The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [92]
But the tower itself was finished. Once fitted out, it lost a little of its rigorous simplicity but none of its elegance. A gunmetal ladder curved from the base to the door. Above the door, there were a further eleven floors, including that of the lightroom, two small subdivided floors (sleeping quarters for the keepers), a kitchen fitted with an immense black cooking range, a room for visiting officials, a workroom and a series of provision stores. Visitors climbed a tiny wooden ladder through a hatch between the floors, and the keepers hoisted stores up and down on their backs. There was no bathroom: keepers had to make do with the freshwater tanks, an iron bucket and a prudent diet. Alan suggested to the Commissioners that all future keepers at Skerryvore should be paid a £10 premium on their salaries, to compensate for the ‘peculiar disadvantages’ of the place. The Bell Rock keepers, by comparison, lived a life of luxury and high society. At Skerryvore, ‘the situation of the lightkeepers will be one of almost complete banishment even from their families during several months in winter.’ This was no idle claim. During 1843, while a party of workmen were fitting up the lantern, the weather remained so bad that the boat could not leave Hynish for seven weeks. ‘The poor seamen who were living in the Barrack passed that time most drearily,’ Alan wrote later, ‘for not only had their clothes been literally worn to rags, but they suffered the want of many things dearer to them than clothes, and amongst others of tobacco, the failure of the supply of which they had despondingly recorded in chalk on the walls of their prison house, with the date of their occurrence!’
The lighthouse on Skerryvore was, by any standards, an astonishing piece of engineering. It consisted of 137 feet of granite, weighing a total of 58,580 tons, with walls at the base nine and a half feet thick. When finally completed, it had taken seven years, £90,268, 150 workmen and the best part of Alan’s working life. It was, as the Institute of Civil Engineers put it, ‘the finest combination of mass with elegance to be met with in architectural or engineering structures’. Louis summed it up a little more pithily as ‘the noblest of all extant deep-sea lights’. It still is. Its making had been a form of self-imposed exile, absorbing every energy of body and spirit for all of those involved. In the time that it had taken to build Skerryvore, Queen Victoria had succeeded to the throne, Hong Kong had been appropriated by the British, the Corn Laws were fought and the Great Famine in Ireland had begun its long slaughter. At home, Tom had grown up and Robert grown old. Alan had built his masterpiece and had almost destroyed himself in the process. He went home, back to life and love and other lighthouses. After Skerryvore, it was not the same.
SEVEN
Muckle Flugga
The home that Alan returned to had changed in his absence. During the tense years of Skerryvore’s construction, his brothers had both risen to fill the gap he had left. David now assumed almost complete control of the family firm and Tom, having finally qualified as an engineer, was assuming more responsibility for the lights. Robert’s assistants, now long past the days of their apprenticeships, were taking on projects of their own or were involved in supervising the Commissioners