is a reason for everything in this world, I reflected as I left the interview, and in the early Seventies most of the answers were to be found somewhere between Richard Milhous Nixon and the Grateful Dead.
Aberdeen, sixty miles north of Dundee, was about to become the oil capital of Europe. A little bit of Scotland that would be forever Texas, at least until the black gold ran out. Many people were provided with high-paid work, and many of the young, and not so young, lads who would traditionally have gone into the lighthouse service took to the rigs. Perhaps I owed my success to this dearth of young recruits, but come early June I received another envelope bearing the lighthouse coat of arms, along with assorted packages from trading companies and summer holiday catalogues from P & O Cruises. I was faced with a dilemma. The letter was offering me employment as a student relief keeper but they wanted me to start almost immediately.
The problem was that to accept the job would mean missing the end of year examinations – setting up the work, taking it down, facing the music of failure once again. I spoke to the most senior drawing lecturer about this, an elderly and craggy-faced man called James Morrison who was probably all of about thirty-eight. He told me I’d have to choose between a life at art school and a life on the lighthouses. Perplexed, I made an appointment to see Ian Fearn, my other drawing lecturer. He was a gentle and good-humoured man, who looked through my thin but honest attempts at capturing old Kate on the life class podium in 3H pencil, and then looked across at me with my waist-length hair and antiapartheid T-shirt and wisely advised, ‘You’ll probably get a second chance at art school, but this will be your only chance of being a lighthouse keeper. I’d go for the lights if that’s what you really want to do.’
And so I did.
Getting There: By Train, Boat and Tractor
There he goes again, I could almost hear my mother thinking as she waved me off on yet another adventure from the front door of our terraced house in Glasgow, while my father looked on knowingly. Two years earlier they had farewelled me as I left for a summer job at Butlins Holiday Camp in Ayr. The next year I was off to Amsterdam, hippy capital of the world, with a large African drum attached to my rucksack. Couldn’t play it, but it looked good. So far, I had always returned safely. Often broke and exhausted, but to the relief of my family always in one piece – or perhaps they were really thinking, my God, he’s come back again.
The island of Arran was the stepping-stone to my ultimate destination, Pladda. Arran is close enough to Glasgow for its high mountains of Beinn Bhreac and Goat Fell to be visible from the top floor of city tenements, and close enough too for day trippers to get there and back and still have time to enjoy its sixty mile coastline. It’s a fair size. Yet it is far enough away to feel you are going on a journey, and the sea crossing adds to the sense of adventure. Arran’s population more than trebles in the summer months but beneath the day-tripping veneer is a long and bloody history marked by Viking invasions in the eighth century and eventual union with the Scottish nation in 1266.
The most war-like presence you will find there today is the occasional cloud of midges, gram for gram the most savage creature on the planet. If you are unlucky enough to encounter these fierce-biting insects you would probably gladly swap them for a boat-load of Scandinavian bandits.
I took the train to the mainland point of departure, Ardrossan, with a rucksack full of clothes, books, cassette player and tapes. My selection of sounds included a recently released work called Tubular Bells. This strange album seemed to appear from nowhere and to have been overlaid, rather than recorded, by an electronic Mozart called Mike Oldfield. Everyone was buying it, which was not normally how I judged the success of a new album. I tended to be drawn to ‘the unusual’, as a London madam might describe her kinkier offerings, and liked to think I shared my tastes with about ten other people on the planet. But Tubular Bells was different, and doubly attractive for having Viv Stanshall of The Bonzo Dog Band doing the climactic voice-overs at the end. I reminded myself to stock up on more batteries when I reached Ardrossan. Lots more batteries.
There was once a plan to build a canal from Ardrossan to Glasgow, some time round the start of the nineteenth century. It never happened and so Ardrossan never took on the mantle of the ‘Venice of the West’. Instead it was gradually globalised out of herring fishing, shipbuilding, coal mining and steel production until its main claim to fame is some of the worst sub-standard housing in Europe.
I had thirty minutes before the ferry left and bought my batteries in the newsagent on the High Street. Then I purchased a Forfar bridie in the baker’s next door. It was time to take to the seas.
As you approach Arran you can see from its profile why it got nick-named ‘The Sleeping Warrior’. It lies only fifteen miles from the mainland but sometimes it can be fifteen miles of very rough seas. But the day I caught the ferry it was hot and sunny and the sea was as flat as the sky was blue. Now, it’s possible to draw the short straw with the west coast of Scotland and drive there from Croydon or Bath with your buckets and spades and experience nothing but rain for weeks on end. It is also possible that you will get weeks of uninterrupted sunshine and wonder why anyone would bother holidaying in the Mediterranean when all this is on your doorstep. That’s the risk you take. If you come to Scotland enough you will experience both extremes. I recommend visiting often and staying long. The summer of 1973 was one of the great ones – hot days and warm summer nights – the sort of climate that got the Bee Gees reaching for their guitars and surfboards and pining for Far North Queensland.
Like every Glasgow school child I was repeatedly told from an early age about the Gulf Stream from Mexico which warms our western coastal waters – unlike the cold east coast cities of Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen. The result was that any time I went near the Clyde as a kid I used to keep my eyes peeled for Mexicans, and once thought I spotted a figure in a sombrero in a distant rowing boat, on a day trip to Helensburgh with my mother and sister. They were not convinced.
Once in Brodick my instructions became increasingly vague. I toyed with the idea of visiting the castle, home of the Dukes of Hamilton. Brodick Castle was once occupied by Oliver Cromwell who added a couple of very plain towers. Later it was given both Gothic and Scottish-Baronial makeovers. But I didn’t have time for all that. My now crumpled missive from the Commissioners instructed me to catch a southward bound bus to Lamlash. The night before I had located it on my father’s The Times Map of the British Isles. Across from it I noticed the tiny Holy Island and a little further down the name Pladda marked by a dot the size of a biscuit crumb. Closer inspection showed it was in fact a biscuit crumb. I scratched it off and found an even smaller dot underneath. This was Pladda. It was so small, this dot marking my home for the next two weeks, it could easily have fitted inside the ‘P’ of the word Pladda, printed in what looked like a six-point font.
In Brodick I lingered over a pint of Export in a harbour-side pub, feeling very much at peace with the world and with myself. With my usual impeccable timing I caught the bus with two minutes to spare and reached Lamlash without a hitch.
Once there I had to catch a taxi from a certain local driver who would know, they promised, the exact spot on the road I was to be picked up by my next connection, a farmer named Harris. I now felt less like a tourist and more like a traveller or itinerant worker. I wandered the streets with my backpack, I asked directions, got lost, found myself again, and some twenty minutes later, having explored various highways and byways, found myself sitting on a white-painted boulder while the taxi driver’s wife separated her husband from his vegetable patch. She was a raving beauty. He looked
