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