Читать книгу Lighthousekeeping - Jeanette Winterson - Страница 10

1) Brew a pot of Full Strength Samson and take it to Pew.

2) 8 am. Take DogJim for a walk.

3) 9 am. Cook bacon.

4) 10 am. Sluice the stairs.

5) 11 am. More tea.

6) Noon. Polish the instruments.

7) 1 pm. Chops and tomato sauce.

8) 2 pm. Lesson – History of Lighthouses.

9) 3 pm. Wash our socks etc.

10) 4 pm. More tea.

11) 5 pm. Walk the dog and collect supplies.

12) 6 pm. Pew cooks supper.

13) 7 pm. Pew sets the light. I watch.

14) 8 pm. Pew tells me a story.

15) 9 pm. Pew tends the light. Bed.

Numbers 3, 6, 7, 8 and 14 were the best times of the day. I still get homesick when I smell bacon and Brasso.

Pew told me about Salts years ago, when wreckers lured ships onto the rocks to steal the cargo. The weary seamen were desperate for any light, but if the light is a lie, everything is lost. The new lighthouses were built to prevent this confusion of light. Some of them lit great fires on their platforms, and burned out to sea like a dropped star. Others had only twenty-five candles, standing in the domed glass like a saint’s shrine, but for the first time, the lighthouses were mapped. Safety and danger were charted. Unroll the paper, set the compass, and if your course is straight, the lights will be there. What flickers elsewhere is a trap or a lure.

The lighthouse is a known point in the darkness.

‘Imagine it,’ said Pew, ‘the tempest buffeting you starboard, the rocks threatening your lees, and what saves you is a single light. The harbour light, or the warning light, it doesn’t matter which; you sail to safety. Day comes and you’re alive.’

‘Will I learn to set the light?’

‘Aye, and tend the light too.’

‘I hear you talking to yourself.’

‘I’m not talking to myself, child, I’m about my work.’ Pew straightened up and looked at me seriously. His eyes were milky blue like a kitten’s. No one knew whether or not he had always been blind, but he had spent his whole life in the lighthouse or on the mackerel boat, and his hands were his eyes.

‘A long time ago, in 1802 or 1892, you name your date, there’s most sailors could not read nor write. Their officers read the navy charts, but the sailors had their own way. When they came past Tarbert Ness or Cape Wrath or Bell Rock, they never thought of such places as positions on the map, they knew them as stories. Every lighthouse has a story to it – more than one, and if you sail from here to America, there’ll not be a light you pass where the keeper didn’t have a story for the seamen.

In those days the seamen came ashore as often as they could, and when they put up at the inn, and they had eaten their chops and lit their pipes and passed the rum, they wanted a story, and it was always the lighthousekeeper who told it, while his Second or his wife stayed with the light. These stories went from man to man, generation to generation, hooped the sea-bound world and sailed back again, different decked maybe, but the same story. And when the lightkeeper had told his story, the sailors would tell their own, from other lights. A good keeper was one who knew more stories than the sailors. Sometimes there’d be a competition, and a salty dog would shout out “Lundy” or “Calf of Man” and you’d have to answer, “The Flying Dutchman” or “Twenty Bars of Gold“.’

Pew was serious and silent, his eyes like a faraway ship.

‘I can teach you – yes, anybody – what the instruments are for, and the light will flash once every four seconds as it always does, but I must teach you how to keep the light. Do you know what that means?’

I didn’t.

‘The stories. That’s what you must learn. The ones I know and the ones I don’t know.’

‘How can I learn the ones you don’t know?’

‘Tell them yourself.’

Then Pew began to say of all the sailors riding the waves who had sunk up to their necks in death and found one last air pocket, reciting the story like a prayer.

‘There was a man close by here, lashed himself to a spar as his ship went down, and for seven days and seven nights he was on the sea, and what kept him alive while others drowned was telling himself stories like a madman, so that as one ended another began. On the seventh day he had told all the stories he knew and that was when he began to tell himself as if he were a story, from his earliest beginnings to his green and deep misfortune. The story he told was of a man lost and found, not once, but many times, as he choked his way out of the waves. And when night fell, he saw the Cape Wrath light, only lit a week it was, but it was, and he knew that if he became the story of the light, he might be saved. With his last strength he began to paddle towards it, arms on either side of the spar, and in his mind the light became a shining rope, pulling him in. He took hold of it, tied it round his waist, and at that moment, the keeper saw him, and ran for the rescue boat.

‘Later, putting up at The Razorbill, and recovering, he told anyone who wanted to listen what he had told himself on those sea-soaked days and nights. Others joined in, and it was soon discovered that every light had a story – no, every light was a story, and the flashes themselves were the stories going out over the waves, as markers and guides and comfort and warning.’