Victory Page 3

  Uncle Charlie said, “Just a touch of broth for me, Em—I’m not hungry.”

  “Rubbish!” said my mother. “You always ate three times as much as me.”

  “Not tonight,” he said, “I ate on the road.”

  I knew how good the broth smelled, and I knew how far away the traveling road was, so that was when I knew I liked my uncle.

  We ate our supper. There was bread, our heavy stale bread, so Uncle Charlie ate a small chunk of it deliberately slowly, and I liked him even more. He and my mother talked about family, and the girls and I listened greedily, trying to put it all in our memories. My father and Dick ate, bored.

  Then my father said, “Why have you come here?”

  Uncle Charlie looked at him, considering. For a moment I saw a look of my mother in his face.

  He said, “There was a wagon coming this way, and going back again. I wanted to see my sister. And perhaps to help.”

  “Help?” said my father. He spat into the fire. “Who says we need help?”

  “There are five children,” my uncle said mildly. “And one more on the way, I see.”

  “And two that died,” my mother said. Uncle Charlie reached out and touched her hand, very quickly, just for a moment. He said, “I am a spinner at the ropewalk in Chatham. The Navy has great need of rope, in all these years of war. I do well. My wife and I had but one child, and he died young. I could take one of your boys and start him at the ropewalk too, if you want. It is hard, but a living.”

  Dick was sitting on a hunk of wood beside my father. He looked up eagerly. “Me!” he said. “I want to go!”

  My father swung his arm across quick as light and hit Dick with the back of his hand, knocking him sideways. “Speak when you’re asked!” he said.

  Dick wiped a little blood off his mouth. We were all used to being hit. He said, low, “I’m the biggest. I’m strong.”

  “So you stay here,” my father said. “I’m not giving you up—the bailey likes you.” He looked over at me, and suddenly I felt my mother’s hand on my shoulder, light, quivering.

  “You could take that one,” my father said to Charlie, jerking his head at me. His eyes narrowed, and you could almost see his piggy little brain working. “What do I get for losing him?”

  “Whatever he earns, until he’s grown,” said my uncle. “Joan and I will house him.”

  “Take him,” my father said. “He eats more than he gets.”

  My mother’s fingers tightened on my shoulder, and I heard her make a little lost sound, like a baby makes.

  My uncle looked at me. “Will you come, Sam?”

  I was giddy at the thought of getting away from my father. I had never imagined there could be any escape. But I felt the hand on my shoulder, trembling now. I turned my head and looked at my mother, at her poor tired face. There was a tear running down from each eye, but she firmed her mouth and nodded her head.

  “All right,” I said to my uncle.

  He said slowly, with his eyes on my mother, “We must leave at first light—the wagon will be by.”

  “Sam will be ready,” she said. And at this the little girls set up a great squalling, and my father shouted at them, and threw his empty bowl to the floor in a fury.

  But when dawn came, my life changed. My mother hugged me to her so tightly, before my uncle and I set out for the road and the world beyond. I shall remember that hugging till the day I die.

  For just five days I thought I was in heaven. The wagon creaked and bumped and splashed its way along the road to Chatham, with Uncle Charlie and me tucked in beside a great load of cabbages and squawking chickens, and after half a day I began to see a thousand things I had never seen before. Tall red-brown buildings of brick rose all around us, houses and shops and such, and a press of carts and carriages. Once, a grand stagecoach came spanking along behind six galloping horses, with a man blowing a long horn like the Last Trump in the Bible. As we came into the city, the streets were made of lumpy stones called cobbles, and full of more people than I had ever known existed in the world. All was noise, shouting voices and creaking wheels; everywhere people were selling and buying, calling out to others about their fruit or fish or wool. Our wagon slowed down near a young woman with a great armful of red and white roses for sale. She grinned up at me, a gap-toothed grin, and she yelled, “Throw us a cabbage, my duck!”

  I did, too, just a little one. She tossed me a red rose, but it fell in the street.

  In my uncle’s house there was a floor of wood, and a stairway leading up to another floor. We ate meat, twice in less than a week, and I slept on my own mattress, in a little room with nobody else in it. My aunt Joan was a chubby lady with smiling lines on her face, and she fed me as if every day were Christmas. The first evening, I kept finding her gazing at me with a wondering expression on her face. After a while I caught her eye so often that she burst out laughing.

  “Forgive me, Sam,” she said. “I stare at your face because you are so much like your uncle. It is like meeting Charlie all over again, when we were young.”

  “So you better keep clear of my wife, lad,” said my uncle, smiling. He took hold of my chin and studied my face for a moment. The smile faded, and he shook his head rather sadly. “I see my sister, days long gone,” he said.

  I think that was the first time I had the feeling, like a quick pain, that life goes by terribly fast.

  On the fifth day, my uncle took me with him to the ropewalk.

  Chatham Dockyard was a huge, amazing place. We walked through the streets for a long time to get there, through a warren of buildings that made me feel squashed just by looking at them. My uncle quickened his pace, and more men came hurrying all around us, all headed the same way. I began to hear a deep bell ringing, slowly at first, then gradually faster, and all the hurrying men began to run toward a high wall, thronging through tall open gates.

  “The muster bell!” my uncle called to me as I ran to keep up. It meant, I found afterward, that if you wanted a full day’s pay you had to be at work before that bell stopped ringing.

  Ahead of us was the ropewalk, a long wooden building, and beyond it I could see the sky full of the masts and rigging of the ships in the dockyard.

  When my uncle led me in through the doors in the middle of the ropewalk I stopped dead still in astonishment. It was full of a deafening rattling noise, and the musty smell of hemp, but the most overwhelming thing was just its length. In both directions the walls, and the wooden rails that carried the rope-making machines, stretched so far that you couldn’t see where they ended. It was like standing on a long, long straight road that runs to the horizon. The whole building was a quarter of a mile long, so that they could make the standard length of ropes needed for ships: one hundred fathoms. A fathom is six feet; it’s the way sailors measure the depth of the ocean. I didn’t know that then.

  There was a huge amount I didn’t know then, from having spent my whole life in the country. I learned a lot even that first day, from listening to my uncle and his friends. Everyone was expecting England to go to war with France and its ally Spain, because Napoleon Bonaparte was planning to take over all of Europe. He already had quite a lot of it. Until last year, said my uncle, we had been fighting France for years, mostly at sea. Pretty soon it would all start again, and our Royal Navy would have to fight off the navies of France and Spain and stop Bonaparte from invading the British Isles. At every shipyard in Britain, ships were being built at a frenzied rate, and since the rigging of a big battleship used twenty-seven miles of rope, besides heavy anchor cables and such, the ropewalks everywhere were also in a frenzy.

  I watched my uncle getting ready for work, on the upper level of the ropewalk, and I was in awe of him. He was a spinner, and he was like a little king. Because I was his nephew, all the men in his team greeted me kindly, even the man in charge of them all, that they called the gaffer. I can’t tell you how happy I was that day; I had never known anything like it. My uncle’s apprentice, a tall, lean, you
ng man called Will, even took time to explain the rope-making to me. He said the raw hemp came to the dockyard from Russia, in great bales like hay, and first it was soaked in whale oil to make it more supple, and then pulled through boards with metal spikes sticking up out of them, to make the fibers all lie in one direction. The men who did this were called hatchellers and they seemed to be pretty important too, but not like my uncle. Not like the spinners.

  Have you ever watched anyone spinning wool? I had, on the farm; it’s like magic, the way all those separate strands off the sheep’s back are twisted together into one long thread. My uncle Charlie and the other spinners worked this same magic with hemp. There were four of them spinning at any one time, two at one end of the long long walk and two at the other. Each one had a bundle of hemp wrapped round his waist, its end attached to three hooks on a round frame that another man turned with a handle—and as the frame turned, the spinner walked backward, spinning those hemp fibers into yarn with his hands. It was the beginning of all rope; three strands made from that yarn would be turned into most of the rigging of a ship.

  My uncle began his backward spinning walk, and the wheel frame rattled as it turned round. He glanced up and grinned at me as he backed past me, hands turning. I watched him disappear down the long walk. I wanted passionately to learn how to do what he did, one day.

  Then the young man Will was upon me—“Your time for work, Samuel!”—and he set me to sweeping up loose hemp all along the ropewalk, with a broom almost as big as me. That was what I did all day, because ropewalks have to be kept clean, safe from the danger of fire. Sweep, sweep, sweep; before I was a tenth of the way down the walk I had blisters on the palms of both hands. I tried to shift the broom to different places in my hands to avoid the blisters, and kept sweeping.

  Somewhere in the middle of the day we paused, for just long enough to eat the packages of bread and cheese that Aunt Joan had given us at dawn. We sat outdoors on bales of hemp, my uncle and me and the other men in his team. It was a cold day but sunny, and a release from the sweaty heat inside the ropewalk. The machines clattered on in there; when a few men were given a break, others took over, so that the work should never stop.

  I listened to the men talking about the war, in wonderment at all the things taking place beyond my cottage childhood. I wished I could report it all to my schoolmaster Mr. Jenkin. The men were fiercely proud of Chatham Dockyard, and of all the ships built there. The biggest of these was HMS Victory, which had been built forty years ago and had just been back in the dockyard for a long refit. Every inch of her rigging had come from this ropewalk, and a lot of it spun by my uncle. Three other ships were under refit in the dry docks now. Theirs were the masts I could see beyond the end of the long ropewalk. I liked the smell of the sea, and the wild calls of the seagulls wheeling overhead.

  “Keep up the sweeping, young Sam,” said Will, as we went back up the narrow wooden stairs to the spinning walk. “The gaffer will take you on, I reckon. I saw his eye on you.”

  “Good!” said my uncle. Since the gaffer was the master of that part of the ropewalk, he did the hiring.

  “I got blisters,” I said proudly, and showed them.

  “You’ll toughen up,” my uncle said. “Like this.” He held out his hands to me. I hadn’t noticed before, but his palms and fingers were calloused thick as leather, from years of pulling the raw hemp into a yarn.

  I said, “I want to be a spinner.”

  They all laughed. “Very well,” said my uncle’s partner Henry, a grizzled old man with a big belly. “Just get yourself stronger, boy. Watch your uncle at the start of a run—that’s sixty-five pounds of hemp round his waist to be carried and fingered into yarn, and he does that eighteen times a day.”

  And I did watch, as I swept, and marveled at how hard the work was, in this town just as in the country. But here, I could earn money, and send it somehow to my mother.

  I was triple blistered, and very tired, when the workday ended and the night shift came on—the ropewalk never stopped in this time of war and shipbuilding. But the gaffer said that I could stay, so I was happy as I stumbled along with my uncle and Will through the dark streets, past glowing doorways with voices shouting and singing inside. Those were taverns, I guessed, where men got drunk. I had heard my father talk of them, with an anger that might have been envy.

  It was noise from a tavern, as we turned a corner, that drowned out the sound of a brawl ahead of us in the street, and the cries of warning. “Run! Run! They’ll take you! Run!” We heard the voices, but too late.

  And suddenly hands seized us, and I saw my uncle twist angrily and strike out, and then fall as a man hit him with a kind of short club. I shrieked and tried to reach him, and that’s all I remember. Someone must have hit me too, and I was out.

  I woke up, dazed, to find myself hanging head down, swinging and bumping to and fro, over the shoulder of a huge evil-smelling lout in a crowd of shouting men. There were dozens of them, and they were dragging the poor wretches they had caught along the dark street. Women were screaming curses at them from bright doorways, and some were throwing things, or beating at them with any weapon they could find, a rolling pin or a chair leg. I caught quick glimpses, as the world swung round my upside-down eyes. I had no idea what was happening to me. I tried to kick at the back of my captor, and he grunted in anger and punched my head, so that my teeth bit my tongue. Blood came salt in my mouth, and it hurt so much that I went limp and hung helpless, rather than anger him again.

  I knew they must have caught Uncle Charlie and Will too, but I could see nothing but a blur of bodies.

  There must have been about thirty of us. They took us to a house where two flaming torches were fixed over the doorway. The giant holding me swung me down onto my feet, and pushed me with the rest into a room crammed with other captured men, all yelling and cursing and pleading as the door opened. And when we were inside, the door closed again. I was terrified. The man pressed nearest to me smelled like a tavern, and his eyes were rolling in his head. Gradually the eyes fixed themselves on my face, and he gave me a horrible sly smile.

  “Aren’t you a pretty boy?” he said, and he groped his hand out at me—and then doubled over shrieking, as someone’s knee smashed into his gut.

  It was my uncle, with Will beside him. Men drew back, making a little space around us. Will kicked at the drunk, and he vomited on the floor.

  “Scum!” my uncle said. His face was tight with anger and worry.

  I clutched his arm. I could hear my voice come out high, like a tiny boy’s. “What’s happening? What are they going to do to us?”

  “It is the Navy,” my uncle said. “When they need sailors, they take men from the streets—it is called being pressed into service.”

  “Every lad’s nightmare,” said Will bitterly. “Being caught by the Press!”

  The door swung open again, and three soldiers in uniform hauled out half a dozen of the nearest men—and we were amongst them.

  “March—this way—come on, you dogs—” and we were in a brightly lit room arrayed with four more soldiers, with guns this time. They were the soldiers of the Navy, called marines, but I didn’t know that then. They were standing along the wall, behind a table, and at the table sat a naval officer, a fat young man with a pink face. He wore a beautiful uniform, a dark blue coat with white cuffs and gleaming gold buttons, and white breeches. On the table in front of him was a black cocked hat, and beside it a lamp and a big open book.

  “Next,” he said, and pointed at my uncle, who was thrust forward by the butt of a marine’s gun before he had a chance to move by himself. He stumbled, and stood there scowling.

  “Name,” said the officer, barely looking at him. He dipped a pen in an inkpot.

  “I am Charles Davis of Chatham and I work at the dockyard,” my uncle said. “I am a spinner in the ropewalk, we are exempt from the Press.”

  “A likely tale,” said the fat young officer. “Let’s look at your hands.”r />
  My uncle spread his calloused palms. “A spinner’s hands,” he said.

  The officer snorted. “Those are the hands of every jack in the Navy, my friend. You’re a merchant seaman.” He wrote in his book. “Age?”

  “Thirty-six,” my uncle said. His voice was tight and tense, I could feel him forcing himself not to shout. “And I am no seaman, sir.”

  “But now you have the opportunity to serve in His Majesty’s Navy,” said the officer, writing. “You are a fortunate fellow. Next.”

  He turned his head to me.

  My uncle started talking in a rush, resisting the marine who was trying to drag him away. “Sir,” he said, “this is my nephew, who is not but eleven years of age. He is a child. In all humanity I ask you to let him go.”

  The pink-cheeked young man surveyed me and then my struggling uncle. “Stuff,” he said. “Look at the size of him, he is at least fourteen years old. Are you not, boy?”

  I said huskily, “I am eleven, sir.”

  “Ill-educated in numbers, I see,” he said blandly. “Name?”

  “Samuel Robbins, sir.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Hunter Green,” I said. “A village north of here.”

  “Oh la,” he said, writing. “Let us set down London. Go with these fine marines, you and your uncle, and you will have excitement and adventures, and money in your pocket the rest of your days.”

  I said, because I had not thought of it, “Money?”

  “Seven pounds a year for a boy,” the officer said. He smiled to himself, perhaps at the difference between that and his own pay.

  “Shall I be able to send it to my mother?”

  “Of course!” he said.

  My uncle tried again. “Sir, have pity on—”

  “Enough!” said the officer sharply, and thumped the table. The flame of the lamp flickered wildly. And the marines pulled us out of the room, as he turned his attention to Will.

  It was Will, as things turned out, who was the only one of us to escape being pressed. I remember that night only as a blur of noise and shoving and stumbling, with my wits still fuzzled by the blow on my head. But I know that maybe twenty of us, out of the crowd in that first room of pressed men, were taken through the streets to the River Medway, upstream from the dockyard, and hustled down a flight of slippery stone steps to a jetty, and then into a broad open boat. Some of the men had irons on their legs or arms, but the press gang had run through their stock of irons just as Will, my uncle and I were brought down, and so we were not chained.