Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson
Silver was born, she tells us, in 1959, to a single mother in the far north-west of Scotland, in a town long past its heyday as a seaman's port.
Silver tells us: "My own father came out of the sea and went back that way. He was crew on a fishing boat that harboured with us one night when the waves were crashing like dark glass. His splintered hull shored him for long enough to drop anchor inside my mother. Shoals of babies vied for life. I won.
"My mother was a single parent and she had conceived out of wedlock. There had been no lock on her door that night when my father came to call. So, she was sent up the hill, away from the town, with the curious result that she looked down on it."
Their house was on such a steep slope that "the chairs had to be nailed to the floor, and we were never allowed to eat spaghetti". It was so windy that they owned the only hens that had to hold on with their beaks when they laid eggs. Indeed, mother had to rope herself to daughter, "like a pair of climbers, just to achieve our own front door".
One especially windy Shrove Tuesday, Silver's mother slips over the cliff and cuts the rope to let her daughter live. Silver is left to the mercy of the citizens of Salts, "a sea-flung, rock-bitten, sand-edged shell of a town". In answer to an advertisement posted by her school teacher, the dreadful Miss Pinch, Silver and DogJim are dispatched to the lighthouse as apprentices to blind lighthouse keeper Pew.
Silver's tasks are to brew a pot of full-strength Samson each morning and polish the brass. But her true apprenticeship is to the art of telling stories, which is the lighthouse keeper's true calling, and also a way of keeping love alive.
In the tall dark lighthouse that was built to spill light into a treacherous darkness Silver realises that although ...
"Our business was light, but we lived in darkness. The light had to be kept going, but there was no need to illuminate the rest. Darkness came with everything. It was standard. My clothes were trimmed with dark. When I put on a Sou'wester, the brim left a dark shadow over my face. When I stood to bathe in the little galvanised cubicle Pew had rigged for me, I soaped my body in darkness. Put your hand in a drawer, and it was darkness you felt first, as you fumbled for a spoon. Go to the cupboards to find the tea caddy of Full Strength Samson, and the hole was as black as the tea itself.
"The darkness had to brushed away or parted before we could sit down. Darkness squatted on the chairs and hung like a curtain across the stairway. Sometimes it took on the shapes of the things we wanted; a pan, a bed, a book. Sometimes I saw my mother, dark and silent, falling towards me. Darkness was a presence. I learned to see in it, I learned to see through it, and I learned to see the darkness of my own."
And so, as Silver and Pew rub along together, their story unfolds beautifully to take in other stories, of the rector Babel Dark (of whom Miss Pinch is a descendant) and his two wives; of ships containing other ghost ships; and mysterious glimpses of the future life of the grown-up Silver, who steals a parrot for love. While the Darks seem destined to forgo love, the Pews (or has there only ever been one old sea-dog called Pew since the lighthouse was built in 1811?) greet it with open arms.
Lighthousekeeping spins out an entrancing story. Darwin visits Salts and doubts his theory of evolution, Robert Louis Stevenson comes to see Babel Dark as he works on Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde. Meantime, the symbol of the lighthouse transforms, from a place where hope shines out of darkness, to the possibility of finding a still point in a changing world, to a kind of inner light we carry with us that makes us open to love and change.
)... you really should get paid for these things, you know.....
