ran a string of antique shops along the Perth Road) while he was away and nicked my Fidelity stereo record player which was my most essential possession. It was eventually returned to me, and they to Perth prison.
There was a strange and regular visitor who had befriended the only non-art student in Greenfield House, a civil engineer at the university. We nicknamed this visitor ‘The Harbinger of Doom’. He had a thin, weasel face, an equally thin tie, short hair (unlike the rest of us) and chain smoked Gauloises cigarettes. It was rumoured that he owned a gun and it was known, through a nursing friend of Albi’s, that he had worked as a mortuary attendant. Whenever he climbed the stairs he kept very close to the walls and seemed to merge in and out of the shadows. Equally exotic, but far more intellectually stimulating, was a friend from Jogg’s school days called Duncan, who later became an investigative journalist. In the early Seventies he was in trouble with the forces of law and order himself for making free phone calls to far flung parts of the globe by using secret British Telecom numbers. I also remember, over large mugs of Nescafé and to the backdrop of George Harrison’s Bangladesh, Duncan talking at great length about some book called Beneath the City Streets. I had met my first conspiracy theorist.
But he was only one of many remarkable characters who entered the hallowed hallway of Greenfield, as the house was generally known.
And in that hallway, sitting on cracked linoleum that in its old age looked more like the mosaic tiling it was originally supposed to imitate, sat a large wooden table on which was dumped all the mail of the day. Fifteen sets of bank statements, grant cheques, letters from home, and postcards from abroad were mixed in with at least as many other names of past residents who had long since left Dundee for Sydney, New York or Ullapool.
I have always enjoyed getting mail and that particular day was a very good mail day for me. Since becoming a student with my own postal address I had taken to ordering sundry items from the weekly magazine Exchange and Mart. As a boy I had always longed to be able to send off for the X-Ray specs regularly advertised inside American Spiderman and Green Lantern comics, and better still to earn the ten cents a copy promised for making home deliveries. By my late teens I had graduated away from the world of X-Ray specs (I remember they were often shown alongside a well-dressed girl whose bikini was magically visible beneath her summer dress) but only as far as knee-length leather motor-cycle boots, a precaution against Dundee’s roving gangs of skinheads and ideal for the art student with no form of transport other than his feet. Then there were the early design solutions to the flat-pack bookcase, again courtesy of Exchange and Mart, which I eagerly assembled and filled with my collection of underground magazines such as the infamous schoolkids’ Oz, well-thumbed copies of International Times, and of course all my poetry books.
Various strange boxes came in the mail that day. It was not until I had covered the floor of my bedsit with torn wrapping paper and brown string that I noticed amongst my newly acquired set of non-stick pans and a Venetian gondolier’s shirt, the smallest of envelopes addressed to me in a copper-plate script. I turned it over and was puzzled to see the crest of a lighthouse on the back flap, slightly embossed with thin black lines signifying beams of light.
I tore it open, and there was the reply to my query of several weeks ago in which I had asked whether students were ever employed as lighthouse keepers during the long summer months.
Please come to an interview it said, and I noticed with alarm the suggested date was only three days away. We will pay your return fare to Edinburgh, it coaxed, and sure enough there was a tiny claim form, hand-typed, attached with a small gold paperclip.
I scornfully threw my gondolier’s shirt in the bottom of my wardrobe and went out to buy a pipe.
The train journey from Dundee south to Edinburgh is one of the world’s great railway adventures. It only takes about an hour, but in that time you journey across two astonishing feats of engineering. First there is the Tay Rail Bridge, darkly curving across the silvery river far below. Then there is the jagged coast-line of The Kingdom of Fife that leads towards the great red-oxide giant of the Forth Rail Bridge. This is more impressive in a laid-back horizontal sort of way than the Eiffel Tower and has the added advantage of being functional, this being Scotland after all. I settled down with anticipation as the train pulled out of Dundee station, past the Queen’s Hotel, past the back of Greenfield House with the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art rising above it. I had with me a Tunnock’s Caramel Log, a can of Irn Bru, and a copy of the latest Mad magazine. As I peeled back the red and gold foil wrapper from my chocolate bar I wondered to myself – and not for the first time – just who the hell ‘Duncan of Jordanstone’ had actually been? In my two years at the art school no one had ever been able to tell me.
I knew who William McGonagall was. The stumps of the first rail bridge just in view far below us reminded me of him and the disaster he immortalised a century before. I must have taken the train across the Tay Bridge many hundreds of times in my life and each time the opening lines of McGonagall’s The Tay Bridge Disaster rise up to haunt me, and probably many of the other passengers:
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas, I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
It is often claimed that McGonagall is the world’s worst poet – but if that is as bad as it gets we shouldn’t complain. Indeed, the good people of Dundee often celebrate their local hero with McGonagall Suppers on the very night the rest of Scotland is tucking into their haggis and neeps at the more conventional Burns Suppers in praise of our other national poet, Rabbie Burns.
As a nineteen-year-old I prepared for job interviews with the same spirited disinterest as I prepared for examinations, and once over the Tay Bridge was soon absorbed in my Mad magazine while some of the most stunning scenery in the world rushed by. Never mind, I would catch it on the way back.
Edinburgh is one of Europe’s most impressive cities to enter by train. You leave the subterranean darkness of the platform area at Waverley Station and walk up a gently rising ramp into a rectangle of bright daylight which might double as a Richard Turrell light sculpture. Then comes the moment near the top when the sky is squeezed out by the mass of Edinburgh Castle perched many hundreds of feet above Princes Street Gardens. In the foreground, the world’s largest monument to a literary figure, the Scott Monument, pierces the clouds like a Gothic rocket. Magic, I thought to myself as I dodged the traffic and skirted round the perimeter of Jenners department store, Edinburgh’s answer to New York’s Bloomingdales, London’s Harrods, or Sydney’s Grace Brothers.
It was not until I was strolling along George Street in the warm sunshine looking for the home of The Commissioners of the Northern Lights that my thoughts finally turned to lighthouses and the men who run them.
If truth be known, I’d never really thought through what a lighthouse keeper actually did.
But I did know it was something I had always wanted to do, whatever it was. Even as a very young child when I turned over various occupations in my mind, as I think everyone does – detective, doctor, trapeze artist, chemist, painter, captain of industry, soldier, tramp, second-hand-bookshop-owner, whisky priest, politician, teacher, spy … even then, at the age of four or five, being a lighthouse keeper or being an astronaut were the two professions which really stood out as being a bit special.
In the middle of George Street I found what I was looking for. High above me on the lintel of a building still dressed in the soot of the industrial revolution, I saw a virgin
