‘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.
The Mysteries of the Light Chamber
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