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 been important to me. There is a poem for every phase of life and at least two for every situation: Dr Seuss, Sylvia Plath, Lewis Carroll, Allen Ginsberg, Les Murray, John Keats, Leonard Cohen, George Mackay Brown, Walt Whitman, Liz Lochhead, Paul Celan, Spike Milligan, Robert Crawford, Hugh McDiarmid, Ivor Cutler … Some of them are referred to in these pages and you may care to seek them out and enjoy them at your leisure. On other occasions you may just want to open a favourite poetry book at random and pretend you are on a lighthouse. Try staying awake until three in the morning and you will soon find you are so tired you can hardly think. Open your curtains over the black starry night sky above Hampstead, or Boston, or Sydney – wherever you live – and read a favourite poem. Then stare at the sky and contemplate the vastness of the universe. Gradually, you will turn into a lighthouse keeper. But take your time, for time is precious. There’s no hurry. There never is on a lighthouse, as my first afternoon on one taught me.
I had just set off on my walk. I was burning off the biggest meal I’d eaten in years. It was a beautiful summer afternoon and a family of seals was guarding the rocks around the bay. Duncan McLeish, as reported earlier, had already gone for his constitutional. I strode past him on my way down the little path and gave a cheery wave. The problem was, the island was only about half the length of a football field and five minutes later I found myself back where I started, wondering where to go next. Duncan, meanwhile, hadn’t moved – or at least I thought he hadn’t. Apparently, the trick was to walk as slowly as possible and take as long as possible to cover a very small distance. So I slowed down. I used my eyes as much as my legs. I picked up pebbles and turned them over in my hand. Like Blake, I saw a universe in a grain of sand, and wondered. I breathed the sea air, deep into my lungs. When was the last time I enjoyed the natural sounds of the daylight hours without traffic noise of some sort in the background? Perhaps never, not even on a mountain top where a Christian Salvesen lorry always appears on the winding road below to break the spell. This was pre-industrial. Damn near medieval … except for the technology of the light itself. But there have been beacons of one kind or another for thousands of years, from Alexandria to Arbroath. I watched the oyster catchers dance like mechanical toys.
Replete is the only word for the way the huge lunch had left me feeling. And contented. I liked it here and looked forward to learning more about ‘the routine’.
As a hybrid art student-cum-hippy I had long scorned routine: waking when I chose, working till dawn, eating irregularly, making no plans and always acting on the spur of the moment. I was a sucker for the moody, self-obsessed poetry of Hermann Hesse:
‘Often I tried the frightening way of “reality,”
Where things that count are profession, law, fashion finance,
But disillusioned and freed I fled away alone
To the other side, the place of dreams and blessed folly.’
After only a few hours on Pladda I was getting the first inklings that perhaps I could tire of that old way of life. Perhaps there was another – not better, but different – way of living.
Gradually, as days went by, the outer wall of the lighthouse compound would appear a fair distance away from our living quarters and to walk to the far end of the island required considerable planning and possibly sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. I have an artist friend called Douglas Gordon who once slowed down Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho until it lasted all
