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