Sian Mackay founded Moubray House
Publishing in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile (1980-90) and wrote several non-fiction
books (as ‘Sheila Mackay’). She contributed regularly to The Herald ‘Weekend’ and lived in Spain for thirteen years where
she wrote fiction and was shortlisted for an Ian St. James award. These days
she lives in Edinburgh and Morayshire and acts as a mentor for other writers.
She describes her own writing practice as ‘a continual wrestle with fact and
fiction - the one a mirror for the other’ that has influenced her recently
published fictive biography The House on
the Chine: Robert Louis Stevenson at Skerryvore as well as The Blue File her work in progress due to be
published next year.
Travels with
a Pen: In Search of Skerryvore
This week
Edinburgh ‘City of Literature’ celebrates the birth of one of its most
treasured sons. Robert Louis Stevenson was born on the 13th of November 1850 at
8 Howard Place in ‘a comfortable ground floor bedroom overlooking the back
garden’ in the Canonmills district of Edinburgh where I was born a century
later. The address of Stevenson’s last home in the British Isles (before his
odyssey to Samoa) was 61 Alum Chine Road, Bournemouth, England, to which Louis
appended the name ‘Skerryvore’ after the mighty lighthouse the Stevenson family
firm constructed in the Irish Sea. In 1885 he moved into the villa with his
wife, Fanny, their French maid, Valentine, and Bogue their Skye terrier.
What led the
Scottish author to settle in Bournemouth of all places, I wondered, and why did
he set aside his work in progress that year (the ‘boys’ adventure story’ Kidnapped) to write Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? At Skerryvore Stevenson’s
network included several Americans: his wife, Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, her
son, Sam Lloyd Osbourne, the novelist, Henry James, the artist, John Singer
Sargent, the illustrator, Edwin Austin Abbey and the entrepreneurial
millionaire, Charles Fairchild. To what extent did they influence the author's
decision to close up Skerryvore and emigrate to North America in 1887? And what
did the house that fostered one of the most extraordinary transitions in
literary history look like? The fact that
Jekyll and Hyde had been written in the seaside town of Bournemouth amused
and intrigued me to such an extent, I
found myself travelling south one blustery November to see Skerryvore for
myself.
As
it turned out, the villa had been blown to smithereens in the second world war.
In Bournemouth Library I found a photograph captioned 'Skerryvore After German Air
Raid, November, 1940'. The lower half of the photo shows a monumental pile of
bricks, lumber and debris. Above it, peeling wallpaper droops forlornly on
gable walls rooflessly exposed to the elements: None who saw it can have forgotten the aspect of the gable: here it was
plastered, there papered, according to the rooms; here the kettle still stood
on the hob, high overhead; and there a cheap picture of the Queen was pasted
over the chimney. Stevenson's description of a demolished tenement he saw
in the High Street of Edinburgh serves for the extinction of Skerryvore. Like
the Edinburgh tenement, Skerryvore was suddenly
cut off from the revolving years and would have been forgotten altogether
had Robert Louis Stevenson not written prodigiously there.
Skerryvore
was the only building in Bournemouth to be hit by a Luftwaffe bomber before it
swerved high and away over the English Channel. After the ruin had been
cleared, the gap site was recreated as a memorial garden in the 1950s by
Bournemouth Corporation. To find it, I took a bus from the city centre to the
suburb of Westbourne, walked down Robert Louis Stevenson Avenue (Middle Road in
Stevenson's day) and found myself on Alum Chine Road beside a signpost marked
'Skerryvore'. ‘Chine’, by the way, rhymes with ‘dine’. Nowadays, the original
low wall fronting the street and the sturdy stone gateposts are all that remain
of the built landscape Stevenson knew. Beyond the gateposts, bricks set into
the ground delineate part of the original villa. The only other features on
site are a wooden bench beside a bin for visitors' rubbish and a touching three-feet
high stone replica of the Skerryvore lighthouse. In truth, there isn't much of
a garden, and I blessed the fact that leaf-littered November day when I first
set foot in Stevenson's domain and explored the space outlined by the bricks.
Soon I found
myself re-inventing the villa: the dining room here, the living room next to
it, the bedrooms upstairs, the kitchen with a door to the stable yard, the
rubbish bins and the coal hole. And was there a bathroom? Where the line of
bricks deviated from its oblong course, I guessed there must have been bay
windows giving wide views of the garden and, not far from the gateposts, an
entrance porch.
A thick
carpet of copper beech leaves obliterated every distraction lurking underfoot
the day I first stood at the edge of the long garden above the chalky ravine of
Alum Chine where Stevenson liked to sunbathe while Fanny created 'labyrinthine
paths' on the slopes below. I explored the deep, dank Alum Chine from its
source below Skerrvore’s garden to the sea. On a bronze plaque set into a
bridge spanning the rivulet of the chine, Stevenson's haunting likeness stared
back at me above these evocative lines:
Robert Louis Stevenson
Lived at Skerryvore
Overlooking This Chine
My morning
research continued in Bournemouth library and the bench in the memorial garden
became my afternoon sanctuary. One day the
archivist found a photograph of Skerryvore taken (by 'S. J. White') three years
before the bombing. It was a sweet moment, staring at an image of the very
house where Kidnapped and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
had been written.
The villa
was one of many put up in Westbourne in the 1860s by entrepreneurial builders
with an eye to giving value for money: homes of English bricks, their tall
chimney stacks proclaiming abundant fireplaces within. On the sunny day in 1937
when the villa was photographed the windows and their louvred shutters had been
flung wide open and a game of croquet set out on the lawn. A second photograph
showed the white-painted entrance porch, unusually situated at the side of the
house, with light and dense shadows playing on the ivy-covered walls. Swerving
wheel marks in the gravel hinted at comings and goings by bicycle or with
wheelbarrow, a scene unaltered since the Stevenson family and their visitors
had entered Skerryvore fifty years before S. J. White.
Wandering
down Alum Chine Road and its neighbouring streets, I took a close look at extant
villas built around the same time as Skerryvore. White's 1937 photographs
helped me to identify identical bay windows, louvred shutters, gateposts and porches.
I needed all the clues I could muster in my search for Skerryvore, but it was a
drawing in the library that captured an atmosphere more telling than any
photograph. In 1912, The Bookman sent a well-known caricaturist for magazines
including Vanity Fair to Westbourne
to make a drawing of Skerryvore: 'A good memory, an eye for detail, and a mind
to appreciate and grasp the whole atmosphere and peculiarity of the 'subject'
are of course essentials,' Leslie Ward wrote of his caricaturist's art. When
Ward visited Skerryvore, eighteen years after Stevenson’s death, 'everyone' had
read his ‘tale of terror’ and it must have influenced the artist’s perception
of the place where the story was incubated.
Ward's
Skerryvore is a house of secrets, its brooding 'atmosphere and peculiarity'
palpable in his Arthur Rackham-like rendering of the elevation facing the
garden and the chine. He depicted his imaginary Louis and Fanny Stevenson
standing tête-à-tête under a cypress. Fanny wears a crinoline, Louis leans on
his walking stick, and the Skye terrier lurks nearby. Three long shadows edge
across the grass. Perhaps Ward went to Bournemouth in cold November as I did.
The louvred shutters of the Skerryvore he captured with his pencil are firmly
closed over an upstairs window. A belching chimney sends curlicues of smoke
into threatening clouds. A flight of birds caws above the sharply delineated
cypress. The cypress casts its shadow over the façade. The façade wavers, half
in sunshine, half in shadow:
All the wicked shadows
Coming tramp, tramp, tramp,
With
the black night overhead
In April
1885 the Stevensons were settling down and the atmosphere was cheerful, as
their neighbour and friend, Adelaide Boodle, recorded in Flashlights from Skerryvore. The black autumn night has yet to come
when the author will waken, startled by his nightmarish inspiration for Jekyll and Hyde. That summer, another
eyewitness, John Singer Sargent, painted Fanny and Louis at home with the
drawing room door open to reveal the dark hall and the staircase rising to the
second floor in his enigmatic portrait, Robert
Louis Stevenson and his Wife.
The
lineaments of the house were taking shape in my mind. Now my challenge was to
bring to life its inhabitants and listen-in to conversations between Stevenson
and Henry James, John Singer Sargent and all the other visitors to Skerryvore that
year. When I felt ready to take the artist's cue, cautiously, I slipped behind
my invented façade and stood in the silent hall. On my tremulous way through its
rooms, I evoked Louis working at his desk and felt the soft sleeve of his
velvet jacket, I smelled his delicious lunch roasting in the oven and heard the
tick of the grandfather clock he named Old Faithful. Upstairs a door slammed:
Fanny in one of her moods. Through careful reading of the many letters they
wrote that year, I hoped to comprehend, at least a little, Stevenson's complex
relationship with his magnificently eccentric wife (who rescued him from
death’s door that summer) and with Fanny's son, Sam, whose over-identification
with his stepfather verged on the pathological.
Eventually,
the Robert Louis Stevenson of my imagination blurred the edges of fact and
fiction and came to sit beside me on the bench in the memorial garden. It was
the thirteenth of November 1885, his thirty-fifth birthday, and he had just
signed the publishing contract for Strange
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Well-wrapped against a chilly breeze and
threatening rain, he hummed the tune he intended to play on the piano during
his birthday celebration: Träumerei -
'Dreaming' from Scenes from Childhood.
Stevenson
was fond of Schumann. His otherworldly song transported me back to our
childhood roots at Canonmills and a dream took shape that became a book about
the momentous year when the 'doomed and dazzling' Scottish author took
possession of the house on the chine.
www.sanchopress.co.uk
.jpeg)
