Mrs Barton stood in front of her cottage on the tip of Pencarrow Head. The wind tugged at her skirt and apron and she shook her head occasionally to free her face of the hair that had come loose from her bonnet. Below her, the waves hurled themselves against the rocks at the bottom of the cliffs. The white tips of the mountains on the large island to the south were just visible in the distance. To her right she could follow the fingers of the peninsula that outlined the approach to the harbour. Smoke was rising from the natives’ settlements near the opposite foreshore. Over a thousand miles to the west beyond the Tasman Sea lay the much larger island of Australia. To the east lay the incalculable expanse of the Pacific ocean. Mrs Barton’s journey from Britain to New Zealand had lasted a gruelling nineteen weeks. It was not at all unreasonable to describe this place as, quite simply, the edge of the world.
The exposed coastline and the wind that gathered strength as it spiralled in largely unobstructed from the ocean could make the living conditions at Pencarrow Head extremely harsh. The shelter provided by the cottage on the top of the hill was pitiful. It was draughty, unstable and frequently became damp. There were just three simple rooms, a larger room with a fireplace and stove and two smaller rooms for sleeping.
Before his untimely death, Mr Barton had written many letters to the Wellington Provincial Council complaining about the conditions of his family home and pleading for improvements to be made. Mrs Barton continued to fight this cause on behalf of her children and late husband, but she also knew that they would cope with or without improvements to their home, just as the native Maori and new immigrants survived perfectly well in their bulrush huts. At least the Governor, assisted by a young engineer from England, had finally erected a tower to house the beacon to help prevent further tragedies or loss of cargo as ships made for Wellington harbour. While Mr Barton had still been alive, the beacon had been nothing more than a fixed light stationed in one of the rooms in their cottage. How proud he would be now to see his young wife managing New Zealand’s first lighthouse.
Mrs Barton had learned a little about the gods that the fearsome tattooed natives revered in this land. She had no doubts about the existence of Tangaroa, the god of the sea, because she had seen him during those long hours she spent guiding the ships. On occasions, bitter battles between Tangaroa and his brother Tawhiri, the god of storms, would whip up howling gales and violent seas. Tangaroa wanted to protect his empire from the growing numbers of human intruders and in pursuit of this goal he tore at ships’ sails, heaved and thrashed, his furious features roaring in the black walls of water that towered then shattered upon the rocks. Mrs Barton knew that the perilous Cook Strait and the Wellington harbour bed were strewn with the shells of vessels he had claimed and dragged to ruin. She had lost her beloved husband one day when Tangaroa had lashed out and swept him overboard during a harbour crossing. She wanted to grieve him and weep as her children had, but found that she could not. Instead her sleep was haunted by images of her husband’s restless soul wandering the dark depths, desperately searching for some light to guide him home. She refused to relinquish responsibility for the light and for a few years the Provincial Council reluctantly allowed her to continue her husband’s work unofficially.
Mrs Barton’s young daughters quickly learned how to manage most of the household affairs and prepare the basic meals for the family. Her eldest son tended the fire down in the cottage. She managed her children’s tuition herself whilst her husband had been alive, but this became difficult after his death and lessons were now a rare event. Mrs Barton stood up in the beacon tower night after night operating the heavy mechanical lens to throw shafts of light out onto the dark water. On some evenings her youngest son would climb up into the tower and help her to trim the wick and keep the oil burning brightly. They stood side by side staring out into the blackness, as the powerful beams they emitted guided floundering ships through a safe passage into the harbour. She saw the huge dark figure of Tangaroa whirl and almost burst through the surface of the sea, snarling at the source of the light that penetrated his kingdom. But despite her determined vigil she never saw her husband. As the months passed, her body became thinner and her eyes grew wider so that they hung on her drawn face like two mirrors, windows into a tormented mind.
The Council sent an assistant to watch over the work at Pencarrow Head and to support the woman who stubbornly retained her husband’s lightkeeping responsibilities. Mrs Barton was glad of the help the assistant gave to her sons, dragging the heavy bags filled with supplies up the steep hill from the shore. She refused to relinquish any of her duties up in the tower however. The assistant became resentful of Mrs Barton’s steadfast confidence and authority. He wrote to the Provincial Council to carp about how tough it was to carry out his important duties with just a woman for support. Representatives from the Provincial Council arrived unannounced one day to carry out a routine check on the condition of the beacon. They left unexpectedly satisfied that the strange woman with her wild family was in fact running things very efficiently and that the beacon was in excellent shape given the difficult conditions. After that incident the assistant withered slowly beneath the unrelenting glassy stare of Mrs Barton and four weeks had not passed before he left Pencarrow for good.
On one hellish night in July, when the wintery gales screamed around the cliff and the cottage groaned and shook, the children trembled and cried out terrified that the house would collapse on top of them. The southerly wind pummelled the tiny structure finding its way through the cracks and the cold and damp seeped through the rooms. Mrs Barton’s eldest son braved the elements and struggled up the ladder to the tower to plead with his mother to abandon her desperate mission. She refused without once moving her steady gaze towards him. ‘Go to your father’s shelter!’ she yelled and trembling with terror he led his siblings from the cottage along the ridge clinging to each other and bowing their heads against the strong gusts that halted their progress. They finally made it to the shelter that his father had dug into the hill for those times when the cold and the wet were less fearsome than the threat of the cottage being pitched over the cliff. They huddled with damp blankets under the makeshift thatched roof their father had built above the alcove.
‘I might not have the appearance of a fearsome warrior,’ shrieked Mrs Barton, ‘but do not dare to underestimate my determination!’ and she poured every last drop of her will into the powerful bursts of light as she scanned the depths for Tangaroa’s most sacred prisoner. The burning oil lamp created two leaping fiery reflections in her huge eyes. For many long hours her muscles strained as she wound up the clockwork mechanism to keep the weights in the tower shaft clunking and pulling against the revolving lens. Mrs Barton fought a strenuous battle that night, but she knew that despite being a worthy opponent she still had not been able to find her husband and guide him to peaceful waters. At first light as the sky cleared and the waters calmed, her shivering children picked their way across the debris-strewn hills back to the house. They clambered into the tower one by one and found their mother still standing but exhausted and slumped with her face and chest laid on top of the beacon's mechanism. Her eldest son approached her and tentatively placed his hand on her shoulder. She raised her head, slowly lifted her heavy lids and turned to look with her gigantic eyes upon her children as if for the first time. She stared with curiosity at these tall thin adolescents with faces etched with worry. She wondered when they had ceased to be the wild-haired care-free youngsters whose playful cries once breathed life into the deserted cliffs. Mrs Barton stood up straight and without a word made her way slowly back to the cottage. As her eldest son hunted for dry logs to light a fire, she found the driest clothes she could for the younger children and went to prepare some food. That afternoon, she sat down and wrote to the Provincial Council explaining that she had decided to go back to England for the sake of her children’s education and would be grateful if they could entrust the Pencarrow Lighthouse responsibilities to another keeper as soon as possible. Three months later they all boarded a ship bound for England where Mrs Barton was reunited with her family and spent the rest of her days.
In the years that followed, Mrs Barton’s four children each found their own paths through life. Her youngest son decided to return to Wellington not long after his mother had passed away. Before long he found himself back at Pencarrow Head. Life at Pencarrow had changed a lot during the years that he had been away. The cottage was sturdier and much better equipped. He puzzled over the fact that many people find it hard to understand how somebody can willingly endure the elements, the isolation and any number of environmental and maritime perils to succeed in this occupation. They don’t understand that there is no real choice in the matter. Somebody has to keep the light.