Text 1: The last lamp on Morrow Head, by Nia Parry

An original contemporary memoir extract.

I had asked for the overnight inspection. In fact, I had asked three times. The Morrow Head lighthouse stood on an island barely wider than the building itself, and the rest of the maintenance team treated a night there as an inconvenience. I imagined silence, stars and the satisfying knowledge that, for once, nobody could send me another message.

The supply boat left at six. As its engine faded, the island seemed to rise out of the sea beneath me. There was the white tower, the keeper’s empty cottage and one hundred metres of wet rock. I climbed to the lantern room and watched the lamp begin its slow rotation. Its beam passed over me every twelve seconds, calmly counting the darkness. This, I thought, was not isolation. It was a privilege.

At 1.17 a.m., the control panel displayed two red words: LAMP ERROR.

The main light was still turning, but the reserve had failed its automatic test. I knew the procedure. I had practised it in a bright workshop while two colleagues stood beside me making unhelpful remarks about my screwdriver. Now the radio gave me only a breath of static and every bolt I touched seemed determined to resist.

Beyond the glass, a storm had swallowed the sea. There was only darkness and, at measured intervals, the white beam sweeping across it. I began to think about the people I could not see: crews checking the light from their wheelhouses, trusting it to appear exactly when it should. The tower no longer felt like a private kingdom. It felt like a promise I had made on behalf of people who did not know my name.

I found salt inside a connection, cleaned it and ran the test again. Green. I ran it a second time. Green. Then a third.

By dawn, the storm had passed. When the boat called to say it could collect me at eight, I was already waiting by the landing steps. I was tired, cold and extremely pleased to hear another human voice. Yet, as we pulled away, I looked back at the lamp still turning in the pale sky and understood why the old keepers had filled their logs with such careful, repetitive detail. I had come to the island wanting to be alone. I left knowing that nobody in a lighthouse ever really is.

Text 2: The lantern room, by Edward Bell

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

In this letter, written in 1879, an assistant lighthouse keeper writes to his brother after being left alone when the principal keeper was delayed on the mainland.

My dear Samuel,

You once accused me of enjoying my own company, and I wish you could have seen how thoroughly I had been cured of that pleasure by last Tuesday. Mr Price had crossed to the mainland in the morning and was prevented from returning when the weather worsened. Thus I faced the night with no companion but the clock, whose ticking grew louder with every hour.

You know that I have never loved this station. The sea surrounds us like a wall, the gulls complain from dawn until dusk, and a month here can feel like a burial conducted very slowly. When the last fishing boat vanished before the storm, I confess that I watched it with envy.

At ten o’clock, however, I saw the lamps of a schooner to the west. She was driving towards the reef. Almost at that same moment, the turning mechanism of our light began to labour. The beam slowed, paused and then remained fixed upon one patch of sea.

There was no one to consult and no time for self-pity. I released the mechanism, set it moving again and remained beside the handle. Each time the machinery faltered, I turned it myself. The wind struck the glass hard enough to make the whole lantern tremble, but the light continued its journey: sea, window frame, my hands, sea again.

I cannot say whether those aboard the schooner ever saw me or knew that anything was wrong. I know only that her lamps altered course shortly before midnight and crept south until they were clear of the reef. At that sight, the island seemed changed. It was no longer a prison set apart from the world, but a small and necessary part of it.

I kept the light moving until sunrise. Pride is an unsuitable word for a man with blistered hands and oil on his shirt, but I have no better one. Even so, when morning came and there was still no sign of Mr Price’s boat, I would have exchanged the gratitude of every sailor in the kingdom for one familiar voice on the stairs.

Your affectionate brother,

Edward

Both of these texts describe working alone in an isolated lighthouse.

Compare:

• how the writers’ attitudes towards isolation change
• the ways in which the writers reveal these changes
• how far their attitudes are different by the end

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