I did this piece for the Guardian last week:
When I grew up, I wanted to be a lighthouse
keeper. Just like Moominpappa
in Tove Jansson’s Moomin books, my ambition was to live on the loneliest
lighthouse on the remotest skerry farthest from
land. It didn’t end well for Moominpappa, the island he and the other Moomins settled on being
barren and desolate, inhabited only by a silent fisherman who turned out to be
the ex-lighthouse keeper driven mad by loneliness. It didn’t put me off.
I
have since met many of my compatriots who had or still have the same dream, for
there is something about lighthouses that seems to speak to our islanded souls.
Now, to celebrate the quincentenary of Trinity House, the organisation
responsible for the lighthouses of England and Wales, an exhibition is opening
at the National Maritime Museum. “Guiding Lights” will display intricate models
of lighthouses and lighthouse keepers’ personal effects. It is hard to imagine
a similarly pulse-quickening exhibition about air traffic controllers or road
safety officers, although our lives are similarly in their hands.
“I
meant nothing by the lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf wrote of its role in her most
celebrated novel, “but I trusted that people would make it the deposit for
their own emotions.” Lighthouses, Woolf realised, are endlessly suggestive
signifiers of both human isolation and our ultimate connectedness to each
other. Countless British artists, from John Constable to Eric Ravilious, have
made them the focus of their paintings, which can’t simply be to do with their
pleasingly vertical contrast with the horizon.
I
suspect that lighthouses appeal especially to introverts like me, who need to
make strategic withdrawals from the social world but also want to retain some
basic link with humanity. A beam sweeping the horizon for the benefit of ships passing
in the night is just that kind of minimal human connection. “Nothing must be allowed to silence our voices … We must call
out to one another,” wrote Janet Frame, a shy New Zealand writer also fascinated
by lighthouses, “across seas and deserts flashing words instead of mirrors and
lights.”
I finally cured my lighthouse fantasy by reading
Tony Parker’s Lighthouse, his oral history of the lighthouse keepers. Looking
after a light – no keeper ever called it a lighthouse - was, I learned, a tedious
job, with little to do but linger over meals and make ships in bottles. The
clincher was reading about the keeper who was so lonely that in the middle of
the night he switched on the transmitter and listened to the ships radioing
each other, just to hear some other human voices. The tower lights, the
ones that rise impossibly out of the sea and carry the most romantic connotations
for landlubberly ignoramuses like me, were the most dreaded by the keepers. Without even a bit of rock to walk around on and escape from your housemates,
they were
the lighthouse-keeping equivalent of being posted to Siberia.
In
any case, I was well out of it because lighthouse keeping was not a job with
prospects. The lighthouses began to be automated in the 1970s and the last
keeper left the last occupied lighthouse in 1998. Now, in an age of radar and
computerised navigation systems, working lighthouses are an endangered species.
Their haunting fog signals are being switched off. Their black and red painted
stripes, meant to stand out against the land and sky, are being left to peel
off without being retouched. And many lighthouses are being decommissioned,
turned into holiday cottages or expensively renovated homes.
No doubt satnav will now
do the job just as well, but it will be a shame when the last lighthouse turns
off its light. In an age when we have to justify public projects with reference
to the consumerist language of stakeholders and end users, lighthouses still
feel like an uncomplicated social good that belongs to us all. They are the concrete
symbol of our common humanity, of the fact that people we may never meet – whom
we may do no more than flash our lights at in the dark - are also our concern.
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