The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
In the front of the book I have just started reading, Outpost by Dan Richards, is a beautiful poem about exactly what the title suggests.
For copyright reasons I will not post the poem, but urge you to go and read it here.
I’m sure you will like it.
It Was Fun While It Lasted – A J Lane – Whittles Publishing – 1998.
In my mind’s eye the life of a lighthouse keeper is, or rather was, a lonely but interesting and wild one, much like being a mountain-top fire-spotter.
Some have written about the latter occupation. Most famously Jack Kerouac who captured his time as a lookout on Desolation Peak in the Cascade mountains, in “Alone On A Mountain Top” from his autobiographical collection “Lonesome Traveller” and also in two of his fictional works, Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels. I have read and enjoyed these and also the excellent Fire Season by Philip Connors; though not recently. And so, in my imagination a book about lighthouse keeping was likely to be equally engaging.
Accordingly, when I saw this book I seized upon it, and was drawn in further by the blurb on the back describing “A lively, at times hilarious, first-hand account of a lighthouse keeper’s life in the last traditional years before the introduction of helicopter reliefs and automation”.
However, had I thought about it more I may have also reached the conclusion that a book about being a lighthouse keeper might also be likely to be a bit dull, on the basis that living a life of constant regimen and routine, bound by isolation runs a good chance of veering towards the tedious.
This book leans towards the latter of those two perspectives. Representing an almost seven year period, from 1953 and published nearly forty years later it must, I feel, have relied on diaries. The fact that the author is able to talk about individual meals and specifically name many of the children and adults he corresponded with, for me, corroborates that.
And therein lies a difficulty. Using diaries as source material for a book is a strategy that succeeds or fails depending on the quality of the diaries and the skill of the author.
Also mentioned with some detail is the author’s writing work. He wrote a novel, short stories and magazine pieces and whilst he talks of a general lack of success, some of his work was published and he even had a few aired on radio with one being read by Bob Monkhouse.
Having the time to write must I guess be part of the reason he chose lighthouse keeping as an occupation, but you can if course have too much of a good thing and no doubt the tedium set in leading to various japes and pranks such as, alarmingly, rewiring colleagues’ accommodation.
Whilst the blurb may have over-egged the funny nature of this memoir, it did raise a few smiles and I particularly liked the episode where he bought a vintage bulb-style motor horn and persuaded his colleague there was an official instruction that it needed to be sounded at the end of the twice daily radio test.
And the book is not without other elements of interest. I would liked to have known more about how they caught fish using kites and wondered if the cairn built at Skerries Islands (off the Welsh coast near Anglesey), by a past lighthouse keeper, known rather wonderfully as Mad Hicks, still stands some sixty years later.
Mention of the launch of Sputnik within the text both pins the book in time and acts as a signal of changing times, accordingly it is perhaps of most interest as a piece of history and is, returning to the blurb “as complete an account as we are now ever likely to get of what it was like to keep a lighthouse in its last traditional year”.
Rare Earth 