Lights out

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.