Lighthousekeeping
From one of Britain’s best-loved literary novelists comes a magical, lyrical tale of the young orphan Silver, taken in by the ancient lighthousekeeper Mr. Pew, who reveals to her a world of myth and mystery through the art of storytelling.Motherless and anchorless, Silver is taken in by the timeless Mr. Pew, keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse. Pew tells Silver ancient tales of longing and rootlessness, of the slippages that occur throughout every life. One life, Babel Dark’s, a nineteenth-century clergyman, opens like a map that Silver must follow, and the intertwining of myth and reality, of storytelling and experience, lead her through her own particular darkness.A story of mutability, talking birds and stolen books, of Darwin and Stevenson and of the Jekyll and Hyde in all of us, Lighthousekeeping is a way into the most secret recesses of our own hearts and minds. Jeanette Winterson is one of the most extraordinary and original writers of her generation, and this shows her at her lyrical best.
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Lighthousekeeping
Jeanette Winterson
For Deborah Warner
‘Remember you must die’
MURIEL SPARK
‘Remember you must live’
ALI SMITH
Table of Contents
My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal part pirate.
As an apprentice to lighthousekeeping my duties were as follows:
To make an end of it Dark had decided to marry.
The moon shone the night white.
This way to the Cobra. Wonders of the East!
Pew – why didn’t my mother marry my father?
The mystery of Pew was a mercury of fact.
Eyes like a faraway ship, Pew was sleeping.
Dark was walking his dog along the cliff path
It was our last day as ourselves.
I sometimes think of myself, up at Am Parbh.
The seahorse was in his pocket.
The pot of Full Strength Samson was finished.
His heart was beating like light.
I have no father. There’s nothing unusual about that, even children who do have fathers are often surprised to see them. My own father came out of the sea and went back that way. He was crew on a fishing boat that harboured with us one night when the waves were crashing like dark glass. His splintered hull shored him for long enough to drop anchor inside my mother.
Shoals of babies vied for life.
I won.
I lived in a house cut steep into the bank. The chairs had to be nailed to the floor, and we were never allowed to eat spaghetti. We ate food that stuck to the plate – shepherd’s pie, goulash, risotto, scrambled egg. We tried peas once – what a disaster – and sometimes we still find them, dusty and green in the corners of the room.
Some people are raised on a hill, others in the valley. Most of us are brought up on the flat. I came at life at an angle, and that’s how I’ve lived ever since.
At night my mother tucked me into a hammock slung cross-wise against the slope. In the gentle sway of the night, I dreamed of a place where I wouldn’t be fighting gravity with my own body weight. My mother and I had to rope us together like a pair of climbers, just to achieve our own front door. One slip, and we’d be on the railway line with the rabbits.
‘You’re not an outgoing type,’ she said to me, though this may have had much to do with the fact that going out was such a struggle. While other children were bid farewell with a casual, ‘Have you remembered your gloves?’ I got, ‘Did you do up all the buckles on your safety harness?’
Why didn’t we move house?
My mother was a single parent and she had conceived out of wedlock. There had been no lock on her door that night when my father came to call. So she was sent up the hill, away from the town, with the curious result that she looked down on it.
Salts. My home town. A sea-flung, rock-bitten, sand-edged shell of a town. Oh, and a lighthouse.
They say you can tell something of a person’s life by observing their body. This is certainly true of my dog. My dog has back legs shorter than his front legs, on account of always digging in at one end, and always scrambling up at the other. On ground level he walks with a kind of bounce that adds to his cheerfulness. He doesn’t know that other dogs’ legs are the same length all the way round. If he thinks at all, he thinks that every dog is like him, and so he suffers none of the morbid introspection of the human race, which notes every curve from the norm with fear or punishment.
‘You’re not like other children,’ said my mother. ‘And if you can’t survive in this world, you had better make a world of your own.’
The eccentricities she described as mine were really her own. She was the one who hated going out. She was the one who couldn’t live in the world she had been given. She longed for me to be free, and did everything she could to make sure it never happened.
We were strapped together like it or not. We were climbing partners.
