What the Traveller Saw. Eric Newby
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу What the Traveller Saw - Eric Newby страница 8
Название: What the Traveller Saw
Автор: Eric Newby
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Хобби, Ремесла
isbn: 9780007392766
isbn:
The Edge of the Western World IRELAND, 1960
‘YOU MUST ASK the Captain but he’s not here,’ the old man said when we asked him if we could visit the house, but not brusquely as he would have done in England, and with no suggestion that he ought to be given something for being rooted out of his habitation late on a winter’s afternoon. He had emerged from a Gothick lodge so narrow that one wondered if he had to go to sleep standing up in it.
He unpadlocked and opened an iron gate, which sounded as if it had not been moved on its hinges since the discovery of oil, and admitted us to the ‘demesne’. Dusk was coming on. A long, seemingly endless ride between huge, shattered trees eventually led to a rather severe, late-eighteenth-century mansion with its façade intact, but which proved when we reached it to be nothing more than a shell. It had either been burnt, if so probably during the Troubles in the 1920s, or someone had taken the roof off to avoid paying taxes. It was at the time of the Troubles, we found out from the old man later, but alone with it in the gloaming there was no way of knowing. The Captain was away, somewhere across the water. And when in residence he lived in a bungalow.
Over the house rooks circled ceaselessly, below there was a lake full of reeds. To one side there was an artificial mound overgrown with impenetrable thorn, and an obelisk choked with ivy rose from it, like a huge tree trunk.
The whole place had an air of indescribable melancholy about it, but exercised an irresistible fascination for people such as myself, lovers of the abandoned and the decayed. In Ireland local authorities and developers have a habit of dynamiting these kinds of remains. But there still are hundreds, and perhaps, in spite of such uncontrolled demolitions, thousands of similar places; many of them with lodges from which old men emerge to unlock gates; and sometimes with invisible captains, Foulenoughs and Grimeses some of them, in the offing, for this was a country, as Waugh’s Captain Grimes said, where you couldn’t get into the soup however hard you tried.
It was the thought of all the people, many of them still alive, who had lived in Ireland but no longer did so, that gave the country its unique feeling of loneliness. Roads led from no place that was or could be signposted, to another, equally nameless, because there was nothing there to signpost. Here, out in the boondocks, women, many of them old, and children, walked long distances; the children to school, the women to weekly markets, there and back. Wherever we went we travelled with a Land Rover full of them, and heard some fine talk of a sort that had simply ceased to exist in modern Britain.
But in spite of this the past was too much for Ireland and its maddening, enchanting people, and sometimes for us, too. In it the ghosts of its past occupants cried out or whispered from empty castles, abandoned islands, hidden loughs, huge, precipitous cliffs (Croaghaun on Achill Island looms 2192 feet above the sea), burial mounds, caverns, towers, abbeys, churches, follies, waterfalls, holy wells, pasturing places, deserted villages; and from nineteenth-century barracks, middens on the edge of enormous sand beaches, from mountain tops and offshore rocks on which innumerable saints once lived in solitary contemplation.
Round Island SCILLY ISLES, 1963
IN THE SUMMER of 1963 while I was trying to get enough money out of various publishers to go to India, and Wanda was endeavouring to let our house in Wimbledon, I succeeded in getting permission to visit an offshore lighthouse at Anvil Point.
It was not easy to obtain, this permission. The Elder Brethren of the Corporation of Trinity House, the general lighthouse authority for England and Wales, the Channel Islands and Gibraltar, consisted of nine active brethren, the remainder being made up of royalty, eminent politicians and so on. Probably perfectly amiable individually, these nine when acting in their collective capacity, through their Secretary, were pretty stuffy.
‘I am directed to acquaint you that the Elder Brethren have granted permission to Mr Newby to spend two nights at Eddystone Lighthouse,’ the Secretary wrote from their eyrie on Tower Hill, and that I must supply the Brethren with copies of any photographs I took in triplicate – ‘It would be convenient so that two copies of each may be retained at this House for record purposes.’ What did they do, play Snap with them? I was also told that I was to supply my own food and bedding and that I wasn’t to ‘interfere’ with the keepers, which conjured up visions of bearded giants calling one another Alice and Mildred. Any further arrangements, I was told, should be made with the Superintendent at Penzance 2259.
At Penzance 2259 a voice in which it would have been difficult to detect willingness to arrange anything, except perhaps a burial at sea – ‘Ullo,’ it said, unhelpfully – indicated that if I wanted to get to the Eddystone, in the sea some 141/2 miles south-south-east of Plymouth, it was nothing to do with them, as the relief boat had already gone and there wouldn’t be another for two months.
In the end I went to Round Island in the Scilly Isles, having received another letter from the Brethren, a facsimile of the first one but with Round Island substituted for Eddystone.
Round Island is a rock, 130 feet high, the last rock in the north Scillies. To the west there is nothing but water until you reach New York, a peculiarity that it shares with a lot of the Cornish coast but because it isn’t part of the mainland it has a very much end-of-the-world feeling.
On the way out to it from St Mary’s, one of the inhabited islands, the boatman told me hair-raising stories about wind velocities on Round Island: ‘The wind gauge registered a hundred and twenty miles an hour, then it bust and nobody knew how hard it blew,’ he said. ‘Mind you, I’ve never been up there myself.’
The only other passenger was a Trinity House mechanic who was going out to overhaul the engines and repair the crane at the landing. ‘You should see the engines,’ he said. ‘I call them diabolical juggernauts.’ His name was Don. At that time mechanics and masons employed by the Brethren spent most of their working lives ‘on’ at lightships or lighthouses, often moving from one to another for a spell of a month or so with no time ashore in between.
‘Hope you’ve got your bed,’ he went on. I told him that I had been told to bring bedding, nobody had said anything about bringing a bed. ‘Ah, I expect they’ll fix you up with something,’ he said, which raised visions of sleeping on a granite slab.
Close to, Round Island was like a great dome from which the top had been sawn off. The landing was on the south side in a narrow gut between the rock and two parallel reefs called the Camber. If it comes on to blow hard from the north-northeast, it is impossible to land because the surge in the gut lifts the boat high up the side of the cliff at one moment and dashes it down towards the bottom of the sea at the next.
As we came into the gut, the lighthouse disappeared from view, 130 feet overhead. From it I could see one of the keepers descending an interminable staircase to the landing, where an iron ladder with its rungs set in the granite of the rock led straight down into the water.
We made fast to the strops which hung off from two bow and stern ropes stretched across the gut to the reef from a massive post, the bole of a tree, cemented into the rock above the landing. High overhead the wire cable of a compressed air hoist ran from a steel gallows on the top of the rock to a shackle on the other side of the gut.
As СКАЧАТЬ