by
Peter Hill
336
pages, Canongate
Review
by Pat Black
Scotland
has a long, treacherous coastline. It looks fantastic on that gumby watercolour
your granny might keep above her mantelpiece, but in real life, the lights have
to be kept burning. You could make an island with the bones of sailors drowned
in those waters.
Being
a lighthouse keeper seemed like a romantic job to me as a kid. We think of the
sea, of course – calm and gentle as your mother one minute, an unstoppable,
raging fury the next. Then there’s the fog, the solitude, old CB radios, and of
course, the sweeping light. It helps that Ray Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn” is one
of my favourite pieces of writing.
The
job has long been outmoded by technology – everything’s automated, and has been
for decades. This phenomenon of redundancy is something many of us will have to
get used to in the coming years if progress continues at its current pace,
unless a nice nuclear war sets the clock back a few millennia. Whatever
humanity survives might have to go back to burning beacons to show wooden ships
the way to safety. Assuming they’d harbour good intentions towards strange
vessels.
Stargazing, Peter
Hill’s memoirs of his days spent as a keeper on several lights on Scotland’s
west coast, is a step back in time. It looks at 1973, when Hill halted his art
school studies in Dundee in order to take a job on the lights. He’s just 19
years old, his head full of Jimi Hendrix, Kerouac, the Watergate hearings and
Vietnam. Peter wants to write haikus, paint pictures and write novels in his
downtime on the lights, and he does. But he also gets to know the crazy
characters he has to share the living quarters with. This is the lifeblood of
the book. It’s good to consider a starry night, with the moon drizzling silver
over indigo waters; but it’s better to have someone to talk to about it - or Coronation Street, whichever you prefer.
You’d
think there’s not much to describe once you get past the rugged coasts, the
seas and the lights, but… imagine the stars. Imagine basking sharks the size of
lorries knifing their way across the water. Imagine thousands of seabirds
nesting overnight on the rock, using the lighthouse as a sort of avian Travelodge
to break up their journeys across the continents. Imagine the things people
might say to each other in the dead of night, their psyches on the fringes of
sleeping and dreaming. It’s magical stuff.
“At
least you’ve got your art,” one late-night companion tells Peter. “You’re
lucky. It’ll sustain you for life.”
In
truth this book only takes up a few months out of Hill’s life – a matter of
weeks, really - but you can imagine the impression it made on the young man. I
was a postie for one summer when I was a similar age, over a similar period of
time, and I was a turn of a card away from doing it full-time. My destiny took
a different course, but I think I learned more about life, the universe and
everything that summer than I have in nearly two decades since, sat on my arse
in offices, getting fat, cynical and bitter.
Hill’s
fellow keepers are incandescent characters. We meet Finlay, the highlander and
gourmand, who teaches Peter how to cook as well how to look after the light; then
there’s the tough guy who used to work on the boats, whose taciturnity becomes
comical rather than threatening; the Doctor Who enthusiast, who could answer
any question on the show in between blasts of the fog horn; the colonel Blinky
type, who used to be a sailor during the war but now does all his fighting with
Scrabble; the traumatised wartime secret agent who had Done Stuff; the polymath
professor, who you suspect could have done anything but ended up working on the
lights; and many more.
It’s
not an essential, but having an idea of the locations described helped anchor
some scenes in my mind. I know Arran and Ailsa Craig - the latter being familiar
to golf fans from any time the Open is held at Troon, as it is during Hill’s
time spent on the light; Peter Alliss even gives the keepers a mention live on
the telly. Corsewall in the Borders is mentioned in passing; it’s a hotel and
restaurant complex now. I’ve stayed there, on one of my best ever birthdays. These
are all dramatic, gorgeous settings which Hill sketches beautifully.
As
for the lights I don’t know about – what about those titles? Pladda! Muckle
Flugga! Everything about these places is a pleasure. Saying their names out
loud; looking them up on the maps; and, surely, going there.
There’s
even some action and adventure, as a fishing trip to intercept a juicy shoal of
herring turns into a potentially fatal incident as Peter and a workmate are
almost swamped by a rogue wave.
You
might ask: How do lighthouse keepers deal with having no sex for weeks on end? The
same way anyone else does, is Hill’s reply. There’s a big, obvious, vertical, shiny
bright metaphor we could use here, but Hill ignores it, and so shall I. I’m reminded
of an interpretation I once heard of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse from years ago, but I shan’t go into it; I
promised myself I’d get through this one without any smutty jokes.
Most
of all, this book is a tribute to youth. The hope, the potential, the energy,
the ambition, the chutzpah. Some parts transported me back in time to my own
younger days – an encyclopaedia full of mistakes, stupidity and fool’s errands,
to be sure, but wonderful and unforgettable and romantic in their own way. There’s
one part where Hill uses shore leave to go hostelling in Amsterdam with a
female friend, who he might be in love with. She knows this, of course, and
tells him in that beautifully nonsensical way that she can’t sleep with a
friend, as it’d spoil the friendship. Some people must think this tactic
amounts to “letting you down gently”. This stirred memories and feelings from
my own youth I’d almost forgotten. It was a lightning bolt, a sudden rekindling
of how you felt when you were that age, doing the same things.
Stargazing
reminded me of the good stuff; the parts a man of 39 thinks he might have left
behind with the lad of 19. But I’d recommend this book to anyone, of any age,
from any background.
It’s
a reminder to keep your light burning; you never know who’ll need it out there
in the dark.
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