The Lighthouse

The Lighthouse

Alan Hancock, July 2024

2 055 wds

June 2024

The lighthouse had withstood storms, high tides and king waves for over 150 years. ‘Just look at those walls, they must be near a metre thick’, Simon said, ‘And windows like ships port holes’ Annie added. It was indeed impressive. 

‘Did you see the cat?’

‘No, where?’ Simon looked up from the visitors’ guide account of the shipwreck.

‘Big black one. Sitting on the path, then it ran up ahead up the steps. Like it was leading the way. You sure you didn’t see it?’

‘Must have been heading home before it got its feet wet.’

‘Then it disappeared.’

‘Cats are good at that.’

‘So is a black cat good luck or bad? I never know.’ Annie has never been sure, and is always in two minds when one of the creatures crosses her path. She can’t decide whether she should be worried, or happy today at the arrival of a good omen.

‘Everyone got off the sinking ship. That sounds pretty good to me.’

The holiday turned out to be shorter than they'd planned. The booking was for a long weekend: Simon's idea of a surprise 50th birthday gift. He'd done a bit of research - like on Who Do You Think You Are? - and discovered that Annie's great-great grandmother had been on the very ship that went down at Steep Point in 1884. Then along with all the crew, she had made an escape to the nearby lighthouse. Steep Point lighthouse is still there but now it has been decommissioned, renovated and converted into a luxury holiday rental where the privileged and adventurous can buy a few days of total isolation from the rest of the world. 

Well almost isolation, because each day at low tide the narrow causeway that links the lighthouse to the mainland allows the experienced walker an hour or so of access. On either side of the stone pathway fierce currents race around the point - it is not a good place for a swim, or a bad step into the freezing waters of the Southern Ocean.

Annie is coming round to the good-omen option – the place was perfect. The clincher was the way everything inside fitted so neatly into the curvature of the walls: single beds banana-shaped fitted snug up against the stonework; there was a curved kitchen bench and a writing desk that looked as if it had been installed the day the lighthouse opened. ‘Just like Bag End - you know the hobbits,’ she said. ‘It's perfect Simon. Thank you so much. And now I'm going to unpack the provisions, put my clothes in the bedroom cupboard, and open a bottle of red.’

There was no signal - this was perhaps the only place left on the coast that still eluded phone connection; there was no TV either, just an old radio that could have featured in a 1950s film. A log fire burned in the fireplace. Annie let out a long breath. ‘I could live here for the rest of my life.’ she said. And as it turned out, so she did.

June 1884

Sid had been banished below decks after becoming a serial pest with the only lady passenger, one Miss Kitty Mabelthorpe on her way to marry her fiancé, Mr Duncan Wallace, a red-haired Scot who had just been promoted to the role of assistant harbour master in the port they were bound for. To be honest, Sid was not the most well-behaved cat. The crew tolerated his attentions because he was an excellent ratter, and because they were firm in their belief that a black cat brought them good luck. Sometimes he might get tangled in their feet and give a little bite or scratch if they tried to kick him away, or yammer half the night at a sealed door if he wasn’t allowed free range throughout the vessel. But he dealt with the rats.

Miss Mablethorpe was the first passenger and the only lady Sid had ever encountered, and whenever she appeared on deck he gave her his full and unwanted attention. He rubbed up against her, and had even put his claws into her Italian leather boots. Her repeated ‘Get away, shoo!’ was in vain. Kitty suffered from allergies, one of which was to cats, and developed streaming eyes and a migraine in their close proximity. Sid was tenacious, impossible; Kitty began to dread his appearance next to her on her deck promenades. So, after she made a polite but firm request to the captain, the cat was banished from her company, and confined below decks for the duration of the voyage

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The S.S. Arcadia was the first twin-screw steamship to operate along this coastline as the age of sail faded into the past - no more clipper ships racing with their cargoes of grain to and from the great cities of the Empire. Now it was all steam - bigger, faster, more efficient. The Arcadia was almost 6,000 tons, bringing provisions from the capital to a distant regional centre, still accessible only by sea. Captain Mountjoy had sailed the oceans of the world but never this coastline and it was his misjudgment and hubris that took the Arcadia down to Davey Jones Locker. Because right now he was confident - too confident. He believed in the power of British engineering, the power of the Arcadia’s steam engines and mighty propellors to resist any tidal current. And in this he was wrong. As the light faded, the ship was pushed inexorably onto the Steep Point reef where it was holed in the bows below waterline, and slowly but unstoppably sank. Captain Montjoy may have been foolhardy on this occasion, but one of his virtues was something that had been drilled into him over many years in the British Merchant Navy - staying calm under pressure. This saved them all. Except for one.

He did not panic. He led the crew in an orderly and disciplined exit from the ship’s deck as it lowered itself into the water. Mercifully winds were light and the swell moderate, and the order to abandon ship was followed with discipline and a grim good humour. The ship’s lifeboats were launched: woman first (there were no children) and as tradition and myth demanded, the captain was last to leave just as the water reached the deck rail and the Arcadia began a long slide down into six fathoms of water. At low tide you can still see the hull, now a refuge for a whole ecosystem of marine life and a popular dive site on the few days that permitted diving.

The current that had pushed the ship to its destruction now brought its lifeboat swiftly to shore on the little beach in front of the lighthouse. No one was lost; no one even got terribly wet, and the crew plus Miss Mablethorpe were welcomed into the safety of the lighthouse. Here they were plied with cups of hot sweet tea laced with rum, of which Kitty Mablethorpe drank several, became flushed, and more than a little animated. 

It was then that the captain remembered: the ship had indeed taken one victim down to the deeps. Not a passenger who appeared on the official register of the Arcadia, but Sid the ship's cat for the last five years. He was now locked forever in the hold, on the Captain's orders, behind stout steel hatches which proved impervious to feline tooth and claw. Kitty noticed a cloud settle on the Captain's face and feeling much freer in her conversation than would normally be acceptable in polite society, leaned close to him and inquired as to what was wrong.

‘It’s Sid’, he said ‘I left him behind. I forgot him. I fear I have brought about his death.’

‘Oh dear,’ she replied, and he found a small warm hand pressed onto his. ‘That must be such a sorrow for you. I feel terribly guilty.’ At this a tear rolled down her cheek. Kitty had been for several years a member of the local Gilbert and Sullivan opera company and a keen thespian. She knew how to command a scene. The Captain placed a strong arm round her shoulder.

‘Now now Miss Mablethorpe. You must not blame yourself.’

What Kitty did not say was what she was thinking, which was something along the lines of ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish’. In theatre, and in life, she had learned that when properly handled, emotion could trump the truth. 

Kitty dined out on her story for many years: the terrible storm - the weather was in fact flat calm that night; the miraculous rescue - which was not miraculous but well managed; and the well-deserved demise of the creature that had made her voyage a misery with its rubbing, caterwauling, and shedding of cat hair. And that's where we’ll leave her, Kitty Mountjoy, wife of the famous captain, source of much tongue wagging among the town’s society about the scarlet woman from the big city whose father it was said paid Mr Wallace a large sum for breach of marriage vows. She lived the rest of her days in the fine Captain’s Cottage at the harbour mouth. You can visit it now, in the heritage park. It's rather beautiful.

June 2024

The first she knew of it was feeling something brush her leg as she mounted the spiral staircase to the bedroom. She pulled up in alarm. ‘Simon, there’s something in here.’

‘What?’ 

‘Come here, please.’ Her voice was high and tense; she’d had a nasty fright.

Simon arrived, searched the room and could find nothing.

‘There was a cat. I felt it.’

Simon suggested she have a glass of wine and an early bed. But it didn't stop. In the middle of the night she woke with a scream when something heavy dropped onto the bed next to her. The lights went on, Simon came over from his own single banana-shape bed, and again found nothing out of the ordinary. ‘Bad dream,’ he said.

‘No it wasn't’ she insisted, and for the rest of the night Simon slept next to her, folded and bent into the single bed. 

The last time he saw her was just before dawn when Annie could no longer sleep because of the loud purring noise next to her, or above her, or under the bed. She said she was going to get some fresh air on the little platform at the front door of the lighthouse, now converted into a veranda. She took a flashlight from its hook in the hallway, descended the spiral staircase, and opened the heavy door that sealed the interior of the lighthouse from its watery environment. She stood at the rail above a flight of stone steps going down to the causeway which was disappearing under the water of a rising tide, and told herself to relax.

Two things happened at the same time. The door slammed shut. It was a solid affair with wooden planks covered in steel plate painted a deep red and once closed it was impenetrable by sound or water. When Annie turned to confirm what had happened a very large very angry black tomcat materialized in front of her and leapt at her face. For the second and last time that night she screamed. She stepped back and found only fresh air where she'd expected solid ground and fell the full length of ten granite steps to land unconscious in the water that was now covering the causeway. 

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It was all in the news: the body discovered at the little lighthouse beach the next day, the autopsy, the questioning of Simon by the local police - a male partner is always the first suspect - until foul play was ruled out. It was a tragic accident. It turned out that other visitors had seen or sensed a ghostly cat in the lighthouse, but from then on it was never sighted again. If, as many spiritually inclined people believed in 1884, pets had their own place in paradise alongside their owners, Sid’s spirit could be sailing the high seas of the afterlife with the good Captain. You may want to imagine him there, master of the decks, chasing rats and mice for all eternity.

End.