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