The Lighthouse Keeper

HISTORICAL SHORT STORY BY ALISON CARTER

In this story, set in the 1902, Awel and Timothy were in love, Whether the others saw it or not…

The three girls had been thrown together by circumstance.
They lived in Trefythan, a village in a narrow bay looking out at the ocean from the tip of Pembrokeshire.

The population was small and Awel, Catrin and Dilys were about the same age. Because there were so few other girls of that age, they were friends.

Catrin was tall and lovely with swaying hips and a bold voice.

She had been destined from childhood to have the pick of the young men, and by the autumn of 1902 she had chosen, and been courting for over a year.

David was handsome and strong, and Catrin worshipped him.

“I think he and I were written in the stars,” Catrin said one evening.

The three women were sitting on the harbour wall.

“What stars?” Dilys asked, and she looked up at a cloudy dusk.

Dilys was the clever one.

“You know what I mean,” Catrin said.

Dilys had a young man, too. She was actually engaged to Griffith.

Awel had only just met her young man. His name was Timothy Hughes and he had come to Trefythan to work the lighthouse that lay four miles off the coast.

Usually a new keeper only spent a day or two in the village before being taken out to the rock.

But a gap had opened up in Timothy’s schedule at the end of a stint on a Devon lighthouse, and he had come to Wales early.

The man who was running the light through spring and summer was not due back for three weeks.

Dilys and Catrin noted that Hughes was quiet.

“Inscrutable,” Dilys said.

“Dull, I’d say,” Catrin said. “He says nothing!”

This was before they knew that Awel had taken a fancy to Timothy.

Awel was quiet, and prone to changes of mood that sent her into herself.

The other girls saw themselves as her protectors. They felt that she was younger than them, though she wasn’t.

When they saw her walking on the beach with Timothy Hughes they were a little disgruntled. It was their role to be worldly. They knew about men.

“Our own men in particular,” Dilys told Awel.

Catrin agreed.

“I’ve learned all there is to know about my David.”

Dilys said that Griffith was like the lines on the palm of her hand.

When the boat came to take Timothy Hughes to the lighthouse, most of the village was present.

Awel and Timothy lingered on the harbour.

“My goodness!” Dilys said. “Romeo and Juliet!”

“It’s infatuation,” Catrin whispered. “I mean, how long has he been here?”

Dilys counted her fingers.

“Barely three weeks.”

As the boat sailed away, Awel stood still for several minutes, and then made her way slowly back towards the village. Her friends hurried after her.

“Don’t worry, you will forget him as the months pass,” Catrin said, draping an arm around Awel’s shoulders.

Awel shook her head.

Privately, Catrin and Dilys agreed that such a brief acquaintance could not possibly result in love.

“Too soon by far,” Catrin said.

“With none of the long association we have had with our sweethearts,” Dilys said.

They felt that Awel ought to be guided by them and they tried to help, not wanting their friend to pine for half a year.

“Not over a man who will come back with hardly a memory of you,” Catrin said.

The lighthouse changes a man

Dilys said. “All alone, dripping whale oil on a flame!”

“The keeper does not drip the fuel,” Awel said. “There’s a reservoir mounted above the burner, operated by gravity.”

Dilys and Catrin looked at each other. Catrin patted Awel’s hand.

“A fancy like yours – it is just a dream,” she said.

“A mirage,” Dilys added.

“Awel, you cannot rely on it as you cannot know a lover in so short a time.

“Not as I know Griff,” Dilys said with a sigh.

“Not as I know my David.”

They caught Awel looking out to sea as the autumn continued, and whispered.

“They are two strangers,” they told each other.

Soon, Catrin and Dilys hardly thought of Timothy Hughes.

They were focused on their approaching nuptials.

Dilys was first, Catrin after Christmas.

Catrin was finding it difficult to pin David down to discuss the wedding.

“He’s busy,” she explained.

Every Saturday and Sunday, and the occasional afternoon, David refereed rugby matches, inland at
St David’s.

“Oh, yes, the season’s begun,” Dilys said with a sage nod.

“But I didn’t know he was quite so . . . regular,” Catrin said sorrowfully.

“I suppose he didn’t tell you when you were first courting,” Dilys said, “last autumn and winter.”

“And you thought you knew every inch of him.” Dilys’s voice was kind. “That’s hard.”

Catrin glared.

Dilys was married on a rainy day in October.

A fortnight later, Awel and Catrin passed the cottage that Dilys and Griffith shared, a tiny structure tacked on to Griffith’s father’s house.

They could hear yelling.

“Just close it behind you!” Dilys’s voice cut through the wind. “Just close one of them, sometimes!”

Griffith emerged, and marched away towards the inn. Dilys followed, but stopped in surprise when she saw her friends.

“Fine day,” she said, though it wasn’t – their faces were sprinkled with wet salt from the wind. Dilys’s shoulders slumped.

“I love the man, but his blessed mother never taught him to close a door.

“He goes through the cottage like a child, flinging all of them open, and it’s bitter in there.”

Awel and Catrin commiserated. Catrin could not resist a light laugh.

“If you’d only known him better –”

“He’s an angel, in all other respects,” Dilys interrupted.

There were occasions when Dilys and Catrin wondered if Awel had sensibly got the lighthouse keeper out of her mind.

Christmas came and went, and Catrin grew excited about her wedding, until one day she came back from a trip to
St David’s, white and shaking.

She had gone with her sister to buy lace for a veil.

“I saw him after one of those rugby matches!”

A glance passed between Awel and Dilys: was seeing a man after a rugby match so shocking?

“He was with a girl!” Catrin wailed.

The situation turned out not to be nearly as bad as Catrin first suspected.

The girl was an old flame, a young woman who worked for the firm in
St David’s that transported shellfish from Trefythan.

“They met in the course of business,” Catrin said a few days later, wiping her eyes. “She swears it was nothing. He swears it, too.”

Dilys remarked softly that it was after all difficult to know David completely, since he had “a past”.

Catrin’s wedding came and went. David was absent every weekend, but they were happy.

Meanwhile, Griffith admitted to Dilys that getting a cottage of their own would have to be delayed. He was in debt.

“He owed money before we became sweethearts,” Dilys said, her head down.

“He didn’t say it because he was ashamed.”

“We cannot know everything about a person,” Awel said.

Dilys glared at her.

“When you have a man, Awel, you come back and lecture us married ladies.” Awel nodded.

It was time to send a new lighthouse keeper to Deanery Rock.

The man who had spent last spring and summer there was coming back to Trefythan for the swap.

When he arrived, Dilys and Catrin happened to be on the road out of town, walking to buy eggs from a farm, and saw him.

“That time again,” Dilys said. “Goodness me.”

Catrin smiled.

“Awel’s fellow will be coming back. Let’s hope that she can pick him out of a crowd!”

As before, the village came out to welcome back one keeper and send off the next.

Dilys and Catrin watched Timothy Hughes climb off the boat and walk dead-straight towards Awel.

People moved aside when they realised how purposeful his movements were.

“I kept it shining,” he said to her when they were three feet apart.

“I know,” Awel said.

They were smiling at each other with such intimacy that the other two women were astounded.

“I said I would keep it on as long as I still loved you,” he said.

Awel laughed.

It was his job to keep the light on, but he had promised to keep it shining out for her alone.

“I made you this as I promised,” he said, and from his pocket he drew a necklace.

Dilys and Catrin drew closer and saw that it was made of pieces of shell, with tiny holes drilled in each, and each separated from the next by an oval sliver of metal.

“Exactly as I described it to you,” Awel said.

“I have your favourite meal waiting at my mother’s house. I just have to warm the stew.”

“You don’t know how welcome that is,” he said.

“I do know,” Awel said. “I know exactly.”

He stepped forward, and she stepped forward, and they kissed each other just as though they had been kissing every day for those whole six months.

The next day, Dilys and Catrin passed Awel outside the village bakery.

“We didn’t realise,” Dilys said.

“I believe I did get to know him in that little time we had.” Awel smiled.

Awel told her friends about their talks – that they had found they were both solitary people.

“I am shy,” she said, “and you know my mind goes astray, and sometimes I need time alone to make my thoughts lie still again.

“Well, Timothy likes solitude, too.” She laughed.

He is happy on a lighthouse, and says that the rest of the time he will be happy with me.

Awel said that Timothy had left a domineering father in Swansea and that he would never accept being under anyone’s command again.

“And I have no need to command another living soul,” Awel said, “so that seemed a good start.

“He understands the confusion of my mind, too, and is sure he is ready.”

Catrin and Dilys sat together after Awel had gone to find her lover.

“She did know him like the lines on the palm of her hand,” Dilys said, staring out at a fishing boat.

“They gathered everything about each other in that short time,” Catrin said.

Life in Trefythan went on. Dilys and Catrin loved their husbands, and their husbands loved them, and they worked hard to fit with each other’s foibles, and learn about each other.

Awel didn’t seem to have so much work to do.

Despite the millions of gallons of salt water that had kept them apart for so long, and would again, she knew Timothy Hughes, and he knew her.

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