![]() Maskelyne, whose Magic Gang never existed outside his memoirs, was of little practical use to the camouflage unit to which he was seconded, but was nevertheless encouraged, for a time at least, to take credit for achievements that would boost confidence at Allied High Command. In reality, if anyone was taken in, it was the British who were fed this tale (reinforced by Back-Room Boy, the propaganda comedy of 1942, starring Arthur Askey and set in a lighthouse). This decoy harbour, complete with dummy lighthouse and rotating searchlights, was supposedly successful in fooling the enemy. The myth of the Pharos still resonated powerfully enough in 1941 for it to be plausibly rumoured that the British illusionist Jasper Maskelyne and his assistants, the Magic Gang, had been ordered by MI9 to build a Potemkin village-style model of the harbour at Alexandria further along the Egyptian coast. On the island of Kea in the Aegean, the chapel of St Nicholas stands on a rocky promontory, a bright, whitened landmark by day and, by night, a working lighthouse. The Greeks placed shrines to Poseidon at points where the risks to ships suggested it would be wise to placate him and, as Veronica della Dora points out in her book, neither the advent of Christianity nor advances in technology have quite eclipsed older faiths. Forster wrote, in having ‘taken on a spiritual life of its own’, being, in effect, worshipped, so that ‘long after its light was extinguished, memories of it glowed in the minds of men.’ A secular age still feels a need for the light that shines in the darkness and for comfort in places of danger. The Pharos at Alexandria was remarkable among secular buildings, E.M. An often postponed trip to carry supplies to the keepers takes place only at the end of the book, and when Mr Ramsay springs ‘lightly like a young man’ out of the boat and onto the rock, he disappears from the narrative.Īs an enigmatic symbol, the lighthouse has long held an imaginative appeal. ![]() In the story, the Lighthouse (it is capitalised throughout) is barely more present than Godot. ‘I trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions.’ To the Lighthouse, her fifth novel, outsold the previous four and readers have been depositing or discovering their emotions in it ever since. ![]() ‘I meant nothing by the lighthouse,’ Virginia Woolf said of the novel she published in 1927. ![]()
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