was directly overhead where it swung in the wind like a crib for some monstrous baby. We piled our gear into it, which included a hamper from Fortnum and Mason, filled with luxurious food and drinks, provided by the rather frivolous, now extinct magazine which had sent me there, and which it was intended that I should share with the keepers in the course of my sojourn there. Then the boatman shouted up the cliff between cupped hands and the box was whisked upwards and disappeared from view over the top. It was only thirty feet or so from the boat to the ladder and the boatman took us across in his dinghy. ‘I’ll come back on Thursday afternoon, unless it’s blowing,’ he said. ‘Watch for the flag on Trinity Cottages,’ which was where the off-duty keepers lived.
On the way up, Ken, the young Assistant Keeper who had come down to meet us, took me along the cliffside to show me his garden, three tomato plants behind a low wall, growing in the peat of the mesembryanthemum, the only plant beside the sea pink which had got a real footing on the rock.
‘No good,’ he said, gloomily, contemplating a solitary, minute, very green tomato. ‘How can you expect the bloody things to grow with all this spray. Still, I’ll keep on trying.’
I asked him whether the other keepers were interested in gardening. ‘Not very,’ he said. ‘Ray, the Keeper in charge now that the PK [Principal Keeper] is on relief, he’s mad on dreadnoughts and cats. He makes models of dreadnoughts all the time. Tony, the other AK [Assistant Keeper], he’s potty about bird-watching and meteorology. He thinks the reason there’re hardly any birds here is because of old Ray’s cats. And now that Don’s come back – he’s mad on photography – it means we’ve all got cameras, cinés and still. When we’re all out stalking one another on top of the rock because there’s nothing else to photograph we look like a lot of loonies. But that’s only in fine weather. You can’t take pictures at all when it’s really blowing, on account of the spray coming right over the top.’
It was bleak on the top of Round Island. The tower was only 63 feet high but it was the highest of all the rock lights between the Scillies and the mainland. It was built in 1887 by Sir William Douglass who also built the light tower on the Eddystone, the Bishop and completed the Wolf Rock. The walls of the Bishop were more than 7½ feet thick at the level of the entrance door; but all three of these towers were lapped by water and in a storm they vibrated. Round Island was on a much more firm base, but even so its walls at the level of the lower windows were over 5 feet thick, as if its builder expected some cataclysmic wave to surge over the top of the rock, which in fact sometimes happened.
The keepers’ quarters were at the base of the tower, not inside it, which made it the most comfortable rock lighthouse off the coasts of southern England. In the others you slept in a bunk with your body following the contour of the tower; here you could sleep in a bed. There were four keepers’ rooms, an office where the radio-telephone was kept, a room for the radio beacon coders, a kitchen and a larder. And there was a separate fog signal house, with two enormous black mouthpieces, giant versions of the sort used at one time on hand-made gramophones, the sort that T. E. Lawrence had at Clouds Hill, an ‘engine room’ with a couple of fantastic old engines in it which provided compressed air for the hoist and the fog signal and three others, two of which were modern, producing power for the radio beacon and electric light.
There were four keepers but only three were on duty at any one time. In the absence of the Principal Keeper the next senior Assistant Keeper became Keeper in Charge. They all did two months ‘off’ on the rock and one month ‘on’ on the world. Round Island was a ‘happy light’. When asked, singly in the dark watches of the night, they all agreed that they got on well together – all liked the Principal Keeper. They told me hair-raising stories of unhappy lighthouses, of being immured with keepers who were religious maniacs or drug fiends or smelly keepers, but these seemed mercifully rare – all agreed, however, that most of the new entrants were not up to previous standards. They all liked being lighthouse keepers, whether they were married or not, and had no crazy ideas about living in Sunningdale or having a second car for shopping.
Two of them had quitted the service temporarily. One, for what he regarded as a ghastly period, worked for Sun Life Assurance in Holborn, the other, more congenially, had worked in a pub; both had returned to it.
All were remarkably free from germs, as proud of the healthiness of their environment, and with presumably more reason, as the London sewermen whose subterranean empire I had visited previously. ‘You can come out here with a nasty sore throat after a turn ashore,’ Ray said. ‘After a day or so on the rock it’s gone.’ None of them was bearded. A mysterious regulation of Trinity House stated that ‘… all keepers after 18.11.52 to be either clean-shaven or wear beard and whiskers or moustache’ – what strange mutations were in existence before this date were not clear. The regulations were of an almost obsessive thoroughness and covered everything from chimney sweeping (‘keepers shall sweep the kitchen chimneys at their stations at least twice a year’); the number of teeth a keeper had to have – ‘a keeper must have sufficient teeth’ – the regulation said; to the wearing of uniform – compulsory if the keeper was to be photographed. None of the keepers on Round Island liked wearing their uniforms; but they had to during the annual visit of the Elder Brethren (all en grande tenue in their vessel, the Patricia, which bore a suspicious resemblance, at least from the outside, to a millionaire’s yacht).
They all possessed the enviable quality of being able to create an atmosphere of high fantasy and maintain it for long periods, rather in the same way as the more resilient prisoners-of-war of my acquaintance had succeeded in doing in Italy and Germany. This, with the fact that they each kept their own food supplies separate from one another’s (at meal times in the kitchen we peered at one another through a forest of sauce bottles), gave Round Island an uncanny resemblance to a prisoner-of-war camp of the better sort. From the moment I landed I never saw my hamper from Fortnum’s. It was whisked away, ‘We’ll keep this for a rainy day,’ they said, roguishly, like the worst sort of hosts, to whom you bring a couple of bottles of champagne hoping to enliven the evening. It never rained while I was there and I lived as they did. They seemed to have a morbid passion for Bird’s Custard.
They also had a little trolley on which, when they were not trying to photograph one another, with their keeper’s hats reversed like early racing motorists at Brooklands, they used to zoom down a concrete path from the high south end of the rock through the open gate in the protecting wall of their living quarters, round the base of the light and back again.
Their life was one of constant activity. If such a comparison were possible it could only be with that of a pre-1914 housewife whose cook and housemaid had left her, armed with nothing but a bottle of meths, paraffin, soap, lubricating oil and metal polish who finds herself saddled with a number of machines, the majority of them outmoded, all in need of constant attention, which are housed either in an embryonic skyscraper without a lift or else dotted about a rocky plateau exposed to the full force of North Atlantic weather.
On Round Island watches were from midnight to four, four until noon, then noon until eight and from eight until midnight. At 9.15a.m. day-workers were called to breakfast by the man who had the four to noon watch. Each keeper worked as a dayman two days out of three. Jobs included removing the seventy-two steel rollers which supported the sixteen-ton edifice of lenses – in some lighthouses it floated in mercury – cleaning them with meths, then oiling and reassembling them; oiling the clockwork mechanisms with which the rock was abundantly provided; cleaning some 350 square feet of lenses inside and out with a mixture of meths and water, cleaning an infinity of brass (some older Elder Brother must have had shares in a brass foundry); wiping over the exposed steelwork with oily rags, a job that had to be done with great care to be successful; maintaining the engines, scrubbing the floors and the spiral staircase; filling the stoves; riddling the ashes from the cooking range – on Saturdays the man who was cook cleaned the telescope, the kitchen window and the mirror, Monday’s cook washed the previous week’s dishcloths (changed on Sundays and Wednesdays); took the Elsan chemical closet from its exposed situation
