From mourning into morning

Grief hangs like a pall over the opening section of Christopher Rush’s account of how he came to make a journey in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson. A 49-year-old Edinburgh schoolmaster and writer, his life disintegrated in 1993 when his beloved wife Patricia died suddenly from breast cancer after 25 years of marriage, and this book is at once a memorial to her and a story of his own catharsis and re-emergence into the life of the living.

In the first 80 pages Rush describes the onset of ‘the obscenity of cancer’ and its effects on his poor wife’s ailing body in such painfully forthright detail that anyone of a squeamish disposition is likely to wince in horror. After Patricia’s death, Rush was plunged into a nightmare of despair and loneliness when only the presence of his two children and his wide-ranging knowledge of literature provided him with a degree of comfort. Indeed, his ‘hopelessly book-anchored brain’ at times makes him sound like some walking thesaurus of literary quotations and allusions, as he rages at the dying of the light. Benumbed with pain, he churns out fragments from Blake, Shakespeare (Lear is his counsellor), Dickens, Auden and Larkin within the space of two or three pages, only rescuing himself from mawkishness and self-indulgence by the poetry and sensitivity of much of his own prose.

After a year’s raw and bitter mourning, in which his pessimism and gloom know no bounds, Rush forms the notion of following his hero, RLS, on an exact re-enactment of the journey he made over 100 years ago and which he described in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. His purpose is to ‘reclaim my sanity’ after his bereavement, and his preparations for his trip are meticulous, to the extent of making a preliminary journey to Le Monastier (the starting point of RLS’s journey) in order to purchase a donkey from a local farmer and even attempting to procure Bologna sausage — in tins, à la Stevenson! — from Valvona & Crolla in Edinburgh.