Stargazing. Peter Hill

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      ’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 blinking 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?

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