call me Big Tam, by the way – Tam Harris’ and he crushed so hard my hand within his own that I thought blood would shoot from the fingertips. He continued shaking it for about twenty seconds. Under the pretence of returning my book to the rucksack I felt for fractures but was confident there were only bruises.
‘Once you’ve throttled a few geese you’ll be able to shake hands like a man. Now, throw your gear in the trailer and jump in after it,’ he ordered, starting up the engine again. He was a dead ringer for one of the characters illustrated in Spike Milligan’s classic book Puckoon.
For the next five minutes I was thrown about amidst a soup of farmyard detritus – loose straw, several potatoes, earth and sand. I didn’t see us cresting the far edge of the field and beginning our rough descent to the little jetty. I was clinging on to the sides of the trailer and trying not to breathe in too much of the dust cloud that covered me while my bones bounced about randomly.
‘Out you get,’ he ordered again. And when I did it was like arriving in Paradise. Blue waters stretched from a sandy beach out to a little island that seemed so close you could reach out and touch it. At one end was a lighthouse, sitting on the highest point. It looked magic.
‘That’s your home for the next few weeks,’ he said, untying a small rowing boat and throwing a bundle of newspapers into it.
He ordered me to hop in.
And so I did, but it was more of a stumble. Like being drunk without alcohol. Euphoric, that’s the word. Harris landed opposite me with a thump and a roll and we pulled out to sea.
And so it was that the farmer-ferryman rowed me across the bay in silence. There wasn’t a ripple on the water except for those made by his slowly sweeping oars. I sat transfixed. A seal broke the surface beside us and barked loudly. I swear it guided us in to the island, looking round occasionally to check we were following. I felt like a character in a Rupert Bear book and would not have been surprised if a whistling flying fish had cartwheeled past.
And as we approached the island, in the midday sun, I could see the silhouette of three keepers and a dog. This, I thought with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, was it. There’s no going back now.
The Mysteries of the Light Chamber
In 1973 there was a shortage of lighthouse keepers. This was not because the lights were being automated – that would come later – but because most of the young men who would traditionally have entered the service were finding better wages building and manning oil-rigs in the North Sea.
The three new colleagues who greeted me on the jetty were from a different generation, in fact several different generations. One was in his sixties and clutched a black bible in his potato-like fist. Another was middle-aged and wiry. The third, Ronnie, in his thirties, had a little cocker spaniel by his side, and was one of the few bachelors I met during my time on the lights. He often blamed the dog for making it difficult to form a lasting relationship with a woman, but I never could see the connection. Nearly thirty years later, in a bar in the magical Orkney Islands, I would meet an ex-keeper who told me Ronnie had eventually married the switchboard operator from lighthouse headquarters in Edinburgh and was, to boot, supremely happy.
How I appeared to them, at first glance on that summer’s day in 1973, I can only speculate. I put the groaning sound I heard on arriving down to the old wooden jetty and the swelling sea, but on reflection it probably came from my fellow keepers who saw before them a miniature version of Neil Young from his Crazy Horse period. They probably shared a vision of the light first ceasing to turn then gradually fading to darkness as I lay stoned on the upper rim of the light listening to Van Morrison on my battery-powered cassette recorder while the Oban fishing fleet crashed into the rocks below.
Three of us and the dog hopped on to an old trailer while the Principal Keeper started up the brand new Massey Ferguson tractor, my second in less than an hour, and pulled us up a steep hill to the lighthouse. To my relief I found that the tower of the light was surrounded by numerous out-houses in which I would live, eat, and sleep for the foreseeable future. Later, I would hear tales of other lights, such as the legendary Skerryvore where the keepers lived in the tower itself. In these, the bedroom walls were cylindrical, and there was a circular hole in all the floors and ceilings to allow the enormous metal weight which turned the giant reflectors to be winched up and down at thirty minute intervals throughout the night.
But these and many other stories were all up ahead. Stories told at two in the morning as one watch sashayed in to another while deep sleep struggled with reluctant consciousness. Stories told by my elders which served the dual purpose of keeping me awake and teaching me the workings of the light. Stories accompanied by endless pots of tea and sweet digestive biscuits topped with orange Cheddar cheese.
In a strange, slow-motion blur I remember, on my arrival at Pladda, first being shown a tiny bedroom by one of the keepers. I left my worldly possessions on the narrow single bed. The bathroom and toilet, three times the size of my room, lay off a short corridor. Then it was in to the living room for proper introductions, starting with Comet the Spaniel. His master, Ronnie, was an Assistant Lighthouse Keeper (ALK). He had a jolly, pink scrubbed face and a friendly manner. He in turn introduced me to Principal Lighthouse Keeper Duncan McLeish, and Assistant Lighthouse Keeper (ALK) Finlay Watchorn. Hands were firmly shaken across the confined space of the living room with a clashing of pullover sleeves and bulbous knuckles like some weird move in a Morris dance. ‘Fit-like, grand ey?’ someone enquired incomprehensibly, while someone else squeezed my hand like a lemon and my lungs filled with a mixture of twenty different blends of pipe tobacco that hung like a Los Angeles smog a little above the chair backs.
My first impression of the room was of a lounge and kitchen combined. A table with four places was already set for a meal. A grandfather clock stood guard at the point where the living area with its upholstered armchairs met the little kitchen with sink and stove. I remember a kettle was bubbling quietly on the gas rings. Finlay Watchorn went across to it, lifted its round hooked handle with a white dishcloth and added more water to it. He didn’t prepare a teapot, as I expected, but merely returned the kettle to the stove.
During my two weeks of training the beacon above us would be switched on and off fourteen times, but the gas below the kettle, I soon learned, was never dimmed. Like the flame of the unknown soldier it burned, and the kettle simmered, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Everyone on Pladda was addicted to tea.
‘I’m chust going to do the weather,’ Duncan said to the others in his slow Hebridean lilt. ‘Tell the laddie about the routines.’
‘He’s just gone to make a weather report and call up Corsewall,’ Ronnie explained mysteriously. ‘You’ll soon pick up the routines,’ he said. ‘Piece of cake.’
‘Thank you,’ I replied.
‘Nah, nah, I’m no offering you cake, eedjit, I mean the routines are complicated but soon learned. Now, while Duncan’s away we should tell you that he is a very religious man and we all respect that. He’ll want to say
