what was once ignominiously called the Empire. I rub my eyes and my mouth has that horrible late afternoon post-sleep taste in it. The bell is still ringing but stops abruptly. I look at my watch. It is precisely five o’clock.
I pull on my trousers and shuffle through to the living area. It seems to be teeming with people and is heavy with pipe tobacco. No, there are only my three companions but they seem to be doing so many different things in such a small space that it appears more crowded than it actually is. Duncan is winding the grandfather clock with a large key. ‘Come in laddie, come in. I chust thought I’d let you hear what the bell sounds like that will wake you up when it is time for you to begin your watch. You’ve got a day’s work ahead of you before you go back to dreamland.’
‘Have you started dreaming about the sea yet?’ Finlay Watchorn asked, and I felt like my brain had been robbed. ‘It happens to all of us, some sooner than others,’ he continued. He was busy sorting through the newspapers and magazines that Harris the ferryman had brought across. ‘We all start to dream of the sea, and our dreams soon become like a second home.’
I noticed one copy of the Sunday Post, several of The Times, a People’s Friend, a small stack of The Daily Record from Glasgow, and a copy of Time magazine. ‘Harris aye brings across our reading material,’ Finlay explained. ‘His daughter works at the hotel and aye keeps what’s left at the end of the day. Once we’ve read them we use them to light the fire. Then there’s the Professor with his damn crosswords.’
Ronnie had obviously got the evening meal under control from the burbling and clicking sounds coming from the stove where several pots of different sizes simmered like a private percussion group. He was washing up the utensils at the sink and craning his head round in an attempt to watch Daktari on the BBC. ‘No’ the hypodermic!’ he shouted at the television vet who was in the process of operating on what looked like a baby giraffe. ‘You’re no’ going to stick that thing in the wee creature?’ and Comet, playing at his feet, barked along in sympathy.
I can’t remember the details of my second lighthouse meal with the same clarity as the first. There were three courses, as every meal seemed to have, and the middle one involved a lot of meat while the third was over-heavy on sugar. I do remember the novelty of the first course, though, which was freshly caught crab on Jacob’s Cream Crackers. Magic. I was beginning to worry about what I would prepare, or more precisely how I would prepare it, when my turn came around – which it would, with the cold inevitability of a revolving light.
‘Ronnie caught six of them in his creel,’ Finlay explained. ‘We’ll be eating crab for a few days yet.’ I had no problem with that. They were delicious.
Afterwards, with the dishes washed and the jokes all told, each seemed to go their separate way. Finlay was going to be on the watch which began at two in the morning, so he went to bed to get some sleep. Finlay, Duncan explained, would be woken by Ronnie around 1.45 a.m. Ronnie in turn would previously have got in an hour or two’s sleep himself and be woken by Duncan and myself around 9.45 p.m. It appeared that Duncan and I were already ‘on watch’ and he would devote the next few hours, until it was time to light the light, to going over ‘the routine’ with me in some detail. I excused myself momentarily and went to get one of my little yellow notebooks. I have it in front of me now. The blue ink has faded slightly. It is a little the worse for wear. But all the instructions are still there, as recorded at Duncan’s elbow. It begins:
Light Duties –
1) Turning on the light:
a) Go up to lightroom and light bunsens
b) Lift out stops
c) Let them soak
d) Turn round and light
e) Place under light at top between cross-sections (leave for ten minutes)
2) Raise the blinds
3) Go down and switch on pumps (turn on numbers 1 to 3 in any order)
4) Lighting the light
a) Light tapir (scribbled note in margin about South American mammal)
b) Turn dial to 20
c) Light fumes when they appear (above the light)
d) Remove pan from underneath and blow out flames
e) Empty pan
f) Go down and start turning
5) Fill in log books
6) Remember: When ‘off ’ gear handle is down
7) Oil generators and empty waste
All of these instructions became much clearer when Duncan eventually took me up the stairs of the lighthouse and turned the theory into practice. For the moment, I was still an armchair lighthouse keeper.
Duncan had begun our session by gently encouraging me, in an avuncular way, to stop referring to the four-hour watches we all undertook twice in every twenty four hours as ‘shifts’. This lapse was a hangover from my previous summer job working in the Pig and Whistle bar in Butlin’s in Ayr, which by strange coincidence was just across the water from where we now conversed. He then went on to give me a brief overview of lighthouses and their upkeep before progressing to the detailed instructions outlined above.
He told me that there are three types of lighthouse: rock lighthouses come straight out of the sea and as a keeper you spend all of your time living, sleeping, and eating in the tower. Coastal lighthouses skirt the British Isles and are on the mainland, allowing keepers to live with their families. Island lights are situated on uninhabited islands. I would eventually work on three of them. A trainee lighthouse keeper entering the job for life would spend 18 months serving short periods of time on many different lights around Scotland, as my taxi driver had tried to explain to me earlier in the day. They would also undergo strict psychological tests before gaining employment as prior to this there had been a few ugly murders and suicides – but Duncan spoke little of those, although others would later.
Thereafter he (and there were sadly never any shes since the job had ceased being a family one many decades ago, when husband and wife teams kept the lights burning) would be posted to a variety of lights for three years at a time. In the space of less than a decade a keeper might find himself on a rock west of the Hebrides, then on mainland Orkney, and after that in an inner- city harbour station like Footdee in Aberdeen.
Each light had three keepers and each keeper took two four-hour watches in every 24 hours. These watches rotated daily.
Let’s say you were on from ten at night until two in the morning. You would then sleep until breakfast at eight (always attended by all three keepers) and then from nine until twelve two keepers would perform any duties that needed doing around the island.
During this period the third keeper would prepare the sort of lavish three-course lunch which I had recently enjoyed. Usually it would be eaten at noon or one o’clock depending on the light and the whim of the different keepers. One keeper would be on lunch duties for a whole week while the other two spent the mornings working on whatever ‘84’ decreed needed doing about the place. Your next watch would then be from two until six in the evening but as a daytime watch it was usually a quiet period with only a few radio tests to make to all
