Seventeen

Small White Ghosts of the Sea

Inside the hide there was shelter from the boisterous wind coming in off the Irish Sea. In the middle distance a small, sky-blue boat leaned into the saltmarsh where it had been left at the high-water mark. It was low tide. I looked over the inlet towards the final crooked finger end of Walney Island, a shingle spit formed of long-shore drift from the sea-rolled west coast. This was home to the largest gull colony on Walney. In the sky above it an aerial flotsam and jetsam of birds moved and flickered, glinting white, grey and black, melding into and out of the spun silver cloud that persisted over the bay. It was a whole society of birds, a sky-city of herring and lesser black-backed gulls that glided, drifting and weaving and passing through each other’s air-drawings, hanging on thermals. The clamour and noise of them carried across the inlet towards me. Near the ground a heat-haze had formed and the young gulls that strutted between nest sites became fractal versions of themselves. As they wandered, their heads swivelled from side to side, looking around as if weighing it all up – this life, and this place.

It’d been too many years since I’d last been to the island. In the mid ’80s I’d come with a group of schoolchildren. It must have been a week or two further into the summer as the chicks had hatched and fledged. Nest-sites had only the remains of marbled gull eggs and the downy feather nest linings were left for the wind to disperse. We walked down the island road, passing the lighthouse where Peggy Braithwaite then reigned, Britain’s only principal female lighthouse keeper. We’d been advised to wear headgear in case the gulls dive-bombed us, and that day my colleague Martin was wearing one of Peggy’s knitted bobble hats; as well as her lighthouse duties, Peggy knitted to raise money for the lifeboats. Years later, when I’d found out more about her, I really wished I’d met her.

* * *

We had journeyed all the way down to the southernmost point of the island, to the place where water from the Walney Channel and Morecambe Bay assimilated with inward-moving currents from the Irish Sea, and where a flume of white water roiled seawards. In the air above it a group of little terns – or ‘sea swallows’, as they’re sometimes called – danced the bright afternoon away. It was the first time I’d seen them, and first time for the bird-mad children too. We listened to their small voices, a rolling, squeaky call that mimicked their ever-restless nature as they flittered through the air, then came down to touch the surface of the water for the merest flick of time before rising again in a continuous wave of activity.

For once the children had been quiet. They were used to birdwatching with us, but there was something other-worldly about the terns. Swallow-like, they flew with the characteristic collapse and fill of the wings, and although larger than swallows they seemed less substantial somehow; I remember that the response ‘ghost-like’ formed in my mind. Then only last summer I’d talked to a friend who’d just seen little terns for the first time. She’d also described them as swallow-like, insubstantial and other-worldly; that they were like little ghosts.

More recently I’d read that the little terns hadn’t fared well in the intervening years. I phoned ahead of my visit and asked the warden about them.

‘They nest precariously close to the tideline, so just one big tide and their nests would be washed away. Then there are the predators; last year we had six kestrels hanging around, all hungry. There are foxes and gulls as well, and this year we’ve seen crows taking the young.’

‘So it’s not looking too good?’ I’d asked.

‘Who knows? They were absent from the island for a decade until last year. They do better across the channel on Foulney Island. There are fewer predators to bother them over there. We try not to create any more disturbance than is necessary, but sometimes we manage to put fences around the nest-sites to stop the foxes getting in. But that’s not going to stop the sea washing them out.’

* * *

From the hide I looked across to Roa Island where the new lifeboat station seemed anachronistic at low tide. It had been built on tall stilts and had the look of an oversized bathing machine, or else a house future-proofed against rising sea levels. Piel Island appeared adrift in the middle of a sea of sand, and the eponymous sandstone castle, worn smooth and rounded from centuries of weather, flared red-ochre in the morning sunlight. There’d been a ship too, sitting at anchor in the channel, glimpsed behind and through the castle ruins.

Then the ship began to move, travelling into my range of vision. It slid around the shingle spit, appearing improbably close to the land. Through the binoculars I saw men on the bridge, and others on deck, leaning on folded arms on the railings and looking down into the water as if they too couldn’t quite believe how close they were to land. Skeletal red channel markers guided the ship out into the Irish Sea and it began to plough across the water towards the quadrants of a vast windfarm, the Walney Array, then under construction. I find the use of the word ‘Array’ interesting. It suggests an aesthetic plan, but to me the windfarm was anything but. I like my nature untrammelled and my views unrestricted. The turbines jarred, as if the horizon had been scratched into.

In the midst of the turbines a crane on a huge construction platform dangled a turbine tower over the water as though it was a toy. Then a small boat came zipping away from the turbines and made its way around the tip of the island into the channel and headed inland towards the harbour at Barrow.

I left the hide. The sky had begun to clear as the tide turned and began to fill. I’d noticed this conversation between the sea and the sky many times on my journey around the bay. Clouds were being created out of the uniform grey. They formed then dissolved and disappeared in minutes. Above them cirrus concluded in replicating curves where the wind spun them away into the blue. Curlew and oystercatchers flew overhead, passing from one side of the island to the other in nothing more than a few beats of their wings.

I moved on, walking in the lee of the wind. It was warmer and I was sheltered by high, grassy dunes to my left. On the right of the path a series of lagoons were populated by eider and mallard and moorhen. I tuned in to the sounds they made, the coo and twitter of the eider, snuggled on small grassy islands dozing the day away. Meadow pipits whistled and mallard and moorhen paddled themselves around. A large bee came towards me on the path, igniting the air with the fizz of a sparkler.

Passing the lighthouse and the cottages, I walked down to the west through the dunes. In the language of my childhood, the sea was far away, across a wide band of sand riddled with shallow sky-pools. Cormorants out at the water’s edge were like dark sentinels looking out at the unnatural towers of white over a sea that barely moved.

The sky was full of gulls again. In our phone call the warden had told me that some of the gull-chicks had already hatched, so I knew I’d have to keep moving. I walked parallel with the coast on a track through the middle of the gull colony. The scrapes were everywhere, a few just a collection of downy feathers and the cracked-open remains of a solitary brown-black veined egg. Overhead the birds reacted to my presence, dropping out of the air towards me, clamouring and calling. In the few scrapes where chicks had hatched, the parent birds became increasingly frantic. I held my walking pole up into the air so that when birds took aim for me they targeted that instead. Where gulls were sitting on eggs, their heads popped out of the nests, swivelling so as to see what and where the trouble was. If I passed too close, they rose up into the air, keeping me in their gaze all the while.

The restlessness among the colony was contagious: pulse after pulse of anxiety flickered through them like a frantic Mexican wave. On the roof of an ancient concrete shelter, a remnant from the war, piles of wind-blown sand had become stitched together by marram grass. Two herring gulls stood upright, emerging from the grass as I walked towards it. Two pairs of yellow eyes gimballed, following me as I moved past. Camouflaged in the grass beside them, a single large chick that moved slowly and purposefully, picking one foot up before the next and moving into the shelter of the turf until it disappeared completely from view.

The stress my presence created became too much for one gull. It swung hard in to scare me off. I ducked and laughed as it banked and turned and came in again for another shot; I was being duly escorted off the premises.

Gradually the nest-sites became fewer until I’d left the colony behind and the gulls quietened again. A stocky pony grazed, tearing at the grass. I walked along in the gentler company of skylarks and a softening wind. The day was opening itself up and the light had become bright and clear. The sea sparkled as waves formed and broke again. Swallows wafted to and fro across the dunes, and in a few minutes more I saw the Sea Hide.

Even before I’d gone inside, there came, borne on the sea wind, the faint and unmistakeable fret and twitter of little terns. Once inside I opened up the windows and the breeze blew straight in from the sea, amplifying the terns’ voices slightly. It took a few seconds more to find them, first by eye and then through the binoculars. They were there, a small number of them, down towards the sea-edge of the shingle beach, so few though that they could easily be overlooked. As I watched them they landed and lifted continuously in that particular, perpetual rolling motion of theirs. Watching the little terns, it seemed that their restless behaviour mirrored their vulnerability; this year just 15 pairs had returned to the island. I watched as they flitted between sea-pools in the sand and their nests on the shingle, intent apparently on feeding chicks, though they remained unseen, camouflaged amongst the pebbles and the beach colours.

There’s an element of the terns’ vulnerability that adds to the thrill of seeing them, but my reaction that day took me by surprise and I wasn’t anticipating it. There was a definite shift of adrenalin and the instinct, though I’d learned to suppress it, to shout, ‘There!’ This emotional connection with certain wild creatures sustains and lifts us up, and it can be disarming. But there was something else too, about the way that time can suddenly collapse like that. It elided, sliding in from my life in Ulverston all the way to that moment; it left me questioning, and wondering. And who’d have thought it? All this from the sight of a few insubstantial birds flitting and fretting on the shoreline, those small white ghosts of the sea.

* * *

Lighthouses. Just say the word, and it conjures up a whole world: charm, the stuff of children’s stories or symbols of strength and indomitable spirit, of engineering wonders. And for me, of a lighthouse without any light, a mile away from the sea. But the story of one of the keepers here at Walney Island, the only female ever to have held the post of principal lighthouse keeper, remains unparalleled in British lighthouse history.

When I began to research her story I realised just what I’d missed by not meeting Peggy; she died in 1996 aged 76, and just two years into her retirement. In his obituary piece in The Guardian, the journalist Martin Wainwright described a redoubtable woman who ‘ruled a unique kingdom on the shores of the Irish Sea’ whilst ‘dangling in a boson’s chair’.25

Peggy was born on tiny, neighbouring Piel Island. Her father ran the small ferry between Piel and the mainland. When he was appointed assistant principal keeper for Walney Island, he moved his family and all their possessions across the channel in a small open boat. Peggy, her sister Ella, her grandmother and the family’s piano were all crammed in on the final trip. In the absence of sons, the keeper trained both his daughters as lighthouse assistants. When her father retired, Peggy was promoted to principal keeper.

On an October morning I returned again to the island. I drove from Kendal in filthy weather. Great sheets of blue-grey clouds persisted over the mountains and extensive bands of rain obliterated vast tracts of the higher ground. But down at the island the sky began to clear, and when the sun broke through at last, light bounced off the sea as if reflected from metal. I had a rendezvous with the harbour master from Glasson Dock who came over twice a year to check the lighthouse and make repairs.26 I’d been put in touch with Brian and emailed him about my interest in Peggy and the island. He offered me an opportunity to see the world from Peggy’s point of view.

There was a peculiar foreshortening of distances that day. Waiting in my car, I looked due north over the channel. Strong sunlight highlighted areas of the landscape so that they appeared closer; Hoad monument glimmered, standing out from the background of hills as if a mere couple of miles away and not the 12 or so it really was.

When Brian arrived (yes, the third Brian in this book, but I do know men with other Christian names), we continued the journey down the island in his car, ploughing into and out of rain-filled craters, the car rocking from side to side as though a ship ploughing through waves. At the lighthouse a group of children were running in circles around puddles, oblivious to the cold. They were on a school visit and couldn’t wait to climb to the top. The first small group was summoned and once inside and out of the wind, they paced up the steps, counting as they climbed: ‘…forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, FIFTY,’ the way they do.

We emerged into the rotunda and the light itself. Unlike the complex and bulky arrangement of mirrors I had expected, it was smaller, more streamlined, a set of four dished reflectors set inside a glass roundel. The Walney light was maintained by hand up until 2003, and was one of the final few to become automated.

The children sat down on a circumference of stone and began asking questions and discussing the light. Brian indicated the narrow door and suggested I might get better photographs out there. As soon as I moved through the door and onto the external gallery, the wind caught me unawares. It was blowing hard, a gusty wind that had me reaching into a pocket for my hat. Straightaway I saw the effects of centuries of long-shore drift, the washing out and re-depositing of stones by the sea and the gradual accretion of land. Though it was built at the southern end of the island, the tower and its once keeper’s cottage now fitted snugly in the centre of a system of dunes and saltmarsh.

It was an oystercatcher’s take on the island, on the world. Water channels cut through the saltmarsh in curls and winding shapes like a piece of Indian fabric. Offshore the windfarm was there, impossible to ignore. The shadow of the lighthouse pointed north-west towards the docks and town and beyond to Black Combe’s bulk across the Duddon estuary. On the southernmost spit, the place where the herring gulls and lesser black-backed gulls of summer had reigned and filled the air, a small number of them moved like tiny shreds in the wind. The grey seal colony and their young were hauled out on the beach by the side of the Walney Channel. The other children and their teachers became smaller as they walked towards the hide on the island’s western coast.

I looked down at the ground, at the cobble-walled gardens and chicken sheds. Being that high up and with the crazy, battering wind I felt the push and pull of giddiness. Looking over the edge of the guardrail, I thought of Peggy setting off in her boson’s chair to repaint the tower – what a woman. I imagined her singing to herself as she cast the dangling seat out from the top rail, organised with paint, brushes and rags, surveying her island province and stopping once in a while to take in the view. Oystercatchers might have winged past so that she’d felt the breeze their wings made. She might have watched them bank and curve around the southernmost spit of the island before following the channel north again. I imagine she wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else on earth.

Over the sea the light was growing brighter. It was hard to look without shading my eyes, but moving around the gantry and looking north towards the mountains and home, although the sky was still dark grey, the visibility was extraordinary. I began to search for and mark the places I’d been on my journey around the bay, across to Sunderland Point, though I had to work hard to find it, and on to Heysham Head and further to Silverdale and to where the hills began. Although the great rolling hills of Furness were visible, the coast was tucked in behind the point at Rampside where the bay swung north. Over Piel Island sunlight and shadows worked, illuminating the few buildings and the castle like stage lighting. This was some kingdom to reign over, and I was glad that a woman had made it hers – even for just a few decades.

I said my farewells to the school group and to Brian and walked out to the west coast and along the final curved beach where the outfall of the bay ran, the place I’d seen the little terns for the first time. But in October it was an empty landscape, hardly a bird in sight. Bordering the beach the marram grass of the dunes bristled in great gusts of wind. The shingle beach had been remade in waves and crests by recent storms. A boat came out from the channel and increased its speed as it set off towards the windfarm. I sat in the shelter of the dunes, looking east.

* * *

Back home again I read more about Peggy and her island domain; of her careering down the island road in her Triumph Herald, roof down, and standing up to shoot rabbits with her .22 rifle. She’d been taught to shoot by her father. His party trick for visitors to the lighthouse was to spin coins into the air, take aim and blast them to smithereens. In the Second World War there had been a small prisoner of war camp on the island and young men, Italian and German, some as young as 15, lived there. They had been brought to the island to help with the job of growing food for British army trainees. The prisoners lived in poverty, possessing little if anything and had little in the way of comfort. But Peggy and other islanders took the boys under their wings. Most of the prisoners didn’t even possess shoes. Peggy’s family provided them with socks and shoes and knitted bobble hats for them and gave them clothes. One Christmas morning the men invited Peggy’s family over to their hut. The prisoners gathered together in a rough ensemble and began to sing to them the carol, Silent Night. It was, they said, all they had to give.

* * *

While researching Walney lighthouse I stumbled upon a short, black and white Pathé news-reel film made in 1948. Remarkably, it was about another female lightkeeper, albeit assistant keeper, Mrs Parkinson, who lived and worked just across the bay at Plover Scar lighthouse beside the outflow of the River Lune, and just south of where my journey began. Plover Scar is a small lighthouse in comparison to most. It’s a fancy that could have been imagined into existence by an illustrator of children’s books. Because of the aged, monochrome medium, the film seems to have an odd, closed-world atmosphere. In the opening sequence there’s a short panoramic of the bay and just visible in the background, the Furness hills. Mrs Parkinson strides over the still-wet sands in knee-high wellington boots and along a causeway to the lighthouse. She climbs the vertical metal-framed ladder up the outside of the tower, and enters the watch-room. She polishes the reflectors, fuels the lamp with paraffin and sets it alight with a match. Underneath her hat, her hair is styled in the wartime Victory Roll, coiled and pinned into place like a never-breaking wave.

The strange thing was that both Peggy and Mrs Parkinson shared facial characteristics. Both were quite square of jaw and were resolute-looking women, women who seemed to have an intrinsic sense of self. Although their lifespan and their lighthouse service didn’t completely overlap, their work at either extremity of Morecambe Bay made them guardians of its waters and inner sanctum. I like to think of them both, these remarkable women, polishing their lenses, cleaning the glass at the top of their towers, and occasionally sending greetings to each other across the sea. Brief messages painted on sweeping beams of light.

* * *

Towards the end of my journey around the bay I had heard the news of my father’s very sudden death. In the way of these things, I was far away on a Hebridean island and with limited mobile phone coverage. Seeing the holiday cottage owner walking up the path towards the front door I’d had an immediate sense that something was out of kilter.

‘Your brother’s trying to get in touch. Come up to the house if you need to use the phone.’

A few minutes later we were talking. With the lack of phone reception, after phoning our neighbour at home and the police on Stornoway, Andy had resorted to calling holiday cottages; he got us on the third call.

‘It’s Dad,’ he said. ‘He died this morning.’

So, it had happened.

As I listened to my brother talking, taking in the details of my father’s last moments, I looked out of the wide window to the chimneys of the next house where two crows were travelling in backwards in the strong wind, landing on the pots like Harrier Jump Jets in reverse, over and over.

My reaction, after taking stock, was of what a ridiculous place to be at a time like that. That day we’d been out by boat to explore the abandoned island of Mingulay. Later though, I reasoned that it had been an entirely appropriate place. Mingulay was an island that had faced its own end of life, the inhabitants giving up through expediency and necessity, much like St Kilda, and I’d read that they too had found it hard to settle, to accept the change of place and circumstance. They’d built new houses facing south on the sea-washed turf of Vatersay, and from here they could look back and see their former home, just a hump of grey rock in the distance. What had been only a shift of a small number of miles, to them was seismic.

* * *

After my visit to the lighthouse I set off to drive up the island road but then stopped again to look across the channel towards Barrow. The massive submarine sheds of BAE Systems had been constructed after my father left his job at the shipyard and moved away again with my mother in the late ’70s. They had chosen to leave the town beside the bay and return to my mother’s native Merseyside, the place she was never properly able to leave behind, and in pursuit of some illusory idyll. Needless to say, it was never found.

I thought of my father’s work at the shipyard, and of how serendipitous it had been – his redundancy and then the new job in Barrow and out of that my coming to live in this landscape and learning to love it all. But actually there was more to it than that; even though I hadn’t been born here, what I had from this land was a feeling of being grounded.

On the day of receiving the news of Dad’s death I had been doing what I had chosen to do, to venture out, to look and to keep on looking; to explore new ground from the firm foundations of my own territory.

The actual place of my birth now seems an irrelevance; I feel no sense of connection with it of any kind. Perhaps just a few memories from early childhood that occasionally filter through in filmic, grainy images: my grandparents’ house where we had all lived; something resembling grief as I stared at the cracked map of a strange ceiling from my cot, waiting interminably for my parents to come home from their only ever trip away – to Paris; dressing up in the garden, strings of beads down to my knees.

Although in my young adult years I did feel something akin to loss, or even fraud that I didn’t quite ‘belong’ because of an accident of birth, this feeling was later replaced by the opposite, of an innate sense of belonging; I feel that I am shot through with the truth of being Cumbrian. And here on the shore of the bay, was my ground, and my journey around its circumference turned out to be a metaphor for finding and losing, for connecting and disconnecting, for remembering and forgetting.

The land, this land, is ultimately the thing that has sustained me. And not to find joy, or myself, in this landscape, is something I couldn’t begin to imagine.