Caledonia, Here I Come

“We have a lovely spot here,” he wrote. “A little green glen with a burn, a wonderful burn, gold and green and snow white, singing loud and low in different steps of its career. Behind, great purple moorlands reaching to Ben Vrackie. Hunger lives here, alone with larks and sheep. Sweet spot, sweet spot.”

Unfortunately, his poet’s imagination was to be taxed on his holiday, for, as Fanny wrote: “Although it was the seventh of June when we moved into the cottage, as yet we have had nothing but cold rains and penetrating winds.”

And it was not to improve. Stevenson had risen from a sick bed the previous month. He wrote to a friend to say he was in his native land “being gently blown and hailed upon, and sitting nearer and nearer to the fire.” Fanny asked her mother-in-law when the Spring would begin, to be told that this was the Spring. “And the Summer, when will the Summer be here?” she asked. “Well,” said Stevenson’s mother, “we must wait for St Swithin’s Day.” Sure enough, it rained then.

Such were the imaginative powers of the man, however, that he refused to give in to the darkness and cold with which he was surrounded. During the previous summer, he had stayed with a friend at Strathpeffer and had been urged to write something about eighteenth-century Scotland. The kitchen of Kinnaird Cottage provided inspiration in the person of their hostess, Mrs Sim, who told her guests tales of the supernatural.

The result was three stories, The Merry Men, The Body Snatchers and, most importantly, Thrawn Janet, the story of a servant of the Manse who is possessed by the Devil.

With his health deteriorating, Stevenson and his family took off at the beginning of August for Braemar, never to return to Highland Perthshire.

And the links I mentioned at the beginning? Stevenson’s foray into the Scotland of the eighteenth century bore fruit in what, to many, is his masterwork. Kidnapped charts the travels of young David Balfour, legitimate heir to the House of Shaws, as he encounters the Jacobite fugitive Allan Breck Stewart, with whom he is shipwrecked, witnesses the Appin Murder, finds Cluny’s Cave on the slopes of Ben Alder and crosses from Highlands to Lowlands in the supreme adventure.

The novel was published in 1886. Incredibly, to me, also first seeing the light of day in 1886 in Lithuania was a young boy who would emigrate to the United States and become acknowledged as the world’s greatest entertainer - Al Jolson.

If ever time could be telescoped, it is with the far-off world of Jacobites and Redcoats meeting twentieth century popular music. And a final note for those to whom the name of Jolson is a mystery. Next time you’re at a football match and you sing “I’d walk a million miles for one of your goals,” that’s Al Jolson!