Lighthousekeeping

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.