Text 1: The week the sea kept us, by Mari Ellis

An original contemporary memoir extract.

As the supply boat pulled away from Black Tor lighthouse, it disappeared behind a wall of rain. I watched it go with more interest than concern. We were a team of three maintenance technicians, we had food for eight days, and the forecast promised that the storm would pass by morning. I had not yet learned that forecasts at Black Tor were a form of fiction.

Our job was to service the electric lamp and the equipment that monitored it. The lighthouse no longer had permanent keepers, so most weeks it stood empty, sending its warning across the water without anyone there to admire it. Inside, everything was narrow and circular. We carried tool cases up 126 iron steps, turning until my legs forgot what a straight line felt like.

At seventeen minutes past one on our second night, an alarm sounded below my bunk. One of the two lamps had failed. Outside, sleet rattled against the glass, and the tower shook so violently that a mug travelled across the kitchen table by itself. We clipped ourselves to the safety rail and climbed to the lantern room. I held the torch while Arun traced the fault and Beth read instructions over the radio. We spoke calmly because there was no room on that staircase for panic.

The repair took forty minutes. When the lamp returned, its white beam swept over the windows and briefly lit the rain sideways. Far below us, a ship answered with a low blast of its horn. I knew the signal was not meant as a thank-you, but it felt like one.

The storm did not pass the next morning. It stayed for three days, drumming on the roof and making the tower ring like a spoon in a saucepan. We played cards, argued about soup and called our families whenever the signal allowed. By the final afternoon, I had stopped finding the isolation exciting. I wanted a pavement, a tree and a door that did not need to be secured with two steel bars.

Before that week, a lighthouse had seemed to me like a simple machine. Afterwards, whenever I saw two white flashes from a ferry, I pictured wet gloves, careful hands and three people awake in the middle of the night. The light was automatic; the responsibility was not.

Text 2: The watcher on Mallow Rock, by A Coastal Correspondent

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

This newspaper feature was written in 1886 after the writer visited a lighthouse several miles from the coast.

Shortly before dusk, I was put ashore upon Mallow Rock, where Mr Nathaniel Cray has charge of the lighthouse. Our boat rose and fell beside the landing place, and I climbed an iron ladder made slippery by the spray. Mr Cray received me with a steady hand, as though visitors commonly arrived out of the sea.

The keeper and his assistant remain here for two months at a time. When the weather permits, a boat brings letters, fresh meat and another pair of men. When it does not, the lighthouse is cut off from mankind. "The sea decides when we have company," Mr Cray observed, without complaint.

At sunset his work began. He wound the mechanism which turned the light, trimmed the oil lamp and polished every surface of the great glass lens. I watched him remove a mark no larger than a raindrop as carefully as a jeweller handles a stone. Each hour of the night he inspected the flame. If fog hid the light, the men sounded a bell so that ships might still be warned away from the reef.

There is dignity in such care, but little comfort. The rooms were clean and warm, yet the wind found every joint in the tower. It moaned upon the stairs and struck the rocks below like a great fist. During one winter, Mr Cray told me, no boat could land for twenty-three days. His youngest son's birthday passed while the child's present waited unopened in a cupboard on shore.

At ten o'clock we stood in the lantern room. Nothing could be seen beyond the glass except our own reflections, but from the darkness came the faint whistle of a steamer. Mr Cray watched until the sound had faded. He could not know the name of the vessel or the number of people aboard it. They, in turn, would never know his.

The public admires a lighthouse as a picturesque object upon the horizon. We should remember that its light is not kept by poetry, but by men who surrender sleep, society and the ordinary pleasures of home. Every safe ship is their achievement, though it carries away neither applause nor thanks.

Both of these texts are about the work of keeping a lighthouse shining.

Compare:

• what the writers say about the demands of lighthouse work
• how the writers present the people who do this work

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