The Village That Says Goodnight to the Lighthouse

The lighthouse on Gull Rock stands a mile out from the harbour, white and narrow, with a lamp that turns all night. For thirty-one years it was looked after by a keeper named Tomas, who rowed out every autumn with his supplies and his fiddle and did not come back until spring. His wife, Maren, stayed in the cottage at the end of the harbour front, because somebody had to look after the hens.

They had an arrangement. At ten o'clock every night, Tomas stepped into the lamp room and covered the light with his hand for a moment, twice, so that the flash from the rock stuttered. On the shore, Maren switched her kitchen light off and on again, twice, so he would know she had seen. Goodnight, it meant. Nothing else. Neither of them was the type to say much more than that anyway.

The lighthouse was made automatic the year Tomas retired, and a machine took over the lamp. Tomas and Maren lived on in the cottage for many years, and when the light turned at night, they watched it from the window without saying anything, the way people do with an old friend they no longer need to talk to.

Nobody knows exactly who noticed first, but a few winters after Tomas died, a child at the harbour asked why Maren's kitchen light always blinked at ten. Maren explained. The child went home and told her parents. The next night, at ten, two kitchens blinked. By the end of the month it was eleven. By the following winter, a visitor standing on the sea wall at ten would see the whole harbour front flicker, house by house, like a row of candles in a draught.

The odd thing is that the lighthouse never stutters any more. The machine does not know about the arrangement. The village does not seem to mind. Somebody once suggested writing to the authorities to ask whether the light could be made to blink twice at ten, and was told, very kindly, that this was not the point.

Maren is ninety-three now. She still switches her light off and on at ten, though her hand is slower than it was. Her neighbours have noticed that on nights when she forgets, or falls asleep in her chair, the whole harbour front waits an extra minute, just in case, before it goes ahead without her.

The story is invented, but the language of lighthouses is real. Every lighthouse has its own pattern of flashes and dark intervals, known as its character, printed on nautical charts so that sailors at night can tell exactly which light they are looking at. Most lighthouses were once staffed by keepers who lived on site, often for months at a time, and in many countries they were gradually automated during the twentieth century. The lights still turn, but the people who once tended them are mostly remembered now in stories told on the shore.