Читать книгу Stargazing - Peter Hill - Страница 13

There he goes again, I could almost hear my mother thinking as she waved me off on yet another adventure from the front door of our terraced house in Glasgow, while my father looked on knowingly. Two years earlier they had farewelled me as I left for a summer job at Butlins Holiday Camp in Ayr. The next year I was off to Amsterdam, hippy capital of the world, with a large African drum attached to my rucksack. Couldn’t play it, but it looked good. So far, I had always returned safely. Often broke and exhausted, but to the relief of my family always in one piece – or perhaps they were really thinking, my God, he’s come back again.

The island of Arran was the stepping-stone to my ultimate destination, Pladda. Arran is close enough to Glasgow for its high mountains of Beinn Bhreac and Goat Fell to be visible from the top floor of city tenements, and close enough too for day trippers to get there and back and still have time to enjoy its sixty mile coastline. It’s a fair size. Yet it is far enough away to feel you are going on a journey, and the sea crossing adds to the sense of adventure. Arran’s population more than trebles in the summer months but beneath the day-tripping veneer is a long and bloody history marked by Viking invasions in the eighth century and eventual union with the Scottish nation in 1266.

The most war-like presence you will find there today is the occasional cloud of midges, gram for gram the most savage creature on the planet. If you are unlucky enough to encounter these fierce-biting insects you would probably gladly swap them for a boat-load of Scandinavian bandits.

I took the train to the mainland point of departure, Ardrossan, with a rucksack full of clothes, books, cassette player and tapes. My selection of sounds included a recently released work called Tubular Bells. This strange album seemed to appear from nowhere and to have been overlaid, rather than recorded, by an electronic Mozart called Mike Oldfield. Everyone was buying it, which was not normally how I judged the success of a new album. I tended to be drawn to ‘the unusual’, as a London madam might describe her kinkier offerings, and liked to think I shared my tastes with about ten other people on the planet. But Tubular Bells was different, and doubly attractive for having Viv Stanshall of The Bonzo Dog Band doing the climactic voice-overs at the end. I reminded myself to stock up on more batteries when I reached Ardrossan. Lots more batteries.

There was once a plan to build a canal from Ardrossan to Glasgow, some time round the start of the nineteenth century. It never happened and so Ardrossan never took on the mantle of the ‘Venice of the West’. Instead it was gradually globalised out of herring fishing, shipbuilding, coal mining and steel production until its main claim to fame is some of the worst sub-standard housing in Europe.

I had thirty minutes before the ferry left and bought my batteries in the newsagent on the High Street. Then I purchased a Forfar bridie in the baker’s next door. It was time to take to the seas.

As you approach Arran you can see from its profile why it got nick-named ‘The Sleeping Warrior’. It lies only fifteen miles from the mainland but sometimes it can be fifteen miles of very rough seas. But the day I caught the ferry it was hot and sunny and the sea was as flat as the sky was blue. Now, it’s possible to draw the short straw with the west coast of Scotland and drive there from Croydon or Bath with your buckets and spades and experience nothing but rain for weeks on end. It is also possible that you will get weeks of uninterrupted sunshine and wonder why anyone would bother holidaying in the Mediterranean when all this is on your doorstep. That’s the risk you take. If you come to Scotland enough you will experience both extremes. I recommend visiting often and staying long. The summer of 1973 was one of the great ones – hot days and warm summer nights – the sort of climate that got the Bee Gees reaching for their guitars and surfboards and pining for Far North Queensland.

Like every Glasgow school child I was repeatedly told from an early age about the Gulf Stream from Mexico which warms our western coastal waters – unlike the cold east coast cities of Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen. The result was that any time I went near the Clyde as a kid I used to keep my eyes peeled for Mexicans, and once thought I spotted a figure in a sombrero in a distant rowing boat, on a day trip to Helensburgh with my mother and sister. They were not convinced.

Once in Brodick my instructions became increasingly vague. I toyed with the idea of visiting the castle, home of the Dukes of Hamilton. Brodick Castle was once occupied by Oliver Cromwell who added a couple of very plain towers. Later it was given both Gothic and Scottish-Baronial makeovers. But I didn’t have time for all that. My now crumpled missive from the Commissioners instructed me to catch a southward bound bus to Lamlash. The night before I had located it on my father’s The Times Map of the British Isles. Across from it I noticed the tiny Holy Island and a little further down the name Pladda marked by a dot the size of a biscuit crumb. Closer inspection showed it was in fact a biscuit crumb. I scratched it off and found an even smaller dot underneath. This was Pladda. It was so small, this dot marking my home for the next two weeks, it could easily have fitted inside the ‘P’ of the word Pladda, printed in what looked like a six-point font.

In Brodick I lingered over a pint of Export in a harbour-side pub, feeling very much at peace with the world and with myself. With my usual impeccable timing I caught the bus with two minutes to spare and reached Lamlash without a hitch.

Once there I had to catch a taxi from a certain local driver who would know, they promised, the exact spot on the road I was to be picked up by my next connection, a farmer named Harris. I now felt less like a tourist and more like a traveller or itinerant worker. I wandered the streets with my backpack, I asked directions, got lost, found myself again, and some twenty minutes later, having explored various highways and byways, found myself sitting on a white-painted boulder while the taxi driver’s wife separated her husband from his vegetable patch. She was a raving beauty. He looked like a butler rejected by central casting for a Hammer horror movie – unbelievably dishevelled in a torn cardigan and with what looked like a sliver of bacon fat hanging from a boil on his lower lip.

‘You’ll be the student lighthouse keeper,’ he said, picking up my rucksack and throwing it in the back of a very old Sunbeam Talbot. Even by 1970s standards it looked very old, like a black bug made out of very heavy metals. It even had orange indicators that flicked sideways out of the side of the chassis.

‘Come on then, son, let’s get you to the lighthouse. You’re the fifth student keeper I’ve taken there this year,’ he said with a mysterious glint in his eye, and I noticed he was about to drive in his worn carpet slippers. ‘And you know, I’ve never brought a single one back. They do say that the keepers on Pladda are cannibals and on a quiet night you can hear the tortured screams of the young relief keepers just before their throats are cut.’

I must have looked a bit pale, for he punched me on the shoulder and laughed long and hard. ‘Dinnae mind me,’ he went on. ‘They’re a fine lot on Pladda. I know them all. You won’t want to leave you’ll be having such fun. They’re real jokers so they are. Finlay Watchorn’s on there at the moment. He’s mad as a meat-axe. Funnier than Eric Sykes is Finlay. Then there’s Ronnie, he’s got another week to do. No’ got himsel’ a wife yet has Ronnie, but he’s got a fine wee spaniel for company. An’ when I bring Ronnie ashore next week for his holidays you’ll maybe get to meet the Professor. He’s a local gentleman, a retired school keeper. He’s English, but we’ll no’ hold that against him for he has a very fine manner. Mind you, Duncan the PLK has his religion. He’s a Wee Free and Sundays are pretty dull when Duncan’s around.’

‘What’s a PLK?’ I asked

‘Aye, I can see you’ve got a lot to learn. A PLK is a Principal Lighthouse Keeper. I’ve had at least a dozen PLKs in this cab in the past thirty years. If it wasn’t for the Northern Lighthouse Board I’d have gone bust years ago.’ And he blew his nose hard on a snotty rag.

‘That seems like a lot to me,’ I replied. ‘Why don’t they stay longer?’

‘Did they not tell you anything at George Street? I presume they gave you an interview, an’ a wee plate of biscuits and some tea? Bet you chatted about everything except how a lighthouse actually works. I know more aboot it than them, an’ I just drive a taxi,’ he said with a mixture of pride and frustration. ‘Civil bloody servants, I ask you. Scunners.’ I waited for more enlightenment and he soon continued.

‘Look laddie, if you were becoming a full-time keeper instead of being trained up as a student, they would send you to different lights all over Scotland for your first two years. You mightnae visit every light but you’d certainly spend a few weeks on a great many. You’d get to know the service and they’d get to know you.’

I appreciated what he was telling me and kept quiet. I was also trying to hold my breath as the cab smelled like a hamster cage.

‘Then you’d get your first real posting,’ and his hand swept low towards the horizon to add dramatic effect. ‘It might be to a rock, or an island or to a mainland coastal station. Aye, and you’d get a free house for your wife and family on the mainland and all your neighbours would be lighthouse families too.’

I tried to picture it. It seemed bizarre. At that point we were stuck behind a dozen large cows who were slowly being herded across the narrow country road from one field to another.

‘But the thing is,’ my wise informant told me, ‘you only ever spend about three years on the one light and then you are posted to another. Would you like an apple? There’s one in the glove box. They did tell you I hope that there is always three keepers on every light? I mean you willnae be there on your tod. In fact, I take it you are here for training since you seem to know sod all about the job?’

‘Aye, that’s right,’ I said, feeling like a real idiot. I dipped into my recent past and offered him a late teenage scowl.

‘Well then, there will be four of you, includin’ yoursel. The other three will work their normal watches through the night and you just have to watch what they do, learn how tae do it yoursel’ … Aye Archie, see you in the pub tonight. Set them up for me,’ he shouted after the farmer as the last cow disappeared into the field.

‘It keeps everybody sane. Three years on a rock off the East Coast, three years up in Shetland, then three on an island in the Hebrides, then doon the west coast. That’s the way it goes, something like that. Fine and dandy. And everyone else is changing at different times too. In some ways its toughest for the wives and kiddies. Different homes, new schools, father and husband gone half the year.’

‘Why have we stopped?’ I asked. We seemed to be in the middle of nowhere.

‘This is where you get out, son. There will be a tractor along to pick you up in a minute, or maybe in an hour or two. Hopefully before it gets dark. And watch out for the wolves. There’s a lot of sheep gone missing recently, and no one’s seen the minister’s boy since he went out collecting butterflies.’

He winked at me, and before he could drive off I asked, ‘What do you mean a tractor will be along?’

‘Tam Harris is your man. He owns all these sheep that ye see, and keeps a few more on Pladda itsel’. He’s done a deal with George Street. He’s your ferryman farmer and in return he gets the grazing rights to Pladda. Not that there’s much there, but enough to feed a few hungry sheep.’ And with that he was gone.

Suddenly there was a great silence around me, then gradually I heard the country sounds, the whirring of dragonflies, the cry of a lamb, and the distant sounds of the sea as an oyster catcher screamed.

I settled down for what might be a long wait, watching the tarmacadam road slowly blister in the heat. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and everything else was in my rucksack. The air smelled of summer. I leaned against the dry stone dyke and saw that a small burn was running through the field to the distant sea. It reminded me of a poem I knew I had with me in an anthology of American poetry. I’d brought a few poetry books with me, my current favourite being Poems from Poetry and Jazz in Concert which I had read at least a dozen times.

I rolled a cigarette and rummaged around for a Mars bar which I thought I’d better eat as it was beginning to liquefy in its wrapper. Still, it hadn’t leaked on to my poetry books. I pulled out the American anthology and found the poem I wanted. I had been planning this moment. It is something that artists seem to do. I remember a documentary about the painter David Hockney and his life in California. He talked about how when he drives from coast to desert he always plays a certain operatic tape in his car and times it so that the musical climax happens just as he is cresting the top of a hill and the desert landscape with setting sun is revealed below. In a similar vein I had been keeping my eyes peeled for anything that resembled a river. I hopped on to the wall and sitting above what was admittedly just a narrow stream, I began to read a poem by Langston Hughes called ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’.

I read it two or three times, pausing between each reading and surveying the land and the sea before me. At that age I didn’t know such moments were called sublime, but the experience was no less sublime for my ignorance. On my third reading I sounded the words out loud – ‘I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep … My soul has grown deep like the rivers’ – and was only dimly aware of the puttering of a tractor close by. This would be the terror element of the sublime just arriving. When the engine switched off I looked up. I saw before me a very big man, probably in his fifties, standing astride a Massey Ferguson tractor.

‘Don’t tell me they’ve sent another fucking hippy!’ were his first words to me. ‘Hop on then, John Lennon. We’ll make a man o’ you yet. But it’ll be a challenge, I can see that. They call me Big Tam, by the way – Tam Harris’ and he crushed so hard my hand within his own that I thought blood would shoot from the fingertips. He continued shaking it for about twenty seconds. Under the pretence of returning my book to the rucksack I felt for fractures but was confident there were only bruises.

‘Once you’ve throttled a few geese you’ll be able to shake hands like a man. Now, throw your gear in the trailer and jump in after it,’ he ordered, starting up the engine again. He was a dead ringer for one of the characters illustrated in Spike Milligan’s classic book Puckoon.

For the next five minutes I was thrown about amidst a soup of farmyard detritus – loose straw, several potatoes, earth and sand. I didn’t see us cresting the far edge of the field and beginning our rough descent to the little jetty. I was clinging on to the sides of the trailer and trying not to breathe in too much of the dust cloud that covered me while my bones bounced about randomly.

‘Out you get,’ he ordered again. And when I did it was like arriving in Paradise. Blue waters stretched from a sandy beach out to a little island that seemed so close you could reach out and touch it. At one end was a lighthouse, sitting on the highest point. It looked magic.

‘That’s your home for the next few weeks,’ he said, untying a small rowing boat and throwing a bundle of newspapers into it.

He ordered me to hop in.

And so I did, but it was more of a stumble. Like being drunk without alcohol. Euphoric, that’s the word. Harris landed opposite me with a thump and a roll and we pulled out to sea.

And so it was that the farmer-ferryman rowed me across the bay in silence. There wasn’t a ripple on the water except for those made by his slowly sweeping oars. I sat transfixed. A seal broke the surface beside us and barked loudly. I swear it guided us in to the island, looking round occasionally to check we were following. I felt like a character in a Rupert Bear book and would not have been surprised if a whistling flying fish had cartwheeled past.

And as we approached the island, in the midday sun, I could see the silhouette of three keepers and a dog. This, I thought with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, was it. There’s no going back now.