The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [107]
By the end of 1857, the new light, constructed under Alan Brebner’s supervision, was finished. From that day to this, it has never let in a drop of water. David returned with relief to the ordinary lighthouse business, and the quarrel with Trinity House and the Board of Trade faded away. But matters remained volatile. London’s insistence that the Commissioners should barter over every detail of the light threatened to paralyse the works completely at times. At one point, the Commissioners, incensed that their judgement was being overridden by committee men down south, threatened to resign their duties and hand the whole business of the Scottish lights over to someone else. David, they argued, was not only a competent engineer, but knew his territory better than any Trinity House man could ever do. If London thought it knew better, then London could see how it fared with Shetlandic gales and impossible deadlines. Faced with the awesome prospect of a dozen mutinous Scots sheriffs, the Board of Trade retreated a little, applied a few emollient words and conceded that the Commissioners probably did know something after all. It was only one of an eternal series of quarrels between Edinburgh and London. At its heart remained the old sore of English meddling in Scottish affairs.
There were, however, more important matters than wars and rocks. The Stevensons’ children were growing up, flocking through the Edinburgh schools and chattering off to North Berwick during the holidays. Alan was aching away the remainder of his life in expensive English spa towns, paralysed by poverty and self-doubt as much as by his own enforced inactivity. His son, meanwhile, was finding consolation in the company of his cousins. Domestic life was taking precedence again; the next generation of prospective Lighthouse Stevensons were appearing. And Tom’s son Louis was being groomed for the life of an engineer.
EIGHT
Dhu Heartach
The story of Robert Louis Stevenson’s childhood has become almost as well known as his fiction: the long sick nights drifting through the Land of Counterpane, the endless attempts to find medicine or comfort, the ministrations of his nurse, Alison Cunningham (known as Cummy), terrifying him with tales of brimstone and Covenanters. ‘I have three powerful impressions of my childhood,’ he wrote later, ‘my sufferings when I was sick, my delights in convalescence at my grandfather’s manse of Colinton, near Edinburgh, and the unnatural activity of my mind after I was in bed at night.’ His weak health has usually been attributed to a history of bronchial problems on his mother’s side. His Balfour grandfather was weak-chested, and most biographers see him as the source of Louis’s sickliness. But matters were not much better on the Stevenson side. Robert’s rigorous good health was the exception, not the rule. Alan, like Louis, had suffered from ill-health since childhood, and both David and Tom were prone to bouts of illness. Louis therefore inherited a double dose of frailties, as well as a family perpetually checking its own pulse. Louis’s condition only worsened his father’s existing capacity for hypochondria. During Louis’s childhood, Tom developed an endless series of phantom illnesses in sympathy with his son.
Tom and Maggie both doted on Louis. Nursing and worrying about him became a full-time occupation during most of his childhood. The rest of his time was spent