Читать книгу Stargazing - Peter Hill - Страница 16

In 1973 there was a shortage of lighthouse keepers. This was not because the lights were being automated – that would come later – but because most of the young men who would traditionally have entered the service were finding better wages building and manning oil-rigs in the North Sea.

The three new colleagues who greeted me on the jetty were from a different generation, in fact several different generations. One was in his sixties and clutched a black bible in his potato-like fist. Another was middle-aged and wiry. The third, Ronnie, in his thirties, had a little cocker spaniel by his side, and was one of the few bachelors I met during my time on the lights. He often blamed the dog for making it difficult to form a lasting relationship with a woman, but I never could see the connection. Nearly thirty years later, in a bar in the magical Orkney Islands, I would meet an ex-keeper who told me Ronnie had eventually married the switchboard operator from lighthouse headquarters in Edinburgh and was, to boot, supremely happy.

How I appeared to them, at first glance on that summer’s day in 1973, I can only speculate. I put the groaning sound I heard on arriving down to the old wooden jetty and the swelling sea, but on reflection it probably came from my fellow keepers who saw before them a miniature version of Neil Young from his Crazy Horse period. They probably shared a vision of the light first ceasing to turn then gradually fading to darkness as I lay stoned on the upper rim of the light listening to Van Morrison on my battery-powered cassette recorder while the Oban fishing fleet crashed into the rocks below.

Three of us and the dog hopped on to an old trailer while the Principal Keeper started up the brand new Massey Ferguson tractor, my second in less than an hour, and pulled us up a steep hill to the lighthouse. To my relief I found that the tower of the light was surrounded by numerous out-houses in which I would live, eat, and sleep for the foreseeable future. Later, I would hear tales of other lights, such as the legendary Skerryvore where the keepers lived in the tower itself. In these, the bedroom walls were cylindrical, and there was a circular hole in all the floors and ceilings to allow the enormous metal weight which turned the giant reflectors to be winched up and down at thirty minute intervals throughout the night.

But these and many other stories were all up ahead. Stories told at two in the morning as one watch sashayed in to another while deep sleep struggled with reluctant consciousness. Stories told by my elders which served the dual purpose of keeping me awake and teaching me the workings of the light. Stories accompanied by endless pots of tea and sweet digestive biscuits topped with orange Cheddar cheese.

In a strange, slow-motion blur I remember, on my arrival at Pladda, first being shown a tiny bedroom by one of the keepers. I left my worldly possessions on the narrow single bed. The bathroom and toilet, three times the size of my room, lay off a short corridor. Then it was in to the living room for proper introductions, starting with Comet the Spaniel. His master, Ronnie, was an Assistant Lighthouse Keeper (ALK). He had a jolly, pink scrubbed face and a friendly manner. He in turn introduced me to Principal Lighthouse Keeper Duncan McLeish, and Assistant Lighthouse Keeper (ALK) Finlay Watchorn. Hands were firmly shaken across the confined space of the living room with a clashing of pullover sleeves and bulbous knuckles like some weird move in a Morris dance. ‘Fit-like, grand ey?’ someone enquired incomprehensibly, while someone else squeezed my hand like a lemon and my lungs filled with a mixture of twenty different blends of pipe tobacco that hung like a Los Angeles smog a little above the chair backs.

My first impression of the room was of a lounge and kitchen combined. A table with four places was already set for a meal. A grandfather clock stood guard at the point where the living area with its upholstered armchairs met the little kitchen with sink and stove. I remember a kettle was bubbling quietly on the gas rings. Finlay Watchorn went across to it, lifted its round hooked handle with a white dishcloth and added more water to it. He didn’t prepare a teapot, as I expected, but merely returned the kettle to the stove.

During my two weeks of training the beacon above us would be switched on and off fourteen times, but the gas below the kettle, I soon learned, was never dimmed. Like the flame of the unknown soldier it burned, and the kettle simmered, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Everyone on Pladda was addicted to tea.

‘I’m chust going to do the weather,’ Duncan said to the others in his slow Hebridean lilt. ‘Tell the laddie about the routines.’

‘He’s just gone to make a weather report and call up Corsewall,’ Ronnie explained mysteriously. ‘You’ll soon pick up the routines,’ he said. ‘Piece of cake.’

‘Thank you,’ I replied.

‘Nah, nah, I’m no offering you cake, eedjit, I mean the routines are complicated but soon learned. Now, while Duncan’s away we should tell you that he is a very religious man and we all respect that. He’ll want to say grace at every meal except breakfast, and he disappears to his room all day Sunday, except when he’s on duty.’

‘We never make fun of a man’s religion on the lighthouses,’ Finlay Watchorn continued Ronnie’s remarks, scratching his bearded chin with the stem of his pipe. I remember the taxi driver who took me across Arran had compared him to Eric Sykes, but to me he looked more like Captain Haddock from the Tin Tin books. ‘You’ll soon discover that we make fun of just about everything else, but no’ a man’s religion. Now let’s think about some lunch,’ and he rubbed his hands together. ‘I’m on lunches this week.’

Ronnie was bouncing a red ball for Comet, and as I turned round to see the dog jump and catch it between his teeth Finlay turned on the television set.

‘Let’s see what’s happening in the great outdoors. We aye watch the one o’ clock news before we settle down for lunch,’ he explained.

This was a novelty for me. During my two years as an art student I don’t think I’d bought a single newspaper and never possessed a television set. My recent television diet had been my weekly trip with my mates Lincoln, Albi, and Jogg to watch Colditz in the flat of Marion and Fionna, two good friends in third year who lived above a fish-and-chip shop on Dundee’s Peddie Street. Like many of my generation the war in Vietnam had weighed so heavily on my mind and disillusioned us about the ‘straight’ world that we’d sought to form an alternative world of our own. During my months on the lighthouses I found I was rejoining a shared reality, filling in the many gaps in recent history and what was soon to be called ‘popular culture’, an overly-academic term for entertainment, I’ve always thought.

The set took a few minutes to warm up, as they did in those days. Then immediately we were beamed live by satellite to the Watergate hearings in Washington.

‘Och, it’s no John Dean again?’ Finlay feigned dismay. ‘Bring on Tricky Dicky and yon Kissinger. Let’s hear what they have to say. Nail the bastards.’

I suddenly experienced the bizarre image of lighthouse keepers all around the globe, thanks to recent satellite technology, from Tierra del Feugo to Nova Scotia, being able to tune in on a daily basis to the world’s biggest political circus. It was rather cumbersomely known as The Senate Select Committee on Presidential Practices, but school kids and their grandparents from Paris to Peru knew it simply by its rather poetic tag of ‘Watergate’.

And as we tuned in Ronnie shouted advice, admonition and encouragement back at the main players on the black-and-white television set. Over the next few days I witnessed how Ronnie interacted with the television in this way no matter what was on. It didn’t matter if it was Emmerdale Farm, The Generation Game, Star Trek, or his favourite Skippy the Bush Kangaroo – they all got Ronnie’s wisdom or rebuke.

As we joined them from Pladda, John Wesley Dean III was getting the third degree from Sam Ervin Jr, chair of the committee. The camera closed in on Dean who was saying, ‘I do not know whether Attorney General John Mitchell approved the Watergate wiretapping operation.’

‘Pull the other one,’ Ronnie told him, wagging his finger at the screen. ‘Of course ye knew about it. You all did. You were up to your armpits in it.’

‘Now, now,’ Finlay admonished, ‘What about the presumption of innocence?’

I listened agog as Dean continued dropping metaphorical bombshells from another time zone with the same easy manner that Kissinger dropped real ones on the peasants of Cambodia. ‘It was the President who ordered the 1971 burglary of the psychiatrist’s office in Los Angeles,’ Dean protested. ‘They were looking for information about Daniel Ellsberg in relation to the Pentagon papers.’

At this point Duncan rejoined us from ‘doing the weather’, whatever that meant. John Dean was babbling on about Egil Krogh and the Plumbers, which I thought sounded like an ace name for a rock band or a James Bond villain. ‘Switch that rubbish off,’ Duncan commanded like an old testament prophet. ‘It is time to eat the food that the Good Lord has provided for us, courtesy of 84 George Street.’

‘Purvey time,’ Finlay Watchorn winked at me. ‘You sit yourself there, Peter. Our first course today is vegetable soup.’

Half a gallon of soup divided between four people is still about a pint each, and that is what we consumed along with a whole loaf of sliced white bread.

Mind you, the sea air had given me an appetite, and although I finished last, I did finish.

As I was licking my soup spoon clean and thinking to myself that that would keep me going nicely until tea time, Finlay was lifting what turned out to be a huge lamb casserole from the oven.

‘I’ll give you a hand with the rice,’ Ronnie offered, and before I knew it I was tucking into a meal that would have easily fed me for a week back in my student bedsit in Greenfield House.

As we ate, the wit and wisdom of my three new friends increasingly reduced me to tears of laughter as they ribbed each other on every aspect of their lives and coaxed me to join in.

‘Ronnie comes from just outside Perth, Peter,’ Finlay Watchorn told me. ‘But we dinnae hold that against him. What do they call it Ronnie, the Carse o’ Gowrie? They tell me Perthshire is a great place for growing mushrooms. They seem to respond well to the dampness and the lack of sunlight. I’ve never been there myself, thank God.’

‘Don’t you listen to him, Peter,’ Ronnie replied. ‘It’s a wonderful place, and not a lighthouse for miles. But of course you’re from the big city of Dundee, you must know Perth well.’

Finlay excused himself to check on the apple crumble as I squeezed in another mouthful of the most exquisite braised lamb.

‘Some more bread, laddie?’ Duncan inquired, opening another loaf while Ronnie gave us a run-down on yesterday’s edition of Skippy and his mates in the bush.

‘If you stay in the service long enough,’ Ronnie continued the Australian theme, ‘you’ll meet Ozzie MacGregor. He’s on Corsewall just now. Amazing set of boomerangs he’s carved from driftwood. Chucks them at the gannets and lets them float back to the beach.’

Over the coming days I witnessed how these three wonderful men could simultaneously carry out three separate conversations for sustained periods of time. Occasionally their quite discrete stories would converge and embrace before going their different ways, only to meet again half an hour down the track.

‘Time to do the dishes,’ Duncan eventually announced. ‘Then we’ll have our tea and biscuits.’

I was bloated, the only word for it. I’d managed a small serve of apple crumble and custard, but it seemed a reckless act.

Washing dishes immediately after eating a meal was another novelty to me. Normally I could go days without washing up, occasionally doing the whole lot in the bath in Greenfield House, one of many tricks I’d learned from Lincoln, my closest art school friend.

We moved to the sink where Finlay washed in what must have been near boiling water while Duncan and I dried. Ronnie put away.

‘Watch where he puts them,’ Duncan advised. ‘We all take turns at doing everything here.’

As we washed and dried they taught me about ‘the routine’.

‘Normally there’s only three of us on a lighthouse,’ Duncan spoke slowly and clearly. ‘So all lighthouse routines are built around the work being shared between three people. It’s very democratic.’

‘Except he gets paid more than us,’ Finlay joked. ‘For doing the same work, like.’

Duncan flicked his dish towel to the side of Finlay’s ear and continued.

‘If your watch happens just before breakfast, let us say, then you’re the man who cooks breakfast that day. But you won’t cook it the next day as you will be on a different watch then.’ It all sounded very complicated. I usually just grabbed a couple of Weetabix and smoked a Golden Virginia, if I bothered at all.

‘If you are on the afternoon watch,’ Duncan broke into my thoughts, ‘you cook the evening meal that day, but you won’t cook it again for another three days.’

‘However,’ Finlay Watchorn chimed in, swivelling round from the sink, pink rubber gloves up to his elbows. ‘The same person cooks lunch all week. Like muggins here this week.’

‘So do the other two have the mornings off?’ I asked innocently.

‘The mornings off?!!’ Finlay exclaimed like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. ‘There’s no such thing as “the mornings off ” on a lighthouse. Och no! Monday to Friday the two other keepers work from nine till one while the third prepares our luncheon banquet. On Saturdays we clean the lighthouse from top to toe.’

‘What sort of work?’ I wondered aloud.

‘Whatever 84 George Street, in their wisdom, tells us to do,’ Ronnie said, taking four dinner plates from Duncan and placing them in the old oak sideboard. ‘Build a jetty, expand the vegetable patch, re-paint the tower white, put in more vegetables, repair the boat, pull out more vegetables, mend the nets, clean the fog horn, degrease the generator, perhaps a bit of dry stane dyking if it’s tae yer liking. I think they have wee competitions at 84 over their tea and biscuits just to see what they can dream up for us to do next.’

‘Jacks of all trades we are,’ Finlay continued. ‘Have you ever sheared a sheep, Peter?’

I scarcely liked to ask what happened on a lighthouse in the afternoons, having so shocked my fellow keepers by suggesting that the mornings might consist of free time. Nobody seemed to be about to do anything other than make a large pot of tea and produce a roll of digestive biscuits and some Cheddar cheese. However, curiosity got the better of me and I asked, ‘What are we up to this afternoon?’

‘Och, whatever you like, laddie,’ Duncan told me. ‘You always get the afternoon off on a lighthouse.’ And suddenly the idea of writing haikus and painting seascapes rushed back to join me.

‘I’m goin’ tae ma pit for a sleep,’ Ronnie said. ‘I was on watch from two till six this morning so I’ve had less than two hours kip. Time to shoot the crow. I’ll be up for Crossroads.’

‘You’ll find that happens every three days,’ Duncan added. ‘But we’ve hardly even begun to teach you the routine. I’m on watch from six till ten this evening. You’ll join me for that Peter and I’ll show you how to light the light and in between times I’ll take you through the whole routine’ – spoken slowly, liltingly rooo-teen – ‘If you’ve finished your tea you should go for a wee walk around our island. That’s what I’m going to do. We usually walk on our own. It is a time for our own thoughts and innermost reflections.’ I could do wi’ some of that, I decided.

I gave Duncan a ten minute head start on his constitutional before going out myself to explore my new home.

All lighthouse keepers have their hobbies. Some build miniature five-masted schooners in bottles. One I knew spent three years building a real motor boat in the vegetable shed behind the fog signal, while others carved mermaids from bits of driftwood, played hymns on the one-stringed fiddle, became experts on the subject of the Dr Who television series, or (God bless him) cooked gourmet meals with the lobsters that we caught and the spices that we had flown in by helicopter or delivered by the supply vessel, The Pole Star. Others prayed. One frequently gave spirited renditions of the delta blues on the ‘moothie’. I never could get mouth-organs to work beyond producing a sequence of random notes that lacked melody, tone, and even discernible rhythm. My efforts sounded like a couple of possums hard at it in a loft, or the orgasmic cries of an asthmatic bull-seal midway between sexual climax and cardiac arrest. So on the lighthouses I read poetry instead, and occasionally tried to write it. That was my hobby. Poetry has always been important to me. There is a poem for every phase of life and at least two for every situation: Dr Seuss, Sylvia Plath, Lewis Carroll, Allen Ginsberg, Les Murray, John Keats, Leonard Cohen, George Mackay Brown, Walt Whitman, Liz Lochhead, Paul Celan, Spike Milligan, Robert Crawford, Hugh McDiarmid, Ivor Cutler … Some of them are referred to in these pages and you may care to seek them out and enjoy them at your leisure. On other occasions you may just want to open a favourite poetry book at random and pretend you are on a lighthouse. Try staying awake until three in the morning and you will soon find you are so tired you can hardly think. Open your curtains over the black starry night sky above Hampstead, or Boston, or Sydney – wherever you live – and read a favourite poem. Then stare at the sky and contemplate the vastness of the universe. Gradually, you will turn into a lighthouse keeper. But take your time, for time is precious. There’s no hurry. There never is on a lighthouse, as my first afternoon on one taught me.

I had just set off on my walk. I was burning off the biggest meal I’d eaten in years. It was a beautiful summer afternoon and a family of seals was guarding the rocks around the bay. Duncan McLeish, as reported earlier, had already gone for his constitutional. I strode past him on my way down the little path and gave a cheery wave. The problem was, the island was only about half the length of a football field and five minutes later I found myself back where I started, wondering where to go next. Duncan, meanwhile, hadn’t moved – or at least I thought he hadn’t. Apparently, the trick was to walk as slowly as possible and take as long as possible to cover a very small distance. So I slowed down. I used my eyes as much as my legs. I picked up pebbles and turned them over in my hand. Like Blake, I saw a universe in a grain of sand, and wondered. I breathed the sea air, deep into my lungs. When was the last time I enjoyed the natural sounds of the daylight hours without traffic noise of some sort in the background? Perhaps never, not even on a mountain top where a Christian Salvesen lorry always appears on the winding road below to break the spell. This was pre-industrial. Damn near medieval … except for the technology of the light itself. But there have been beacons of one kind or another for thousands of years, from Alexandria to Arbroath. I watched the oyster catchers dance like mechanical toys.

Replete is the only word for the way the huge lunch had left me feeling. And contented. I liked it here and looked forward to learning more about ‘the routine’.

As a hybrid art student-cum-hippy I had long scorned routine: waking when I chose, working till dawn, eating irregularly, making no plans and always acting on the spur of the moment. I was a sucker for the moody, self-obsessed poetry of Hermann Hesse:

‘Often I tried the frightening way of “reality,”

Where things that count are profession, law, fashion finance,

But disillusioned and freed I fled away alone

To the other side, the place of dreams and blessed folly.’

After only a few hours on Pladda I was getting the first inklings that perhaps I could tire of that old way of life. Perhaps there was another – not better, but different – way of living.

Gradually, as days went by, the outer wall of the lighthouse compound would appear a fair distance away from our living quarters and to walk to the far end of the island required considerable planning and possibly sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. I have an artist friend called Douglas Gordon who once slowed down Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho until it lasted all of twenty-four hours. To see three lighthouse keepers out for a stroll on Pladda was to see a similar rupturing of the space-time continuum.

‘Aye, you’ll have to remember you’re not in the big city any more,’ Duncan advised me that first evening, looking up from a psalm he was reading in the bible that always seemed to accompany him, and adding cryptically, ‘Grant that this day we fall into no sin, neither run into any kind of danger.’

I must have looked puzzled, for he added, with a wink, ‘You will find that we do no running on this island, and when we walk we do so at a very slow pace.’

‘Yes, of course,’ I replied.

‘And one other thing. No whistling on the Sabbath.’

I strolled off as slowly as I could to inspect the vegetable patch, wondering what Duncan would say when he heard my Jimi Hendrix compilation tape that I had been dying to play all day. I had lugged my portable tape recorder, miniaturised to roughly the size of a big city phone book (that was the state of the art in 1973), all the way from Dundee on the opposite coast of Scotland. I planned to play the maestro’s rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ across the still waters of the Firth of Clyde at the earliest opportunity.

How can I describe it? I’ve often said that being on a lighthouse resembled nothing more than being in a spaceship. Perhaps a spaceship co-designed by NASA and the Goons.

And as if in agreement with this sentiment, while Watergate, Vietnam, and Brezhnev’s visit to America clogged the television news during my two weeks on Pladda, high above us three Skylab astronauts struggled with the daily routines that we all took for granted. We watched them trying to complete ordinary tasks in zero gravity as slices of bread and ruptured tomatoes floated around them. Living in confined space and good comradeship was perhaps our greatest commonality. By contrast, we had it easy. We had our comfy armchairs, our Tetley tea bags, our lively repartee, and our coal fires. But we also had the night sky, the aurora borealis, and the luxury of leaning on the rail at three in the morning, high above the sea swell, watching satellites track across the Milky Way. And I would smile a secret smile to myself in the absurd knowledge that I was actually being paid to stargaze.

Yet the wild nights, when they happened, weren’t so easy when, with gale-force winds and a spume-tanned face, I’d have given anything to be inside a warm, dry spaceship rather than outside on the rim of the light, knuckles white as if the bone beneath were shining through … out on the rim, out on the rim, out on the rim … I would repeat the words as I pulled myself round, checking on the other lights. It was as if all my senses were being assaulted by the universe – the wind trying to rip off my ears and blow through my ear drums with the savagery of an apple corer; my tongue marinaded in the sharp salt spray; my fingers, keep them moving, lest they froze against the metal rail, and the paraffin vapour rising through my nostrils like a giant wave while all my eyes could see was blackness spangled with a field of expanding stars as if the sky had turned into a huge Ross Bleckner canvas. Cold, and wet, and aching in every muscle, I would pull the heavy door fast behind me and shoot the submarine-like bolt against the bulkhead. And in the warmth of the light chamber the three-in-the-morning tiredness would be released like the most narcotic perfume. The fight from then onwards was to stay awake and retain consciousness for another three hours.

Ronnie used to joke that on Skerryvore, far to our West, where the keepers lived in the tower for most of their term of duty, it was possible to be seated at the dining room table and from there perform most tasks without leaving your seat. You could lean across and pluck the kettle from the stove. You could make a radio broadcast to the mainland. Or take a Yorkshire pudding from the oven. You could turn on the television and watch your favourite soap opera. He even claimed you could wash and dry the dishes without having to rise from your seat.

In the early days of my apprenticeship it was difficult to know when I was getting my leg pulled, precisely because so much of what sounded far-fetched eventually proved to be correct. Stories I heard on one lighthouse would be confirmed months later on a different light with a different crew.

This shared camaraderie contrasted with our internal lives, our solitary thoughts, our three in the morning musings, and especially our readings. Having read and re-read most of J. R. R. Tolkien and Herman Hesse I graduated around this time to Kurt Vonnegut and Carlos Castaneda. Vonnegut was a particularly sane companion to have on a lighthouse and a fine contrast to the madness of Vietnam. So at three in the morning I would pick up classics such as Cat’s Cradle and read sections at random. I particularly enjoyed Bokonon’s ‘Fifty-third Calypso’ and read it many times that summer from the rims of three different lighthouses. I felt it captured the beauty and absurdity and complexity of this awesome planet where ‘A Chinese dentist and a British Queen’ all had to fit together ‘in the same machine’, a feeling aided by the visual backdrop of the night sky and the knowledge that I was the only sentient being awake for miles around.

It is easy from a distance of over a quarter of a century to forget what happened on which lighthouse, or who told what tale in the depths of the night. Perhaps it was because the keepers on Pladda made such an impression that recollections of the island itself, and of the light, are hazier. The next two islands I was posted to are far clearer, but on them I had less to learn. I seem to recall that there were actually two lighthouses on Pladda, immediately adjacent to each other. I think they belonged to different centuries and that it was the smaller of the two which was currently in use. I feel frustrated that I cannot remember such an obvious thing, while the outpourings of the television come with almost instant recall.

Then there were the fog signals. Again, I cannot remember which type of signal was on each island. And yet, as I type, gradually it is coming back. Some were massive steam driven things occupying whole sheds. They looked like a cross between a Tibetan horn (if you’ve read Tintin in Tibet you will be able to picture it) and a Tinguley sculpture. The older ones more than nodded in the direction of Heath Robinson’s quirky machines. Others were sleek and modern like a bank of fire sirens. Either way, they were hell to live with when in operation.

Memory is strange. Largely, it is my early days on Pladda that remain with me most vividly. Everything was new to me and I had to take copious notes to remind me what had to be switched on or off, when and how. I still have those notes in a kind of on-running diary I had been keeping since I was about sixteen. In those days, Woolworths in Byres Road, the main artery in the West End of Glasgow, sold packs of three spiral-bound yellow notebooks, each pack not much bigger than a packet of cigarettes and thin enough to slip in a shirt pocket. I must have gone through dozens of them, scribbling poetry, making sketches for paintings, jotting down daily events.

One such entry, for example, tells me that not long before leaving for Pladda I went to the art school film club. With all the bluntness of a Spectator film critic I wrote, and I can hardly believe it now: ‘Went with Lincoln, Albi and Jogg to see an Andy Warhol film called Chelsea Girls. It was the biggest load of rubbish I have ever had the misfortune to sit through in my entire nineteen years. Talk about boring!!!!!! We tried to get our money back. We did not succeed but went to the Tav instead. Glad I am a painter.’

When I returned to the living quarters that first afternoon I found Ronnie was already starting to prepare the evening meal. His watch was the otherwise invisible one from two in the afternoon till six in the evening. The only other duty in this period was to make a radio and weather check. I could not face even looking at food, so I disappeared to my room and immediately fell into a deep sleep. In that sleep I had the first of many dreams of being surrounded by a flat sea on a sunny summer’s day. The light is diamond hard and sharp as a lemon. Strange islands break the surface tension and occasional rowing boats drift past. I realise that my eyes are the eyes of the sea and I am looking all around me. I have no body. I sink to the ocean floor and linger there until the most godawful ringing noise wakes me up. There is a small bell in my room and its size is nowhere relative to its strength. It is of a similar type to the sort of maid’s bell found in Victorian terraced houses across what was once ignominiously called the Empire. I rub my eyes and my mouth has that horrible late afternoon post-sleep taste in it. The bell is still ringing but stops abruptly. I look at my watch. It is precisely five o’clock.

I pull on my trousers and shuffle through to the living area. It seems to be teeming with people and is heavy with pipe tobacco. No, there are only my three companions but they seem to be doing so many different things in such a small space that it appears more crowded than it actually is. Duncan is winding the grandfather clock with a large key. ‘Come in laddie, come in. I chust thought I’d let you hear what the bell sounds like that will wake you up when it is time for you to begin your watch. You’ve got a day’s work ahead of you before you go back to dreamland.’

‘Have you started dreaming about the sea yet?’ Finlay Watchorn asked, and I felt like my brain had been robbed. ‘It happens to all of us, some sooner than others,’ he continued. He was busy sorting through the newspapers and magazines that Harris the ferryman had brought across. ‘We all start to dream of the sea, and our dreams soon become like a second home.’

I noticed one copy of the Sunday Post, several of The Times, a People’s Friend, a small stack of The Daily Record from Glasgow, and a copy of Time magazine. ‘Harris aye brings across our reading material,’ Finlay explained. ‘His daughter works at the hotel and aye keeps what’s left at the end of the day. Once we’ve read them we use them to light the fire. Then there’s the Professor with his damn crosswords.’

Ronnie had obviously got the evening meal under control from the burbling and clicking sounds coming from the stove where several pots of different sizes simmered like a private percussion group. He was washing up the utensils at the sink and craning his head round in an attempt to watch Daktari on the BBC. ‘No’ the hypodermic!’ he shouted at the television vet who was in the process of operating on what looked like a baby giraffe. ‘You’re no’ going to stick that thing in the wee creature?’ and Comet, playing at his feet, barked along in sympathy.

I can’t remember the details of my second lighthouse meal with the same clarity as the first. There were three courses, as every meal seemed to have, and the middle one involved a lot of meat while the third was over-heavy on sugar. I do remember the novelty of the first course, though, which was freshly caught crab on Jacob’s Cream Crackers. Magic. I was beginning to worry about what I would prepare, or more precisely how I would prepare it, when my turn came around – which it would, with the cold inevitability of a revolving light.

‘Ronnie caught six of them in his creel,’ Finlay explained. ‘We’ll be eating crab for a few days yet.’ I had no problem with that. They were delicious.

Afterwards, with the dishes washed and the jokes all told, each seemed to go their separate way. Finlay was going to be on the watch which began at two in the morning, so he went to bed to get some sleep. Finlay, Duncan explained, would be woken by Ronnie around 1.45 a.m. Ronnie in turn would previously have got in an hour or two’s sleep himself and be woken by Duncan and myself around 9.45 p.m. It appeared that Duncan and I were already ‘on watch’ and he would devote the next few hours, until it was time to light the light, to going over ‘the routine’ with me in some detail. I excused myself momentarily and went to get one of my little yellow notebooks. I have it in front of me now. The blue ink has faded slightly. It is a little the worse for wear. But all the instructions are still there, as recorded at Duncan’s elbow. It begins:

Light Duties –

1) Turning on the light:

a) Go up to lightroom and light bunsens

b) Lift out stops

c) Let them soak

d) Turn round and light

e) Place under light at top between cross-sections (leave for ten minutes)

2) Raise the blinds

3) Go down and switch on pumps (turn on numbers 1 to 3 in any order)

4) Lighting the light

a) Light tapir (scribbled note in margin about South American mammal)

b) Turn dial to 20

c) Light fumes when they appear (above the light)

d) Remove pan from underneath and blow out flames

e) Empty pan

f) Go down and start turning

5) Fill in log books

6) Remember: When ‘off ’ gear handle is down

7) Oil generators and empty waste

All of these instructions became much clearer when Duncan eventually took me up the stairs of the lighthouse and turned the theory into practice. For the moment, I was still an armchair lighthouse keeper.

Duncan had begun our session by gently encouraging me, in an avuncular way, to stop referring to the four-hour watches we all undertook twice in every twenty four hours as ‘shifts’. This lapse was a hangover from my previous summer job working in the Pig and Whistle bar in Butlin’s in Ayr, which by strange coincidence was just across the water from where we now conversed. He then went on to give me a brief overview of lighthouses and their upkeep before progressing to the detailed instructions outlined above.

He told me that there are three types of lighthouse: rock lighthouses come straight out of the sea and as a keeper you spend all of your time living, sleeping, and eating in the tower. Coastal lighthouses skirt the British Isles and are on the mainland, allowing keepers to live with their families. Island lights are situated on uninhabited islands. I would eventually work on three of them. A trainee lighthouse keeper entering the job for life would spend 18 months serving short periods of time on many different lights around Scotland, as my taxi driver had tried to explain to me earlier in the day. They would also undergo strict psychological tests before gaining employment as prior to this there had been a few ugly murders and suicides – but Duncan spoke little of those, although others would later.

Thereafter he (and there were sadly never any shes since the job had ceased being a family one many decades ago, when husband and wife teams kept the lights burning) would be posted to a variety of lights for three years at a time. In the space of less than a decade a keeper might find himself on a rock west of the Hebrides, then on mainland Orkney, and after that in an inner- city harbour station like Footdee in Aberdeen.

Each light had three keepers and each keeper took two four-hour watches in every 24 hours. These watches rotated daily.

Let’s say you were on from ten at night until two in the morning. You would then sleep until breakfast at eight (always attended by all three keepers) and then from nine until twelve two keepers would perform any duties that needed doing around the island.

During this period the third keeper would prepare the sort of lavish three-course lunch which I had recently enjoyed. Usually it would be eaten at noon or one o’clock depending on the light and the whim of the different keepers. One keeper would be on lunch duties for a whole week while the other two spent the mornings working on whatever ‘84’ decreed needed doing about the place. Your next watch would then be from two until six in the evening but as a daytime watch it was usually a quiet period with only a few radio tests to make to all the nearby lights and coastguard stations. You would then have a night watch, a ‘Rembrandt’ as I immediately nicknamed them, from two in the morning until six in the morning, the worst of the three since you would be lucky to get an hour’s sleep before you had to be up again for breakfast. The following afternoon you would sleep. And so it would go on, seven days a week. The longest I kept up such a regime was eight weeks without a break and I can tell you I was ready for a pint of export and a ‘nippy sweetie’ when I eventually hit the high-life in Girvan.

We were kept pretty busy. I never did complete many haikus or watercolours. The light had to be wound up like a giant grandfather clock every thirty minutes. Every twenty minutes we checked the air pressure to the paraffin and if necessary pumped it up. This was a subtle ruse to keep us awake and alert, as was the little hammer that banged away on the brass every second through the night – for a lighthouse is nothing if not the most phallic clock in the world. At the highest level the light itself burned and the giant mirrors, the reflectors, turned like a slow-motion merry-go-round supported on a huge bath of mercury. To light the paraffin one had to cause a mini explosion within the light room, allowing a small cloud of paraffin vapour to form in the air, tucking one’s face under ones arm for protection while igniting the gas with a burning taper.

Duncan explained that many lighthouses still used paraffin as their source of illumination because the beam was stronger and travelled a greater distance. Increasingly, new forms of electric light were being introduced into the service.

The most magical moments happened when we changed watches. There was an unwritten rule that the keeper about to head off for bed would stay up for an extra half an hour and engage in conversation with his colleague in order to help him stay awake. A large pot of tea would have already been prepared along with a plate of digestive biscuits and cheddar cheese. It was at these times that I really got to know my fellow keepers. One person would be consumed with tiredness, the other trying desperately to shake off his dreams. Magritte would have loved it. It was at that hour in the morning with the wind whistling like a devil outside that I would hear the tales of lighthouse murders and suicides. After bridges, lighthouses are a favourite spot for those who want to take a header from a great height.

Isolation affects people in different ways, and island life can be utterly surreal.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. At this point all these adventures were up ahead and I had still to work through a complete watch.

‘Come on, laddie,’ Duncan said, looking up at the grandfather clock. ‘It’s time to light the light.’