It’s not always a good idea to revisit poems or stories once loved as children.
It’s not always a good idea to revisit poems or stories once loved as children. The magic and mystery can dissolve all too rapidly when refracted through adult eyes. Late on Saturday night, the poet Kenneth Steven did for me with his careful probing of the true story behind Wilfrid Gibson’s 1912 poem, ‘Flannan Isle’.
Gibson retells in eerie, doomy verse the story of the disappearance of the three keepers of the Flannan lighthouse on the afternoon of Saturday 15 December 1900. As children listening to Schools Radio, we relished the horror of the tale as Gibson recreates the loneliness of the keepers’ life, the wild fury of the sea and the terror of the relief crew as they encounter the three ‘queer, black, ugly birds’ which were standing sentry beneath the light, ‘Like seamen sitting bolt-upright/ Upon a half-tide reef’. We discovered also, perhaps for the first time, that very tangible fear of the unknown, of the realisation that there are things out there for which there can be no explanation. Not every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. As the poet says, ‘We listened…And, listening still, without a word,/ We set about our hopeless search’. Would they ever know what had really happened on the afternoon of 15 December? Would we?
Gibson tells the story as if through the eyes of those three relief keepers as they arrived on the tiny rocky outcrop, 18 miles north-west of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. I’ve never forgotten the image of the terrified men climbing up to ‘the lighthouse towering white’ above them, not knowing what they will find when they reach the top. All they can be sure of is that the light has gone dark. No radios then to warn of what has taken place, or why.
What they find, says the poem, is the ‘black, sun-blistered’ door slightly ajar and the table ‘spread for dinner, meat and cheese and bread’. A chair lies ‘tumbled on the floor’ as if the men had left in great alarm. A starving bird cheeps feebly on its perch.
But none of this was true; not any of it. As Kenneth Steven revealed on But Found No Keepers There, according to the Trinity House records the keepers had tidied away the pots and pans after lunch before trimming the lamps as required. Not everything, though, was ship-shape. On the contrary, the handrail leading up to the light from the shore had been swept away and all the mooring ropes strewn around the rocks below. A large block of stone had been dislodged and the lifebuoy which was kept in a box 110 feet above the sea had also gone.
At the time it was concluded that a huge freak wave had swept all three keepers away while they were inspecting the landing stage for damage after several days of terrible weather. The lighthouse had only been operational for a year and the crew would not have been familiar with the particular conditions of Flannan. The records show that they had been ‘irritable’, ‘weeping’ and ‘praying’ just before the disappearance.
So no mystery, nothing supernatural. Just a case of bad luck.
More bad luck and natural disaster was retailed in an entertaining ‘Afternoon Play’ on Monday. The Patience of Mr Job by Justin Butcher (directed by Claire Grove) passed the Car Test, keeping me seatbelt-bound until it had finished. Mr Sisyphus Job persuades his African village to give up farming goats and honey for the temptation of growing flowers for cash. Disaster ensues — as it must with a name like Job. It was all very silly but there were some great lines, beautifully played by the cast which included Jude Akuwudike as Mr Job and Adjoa Andoh as his wife. Best of all, the play took us right there, to the village on the coast of West Africa, as the trees are cut down and the daffodils planted, only to be lost in a flood for which there will be no compensation.
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