Robert Louis Stevenson was without doubt one of my favourite authors growing up. When I was six I got my first taste of poetry from his ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’ and was hooked. I had a beautiful illustrated copy which I failed to locate tonight when I had an urge to reread it for nostalgic purposes, but it doesn’t really matter because I know most of it by heart ‘The Land of Counterpane’ was a particular favourite of mine. These days I can’t hear the word without thinking of one of the early chapters of Bill Bryson’s ‘Notes From A Small Island’ where he questions “what the fuck is a counterpane?!” but at the time I did indeed have a counterpane, a horrible orange one with stripes, and so it caught my imagination As for the one about the railway carriage, even today I sometimes find myself sitting on a train and absentmindedly chanting to myself, “Faster than fairies, faster than witches, bridges and houses, hedges and ditches. And charging along like troops in a battle, all through the meadows the horses and cattle…”. I’m sad enough to be able to get to the end of that, but I shall spare you

When I was twelve, or possibly thirteen, I needed to write a book review for a school project and for some reason feeling devoid of books, I asked my father to lend me something. He gave me a huge volume of RLS; three books in one which he got from a bargain bookstore. He then proceeded not to see the book again for over six years (no joke!) while my sister and I read, reread and rereread it. In fact I don’t think the poor man has ever read it himself, because possession is nine tenths of the law and my sister had it on her bedside table for so long I think he thinks it’s actually hers

The first book, which I read and reviewed for school, was ‘Kidnapped’. i read it four or five times in quick succession, though haven’t touched it now for over ten years, and am almost afraid to pick it up again in case I find it has lost the magic it used to have. Wow, I loved that book There were vast quantities of it I didn’t understand, either through inadequate understanding of Scottish history or inadequate comprehension of the dreadful Scottish dialect which pervades much of the dialogues, but it still registered as one of the most exciting books I had ever read. I confess now that I can’t remember the twists and turns of the narrative, just certain random details which make a big impression on me. The bit where the evil uncle sends the kid to climb the staircase into oblivion – an almost certain death. The Scottish guy who was crucial to the whole premise of the book and whose name I have forgotten – was it Alan? – and the way he used to start all his sentences with “hout tout”. An amazing chapter where the hero is being pursued by the baddies and spends the whole day lying on the top of a high, flat rock in the baking sunlight whilst they stand underneath… All so exciting. I think books which are set in Scotland are necessarily exciting by virtue of the landscape. If Buchan’s ‘The Thirty Nine Steps’, one of the greatest books ever ever ever, had been set entirely in Norfolk, it wouldn’t have been anywhere near such a thrilling thriller

Having finished Kidnapped, I moved onto ‘The Master of Ballantrae’, probably one of RLS’s lessor known works. It probably took me a whole year of Saturday morning lie ins to get through it. The beginning is good and I read it with enthusiasm about ten times, but the middle is incredibly dull. Or at least, it seemed so to teenage me. An unnecessarily long diversion about pirates which seemed to add precious little to the narrative. After multiple readings of the beginning I eventually decided to abandon the middle and cut to the end. The end is good. Really, really good; hairraising stuff. I’m unclear at this distance how what started as a tale of two Scottish brothers and which one was the rightful master of Ballantrae turned into a story of travelling across America pursued by Red Indians, but that’s pretty much what happened and there are terrifying scenes where the party wake up each morning to find one of their number has been scalped. So deep an impression they made on me in fact, I don’t want to remember them now when I am on my own in a darkened room! Eventually, already knowing how things panned out, I forced myself to go back and read the middle

And so I came to Jekyll and Hyde, and I regret to say that after the proceeding masterpieces, this one made little impression on me at all. It’s very short, more of a novella than a novel in fact, and quite frightening, but I found when rereading it today in Esperanto that I couldn’t remember the ins and nuts of the plot in the slightest. It’s pretty easy to read in Esperanto anyway; it only took a couple of hours, and I think I probably enjoyed it more than I did when reading it in English aged 13 so it’s all good.

I don’t like dwelling on evil late at night so I won’t make clever observations about split personalities and original sin and whether the allegory essentially has the same message as ‘Lord of the Flies’ or whether I am just obsessed by ‘Lord of the Flies’ because I studied it for GCSE I will however say that anyone who didn’t watch the recent BBC spin off ‘Hyde’ missed out on a real treat, and if you do manage to get hold of it on iplayer or something, be prepared to never fancy James Nesbitt ever again! Meanwhile, I’m off to consult an Esperanto dictionary because there’s one word which confused me throughout the entire text. The translator kept using the word mento, or various variations like mente depending on context, and I was initially perplexed because I thought he was making reference to the narrator’s chin and that didn’t quite seem to fit. Then I remembered that chin is actually mentono, or something like that, and it occurred to me that whenever the word was used it was something to do with the mind, something mental. Except I thought mind was menso rather than mento, so I tied myself in a knot and will need the help of a dictionary and possibly Babel too to extricate myself