Lighthousekeeping

A beginning, a middle and an end is the proper way to tell a story. But I have difficulty with that method.

Already I could choose the year of my birth – 1959. Or I could choose the year of the lighthouse at Cape Wrath, and the birth of Babel Dark – 1828. Then there was the year Josiah Dark first visited Salts – 1802. Or the year Josiah Dark shipped firearms to Lundy Island – 1789.

And what about the year I went to live in the lighthouse – 1969, also the year that Apollo landed on the moon?

I have a lot of sympathy with that date because it felt like my own moon landing; this unknown barren rock that shines at night.

There’s a man on the moon. There’s a baby on earth. Every baby plants a flag here for the first time.

So there’s my flag – 1959, the day gravity sucked me out of the mother-ship. My mother had been in labour for eight hours, legs apart in the air, like she was skiing through time. I had been drifting through the unmarked months, turning slowly in my weightless world. It was the light that woke me; light very different to the soft silver and night-red I knew. The light called me out – I remember it as a cry, though you will say that was mine, and perhaps it was, because a baby knows no separation between itself and life. The light was life. And what light is to plants and rivers and animals and seasons and the turning earth, the light was to me

When we buried my mother, some of the light went out of me, and it seemed proper that I should go and live in a place where all the light shone outwards and none of it was there for us. Pew was blind, so it didn’t matter to him. I was lost, so it didn’t matter to me.

Where to begin? Difficult at the best of times, harder when you have to begin again.

Close your eyes and pick another date: 1 February 1811.

This was the day when a young engineer called Robert Stevenson completed work on the lighthouse at Bell Rock. This was more than the start of a lighthouse; it was the beginning of a dynasty. For ‘lighthouse’ read ‘Stevenson’. They built scores of them until 1934 and the whole family was involved, brothers, sons, nephews, cousins. When one retired, another was immediately appointed. They were the Borgias of lighthousekeeping.

When Josiah Dark went to Salts in 1802, he had a dream but no one to build it. Stevenson was still an apprentice – lobbying, passionate, but without any power and with no record of success. He started out on Bell Rock as an assistant, and gradually took over the project that was hailed as one of the ‘modern wonders of the world’. After that, everybody wanted him to build their lighthouses, even where there was no sea. He became fashionable and famous. It helps.

Josiah Dark had found his man. Robert Stevenson would build Cape Wrath.

There are twists and turns in any life, and though all of the Stevensons should have built lighthouses, one escaped, and that was the one who was born at the moment Josiah Dark’s son, Babel, made a strange reverse pilgrimage and became Minister of Salts.

1850 – Babel Dark arrives in Salts for the first time.

1850 – Robert Louis Stevenson is born into a family of prosperous civil engineers – so say the innocent annotated biographical details – and goes on to write Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The Stevensons and the Darks were almost related, in fact they were related, not through blood but through the restless longing that marks some individuals from others. And they were related because of a building. Robert Louis came here, as he came to all his family lighthouses. He once said, ‘Whenever I smell salt water, I know I am not far from one of the works of my ancestors.’

In 1886, when Robert Louis Stevenson came to Salts and Cape Wrath, he met Babel Dark, just before his death, and some say it was Dark, and the rumour that hung about him, that led Stevenson to brood on the story of Jekyll and Hyde.

‘What was he like, Pew?’

‘Who, child?’

‘Babel Dark.’

Pew sucked on his pipe. For Pew, anything to do with thinking had first to be sucked in through his pipe. He sucked in words, the way other people blow out bubbles.

‘He was a pillar of the community.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You know the Bible story of Samson.’

‘No I don’t.’

‘Then you’ve had no right education.’

‘Why can’t you just tell me the story without starting with another story?’

‘Because there’s no story that’s the start of itself, any more than a child comes into the world without parents.’

‘I had no father.’

‘You’ve no mother now neither.’

I started to cry and Pew heard me and was sorry for what he had said, because he touched my face and felt the tears.

‘That’s another story yet,’ he said, ‘and if you tell yourself like a story, it doesn’t seem so bad.’

‘Tell me a story and I won’t be lonely. Tell me about Babel Dark.’

‘It starts with Samson,’ said Pew, who wouldn’t be put off, ‘because Samson was the strongest man in the world and a woman brought him down, then when he was beaten and blinded and shorn like a ram he stood between two pillars and used the last of his strength to bring them crashing down. You could say that Samson was two pillars of the community, because anyone who sets himself up is always brought down, and that’s what happened to Dark.

‘The story starts in Bristol in 1848 when Babel Dark was twenty years old and as rich and fine as any gentleman of the town. He was a ladies’ man, for all that he was studying Theology at Cambridge, and everyone said he would marry an heiress from the Colonies and take up his father’s business in ships and trade.

‘It was set fair to be so.

‘There was a pretty girl lived in Bristol and all the town knew her for her red hair and green eyes. Her father was a shopkeeper, and Babel Dark used to visit the shop to buy buttons and braids and soft gloves and neckties, because I have said, haven’t I, that he was a bit of a dandy?

‘One day – a day like this, yes just like this, with the sun shining, and the town bustling, and the air itself like a good drink – Babel walked into Molly’s shop, and spent ten minutes examining cloth for riding breeches, while he watched out of the corner of his eye until she had finished serving one of the Jessop girls with a pair of gloves.

‘As soon as the shop was empty, Babel swung over to the counter and asked for enough braid to rig a ship, and when he had bought all of it, he pushed it back towards Molly, kissed her direct on the lips, and asked her to a dance.

‘She was a shy girl, and Babel was certainly the handsomest and the richest young man that paraded the waterfront. At first she said no, and then she said yes, and then she said no again, and when all the yeas and nays had been bagged and counted, it was unanimous by a short margin, that she was going to the dance.

‘His father didn’t disapprove, because old Josiah was no snob, and his own first love had been a jetty girl, back in the days of the French Revolution.’

‘What’s a jetty girl?’

‘She helps with the nets and the catch and luggage and travellers and so on, and in the winter she scrapes the boats clean of barnacles and marks the splinters for tarring by the men. Well, as I was saying, there were no obstacles to the pair meeting when they liked, and the thing continued, and then, they say, and this is all rumour and never proved, but they say that Molly found herself having a child, and no legal wedded father.’

‘Like me?’

‘Yes, the same.’

‘It must have been Babel Dark.’

‘That’s what they all said, and Molly too, but Dark said not. Said he wouldn’t and couldn’t have done such a thing. Her family asked him to marry her, and even Josiah took him aside and told him not to be a panicky fool, but to own up and marry the girl. Josiah was all for buying them a smart house and setting up his son straight away, but Dark refused it all.

‘He went back to Cambridge that September, and when he came home at Christmas time, he announced his intention of going into the Church. He was dressed all in grey, and there was no sign of his bright waistcoats and red top boots. The only thing he still wore from his former days was a ruby and emerald pin that he had bought very expensive when he first took up with Molly O’Rourke. He’d given her one just like it for her dress.

‘His father was upset and didn’t believe for a minute that he had got to the bottom of the story, but he tried to make the best of it, and even invited the Bishop to dinner, to try and get a good appointment for his son.

‘Dark would have none of it. He was going to Salts.

“Salts?” said his father. “That God-forsaken sea-claimed rock?’

‘But Babel thought of the rock as his beginning, and it was true that as a child his favourite pastime when it rained was to turn over the book of drawings that Robert Stevenson had made, of the foundations, the column, the keeper’s quarters, and especially the prismatic diagrams of the light itself. His father had never taken him there, and now he regretted it. One week at The Razorbill would surely have been enough for life.

‘Well, it was a wet and wild and woebegone January when Babel Dark loaded two trunks onto a clipper bound seaward from Bristol and out past Cape Wrath.

‘There were plenty of good folks to see him go, but Molly O’Rourke wasn’t amongst them because she had gone to Bath to give birth to her child.

‘The sea smashed at the ship like a warning, but she made good headway, and began to blur from view, as we watched Babel Dark, standing wrapped in black, looking at his past as he sailed away from it forever.’

‘Did he live in Salts all his life?’

‘You could say yes, and you could say no.’

‘Could you?’

‘You could, depending on what story you were telling.’

‘Tell me!’

‘I’ll tell you this – what do you think they found in his drawer, after he was dead?’

‘Tell me!’

‘Two emerald and ruby pins. Not one – two.’

‘How did he get Molly O’Rourke’s pin?’

‘Nobody knows.’

‘Babel Dark killed her!’

‘That was the rumour, yes, and more.’

‘What more?’

Pew leaned close, the brim of his sou’wester touching mine. I felt his words on my face.

‘That Dark never stopped seeing her. That he married her in secret and visited her hidden and apart under another name for both of them. That one day, when their secret would have been told, he killed her and others besides.’

‘But why didn’t he marry her?’

‘Nobody knows. There are stories, oh yes, but nobody knows. Now off to bed while I tend the light.’

Pew always said ‘tend the light’, as though it were his child he was settling for the night. I watched him moving round the brass instruments, knowing everything by touch, and listening to the clicks on the dials to tell him the character of the light.

‘Pew?’

‘Go to bed.’

‘What do you think happened to the baby?’

‘Who knows? It was a child born of chance.’

‘Like me?’

‘Yes, like you.’

I went quietly to bed, DogJim at my feet because there was nowhere else for him. I curled up to keep warm, my knees under my chin, and hands holding my toes. I was back in the womb. Back in the safe space before the questions start. I thought about Babel Dark, and about my own father, as red as a herring. That’s all I know about him – he had red hair like me.

A child born of chance might imagine that Chance was its father, in the way that gods fathered children, and then abandoned them, without a backward glance, but with one small gift. I wondered if a gift had been left for me. I had no idea where to look, or what I was looking for, but I know now that all the important journeys start that way.

As an apprentice to lighthousekeeping my duties were as follows:

1) Brew a pot of Full Strength Samson and take it to Pew.

2) 8 am. Take DogJim for a walk.

3) 9 am. Cook bacon.

4) 10 am. Sluice the stairs.

5) 11 am. More tea.

6) Noon. Polish the instruments.

7) 1 pm. Chops and tomato sauce.

8) 2 pm. Lesson – History of Lighthouses.

9) 3 pm. Wash our socks etc.

10) 4 pm. More tea.

11) 5 pm. Walk the dog and collect supplies.

12) 6 pm. Pew cooks supper.

13) 7 pm. Pew sets the light. I watch.

14) 8 pm. Pew tells me a story.

15) 9 pm. Pew tends the light. Bed.

Numbers 3, 6, 7, 8 and 14 were the best times of the day. I still get homesick when I smell bacon and Brasso.

Pew told me about Salts years ago, when wreckers lured ships onto the rocks to steal the cargo. The weary seamen were desperate for any light, but if the light is a lie, everything is lost. The new lighthouses were built to prevent this confusion of light. Some of them lit great fires on their platforms, and burned out to sea like a dropped star. Others had only twenty-five candles, standing in the domed glass like a saint’s shrine, but for the first time, the lighthouses were mapped. Safety and danger were charted. Unroll the paper, set the compass, and if your course is straight, the lights will be there. What flickers elsewhere is a trap or a lure.

The lighthouse is a known point in the darkness.

‘Imagine it,’ said Pew, ‘the tempest buffeting you starboard, the rocks threatening your lees, and what saves you is a single light. The harbour light, or the warning light, it doesn’t matter which; you sail to safety. Day comes and you’re alive.’

‘Will I learn to set the light?’

‘Aye, and tend the light too.’

‘I hear you talking to yourself.’

‘I’m not talking to myself, child, I’m about my work.’ Pew straightened up and looked at me seriously. His eyes were milky blue like a kitten’s. No one knew whether or not he had always been blind, but he had spent his whole life in the lighthouse or on the mackerel boat, and his hands were his eyes.

‘A long time ago, in 1802 or 1892, you name your date, there’s most sailors could not read nor write. Their officers read the navy charts, but the sailors had their own way. When they came past Tarbert Ness or Cape Wrath or Bell Rock, they never thought of such places as positions on the map, they knew them as stories. Every lighthouse has a story to it – more than one, and if you sail from here to America, there’ll not be a light you pass where the keeper didn’t have a story for the seamen.

In those days the seamen came ashore as often as they could, and when they put up at the inn, and they had eaten their chops and lit their pipes and passed the rum, they wanted a story, and it was always the lighthousekeeper who told it, while his Second or his wife stayed with the light. These stories went from man to man, generation to generation, hooped the sea-bound world and sailed back again, different decked maybe, but the same story. And when the lightkeeper had told his story, the sailors would tell their own, from other lights. A good keeper was one who knew more stories than the sailors. Sometimes there’d be a competition, and a salty dog would shout out “Lundy” or “Calf of Man” and you’d have to answer, “The Flying Dutchman” or “Twenty Bars of Gold“.’

Pew was serious and silent, his eyes like a faraway ship.

‘I can teach you – yes, anybody – what the instruments are for, and the light will flash once every four seconds as it always does, but I must teach you how to keep the light. Do you know what that means?’

I didn’t.

‘The stories. That’s what you must learn. The ones I know and the ones I don’t know.’

‘How can I learn the ones you don’t know?’

‘Tell them yourself.’

Then Pew began to say of all the sailors riding the waves who had sunk up to their necks in death and found one last air pocket, reciting the story like a prayer.

‘There was a man close by here, lashed himself to a spar as his ship went down, and for seven days and seven nights he was on the sea, and what kept him alive while others drowned was telling himself stories like a madman, so that as one ended another began. On the seventh day he had told all the stories he knew and that was when he began to tell himself as if he were a story, from his earliest beginnings to his green and deep misfortune. The story he told was of a man lost and found, not once, but many times, as he choked his way out of the waves. And when night fell, he saw the Cape Wrath light, only lit a week it was, but it was, and he knew that if he became the story of the light, he might be saved. With his last strength he began to paddle towards it, arms on either side of the spar, and in his mind the light became a shining rope, pulling him in. He took hold of it, tied it round his waist, and at that moment, the keeper saw him, and ran for the rescue boat.

‘Later, putting up at The Razorbill, and recovering, he told anyone who wanted to listen what he had told himself on those sea-soaked days and nights. Others joined in, and it was soon discovered that every light had a story – no, every light was a story, and the flashes themselves were the stories going out over the waves, as markers and guides and comfort and warning.’

Cliff-perched, wind-cleft,

the church seated 250, and was almost full at 243 souls, the entire population of Salts.

On 2 February 1850, Babel Dark preached his first sermon.

His text was this: ‘Remember the rock whence ye are hewn, and the pit whence ye are digged.’

The innkeeper at The Razorbill was so struck by this sermon and its memorable text that he changed the name of his establishment. From that day forth, he was no longer landlord of The Razorbill, but keeper of The Rock and Pit. Sailors, being what they are, still called it by its former name for a good sixty years or more, but The Rock and Pit it was, and is still, with much the same low-beamed, inward-turned, net-hung, salt-dashed, seaweed feel of forsakenness that it always had.

Babel Dark used his private fortune to build himself a fine house and a walled garden and to equip himself comfortably there. He was soon seen in earnest Biblical discussion with the one lady of good blood in the place – a cousin of the Duke of Argyll, a Campbell in exile, out of poverty and some other secret. She was no beauty, but she read German fluently and knew something of Greek.

They were married in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, and Dark took his new wife to London for her honeymoon, and thereafter he never took her anywhere again, not even to Edinburgh. Wherever he went, riding alone on a black mare, no one was told, and no one followed.

There were disturbances at night, sometimes, and the Manse windows all flamed up, and shouts and hurlings of furniture or heavy objects, but question Dark, as few did, and he would say it was his soul in peril, and he fought for it, as every man must.

His wife said nothing, and if her husband was gone for days at a time, or seen wandering in his black clothes over the high rocks, then let him be, for he was a Man of God, and he accepted no judge but God himself.

One day, Dark saddled his horse and disappeared.

He was gone a month, and when he returned, he was softer, easier, but with plain sadness on his face.

After that, the month-long absences happened twice a year, but no one knew where he went, until a Bristol man put up at The Razorbill, that is to say The Rock and Pit.

He was a close-guarded man, eyes as near together as to be always spying on one another, and a way of tapping his finger and thumb, very rapid, when he spoke. His name was Price.

One Sunday, after Price had been to church, he was sitting over the fire with a puzzlement on his face, and it was finally got out of him that if he hadn’t seen Babel Dark before and just recently, then the man had the devil’s imprint down in Bristol.

Price claimed that he had seen Dark, wearing very different clothes, visiting a house in the Clifton area outside Bristol. He took note of him for his height – tall, and his bearing – very haughty. He had never seen him with anyone, always alone, but he would swear on his tattoo that this was the same one.

‘He’s a smuggler,’ said one of us.

‘He’s got a mistress,’ said another.

‘It’s none of our business,’ said a third. ‘He does his duties here and he pays his bills and handsomely. What else he does is between him and God.’

The rest of us were not so sure, but as nobody had the money to follow him, none of us could know whether Price’s story was true or not. But Price promised to keep a look out, and to send word, if he ever saw Dark or his like again.

‘And did he?’

‘Oh yes, indeed he did, but that didn’t help us to know what Dark was about, or why.’

‘You weren’t there then. You weren’t born.’

‘There’s always been a Pew in the lighthouse at Cape Wrath.’

‘But not the same Pew.’

Pew said nothing. He put on his radio headphones, and motioned me to look out to sea. ‘The McCloud’s out there,’ he said.

I got the binoculars and trained them on a handsome cargo ship, white on the straight line of the horizon. ‘She’s the most haunted vessel you’ll ever see.’

‘What haunts her?’

‘The past,’ said Pew. ‘There was a brig called the McCloud built two hundred years ago, and that was as wicked a ship as sailed. When the King’s navy scuttled her, her Captain swore an oath that he and his ship would some day return. Nothing happened until they built the new McCloud, and on the day they launched her, everyone on the dock saw the broken sails and ruined keel of the old McCloud rise up in the body of the ship. There’s a ship within a ship and that’s fact.’

‘It’s not a fact.’

‘It’s as true as day.’

I looked at the McCloud, fast, turbined, sleek, computer-controlled. How could she carry in her body the trace-winds of the past?

‘Like a Russian doll, she is,’ said Pew, ‘one ship inside another, and on a stormy night you can see the old McCloud hanging like a gauze on the upper deck.’

‘Have you seen her?’

‘Sailed in her and seen her,’ said Pew.

‘When did you board the new McCloud? Was she in dry dock at Glasgow?’

‘I never said anything about the new McCloud,’ said Pew.

‘Pew, you are not two hundred years old.’

‘And that’s a fact,’ said Pew, blinking like a kitten. ‘Oh yes, a fact.’

‘Miss Pinch says I shouldn’t listen to your stories.’

‘She doesn’t have the gift, that’s why.’