Stargazing Page 2

  Once purchased, I couldn’t get back into the Tav and waited around amongst clusters of others for my pals to emerge. With my armful of cans I joined May, Chris and Kath, three of the most alluring pre-Raphaelite beauties, who watched over my antics like concerned big sisters – usually rightly concerned. They were chatting with a few others on the subject of ‘the ideal job’.

  ‘What would you most like to do Peter?’ May asked me.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘If you could choose any job at all, anything in the whole wide world.’

  ‘I’d be a lighthouse keeper,’ I replied, quick as a flash. ‘I’ve always wanted to be a lighthouse keeper.’ It was true, next best thing to being a spaceman, probably better.

  And all of this might have been just another conversation borne on the wind and scattered in the darkness of the Hawkhill Road, if it had not been for May coming into the life-drawing class the following Monday (and me even more surprisingly being there) with an advertisement from Saturday’s Scotsman newspaper seeking full-time lighthouse keepers.

  ‘Why don’t you write to them,’ she encouraged, ‘and see if they take students on for the summer?’

  And so I did.

  The Interview

  I remember with great clarity the day in late spring when I received the letter summoning me to Edinburgh for the interview for the position of relief lighthouse keeper.

  I was living in an old house on Dundee’s Perth Road which had been split into bedsitting rooms. It was situated diagonally opposite the art school so what I saved on travel I made up for in extra sleep, often until well past noon. The house was occupied by fifteen different art students, their lovers, pets and occasionally children. The name ‘Greenfield House’ was inscribed in faded gilt letters on the glass panel above the front door. In some quarters it is still as famous as Picasso’s early gaff, the ‘Bateau Lavoir’.

  The house was constantly full of visitors, coming and going, at all hours of day and night. Lincoln lived in the room above me; Albi Sinclair was directly underneath; and Euan Heng right opposite. During one long summer two elderly house breakers rented Albi’s room from our landlady (a rather grand dame who looked like Barbara Cartland and ran a string of antique shops along the Perth Road) while he was away and nicked my Fidelity stereo record player which was my most essential possession. It was eventually returned to me, and they to Perth prison.

  There was a strange and regular visitor who had befriended the only non-art student in Greenfield House, a civil engineer at the university. We nicknamed this visitor ‘The Harbinger of Doom’. He had a thin, weasel face, an equally thin tie, short hair (unlike the rest of us) and chain smoked Gauloises cigarettes. It was rumoured that he owned a gun and it was known, through a nursing friend of Albi’s, that he had worked as a mortuary attendant. Whenever he climbed the stairs he kept very close to the walls and seemed to merge in and out of the shadows. Equally exotic, but far more intellectually stimulating, was a friend from Jogg’s school days called Duncan, who later became an investigative journalist. In the early Seventies he was in trouble with the forces of law and order himself for making free phone calls to far flung parts of the globe by using secret British Telecom numbers. I also remember, over large mugs of Nescafé and to the backdrop of George Harrison’s Bangladesh, Duncan talking at great length about some book called Beneath the City Streets. I had met my first conspiracy theorist.

  But he was only one of many remarkable characters who entered the hallowed hallway of Greenfield, as the house was generally known.

  And in that hallway, sitting on cracked linoleum that in its old age looked more like the mosaic tiling it was originally supposed to imitate, sat a large wooden table on which was dumped all the mail of the day. Fifteen sets of bank statements, grant cheques, letters from home, and postcards from abroad were mixed in with at least as many other names of past residents who had long since left Dundee for Sydney, New York or Ullapool.

  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 amongst a pile of old copies of Punch and The Readers’ Digest.

  I flicked through grainy black and white images of a myriad of lighthouses, each of a type yet each as individual as erect penises in a porn magazine. Some were tall and slender, others had big knobbly heads and prominent rims, while others were short and thick. I eventually started to read the General Manager’s foreword. It was a jolly piece obviously aimed at boosting morale and began:

  ‘One of the lines of “Que Sera”, the pop number which hit the charts quite a few years ago, was “the Future is not ours to see” and who is going to argue with that? Who, for instance, could possibly have foretold this time a year ago, when the PHAROS, POLE STAR, and HESPERUS were busy laying buoys beside oil rigs and wellheads on newly discovered oilfields, that by Christmas we should be drawing coupons for petrol rationing? It just goes to show that like getting 24 points on the Pools, it is the unexpected that turns up, guard against it how we will.’

  He sounded a friendly cove and I was just getting into his head when Rosie shouted across at me in her full scouse accent:

  ‘Mr Donaldson won’t keep you long, luv. Ever such a nice man is Mr Donaldson. Such a shame his parents gave him Donald as a first name too, I always think.’ What was she talking about? Buzzing away like a scouse chainsaw. ‘Seemingly it was his mother’s father’s name and it was a sort of family thing to do to call the first son Donald. But he’s ever such a nice man.’

  And indeed he was. I dropped The Northern Lighthouse Journal onto the side table just as a clean-shaven man in an elegantly striped shirt and dark trousers, who looked a little bit like the youthful Edward de Bono, appeared before me. He shook hands and ushered me upstairs to his office.

  ‘Some tea, Mr Donaldson?’

  ‘Thank you, Rosie,’ he called behind him as we climbed the green-carpeted stairs. ‘And the usual biscuits, plain and fancy, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘You must be Peter,’ he said in a friendly middle-class accent, the sort that is inbred within the east coast Scottish legal community. ‘Take a seat, take a seat,’ ushering me in to a large, Edwardian looking office with views down to the distant Firth of Forth, ‘I’m Donald Donaldson, personnel.’ And he perched on the edge of his desk. ‘Don’t get to see many lighthouses myself, unless we take the children to the beach. These are my two little ones,’ and he pointed to two young earthlings framed in gilt beside his crimson leather blotter.

  Well, it was more like a friendly chat than an interview I thought afterwards, not realising of course that his easy manner was extracting far more personal details from me than would any formal interview with half a dozen anonymous administrators in suits. We talked about art and family, we discovered which television programmes we had in common and which newspapers we read – or in my case used to read – the International Times and the Guardian, he the Sun and the Scotsman. How was I doing in my studies, he wondered? Did I like a drink with the lads? Had I any strong or peculiar religious beliefs? And what about girls? Was I dating anyone at the moment?

  I rolled a Golden Virginia cigarette, tamped the end on the heel of my motorcycle boots, and filled him in on everything relating to life, the universe and Peter W. Hill.

  The only point at which the proceedings took a more serious turn was when he cupped his hands together, leaned towards me (and I can still remember the whiff of Gillette deodorant as I waited expectantly for what I sensed would be a very important question) and asked, ‘Now Peter, what are you like as a cook?’

  I don’t suppose I lie any more than the average person. Occasional small white ones but on a scale of one to ten, with American Presidents up there in the double figures, I am way down in the foothills of the decimal fractions, occasionally scoring a one or a two. I’m just not very good at it. ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive’ just about sums it up. But this occasion was different.

  ‘I really enjoy cooking,’ I replied, without blink
ing an eyelid although the palms of my hands turned suddenly moist. I didn’t elaborate on the fact that this mostly related to half a dozen different variations on preparing toasted cheese – sometimes with onion and chutney, always with tomato and pepper, occasionally – if it was a main meal – with a slice of gammon and pineapple.

  ‘Good, good, ‘he replied. ‘Food is very important on a lighthouse, as I believe it is in prisons and on submarines. Men living in confinement, away from the nurture of their families. No alcohol of course, but three good meals a day. Very important.’ He hopped off the edge of his desk as Rosie appeared at the open door with a tray of afternoon tea and biscuits.

  ‘We get a lot of students as relief keepers these days,’ he said, and had the good grace not to add that there probably wasn’t much to choose between us. He dipped a digestive biscuit into his large white tea-cup and for a moment pondered my long hair, frayed jeans (I used to sit up for hours with a darning needle fraying the ends of my denims until they resembled ankle-length Elizabethan ruffs), and sleeveless brown cord jacket over navy blue, heavy-knitted polo neck jumper. No doubt he was comparing me with the other students he had interviewed recently – the marine biologists, the archaeologists, the English Lit students off to write their first novel, the engineers, each with their own reasons to spend their summers on a lighthouse, but each probably looking very much like me, youngsters disillusioned by the war that still raged in Vietnam, as it had throughout our adolescence every night on television and every morning in every newspaper around what was starting to be called The Global Village. Yet we youngsters of nineteen and twenty were still older than some of the boys and girls sent from America, Australia, and New Zealand to fight in Vietnam and to bomb Cambodia. For what?