on Pladda was to see a similar rupturing of the space-time continuum.
‘Aye, you’ll have to remember you’re not in the big city any more,’ Duncan advised me that first evening, looking up from a psalm he was reading in the bible that always seemed to accompany him, and adding cryptically, ‘Grant that this day we fall into no sin, neither run into any kind of danger.’
I must have looked puzzled, for he added, with a wink, ‘You will find that we do no running on this island, and when we walk we do so at a very slow pace.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I replied.
‘And one other thing. No whistling on the Sabbath.’
I strolled off as slowly as I could to inspect the vegetable patch, wondering what Duncan would say when he heard my Jimi Hendrix compilation tape that I had been dying to play all day. I had lugged my portable tape recorder, miniaturised to roughly the size of a big city phone book (that was the state of the art in 1973), all the way from Dundee on the opposite coast of Scotland. I planned to play the maestro’s rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ across the still waters of the Firth of Clyde at the earliest opportunity.
How can I describe it? I’ve often said that being on a lighthouse resembled nothing more than being in a spaceship. Perhaps a spaceship co-designed by NASA and the Goons.
And as if in agreement with this sentiment, while Watergate, Vietnam, and Brezhnev’s visit to America clogged the television news during my two weeks on Pladda, high above us three Skylab astronauts struggled with the daily routines that we all took for granted. We watched them trying to complete ordinary tasks in zero gravity as slices of bread and ruptured tomatoes floated around them. Living in confined space and good comradeship was perhaps our greatest commonality. By contrast, we had it easy. We had our comfy armchairs, our Tetley tea bags, our lively repartee, and our coal fires. But we also had the night sky, the aurora borealis, and the luxury of leaning on the rail at three in the morning, high above the sea swell, watching satellites track across the Milky Way. And I would smile a secret smile to myself in the absurd knowledge that I was actually being paid to stargaze.
Yet the wild nights, when they happened, weren’t so easy when, with gale-force winds and a spume-tanned face, I’d have given anything to be inside a warm, dry spaceship rather than outside on the rim of the light, knuckles white as if the bone beneath were shining through … out on the rim, out on the rim, out on the rim … I would repeat the words as I pulled myself round, checking on the other lights. It was as if all my senses were being assaulted by the universe – the wind trying to rip off my ears and blow through my ear drums with the savagery of an apple corer; my tongue marinaded in the sharp salt spray; my fingers, keep them moving, lest they froze against the metal rail, and the paraffin vapour rising through my nostrils like a giant wave while all my eyes could see was blackness spangled with a field of expanding stars as if the sky had turned into a huge Ross Bleckner canvas. Cold, and wet, and aching in every muscle, I would pull the heavy door fast behind me and shoot the submarine-like bolt against the bulkhead. And in the warmth of the light chamber the three-in-the-morning tiredness would be released like the most narcotic perfume. The fight from then onwards was to stay awake and retain consciousness for another three hours.
Ronnie used to joke that on Skerryvore, far to our West, where the keepers lived in the tower for most of their term of duty, it was possible to be seated at the dining room table and from there perform most tasks without leaving your seat. You could lean across and pluck the kettle from the stove. You could make a radio broadcast to the mainland. Or take a Yorkshire pudding from the oven. You could turn on the television and watch your favourite soap opera. He even claimed you could wash and dry the dishes without having to rise from your seat.
In the early days of my apprenticeship it was difficult to know when I was getting my leg pulled, precisely because so much of what sounded far-fetched eventually proved to be correct. Stories I heard on one lighthouse would be confirmed months later on a different light with a different crew.
This shared camaraderie contrasted with our internal lives, our solitary thoughts, our three in the morning musings, and especially our readings. Having read and re-read most of J. R. R. Tolkien and Herman Hesse I graduated around this time to Kurt Vonnegut and Carlos Castaneda. Vonnegut was a particularly sane companion to have on a lighthouse and a fine contrast to the madness of Vietnam. So at three in the morning I would pick up classics such as Cat’s Cradle and read sections at random. I particularly enjoyed Bokonon’s ‘Fifty-third Calypso’ and read it many times that summer from the rims of three different lighthouses. I felt it captured the beauty and absurdity and complexity of this awesome planet where ‘A Chinese dentist and a British Queen’ all had to fit together ‘in the same machine’, a feeling aided by the visual backdrop of the night sky and the knowledge that I was the only sentient being awake for miles around.
It is easy from a distance of over a quarter of a century to forget what happened on which lighthouse, or who told what tale in the depths of the night. Perhaps it was because the keepers on Pladda made such an impression that recollections of the island itself, and of the light, are hazier. The next two islands I was posted to are far clearer, but on them I had less to learn. I seem to recall that there were actually two lighthouses on Pladda, immediately adjacent to each other. I think they belonged to different centuries and that it was the smaller of the two which was currently in use. I feel frustrated that I cannot remember such an obvious thing, while the outpourings of the television come with almost instant recall.
Then there were the fog signals. Again, I cannot remember which type of signal was on each island. And yet, as I type, gradually it is coming back. Some were massive steam driven things occupying whole sheds. They looked like a cross between a Tibetan horn (if you’ve read Tintin in Tibet you will be able to picture it) and a Tinguley sculpture. The older ones more than nodded in the direction of Heath Robinson’s quirky machines. Others were sleek and modern like a bank of fire sirens. Either way, they were hell to live with when in operation.
Memory is strange. Largely, it is my early days on Pladda that remain with me most vividly. Everything was new to me and I had to take copious notes to remind me what had to be switched on or off, when and how. I still have those notes in a kind of on-running diary I had been keeping since I was about sixteen. In those days, Woolworths in Byres Road, the main artery in the West End of Glasgow, sold packs of three spiral-bound yellow notebooks, each pack not much bigger than a packet of cigarettes and thin enough to slip in a shirt pocket. I must have gone through dozens of them, scribbling poetry, making sketches for paintings, jotting down daily events.
One such entry, for example, tells me that not long before leaving for Pladda I went to the art school film club. With all the bluntness of a Spectator film critic I wrote, and I can hardly believe it now: ‘Went with Lincoln, Albi and Jogg to see an Andy Warhol film called Chelsea Girls. It was the biggest load of rubbish I have ever had the misfortune to sit through in my entire nineteen years. Talk about boring!!!!!! We tried to get our money back. We did not succeed but went to the Tav instead. Glad I am a painter.’
When I returned to the living quarters that first afternoon I found Ronnie was already starting to prepare the evening meal. His watch was the otherwise invisible one from two in the afternoon till six in the evening. The only other duty in this period was to make a radio and weather check. I could not face even looking at food, so I disappeared to my room and immediately fell into a deep sleep. In that sleep I had the first of many dreams of being surrounded by a flat sea on a sunny summer’s day. The light is diamond hard and sharp as a lemon. Strange islands break the surface tension and occasional rowing boats drift past. I realise that my eyes are the eyes of the sea and I am looking all around me. I have no body. I sink to the ocean floor and linger there until the most godawful ringing noise wakes me up. There is a small bell in my room and its size is nowhere relative to
