on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Better by far, they all said, than the lugubrious pilgrimages with a wheelbarrow that keepers used to go on from the old lighthouse at Dungeness, and better than hanging over the void in the lavatory on the outside gallery of the Longships Light off Land’s End – 110 feet up, and, if you were on duty in thick weather, rising every five minutes to change the guncotton charges on the manually operated fog signal, raise them high in the air on the counterbalanced jib, a facsimile of the one I had seen twenty-five years previously at Anvil Point in Dorset, and push down the plunger on the exploder, ‘Just like Lawrence and the Arabs,’ as one of them who had done it said.
At sunset the lamp was lit, a 75 mm Hood Petroleum Vapour Burner, visible twenty-one miles away, like the one at Anvil Point, but now very old-fashioned and soon to be supplanted by electricity, the product of one of the finest makers in the world, Chance Brothers of Birmingham. At last I realised a long-cherished ambition, to see the lamp of a lighthouse lit, and only just in time. The Keeper on Watch poured meths into a spirit cup under the upper and lower vaporizers. They were really nothing more than over-size Primus stoves. While he was waiting for them to heat up, he removed the curtains that shielded the lenses from the sun. The magnification was so great that if they were not shielded the sun would splinter the red Venetian shades on the mantles. Then he lit the mantles, which erupted like great crimson fungi. The light was economical. It only burned two and a quarter pints of paraffin in seven hours.
He then wound up the weight from the base of the tower to the level of the lantern. It weighed about 7 cwt and it took 400 turns of the handle to raise it. When the bell rang it meant that there were fifty more turns to be made. If he went over the fifty, the handle would begin to unwind and either remove his front teeth or else hit him in the pit of the stomach, according to whether he was a large or small light-house-keeper. He had to do this once every hour. At the end of the hour, the bell rang to tell him that the weight was almost down; but he would know, even if he did not hear the bell. ‘When it’s nearly down you feel it in your bones,’ one of them said.
Once the light was burning the only sounds were the hiss of the vaporiser, the whirr of the governor and the clacking of the ratchet when he began winding again. If fog came down he had to go over to the engine house and start the engine, a 22 h.p. Hornsby Fog Signal Engine, installed aout 1905, but looking like a copy of something much older. In order to start it he heated a metal dome at the end of the cylinder with a blow lamp. When it was nice and hot, he set the flywheel to top dead centre, opened the valve to the compressed air tank, switched on the paraffin and oil drips, and operated the starting lever in short jerks at every other revolution of the flywheel. The first time he did it while I was there he caught the piston on the wrong stroke, the engine went backwards, there was an explosion and the room was filled with dense smoke and a voice fucking the engine and the Brethren for not providing a replacement.
Once the thing was firing correctly he locked the starting lever and closed down the relief valve to allow the compressor to pump air back to the main tank. While he was doing this, being a good lighthousekeeper, he was wondering if the weight bell had sounded, whether the Radio Beacon was functioning (actually, he could see the monitor in the engine house); or whether he ought to be listening to Land’s End on the RT.
Now he had steam up and he could begin to operate the siren, which was miles away on the other side of the rock. Like everything else on Round Island that wasn’t operated by paraffin, the opening and closing of the valves was controlled by clockwork, a gigantic weighted mechanism in the basement which had to be wound up every two hours.
Just before the siren went off the two black horns emitted a sighing noise, like a whale surfacing, there was a pause and an enormous, indescribable sound came blasting out of them. Out on the platform, close to them, it was as if one’s ears were full of giant bluebottles; not surprising as the thing could be heard ten miles away. Inside the keepers’ house it was worse. The ones off duty lay rigid in their bunks waiting for it. There was not long to wait. It gave four three-second blasts every two minutes. After seventy-two hours of the siren, everyone was ready to transfer to British Railways.
The power of the sea at Round Island was enormous. At three in the morning on 7 January, the previous year, the wind was WSW Force Ten. In the official jargon this produces ‘very high waves with long overhanging crests … the tumbling of the seas becomes very heavy …’. At three-thirty the radio aerial carried away, the window of the pantry on the inside of the protecting wall was smashed in by seas surging 130 ft up the rock. This was the weather in which a giant wave roared up the West Gulley and stove in the oak doors of the engine room which were more than three inches thick.
At six o’clock it was blowing Force Eleven – more than sixty knots. This was a storm in which ‘small and medium ships might be lost to view’. In such weather seas will be breaking over the top of the Bishop, 180 ft, and the Wolf and their towers will be shaking violently. In addition, according to keepers who have served there, on the Bishop at the height of the storm they hear strange metallic clankings that seem to come from the base of the tower. On the Longships there is an awe-inspiring sound that is generally agreed to be made by a boulder rumbling about in an underwater cave.
At a quarter to six in mid-September the sun is rising behind a line of jagged cloud over a grey, heaving sea. In a half-circle around you the lights begin to go out. From Round Island you can see them going: to the east the triple-flashing light on the Seven Stones light vessel towards Cape Cornwall; beyond it to the east the occulting white light with red sectors on the Longships; the alternating red and white light on the Wolf to the south-east and the double-flashing white of the Bishop. There is not a ship to be seen. It is lonely here. Occasionally a Dutch liner comes in close to give them a toot on the siren. The Keeper on Watch closes the micrometer valve, changes over the bottom lens vaporizer. He changes bottom and top vaporizers alternately (later he will put it on the kitchen-stove to dry out) and hangs the curtains over the lenses for another day.
AT TWO O’CLOCK in the afternoon of 6 December 1963, my forty-fourth birthday, Wanda and I set off to travel down the Ganges by boat from Hardwar, one of the most venerated Hindu bathing places, which lies at the feet of the Siwalik Hills. Our destination was the Bay of Bengal, 1200 miles away. The vessel was a five-oared rowing boat and it looked very much like an oversize Thames skiff – it had probably been built by some British official in a moment of nostalgia for the Thames at Henley. Now it was the property of the Executive Engineer of the Irrigation Works on the Ganges Canal, who was an Indian. He had only lent it to us, and then with extreme reluctance, because we had shown him a letter, signed by Mr Nehru, ordering all and sundry to help us on our way down the river.
The boat was twenty-five feet long, had a five-foot beam, was made of mild steel put together with rivets and needed thirty-two people to carry it. This was the number of barefooted men I had paid to carry it across a mile of almost red-hot shingle to the Ganges from the Ganges Canal.
With us was a rather too-high-caste companion for such a journey, procured for us by the personal intervention of Indira Gandhi, acting on behalf of her father, who warned us that he wouldn’t stay the course – he didn’t – and, for this first part of the journey, three boatmen.
Among the things we had with us was a canvas bag full of books, a Janata oil stove, hurricane lamps, 8 kilos of rice, a small sack of chilli powder, flour, vegetables, a teapot, a kettle, a number of lathis (weighted bamboo poles) for hitting dacoits – robbers – on the nut, and military maps with which we had been supplied by the Director General of Ordnance of the Indian Army, who had also obligingly allowed us to acquire some bottles of Indian Army rum.
Two hundred yards below the bridge at Chandi Ghat from which we set off, the boat went aground on great, slimy stones the size and shape
