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