Text 1: My first night in charge, by Mina Cole

An original contemporary blog.

I had volunteered at the hilltop observatory for six months before I was trusted to run a public evening alone. Usually, I stood beside an experienced guide and adjusted the telescope when told. That Saturday, however, I unlocked the building myself and found fourteen visitors already waiting at the gate.

I had expected a straightforward evening. The forecast had promised clear skies, and I had prepared a list of objects for the visitors to observe. By sunset, though, cloud covered the whole sky. Children kept asking when they would see the Moon, while their parents looked at me as if I could simply move the weather elsewhere. Because I was the only volunteer there, every disappointed face felt like my fault.

Rather than send everyone home, I took the group into the exhibition room. We used a wall chart to work out where the hidden stars would be, and I passed around a small meteorite while answering questions. I was inventing the evening minute by minute, but gradually people stopped staring through the windows and started joining in.

Shortly after nine, a narrow gap opened in the cloud. I hurried everyone back to the telescope, and each visitor managed a brief look at the Moon before it disappeared again. As she left, one girl announced that holding the meteorite had been even better. I locked up exhausted, but proud that nobody had wasted the journey. Before going home, I added my name to the rota for the following month.

Text 2: The lamp in the storm, by Thomas Vale

An original journal entry written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this entry, written in 1888, an assistant lighthouse keeper records a night when the senior keeper was too ill to take his watch.

At ten o'clock I climbed to the lantern room to begin my first watch alone. I had often complained that the hours beside the lamp were dull, but last night I would gladly have had Mr Hales beside me. A storm was driving against the tower, and no moon or star could be seen beyond the glass.

The wind made the panes tremble in their frames. Whenever the flame bent, I pictured the black rocks below and the vessels somewhere beyond them. I trimmed the wick, cleaned soot from the glass and checked the oil again and again. There was little more I could do, yet I dared not sit down for long. The thought that sailors I could not see depended upon that light made every minute of the watch feel important.

At about four in the morning, I noticed the lamp of a fishing vessel through the rain. It moved slowly towards the headland, vanished for a moment and then appeared beyond the rocks. Only when it had passed did I realise how tightly I had been gripping the rail.

By dawn, the storm had weakened and our lamp was still burning strongly. When the next keeper came upstairs, my arms ached from carrying oil and my eyes smarted with tiredness. I felt no great triumph, only a powerful relief. I had once imagined that loneliness would be the hardest part of a night watch. I know now that it is the weight of being responsible for people who will never know your name.