died four years previously and with her death Robert aged rapidly. For all his frailty, however, he remained active almost until the day of his death. On 28 June, he was still attempting to prepare a fine copy of his memoir of the voyage with Sir Walter Scott, despite his family’s pleas for him