Tuesday.—I am utterly sick of this grey, grim, sea-beaten hole. I have a little cold in my head, which makes my eyes sore; and you can’t tell how utterly sick I am, and how anxious to get back among trees and flowers and something less meaningless than this bleak fertility.
Papa need not imagine that I have a bad cold or am stone-blind from this description, which is the whole truth.
Last night Mr. and Mrs. Fortune called in a dog-cart, Fortune’s beard and Mrs. F.’s brow glittering with mist-drops, to ask me to come next Saturday. Conditionally, I accepted. Do you think I can cut it? I am only anxious to go slick home on the Saturday. Write by return of post and tell me what to do. If possible, I should like to cut the business and come right slick out to Swanston.—I remain, your affectionate son,
R. L. Stevenson.
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson
An early Portfolio paper On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places, as well as the second part of the Random Memories essay, written twenty years later, refer to the same experiences as the following letters. Stevenson lodged during his stay at Wick in a private hotel on the Harbour Brae, kept by a Mr. Sutherland.[4]
Wick, Friday, September 11, 1868.
MY DEAR MOTHER,— ... Wick lies at the end or elbow of an open triangular bay, hemmed on either side by shores, either cliff or steep earth-bank, of no great height. The grey houses of Pulteney extend along the southerly shore almost to the cape; and it is about half-way down this shore—no, six-sevenths way down—that the new breakwater extends athwart the bay.
Certainly Wick in itself possesses no beauty: bare, grey shores, grim grey houses, grim grey sea; not even the gleam of red tiles; not even the greenness of a tree. The southerly heights, when I came here, were black with people, fishers waiting on wind and night. Now all the S.Y.S. (Stornoway boats) have beaten out of the bay, and the Wick men stay indoors or wrangle on the quays with dissatisfied fish-curers, knee-high in brine, mud, and herring refuse. The day when the boats put out to go home to the Hebrides, the girl here told me there was “a black wind“; and on going out, I found the epithet as justifiable as it was picturesque. A cold, black southerly wind, with occasional rising showers of rain; it was a fine sight to see the boats beat out a-teeth of it.
In Wick I have never heard any one greet his neighbour with the usual “Fine day” or “Good morning.” Both come shaking their heads, and both say, “Breezy, breezy!” And such is the atrocious quality of the climate, that the remark is almost invariably justified by the fact.