Featherlight by Peter Bunzl (debian ebook reader TXT) 📕

It’s bright enough that when I want to go to sleep I have to throw a cloth over it. I call it my featherlight. When Cyrus gets home, I am going to show it to him.

*

Two days pass quickly. I go up to the top of the lighthouse tower with Grandma on the day Mum and Dad and Cyrus are due to arrive back, so we can see Dad’s boat bringing them across.

I look into the spyglass, staring out to sea. Finally, I catch sight of the sail of Dad’s boat. It is weaving its way past the rocks and across the rolling blue water towards the island.

The sun flashes on the boat’s sails, making it look as bright as a white cloud.

I can see Mum and Dad together in the boat. Mum has something clasped to her chest. A tiny bundle of blankets. I can just make out a pink face beneath the folds of cloth.

Cyrus. My new baby brother.

I am about to hand the spyglass back to Grandma when I catch sight of something else in the sky. A light.

It is travelling towards us fast, faster than the boat. It’s glittering bright orange like it might be a shooting star. But you only see those at night, don’t you?

I put the spyglass up to my eye again and stare at the light, squinting against its glowing bright trail.

It’s a baby bird, with flaming wings, and it is coming straight towards us. As it gets closer, I recognise the red breast and bright orange crest on its head. It is my firebird. The bird I rescued. The bird who helped us save three fishermen.

Tan. She is coming back for her missing beam of light.

She is coming back for her last, lost feather.

FIREBIRD

LIGHTHOUSE

I am the lighthouse keeper’s daughter

And I keep the lighthouse by the water.

Keep the oil lamps burning bright

through the stormy hours of the night.

Keep the trawlers, ships and boats away

from the rocky rocks in Featherstone Bay.

Keep the lighthouse lantern blazing proudly

when lightning crackles and the thunder’s rowdy.

I am the lighthouse keeper’s one and only daughter

and with my brother and my firebird I keep the

lighthouse by the water.

— Deryn Darling, Featherstone Lighthouse,

Featherstone Island, 1907

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The story of Deryn Darling and Tan was partly inspired by two other famous lighthouse keepers’ daughters. The first was Grace Darling. The second was Ida Lewis.

Grace was born in 1815. Her father, William Darling, was a lighthouse keeper on the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumberland in England.

In 1838, when Grace was twenty-two, she looked out of the window on a stormy night and spotted a ship that had been wrecked on nearby rocks. Grace and her father rowed out from the lighthouse in their little boat, risking their own lives. They were able to rescue five of the sixty-three people who had been on board the ship. After they had brought those survivors back, Grace’s father and two of the passengers went out again and managed to save four more people.

Ida Lewis was born in 1842 in Rhode Island in America. Her father, Captain Hosea Lewis, was the lighthouse keeper at the Lime Rock Lighthouse in Newport. Ida was just twelve years old when she made her first rescue, saving four men whose boat had turned over. When Ida was twenty-seven, she made her most famous rescue, of two soldiers who’d been sailing across the harbour in a snowstorm when their boat capsized.

Both Ida and Grace became famous for their daring rescues. Grace was declared a hero and was known all over England. Ida was called the bravest woman in America. She became the lighthouse keeper at Lime Rock after her parents died of old age.

LIGHTING THE WAY

Lighthouses are important buildings used by sailors to help them find their way and warn them of dangers. For example, rocks hidden under the surface of the sea could sink their ships. They are often built on cliffs, at the entrance to harbours and sometimes on raised stands in the water. Different lighthouses use different flashes and colours of light so that sailors can tell them apart.

Before the first lighthouses were built, sailors out at sea were guided by fires built on hilltops. People realised that if the fires could be built higher up, the light would be seen further away, so they then built fires on platforms and raised them higher and higher.

One of the first lighthouses was the Lighthouse of Alexandria on the island of Pharos built around 280 BC. It was one of the Wonders of the Ancient World before it was destroyed by an earthquake in the fourteenth century.

Lighthouses originally used oil lamps or candles, and the job of a lighthouse keeper was to make sure that all the equipment was working to keep the light shining through the night. Nowadays, lighthouses use electricity and most run without lighthouse keepers. Computer technology is used to light the lamp at dusk and put it out in the morning.

The first lighthouse in the UK was built in Devon in the 1690s to warn sailors off the dangerous Eddystone rocks. There are now over a hundred lighthouses in the UK, though not all of them are still in use.

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