of it made it possible to build up a kind of retrospective intimacy with each Stevenson just through their handwriting – not just the words, but the words behind the words, the way they spoke and wrote: Robert by turns direct, commanding or circumlocutory, the way Alan’s hand could slip from health to sickness to seasickness, writing in bed or from the lighthouse yacht or from some forsaken end-of-the-road croft. Often his writing looks agonised, the drift of ink and its disorder reminding me of Robert Falcon Scott’s final journal entry from the Antarctic: ‘For God’s sake, look after our people.’ Occasionally, too ill even to hold a pen, he dictated through a scribe.
Either way Alan was always more tempered than his father, more tolerant, but somehow further back. Robert was a master both of detail and of the grand design who worked to a hard view of human nature but remained thrilled by the lift of adventure. As RLS noted, ‘What he felt himself, he continued to attribute to all around him.’ RLS’s best known literary character is Jekyll/Hyde, still considered the ultimate delineation of a split personality: public and private, light and shadow, secret and revealed. His grandfather embodied all of those things, a composite of opposites contained within a singular man. In the hush of the library’s manuscript section, this family rose from the page alive and loud again. From the stains of rainwater blots to family squabbles over rent payments and eating habits, the reality of their lives took on form and weather.
Meanwhile, out at the edges, the last of the keepers were packing up and preparing to leave.
The cottages are cosy and the kettle has recently boiled. The Assistant Keepers Kenny and Alan appear, recently woken from the last watch. Interest in the automation process has been increasing and all three have recently grown accustomed to being persons of interest. Most keepers recognise the sense of automation, but they wouldn’t be professionals if they weren’t discomfited by some of its results: drystone dykes patched with remedial fencing, cement bags all over the place, the watched coast now not seen at all.
Kenny opens a packet of Rich Tea from the stores and pulls the milk out of the new fridge. Beside him in one of the cupboards are the dry stores, the 1990s equivalent of ship’s biscuit, designed to prevent the keepers from starving in the event that the relief cannot be made. When circumstances permit, fresh veg or meat can be brought over from Durness. Alcohol is not permitted, and from the beginning of the service all the lights were supposed to be dry, though like everything else this was occasionally subject to interpretation. Some time later, one of the last keepers at the Bell Rock, sends me a picture of a Hogmanay celebration which included twenty-one cans of McEwan’s Export, eight bottles of whisky, one of Drambuie, a wall of lager and a Tennent’s Special extension. No food at all.
Outside, the backdraft from the helicopter’s rotors rattles the double glazing. Iain Roberton has been with the NLB for thirty years and cannot bring himself to think beyond the moment of ‘closure’. None of the keepers have begun to look for other jobs since they say there’s no point this far in advance. ‘I’ll miss it’, says Alan, even though the Cape was seen as one of the worst postings. ‘I hate people saying you must be lonely out here. I’ve never been lonely.’ He looks out towards the space where Orkney should be. ‘Still,’ he says, ‘I wish I was coming with you.’
A couple of hours later the Scotsman’s photographer and I are on the helicopter. He is harnessed to the seat with the door open, taking photographs of the sea and the slabby coast while the pilot does wheelies round the light, running tight to the north walls of Scotland and then pulling up so hard that the controls spark red in alarm and the rotors chop at the air. The wind is already strengthening. Below us the surface of the Firth now wears wrackish strands of white and the helicopter prances from side to side while all the air I had in my lungs disappears in an almost-scream of exhilaration.
Several hours later on the Pharos, the weather has worsened. The ship was scheduled to take further supplies up to Fair Isle, but instead we are running for shelter in Scapa Flow. From the ship’s bridge the Pentland Firth rises and rises. The wind speed is now at 50 knots and the forecast is severe gale force 9 or 10. The captain Bryce Henderson finds a spot near St Margaret’s Hope close by three lights and lowers both anchors. The helicopter stopped being able to fly once the wind speed exceeded 40 knots, so there’s now no question of us leaving until this is over.
Opening the steel door out onto deck has become increasingly difficult. The wind pitches from a song to a shriek and the division between sea and air softens and dissolves. Water appears from above in gouts, or sideways as projectiles, or from below as sudden rearing mountains lifting over the bow and smashing towards us over the decks. Sea has become sky, and the sky has vanished. A kind of darkness falls, broken by the beams of lighthouses. Beside us or behind us or abruptly in front the high-up, squared-off lights of oil tankers loom, implacable as office blocks, sliding past us on their way out of the Flotta terminal. For long moments the ships just seem to stand there, the tankers’ engines insisting they are doing 15, 20 knots but the force of the water holding them almost stationary.
The forecast is now at force 11, the wind at between 55 to 60 knots, and though there are two anchors down the one at the stern is dragging. Henderson has been an NLB man for a long time and in between the urgent punctuations of Mayday calls he stares out of the window, listening. Beneath his uniform, in through his feet and his fingertips, he is tuned to the sound of the ship so acutely he could trace it down to the last semitone. In the silences the rest of us can pick up the faint gravelly scuffle as the back anchor drags. Below us is foul ground, bits of seabed which haven’t been surveyed since the Stevensons’ day. Henderson thinks the anchor is snagged on something and isn’t holding ground. He’d like to move the ship to a more secure anchorage but Scapa Flow is strewn with old ship and submarine carcasses, and there’s no guarantee he wouldn’t just catch on another wreck. Beneath the bridge the cable of the bow anchor is pulled so tight we can feel a hard, high thrum sounding through the ship’s steel plates. Behind there are other sounds, bangs and wrenches, the discordance of metal played out to the end of its tether.
Later that evening I go in search of a view that doesn’t include bits of diagonal sea. Sitting chatting in the canteen, I’m struck by the almost naval divisions on board. In total there are twenty-four crew, all male, but three separate dining areas – one for crew, one for officers and one for the NLB’s Commissioners. Is it a military culture, I ask Jake, at thirty-six the youngest person on board. ‘No,’ he says, ‘more like prison.’ In the commissioners’ dining room a portrait of the NLB’s patron Princess Anne looks down from her wood-panelled wall, over a grand dining table and a set of old photo albums stuck with pictures of past inspection voyages – sunlit games of deck quoits, tall men with moustaches handing up guns and fishing rods. The bookshelf downstairs is not stocked for reassurance. All I can find are commentaries on Job and Isaiah, and a couple of books on lobbying Parliament. Behind me, the glass decanters clink within their silver-fenced tray.
This – the storm – is bad, but it’s not unusual. This is the Pentland Firth, this is the weather, here is what happens when you pass the end of Scotland. Two hundred years ago when there were no roads or ferries or oil terminals or hundred-horsepower engines or anything much except real horsepower, the Stevensons came and built lights. They built them for this, and frequently they built them in this. Marooned at the Bell Rock in 1824, the superintending artificer MacDonald wrote to Robert Stevenson: ‘While at work on the rock the water came upon the house in an unbroken state to the height of the kitchen windows (64ft above the rock) and green seas as high as the bedroom windows (76ft). At times, seas, for I cannot call them sprays … came above the library windows and struck the cornice (90ft) with such force that on separating they darted to leeward of the house, which was left, if I may so express it, at one end of an avenue of water. Indeed the appearance in all directions around us was at times more dreadful and terrific than I have ever seen it before.’ Robert was unimpressed. This was mere business as usual.
It is a reminder that when the Stevensons started, they really did start from scratch. This wasn’t just arriving by a coast and building a lighthouse
