What the Traveller Saw

The Edge of the Western World IRELAND, 1960

‘YOU MUST ASK the Captain but he’s not here,’ the old man said when we asked him if we could visit the house, but not brusquely as he would have done in England, and with no suggestion that he ought to be given something for being rooted out of his habitation late on a winter’s afternoon. He had emerged from a Gothick lodge so narrow that one wondered if he had to go to sleep standing up in it.

He unpadlocked and opened an iron gate, which sounded as if it had not been moved on its hinges since the discovery of oil, and admitted us to the ‘demesne’. Dusk was coming on. A long, seemingly endless ride between huge, shattered trees eventually led to a rather severe, late-eighteenth-century mansion with its façade intact, but which proved when we reached it to be nothing more than a shell. It had either been burnt, if so probably during the Troubles in the 1920s, or someone had taken the roof off to avoid paying taxes. It was at the time of the Troubles, we found out from the old man later, but alone with it in the gloaming there was no way of knowing. The Captain was away, somewhere across the water. And when in residence he lived in a bungalow.

Over the house rooks circled ceaselessly, below there was a lake full of reeds. To one side there was an artificial mound overgrown with impenetrable thorn, and an obelisk choked with ivy rose from it, like a huge tree trunk.

The whole place had an air of indescribable melancholy about it, but exercised an irresistible fascination for people such as myself, lovers of the abandoned and the decayed. In Ireland local authorities and developers have a habit of dynamiting these kinds of remains. But there still are hundreds, and perhaps, in spite of such uncontrolled demolitions, thousands of similar places; many of them with lodges from which old men emerge to unlock gates; and sometimes with invisible captains, Foulenoughs and Grimeses some of them, in the offing, for this was a country, as Waugh’s Captain Grimes said, where you couldn’t get into the soup however hard you tried.

It was the thought of all the people, many of them still alive, who had lived in Ireland but no longer did so, that gave the country its unique feeling of loneliness. Roads led from no place that was or could be signposted, to another, equally nameless, because there was nothing there to signpost. Here, out in the boondocks, women, many of them old, and children, walked long distances; the children to school, the women to weekly markets, there and back. Wherever we went we travelled with a Land Rover full of them, and heard some fine talk of a sort that had simply ceased to exist in modern Britain.

But in spite of this the past was too much for Ireland and its maddening, enchanting people, and sometimes for us, too. In it the ghosts of its past occupants cried out or whispered from empty castles, abandoned islands, hidden loughs, huge, precipitous cliffs (Croaghaun on Achill Island looms 2192 feet above the sea), burial mounds, caverns, towers, abbeys, churches, follies, waterfalls, holy wells, pasturing places, deserted villages; and from nineteenth-century barracks, middens on the edge of enormous sand beaches, from mountain tops and offshore rocks on which innumerable saints once lived in solitary contemplation.

Round Island SCILLY ISLES, 1963

IN THE SUMMER of 1963 while I was trying to get enough money out of various publishers to go to India, and Wanda was endeavouring to let our house in Wimbledon, I succeeded in getting permission to visit an offshore lighthouse at Anvil Point.

It was not easy to obtain, this permission. The Elder Brethren of the Corporation of Trinity House, the general lighthouse authority for England and Wales, the Channel Islands and Gibraltar, consisted of nine active brethren, the remainder being made up of royalty, eminent politicians and so on. Probably perfectly amiable individually, these nine when acting in their collective capacity, through their Secretary, were pretty stuffy.

‘I am directed to acquaint you that the Elder Brethren have granted permission to Mr Newby to spend two nights at Eddystone Lighthouse,’ the Secretary wrote from their eyrie on Tower Hill, and that I must supply the Brethren with copies of any photographs I took in triplicate – ‘It would be convenient so that two copies of each may be retained at this House for record purposes.’ What did they do, play Snap with them? I was also told that I was to supply my own food and bedding and that I wasn’t to ‘interfere’ with the keepers, which conjured up visions of bearded giants calling one another Alice and Mildred. Any further arrangements, I was told, should be made with the Superintendent at Penzance 2259.

At Penzance 2259 a voice in which it would have been difficult to detect willingness to arrange anything, except perhaps a burial at sea – ‘Ullo,’ it said, unhelpfully – indicated that if I wanted to get to the Eddystone, in the sea some 141/2 miles south-south-east of Plymouth, it was nothing to do with them, as the relief boat had already gone and there wouldn’t be another for two months.

In the end I went to Round Island in the Scilly Isles, having received another letter from the Brethren, a facsimile of the first one but with Round Island substituted for Eddystone.

Round Island is a rock, 130 feet high, the last rock in the north Scillies. To the west there is nothing but water until you reach New York, a peculiarity that it shares with a lot of the Cornish coast but because it isn’t part of the mainland it has a very much end-of-the-world feeling.

On the way out to it from St Mary’s, one of the inhabited islands, the boatman told me hair-raising stories about wind velocities on Round Island: ‘The wind gauge registered a hundred and twenty miles an hour, then it bust and nobody knew how hard it blew,’ he said. ‘Mind you, I’ve never been up there myself.’

The only other passenger was a Trinity House mechanic who was going out to overhaul the engines and repair the crane at the landing. ‘You should see the engines,’ he said. ‘I call them diabolical juggernauts.’ His name was Don. At that time mechanics and masons employed by the Brethren spent most of their working lives ‘on’ at lightships or lighthouses, often moving from one to another for a spell of a month or so with no time ashore in between.

‘Hope you’ve got your bed,’ he went on. I told him that I had been told to bring bedding, nobody had said anything about bringing a bed. ‘Ah, I expect they’ll fix you up with something,’ he said, which raised visions of sleeping on a granite slab.

Close to, Round Island was like a great dome from which the top had been sawn off. The landing was on the south side in a narrow gut between the rock and two parallel reefs called the Camber. If it comes on to blow hard from the north-northeast, it is impossible to land because the surge in the gut lifts the boat high up the side of the cliff at one moment and dashes it down towards the bottom of the sea at the next.

As we came into the gut, the lighthouse disappeared from view, 130 feet overhead. From it I could see one of the keepers descending an interminable staircase to the landing, where an iron ladder with its rungs set in the granite of the rock led straight down into the water.

We made fast to the strops which hung off from two bow and stern ropes stretched across the gut to the reef from a massive post, the bole of a tree, cemented into the rock above the landing. High overhead the wire cable of a compressed air hoist ran from a steel gallows on the top of the rock to a shackle on the other side of the gut.

As soon as we were moored fore and aft, another keeper in the winch house up on top sent a big red box down the wire until it was directly overhead where it swung in the wind like a crib for some monstrous baby. We piled our gear into it, which included a hamper from Fortnum and Mason, filled with luxurious food and drinks, provided by the rather frivolous, now extinct magazine which had sent me there, and which it was intended that I should share with the keepers in the course of my sojourn there. Then the boatman shouted up the cliff between cupped hands and the box was whisked upwards and disappeared from view over the top. It was only thirty feet or so from the boat to the ladder and the boatman took us across in his dinghy. ‘I’ll come back on Thursday afternoon, unless it’s blowing,’ he said. ‘Watch for the flag on Trinity Cottages,’ which was where the off-duty keepers lived.

On the way up, Ken, the young Assistant Keeper who had come down to meet us, took me along the cliffside to show me his garden, three tomato plants behind a low wall, growing in the peat of the mesembryanthemum, the only plant beside the sea pink which had got a real footing on the rock.

‘No good,’ he said, gloomily, contemplating a solitary, minute, very green tomato. ‘How can you expect the bloody things to grow with all this spray. Still, I’ll keep on trying.’

I asked him whether the other keepers were interested in gardening. ‘Not very,’ he said. ‘Ray, the Keeper in charge now that the PK [Principal Keeper] is on relief, he’s mad on dreadnoughts and cats. He makes models of dreadnoughts all the time. Tony, the other AK [Assistant Keeper], he’s potty about bird-watching and meteorology. He thinks the reason there’re hardly any birds here is because of old Ray’s cats. And now that Don’s come back – he’s mad on photography – it means we’ve all got cameras, cinés and still. When we’re all out stalking one another on top of the rock because there’s nothing else to photograph we look like a lot of loonies. But that’s only in fine weather. You can’t take pictures at all when it’s really blowing, on account of the spray coming right over the top.’

It was bleak on the top of Round Island. The tower was only 63 feet high but it was the highest of all the rock lights between the Scillies and the mainland. It was built in 1887 by Sir William Douglass who also built the light tower on the Eddystone, the Bishop and completed the Wolf Rock. The walls of the Bishop were more than 7½ feet thick at the level of the entrance door; but all three of these towers were lapped by water and in a storm they vibrated. Round Island was on a much more firm base, but even so its walls at the level of the lower windows were over 5 feet thick, as if its builder expected some cataclysmic wave to surge over the top of the rock, which in fact sometimes happened.

The keepers’ quarters were at the base of the tower, not inside it, which made it the most comfortable rock lighthouse off the coasts of southern England. In the others you slept in a bunk with your body following the contour of the tower; here you could sleep in a bed. There were four keepers’ rooms, an office where the radio-telephone was kept, a room for the radio beacon coders, a kitchen and a larder. And there was a separate fog signal house, with two enormous black mouthpieces, giant versions of the sort used at one time on hand-made gramophones, the sort that T. E. Lawrence had at Clouds Hill, an ‘engine room’ with a couple of fantastic old engines in it which provided compressed air for the hoist and the fog signal and three others, two of which were modern, producing power for the radio beacon and electric light.

There were four keepers but only three were on duty at any one time. In the absence of the Principal Keeper the next senior Assistant Keeper became Keeper in Charge. They all did two months ‘off’ on the rock and one month ‘on’ on the world. Round Island was a ‘happy light’. When asked, singly in the dark watches of the night, they all agreed that they got on well together – all liked the Principal Keeper. They told me hair-raising stories of unhappy lighthouses, of being immured with keepers who were religious maniacs or drug fiends or smelly keepers, but these seemed mercifully rare – all agreed, however, that most of the new entrants were not up to previous standards. They all liked being lighthouse keepers, whether they were married or not, and had no crazy ideas about living in Sunningdale or having a second car for shopping.

Two of them had quitted the service temporarily. One, for what he regarded as a ghastly period, worked for Sun Life Assurance in Holborn, the other, more congenially, had worked in a pub; both had returned to it.

All were remarkably free from germs, as proud of the healthiness of their environment, and with presumably more reason, as the London sewermen whose subterranean empire I had visited previously. ‘You can come out here with a nasty sore throat after a turn ashore,’ Ray said. ‘After a day or so on the rock it’s gone.’ None of them was bearded. A mysterious regulation of Trinity House stated that ‘… all keepers after 18.11.52 to be either clean-shaven or wear beard and whiskers or moustache’ – what strange mutations were in existence before this date were not clear. The regulations were of an almost obsessive thoroughness and covered everything from chimney sweeping (‘keepers shall sweep the kitchen chimneys at their stations at least twice a year’); the number of teeth a keeper had to have – ‘a keeper must have sufficient teeth’ – the regulation said; to the wearing of uniform – compulsory if the keeper was to be photographed. None of the keepers on Round Island liked wearing their uniforms; but they had to during the annual visit of the Elder Brethren (all en grande tenue in their vessel, the Patricia, which bore a suspicious resemblance, at least from the outside, to a millionaire’s yacht).

They all possessed the enviable quality of being able to create an atmosphere of high fantasy and maintain it for long periods, rather in the same way as the more resilient prisoners-of-war of my acquaintance had succeeded in doing in Italy and Germany. This, with the fact that they each kept their own food supplies separate from one another’s (at meal times in the kitchen we peered at one another through a forest of sauce bottles), gave Round Island an uncanny resemblance to a prisoner-of-war camp of the better sort. From the moment I landed I never saw my hamper from Fortnum’s. It was whisked away, ‘We’ll keep this for a rainy day,’ they said, roguishly, like the worst sort of hosts, to whom you bring a couple of bottles of champagne hoping to enliven the evening. It never rained while I was there and I lived as they did. They seemed to have a morbid passion for Bird’s Custard.

They also had a little trolley on which, when they were not trying to photograph one another, with their keeper’s hats reversed like early racing motorists at Brooklands, they used to zoom down a concrete path from the high south end of the rock through the open gate in the protecting wall of their living quarters, round the base of the light and back again.

Their life was one of constant activity. If such a comparison were possible it could only be with that of a pre-1914 housewife whose cook and housemaid had left her, armed with nothing but a bottle of meths, paraffin, soap, lubricating oil and metal polish who finds herself saddled with a number of machines, the majority of them outmoded, all in need of constant attention, which are housed either in an embryonic skyscraper without a lift or else dotted about a rocky plateau exposed to the full force of North Atlantic weather.

On Round Island watches were from midnight to four, four until noon, then noon until eight and from eight until midnight. At 9.15a.m. day-workers were called to breakfast by the man who had the four to noon watch. Each keeper worked as a dayman two days out of three. Jobs included removing the seventy-two steel rollers which supported the sixteen-ton edifice of lenses – in some lighthouses it floated in mercury – cleaning them with meths, then oiling and reassembling them; oiling the clockwork mechanisms with which the rock was abundantly provided; cleaning some 350 square feet of lenses inside and out with a mixture of meths and water, cleaning an infinity of brass (some older Elder Brother must have had shares in a brass foundry); wiping over the exposed steelwork with oily rags, a job that had to be done with great care to be successful; maintaining the engines, scrubbing the floors and the spiral staircase; filling the stoves; riddling the ashes from the cooking range – on Saturdays the man who was cook cleaned the telescope, the kitchen window and the mirror, Monday’s cook washed the previous week’s dishcloths (changed on Sundays and Wednesdays); took the Elsan chemical closet from its exposed situation on the west side of the rock and emptied it over the cliff on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Better by far, they all said, than the lugubrious pilgrimages with a wheelbarrow that keepers used to go on from the old lighthouse at Dungeness, and better than hanging over the void in the lavatory on the outside gallery of the Longships Light off Land’s End – 110 feet up, and, if you were on duty in thick weather, rising every five minutes to change the guncotton charges on the manually operated fog signal, raise them high in the air on the counterbalanced jib, a facsimile of the one I had seen twenty-five years previously at Anvil Point in Dorset, and push down the plunger on the exploder, ‘Just like Lawrence and the Arabs,’ as one of them who had done it said.

At sunset the lamp was lit, a 75 mm Hood Petroleum Vapour Burner, visible twenty-one miles away, like the one at Anvil Point, but now very old-fashioned and soon to be supplanted by electricity, the product of one of the finest makers in the world, Chance Brothers of Birmingham. At last I realised a long-cherished ambition, to see the lamp of a lighthouse lit, and only just in time. The Keeper on Watch poured meths into a spirit cup under the upper and lower vaporizers. They were really nothing more than over-size Primus stoves. While he was waiting for them to heat up, he removed the curtains that shielded the lenses from the sun. The magnification was so great that if they were not shielded the sun would splinter the red Venetian shades on the mantles. Then he lit the mantles, which erupted like great crimson fungi. The light was economical. It only burned two and a quarter pints of paraffin in seven hours.