Lighthousekeeping Read Free Page A

stood to bathe in the little galvanised cubicle Pew had rigged for me, I soaped my body in darkness. Put your hand in a drawer, and it was darkness you felt first, as you fumbled for a spoon. Go to the cupboards to find the tea caddy of Full Strength Samson, and the hole was as black as the tea itself.
    The darkness had to be brushed away or parted before we could sit down. Darkness squatted on the chairs and hung like a curtain across the stairway. Sometimes it took on the shapes of the things we wanted: a pan, a bed, a book. Sometimes I saw my mother, dark and silent, falling towards me.
    Darkness was a presence. I learned to see in it, I learned to see through it, and I learned to see the darkness of my own.
    Pew did not speak. I didn’t know if he was kind or unkind, or what he intended to do with me. He had lived alone all his life.
    That first night, Pew cooked the sausages in darkness. No, Pew cooked the sausages with darkness. It wasthe kind of dark you can taste. That’s what we ate: sausages and darkness.
    I was cold and tired and my neck ached. I wanted to sleep and sleep and never wake up. I had lost the few things I knew, and what was here belonged to somebody else. Perhaps that would have been all right if what was inside me was my own, but there was no place to anchor.
    There were two Atlantics; one outside the lighthouse, and one inside me.
    The one inside me had no string of guiding lights.

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