The sea hasn't changed

I wrote this 20 years ago:

All you need to take to the lighthouse: a pair of binoculars, and The Oxford Book of the Sea. Actually you won't even need binoculars. In the decommissioned lantern of the lighthouse is an old gunsight from HMS Victorious. Besides having powerful magnification, the sight has crosshairs for aiming, and when you align them over the speck of a distant yacht in Dead Man's Bay your index finger reaches involuntarily for the "Fire!" button. Mine did, anyway.

I blasted yachts, lobster potters, even a Royal Navy frigate, in my three days in the Old Higher Lighthouse on Portland Bill. The rest of the time I sat up in that lantern, or walked the rocky foreshore, and allowed the sea to work spells on me. For the effect of the sea on our state of mind is a kind of sorcery. After half a lifetime spent wondering, intermittently, at the miracle of the ocean I'd decided to come right down to the edge to think it out.

The Isle of Portland turned out to be a perfect place to contemplate the sea. All I knew, before I saw the ad and booked the lighthouse keeper's cottage, was that Portland stone was quarried there, that cool, smooth plunderings of it stand now as St Paul's Cathedral and the British Museum, and half of imperial Delhi. But when I drove the car down the sloping green snout of the Bill on my first day, I knew it would suit my purpose.

This "Gibraltar of Wessex", in Thomas Hardy's phrase, is a kind of honorary sea itself - a piratical earring of grass and rock dangling from the coast of Dorset. Besieged by water, it has a maritime climate of ripped clouds, buffeting winds and shafting sunlight. Aprons and blocks of oolitic limestone, the caviar of masonry, hem the tip (or bill). That first night, the action of wave upon stone produced music that lulled me to sleep.

Portland is also a Shipping Forecast Area. At 5.40 the next morning I crouched over the radio in the kitchen and heard the announcer of the Shipping Bulletin intone: "Portland, Plymouth, west or south-west, four or five, cyclonic. Showers, then rain, becoming moderate . . ." I hardly knew what it meant but scuttled off along the corridor that connects the cottage to the tower, and climbed the stone steps and slate ladder that lead to the lantern.

The barometer in the lantern seemed to contradict the forecast; the arrow on its face lay across the gothic V of Very Dry. And then: ah, the sea. It lay around me pale as ghosts, insubstantial as steam, in the flat light of dawn, and coyly quiet after its small hours exertions. It's a mercurial sea around here.

Off the Bill is a treacherous current called Portland Race, caused by tides hitting the steep shelving of submarine rock. "A chaos of pyramidal waters," Hilaire Belloc called it; "the master terror of our world". Just to the east, where at low tide the water boils into white horses, lies the sandbank known as The Shambles.

Between them, like psychopathic footpads, Race and Shambles have done for hundreds of ships and thousands of lives. In 1805, for instance, the Earl of Abergavenny ran aground on the sandbank and was then driven by southwesterly gales into Dead Man's Bay, where it sank. Of a crew of 400, 260 died, including the Captain, John Wordsworth, brother of the poet William.

Looking westward at the impassive water of the bay on this peaceful morning I imagined the wrecks, the belt buckles and eye sockets, far below; imagined the spirits trapped there. And then, in my Book of the Sea, I read of John Masefield's terrifying vision of sea spirits in the tropics, "under the ghastly corpse-light of the moon", and the explanation a Danish sailor had given him: "that the souls of old sailors follow the sea, in birds' bodies, till they have . . . purged their years of penitence." And suddenly the herring gulls planing past the lighthouse lantern took on a different aspect.

Equipped with a circle of padded seats as well as a gunsight, the lantern resembled a tall summer house and was perfect for lounging and musing in. But it wasn't just the views that made me reluctant to descend out of the blinding light and hothouse warmth. There was something compelling about being in the structure itself; the solidity of its construction, the etherealness of its curving, semi-conical lines.

The Old Higher Lighthouse was decommissioned in 1906, when its work was taken over by the present, red-banded tower down by the tip of the Bill. From 1789 the Old Higher had worked in tandem with a second house, the Old Lower, about a half-mile away to the south-east and now a bird observatory. The idea was that when the two lighthouses fell into alignment, ships' navigators would know they were about to hit the Shambles sandbank.

Given the number of wrecks it seems an approximate alignment and I couldn't help feeling that my lovely old tower had been as much a siren as a watchman, that all those sea spirits down in Dead Man's Bay looked up and cursed it daily. It certainly had an atmosphere to it that I couldn't put my finger on. But then, reluctantly, I dragged myself out to do some exploring; and in the island's tiny museum at Wakeham I made a discovery.

For 35 years, the Old Higher Lighthouse was the holiday home of Marie Stopes. That the pioneer of birth control, and the author of Married Love and Enduring Passion, should have lived in a phallic symbol, struck me as priceless. Not only that: the lighthouse features in Thomas Hardy's last novel; and, on July 21 1923, Hardy had visited Marie Stopes here for afternoon tea.

Later I would track down a photograph of this occasion - Hardy in homburg and overcoat, holding a stick, Stopes in floppy hat, both throwing strong shadows against the curving wall of the tower - and read Marie's recollection:

"Hardy told me that having tea in that tower fulfilled one of the longings of his youth. The lighthouse is mentioned in his novel, `The Well-Beloved', but he had never been in it. After tea he climbed on to the roof of the tower and eagerly looked towards every point of the compass over the magnificent stretches of land and sea that are limited only by the blue haze of the circular horizon."

It was gratifying to think of that frail Colossus of letters getting as excited as I did by the sheer pleasure of being in the top of the lighthouse. For Marie, too, it was an auspicious place, for here she conceived her son: "high above the sea, with the sea all around . . . and the brilliant blue sky above, in a blaze of sunlight he was called into being."

Marie swam in the Portland sea, she drank it for longevity (though she didn't live to be 140 as she had expected); to the consternation of local fishermen, she sunbathed next to it wearing only her trademark floppy hat. Walking the coastline, I found it easy to see why she had a thing about this particular sea.

Down at the tip it comes in in great, oblique rollers that seem to accelerate as they smell turf, and detonate on the rocks in thrilling vertical spumes; round in the deep horseshoe of Church Ope Bay there is the strangest feeling, as you stand in the surf line, that the sea level is higher than you are, that only, perhaps, the invisible moon's magnetism stands between you and engulfment.

The bay is backed by the Romantic ruins of a church and castle. I watched the grey shingle turn fawn in the breakers and thought back to a moment 12 years ago. I lived right in the middle of London then but was spending the weekend in a sea-facing hotel at Cromer. When I awoke and heard the muffled roar outside, I cursed the traffic on the Euston Road. Then I remembered where I was. It wasn't lorries I heard but the sea; and the sound, the same sound, became infinitely soothing.

Later I spent a summer in a seafront terrace in Brighton. Every morning, before doing anything else, I would get out of bed and gaze for long minutes on the sea. It was as if I was driven by an impulse beyond my control, though an impulse I was happy to submit to. My obsession with the sea puts me in good company, but dreamers with landlocked boltholes to go back to can perhaps afford to be romantic about it. What about the people who have to live day in, day out with its unpredictability and murderous rages?

The current working lighthouse was automated in 1996 but it still needs a keeper, and every night since automation Peter Fitch has called in to check and fret that everything's in order. I spoke to him 120 feet up in the lantern amid sage-green Edwardian ironwork. The prismatic lens, weighing four tons and resembling a crystal beehive, cast rainbows across his face as it turned on its slick of mercury.

For more than 20 years he kept long solo watches on some of Britain's most lonely outcrops. "I was Principal Keeper at St Anne's in Pembrokeshire. Remember the Sea Empress? I saw that go aground." He made the usual point about learning to respect the sea, though his reason for doing so is better than most. "When you're in a tower 140 foot high and the sea almost reaches to the top, as it has on occasions with me, you think, `Well there's some power there'."

Peter's a pro, with no illusions, but he has still got the call of the sea. "I can't see myself living anywhere else. It changes every day." The current owner of Marie Stopes's lighthouse, Fran Lockyer, said the same thing when, on my last morning, we talked in the lantern with the clouds scudding past on gusting southwesterlies.

Fran was born in Surrey, grew up in Bristol and came to Portland in the late 1950s. She has worked as a coastguard and now files weather reports for the Met Office. "As a child, every opportunity we had we got away to the sea as father wanted to get by the water. I emigrated to Canada in 1957 and couldn't believe how much I missed the ocean. We were by one of the Great Lakes and it looked the same, but I knew it was different.

"The sea means . . . I was going to say everything . . . a great deal to me. It's the first thing I look at in the morning and the last thing at night and I hope I never have to live anywhere where I can't see it all the time. I can sit and look at it for hours on end. It has life, atmosphere. The sound of it and the smell of it. It's everything, isn't it?"

Marie Stopes, whom Fran never met but likes the sound of ("Her intentions were good but she was a bit overpowering"), died in 1958 at the age of 78. In her will Marie asked for her ashes to be scattered off Portland Bill from a boat, "as near the Race as a fisherman can safely go". This phrase found a strange echo in my anthology. "The sea," wrote the poet, Anne Stevenson, "is as near as we come to another world.”

Published in the Daily Telegraph on July 14 2001