Stargazing. Peter Hill
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I have always enjoyed getting mail and that particular day was a very good mail day for me. Since becoming a student with my own postal address I had taken to ordering sundry items from the weekly magazine Exchange and Mart. As a boy I had always longed to be able to send off for the X-Ray specs regularly advertised inside American Spiderman and Green Lantern comics, and better still to earn the ten cents a copy promised for making home deliveries. By my late teens I had graduated away from the world of X-Ray specs (I remember they were often shown alongside a well-dressed girl whose bikini was magically visible beneath her summer dress) but only as far as knee-length leather motor-cycle boots, a precaution against Dundee’s roving gangs of skinheads and ideal for the art student with no form of transport other than his feet. Then there were the early design solutions to the flat-pack bookcase, again courtesy of Exchange and Mart, which I eagerly assembled and filled with my collection of underground magazines such as the infamous schoolkids’ Oz, well-thumbed copies of International Times, and of course all my poetry books.
Various strange boxes came in the mail that day. It was not until I had covered the floor of my bedsit with torn wrapping paper and brown string that I noticed amongst my newly acquired set of non-stick pans and a Venetian gondolier’s shirt, the smallest of envelopes addressed to me in a copper-plate script. I turned it over and was puzzled to see the crest of a lighthouse on the back flap, slightly embossed with thin black lines signifying beams of light.
I tore it open, and there was the reply to my query of several weeks ago in which I had asked whether students were ever employed as lighthouse keepers during the long summer months.
Please come to an interview it said, and I noticed with alarm the suggested date was only three days away. We will pay your return fare to Edinburgh, it coaxed, and sure enough there was a tiny claim form, hand-typed, attached with a small gold paperclip.
I scornfully threw my gondolier’s shirt in the bottom of my wardrobe and went out to buy a pipe.
The train journey from Dundee south to Edinburgh is one of the world’s great railway adventures. It only takes about an hour, but in that time you journey across two astonishing feats of engineering. First there is the Tay Rail Bridge, darkly curving across the silvery river far below. Then there is the jagged coast-line of The Kingdom of Fife that leads towards the great red-oxide giant of the Forth Rail Bridge. This is more impressive in a laid-back horizontal sort of way than the Eiffel Tower and has the added advantage of being functional, this being Scotland after all. I settled down with anticipation as the train pulled out of Dundee station, past the Queen’s Hotel, past the back of Greenfield House with the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art rising above it. I had with me a Tunnock’s Caramel Log, a can of Irn Bru, and a copy of the latest Mad magazine. As I peeled back the red and gold foil wrapper from my chocolate bar I wondered to myself – and not for the first time – just who the hell ‘Duncan of Jordanstone’ had actually been? In my two years at the art school no one had ever been able to tell me.
I knew who William McGonagall was. The stumps of the first rail bridge just in view far below us reminded me of him and the disaster he immortalised a century before. I must have taken the train across the Tay Bridge many hundreds of times in my life and each time the opening lines of McGonagall’s The Tay Bridge Disaster rise up to haunt me, and probably many of the other passengers:
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas, I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
It is often claimed that McGonagall is the world’s worst poet – but if that is as bad as it gets we shouldn’t complain. Indeed, the good people of Dundee often celebrate their local hero with McGonagall Suppers on the very night the rest of Scotland is tucking into their haggis and neeps at the more conventional Burns Suppers in praise of our other national poet, Rabbie Burns.
As a nineteen-year-old I prepared for job interviews with the same spirited disinterest as I prepared for examinations, and once over the Tay Bridge was soon absorbed in my Mad magazine while some of the most stunning scenery in the world rushed by. Never mind, I would catch it on the way back.
Edinburgh is one of Europe’s most impressive cities to enter by train. You leave the subterranean darkness of the platform area at Waverley Station and walk up a gently rising ramp into a rectangle of bright daylight which might double as a Richard Turrell light sculpture. Then comes the moment near the top when the sky is squeezed out by the mass of Edinburgh Castle perched many hundreds of feet above Princes Street Gardens. In the foreground, the world’s largest monument to a literary figure, the Scott Monument, pierces the clouds like a Gothic rocket. Magic, I thought to myself as I dodged the traffic and skirted round the perimeter of Jenners department store, Edinburgh’s answer to New York’s Bloomingdales, London’s Harrods, or Sydney’s Grace Brothers.
It was not until I was strolling along George Street in the warm sunshine looking for the home of The Commissioners of the Northern Lights that my thoughts finally turned to lighthouses and the men who run them.
If truth be known, I’d never really thought through what a lighthouse keeper actually did.
But I did know it was something I had always wanted to do, whatever it was. Even as a very young child when I turned over various occupations in my mind, as I think everyone does – detective, doctor, trapeze artist, chemist, painter, captain of industry, soldier, tramp, second-hand-bookshop-owner, whisky priest, politician, teacher, spy … even then, at the age of four or five, being a lighthouse keeper or being an astronaut were the two professions which really stood out as being a bit special.
In the middle of George Street I found what I was looking for. High above me on the lintel of a building still dressed in the soot of the industrial revolution, I saw a virgin white statue of a lighthouse. I climbed the well-worn stone steps and pushed open the heavy black door. If ever there was a rite of passage, this was it.
’Ello luv, come in,’ said a friendly woman with a Liverpool accent who sat behind a large reception desk. She looked like Jane Asher and sounded like Cilla Black. Her white PVC raincoat hung from a hook beside an imposing grandfather clock which chimed loudly three times as the door banged behind me. Postcards from all over the world, many featuring lighthouses, covered a green pinboard on the wall behind her. ‘Take a seat thur, luv. You’ll be Mr Donaldson’s three o’clock. Yer here fur an interview, luv?’
‘Yes, lighthouse job,’ I said, trying to sound confident, man of the world, fingering the pipe in my pocket as if it was some Pacific Island amulet. I really would have to grow a beard, I decided.
‘I’m just a temp. I gerr-all-over town so I do,’ she continued in a mesmerising sort of way. ‘Me Mam calls me The Rash because of the way I spread meself about between jobs, but everybody else calls me Rosie. You know I’ve been here three weeks an’ I still haven’t met a lighthouse keeper. Always fancied the outdoor type, so I hav.’
I may have opened my mouth to say something but she talked with such speed it would be like trying to throw pebbles through the spokes of a racing bicycle. But I liked her, I liked her a lot. It was still very trendy to have a Liverpool accent in the early Seventies. Liverpool had been my first choice of art school and I even lived there for ten days before getting a ‘late acceptance’ from Duncan of Jordanstone. On my first night in Liverpool I had seen The Scaffold play in a production called Mr Plod at the end of which the whole theatre audience was invited up on to the stage to shake hands with the cast and be presented with a PC Plod badge. I found it the other day in an old shoe box with other such memorabilia as a flyer about Allen Ginsberg’s visit to Glasgow and the stub of a ticket for a Rolling Stones concert. Rosie’s accent brought it all back in even sharper focus.
While she typed and answered occasional phone calls I immersed myself in the pages of the previous Christmas edition of The Northern Lighthouse Journal which lay