Victory Read online

  “Molly! Over here!” It is her grandmother’s clear positive voice, and Molly sees that her family has encamped itself beneath a tree—a young, modest tree still tethered to a post, with a hundred years or so to go before it matches the giant old trees elsewhere in the Gardens. Kate is spreading a dark green tartan blanket familiar to Molly from years of picnics, Grandad is unfolding two collapsible chairs, and Granny has begun ceremoniously opening the cooler and the old-fashioned wicker hamper that she took great pleasure in packing before they left. Donald is soon sprawled happily on the blanket, hauling himself onto all fours, rocking back and forth in a vain attempt to crawl. He looks like a trapped turtle. Molly beams at him. She feels an enormous sense of well-being.

  They eat the feast that Granny has now unpacked: ham and tomato sandwiches, crunchy green beans, cheddar and (added by Grandad) Stilton cheese, apples, brown bread and chocolate, with blackcurrant soda for Molly and a thermos of tea for the rest. Grandad, a man of definite tastes, lingers over his chocolate, and an envious wasp zooms round his head trying to settle in his beard. Molly scrambles up from the blanket to escape the wasp, and finds herself colliding with an unexpected person approaching over the grass.

  “Sorry!” he says. It is the boy from the Round Pond, holding his hawklike brown-sailed yacht by its mast; he lets it down to the ground, so that its hull leans against his leg. He gives Molly a brief grin of apology, but he is looking past her, at Kate. He says, “Er—Mrs. Jennings?”

  Kate looks up, startled. She has been Mrs. Hibbert for two years now, and has begun to get used to it.

  The boy says, “I’m Alex. Alex Stewart. We used to live in the ground-floor flat in Merton Square, do you remember? You knew my mum, her name is Mary. We have a golden retriever.”

  “Buster,” Molly says, out of some deep well of memory. Now she realizes why this boy looked familiar.

  He turns to her, surprised. He is almost grownup, with a faint dark shadow on his upper lip. “Excellent!” he says. “That’s right. Buster’s still around—he’s pretty old, though. Fat and lazy. And you’re Molly? You grew up.”

  “So did you,” Molly says.

  Kate says, “And you moved, didn’t you?” She surfaces out of remembering. “Oh, I’m sorry—Alex, these are my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Blake.”

  Granny and Grandad and Alex Stewart all nod and smile at one another. “We bought a house in Fulham,” Alex says. “But I sail the boat here, when I can.”

  “She’s a beauty,” Grandad says.

  “Isn’t she? I just got her, she’s my biggest yet.” He touches the brown mainsail with pride, and looks again at Kate. He says hesitantly, “That’s why I had to come over when I saw you. It was your husband who got me started on boats, do you remember?”

  Kate looks blank. “Did he?”

  “Right here. He had a wonderful yacht. I was about eight, I think. He showed me the controls, he let me sail her all the way across the pond, I’ve never forgotten it. He got me hooked. My mum and dad had to buy me a boat the next Christmas. You were here, that first day, we all were, both families. Molly was very little, a toddler. We’d all come for a picnic, like you are now.”

  Granny holds out a plate. “Have a sandwich, Alex.”

  The boy laughs. “No, thank you, I must go. I just wanted to say hello.” He picks up the boat again with his left hand, and holds out the right one to Kate, who shakes it. He adds, rather quick and low, “I was really sorry about Mr. Jennings.”

  “Thank you, Alex,” Kate says.

  To Molly’s surprise, Alex Stewart puts out his hand to her too, and she takes it. The hand is big and hard, like Russell’s. “Good-bye, Molly,” he says. “Nice to see you.”

  “Good-bye.”

  They all watch him walk away, carrying the brown-sailed yacht that is almost as tall as Molly. “That was pleasant,” Granny says.

  Grandad nods. “Nice boy,” he says.

  “I didn’t see any point in explaining about Carl, and America,” Kate says.

  “No, of course not.”

  Molly is not listening to them. She is gazing out at the Round Pond, seeing in her mind flickers of images that she had not known were there. A tall man with something in his hand, and a smaller figure beside him. A boat on the water, moving, its sail curving out white and full. She is very small, she is running toward the man, calling. But he does not look at her, not at this moment; he is looking out across the water, squinting into the sunlight, watching his boat dip and sway in the small waves.

  And then he is gone.

  Sam

  1803 – 1805

  For the first few weeks on the Victory, I had hated the sea. I was no longer sick all the time, but the weather continued foul as we sailed south. Day after day, the sea was so rough that the ship was always heeled over in one direction or the other, tipping so steeply that you could never walk without clutching at a bulkhead or a cannon. In some places there was netting to hang on to. The men would reach over their heads and grab a beam in the ceiling, but I was not quite tall enough. Sometimes I had to go on all fours. It was miserable all the way along the coast of France, and then of Spain and Portugal—not that I could see the coast, nor anything but waves and spray.

  But gradually I got used to it and managed to stay upright. One day I saw Tommy laughing at me, as I skidded along the deck on my way to feed the chickens.

  “You got your sea-legs, Sam!” he said, and I realized I had come half the length of the tilting ship without holding on to anything at all. Later that day, as we thrummed along under our creaking load of canvas, the clouds broke, and I saw the moon rise in the twilight sky. A big fat white moon it was, over the restless sea, and I looked at it through the dark mesh of rigging and thought that it was beautiful.

  Then a bosun’s mate flicked his cane against my bare legs and snarled, “Move, boy!” and I was back in the Navy again.

  Though I still worked for the cook, I was no longer the slave of the mess at which he and his hangers-on ate. Thanks to my uncle and James Hartnell the rope-maker, I had a new family: the six men of their mess, number seventy-eight. I could hardly believe my good fortune. At the start of each month any man could change his mess, if he disliked the men he was with, or wanted to be with a friend elsewhere, but boys were not important enough to get that chance. I was just lucky that Lieutenant Quilliam had noted my connection to my uncle at the beginning—and it helped that we had joined the service, and were not written down as pressed men.

  So now, at midday dinnertime and at supper, I would run down from the galley to the lower gundeck, where there was a roar of voices as the wooden mess tables were unhooked to swing down from the ceiling between the great cannons. The grog issue came right after dinner and supper, so these were the most cheerful times of the day. The men sat at benches on either side of the table; I sat on a barrel, at the end. They took turns weekly to be mess cook, the one responsible for bringing the food from the galley, and I used to go with each one of them; I was still a cook’s boy, after all, and that was useful even if Mr. Carroll was in a bad mood. I helped to clean up too; the mess tables had to be spotless for inspection.

  They were good men in that mess, none of them very young, all of them craftsmen. My uncle and Mr. Hartnell were the only rope-makers; the others were sailmakers. William Smith, a sturdy, amiable man from the West of England, was the master sailmaker; his mate was Andrew Scott, and Jonathan Stead was one of their crew—he was the oldest, a tall, stooped man with a thin fringe of hair round his bald head and a sad, lined face. In all the time I knew Jonathan I never saw him smile, not even at the funniest joke, not even after the second grog issue of the day. But he never cuffed me or even yelled at me, and when he found I had no knife of my own to eat with, he gave me an old one he had in his kit, after sharpening it very fine and giving it a canvas sheath so it would not cut me.

  Early in the morning before breakfast, the mess cook went to collect sugar, butter, bread and flour for his mess from the p
urser’s stores. If it was one of the four days of the week when we had meat, he also needed to pick out our share from the “steep tub” where chunks of salt pork or beef had been soaking overnight. To make this fair, every mess cook reached a long fork over the edge of the tub without looking, and he had to take the chunk that the fork pricked. A metal tag called a tally, with the number of his mess on it, was attached firmly to that chunk of meat, and along with all the rest it was boiled, for hours. Then at dinnertime we went to fetch it, and sometimes a bag of vegetables—also tagged—which had been boiling too.

  Ship’s bread, which was really a baked round biscuit as hard as wood, was kept near each mess table in a box called a “barge.” Each mess had a keg of vinegar too, which was issued every two weeks. The water we drank was kept in casks in the hold and tasted worse and worse as it got older and older; it was a little bit better if you added some vinegar. And vinegar was useful for covering up the taste of the nastier kinds of food, too—like the brined cabbage, called “sour krout,” that smelled so bad when a cask of it was first opened that men ran away if they saw one rolled out onto the deck. Mr. Smith made me eat the cabbage, though; he said it was an Admiral Nelson rule, to prevent scurvy, the disease which killed many seamen on long voyages.

  I was used to horrible smells, from working in the galley—not to mention the pigsty. The first reek of the day came from the thin sticky gruel called “burgoo,” that Mr. Carroll made every morning by boiling nasty oatmeal in stale water. It was a regulation breakfast, but the men in our mess hated it so much that they wouldn’t eat it. Like a lot of other messes, they bribed the cook instead to blacken ship’s bread over the galley fire, then grind it to a powder and boil it in water. We called this dark goop “Scotch coffee” and drank it with a little sugar, if we had any—and that, with a piece of the hard bread, was breakfast.

  It could have been worse. On the farm we had often had no breakfast at all.

  All morning, for the four meat days of the week, the galley stank of boiling salt pork or beef. When they first came out of their barrels, those fatty, gristly, bony chunks of meat were white with grains of salt, and as hard as rock, and even their overnight soaking didn’t change them much. As they boiled away in the big coppers over the galley fire, the fat would rise to the top in an evil yellowish layer that Tommy had to skim off. Mr. Carroll didn’t trust us boys to do it, because the fat, called “slush,” was very valuable to him. Half of it was used to grease the ship’s rigging, but the other half belonged by tradition to the ship’s cook. He wasn’t supposed to sell it to the men, but a lot of them were greedy for it, so of course he did. They spread it on their bread, or mixed it with flour to make a boiled pudding. Mr. Smith always made sure to buy some for our mess, but I wouldn’t touch it; I’d spent too many hours scrubbing the coppers after Tommy had scraped out the last yellow layer of the awful stuff.

  Almost every minute of every day on board ship was regulated, from the wake-up shake before dawn that sent Stephen and me to the galley, to supper before dusk and lights out four hours later. I was beginning to learn the strokes of the ship’s bell, struck every half hour, that divided a day and night into six four-hour watches, but I still got muddled sometimes. The rhythm of each day was so much more exact than on the farm.

  At weekends, everything was focused on Sunday morning inspection, before the church service. Every morning of the week we had to parade on deck in divisions, but on Sunday the inspection was truly fierce. You had to be shining clean and in a fresh shirt and trousers (and freshly shaved, though I didn’t have to worry about that) or your name would be taken for punishment. So on Saturdays, we were given an hour after dinner to wash and mend our clothes, and the sailors with long hair plaited each other’s pigtails smooth and neat. I was planning on a pigtail, but all I could do so far was tie my hair back in a little stub.

  One Saturday I was mending a hole in my uncle’s clean shirt, while he scrubbed his chest at a barrel of seawater shared with a group of others, and William Smith the sailmaker stopped to watch me.

  “Ho,” he said in his round Devon accent. “Look at thee, now. Middling good, for a rope-maker’s boy.”

  “My mam used to make me help her with sewing,” I said, flushing. “My sisters were too little.” But then I realized with surprise that the expression on his face was not amusement, but interest.

  “And hast a strong wrist? Push at my hand.” He held out his big hand with the fingers pointing upward, palm toward me, and I held mine the same way and shoved my palm at his. I didn’t last long, of course; he was strong as an ox.

  My uncle shook his wet head, splashing us, and began rubbing himself dry with his dirty shirt. “Arm-wrestling with a boy, William?” he said.

  “Charlie,” said Mr. Smith, “I have a mind to steal this lad for a sailmaker.”

  “The service owns him, not me,” said my uncle Charlie cheerfully. “We are not allowed him for roping—he has a talent for chickens.” He grinned at me. He was not totally cast down by life in the Navy, even though he sorely missed my aunt; I think he was relieved to be still doing the work in which he took such pride. And the other men liked him.

  William Smith snorted. “Chickens! When we go into battle the chickens go overboard—and the sails need mending.”

  “Overboard?” I said. “Is that true?” I was getting quite fond of my chickens—at least of the egg-layers, which I rarely had to kill.

  “All the livestock,” said Mr. Smith. He gave me a horrid leer, rolling his eyes, but I could see he was telling the truth. “Clear the decks for action, the order goes. Pigs and cannon don’t mix.”

  “Oh.” I felt sad for a moment. I had heard plenty of bloody stories about battles, from sailors who loved to try and terrify the boys, but nobody had mentioned chickens and pigs.

  “So tha’ll need a second occupation,” said William Smith.

  And that was how I came out of the bowels of the ship into the fresh air, far more often than before—for sailmaking needs space, and the sailmakers worked on deck whenever possible. William Smith had only to mention to the bosun, who had charge of all rigging and sails, that I might be useful to him, and half my galley duties vanished away. Every ship depended for its life upon its carpenters and sailmakers, and the masters of those crafts were warrant officers, who would stay with the ship even in peacetime, when the captain and officers would be let go. William Smith got what he wanted.

  The cook grumbled loudly at losing half my time, but they gave him another of the boys, Hugh Portfield from Ireland, who had been cleaning the officers’ cabins, and was glad of the change. And Stephen enjoyed ordering Hugh around. I still slept with the other boys, and big William Pope and I had become almost friends. I was closest to Stephen though. His street tricks were serving him well; he was quick and crafty, good at wheedling favors out of seamen in illegal exchange for his ration of grog—which by the strange laws of the Navy he was supposed to drink himself, even though he was so small that it would make him drunk, and drunkenness was a flogging offense. He was also, I noticed, beginning to pocket an occasional treat from the supplies that passed through the galley from the purser: an egg, or a chunk of the soft bread baked for the officers, or a piece of fruit.

  “Be careful,” I would say, and Stephen would laugh.

  “Care killed the cat, Sam.”

  “I thought it was curiosity killed the cat.”

  “Well, it wasn’t pinching an apple.”

  We were growing up fast, we boys, in some ways. We were certainly seeing the world, as Lieutenant Quilliam had promised me. Before long we had not only passed the whole of France, Portugal, and Spain, we had reached the Strait of Gibraltar, and were sailing in past the big rocky fortress that guards the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. Gibraltar being in British hands, we fired them a salute, with no shot in the guns, and they fired one back. We sailed through the narrow strait dead true on course, with flags flying and all our redcoats lined up standing to attention, and I
felt proud to be part of the ship.

  It was strange to have a feeling like that. I had it again the next time we fired a salute, when we had sailed halfway across the Mediterranean, past the rocky coasts of islands whose names I didn’t know, to join the fleet and our Admiral. I counted nine great ships scattered across that blue sea, and a few smaller ones, and when we had saluted one another, Lord Nelson came back aboard with Captain Hardy to take HMS Victory as his flagship.

  Our Captain Sutton left us, with all the ship’s company standing at attention and the bosun’s pipe shrilling and the ship’s band playing; off he went in the Admiral’s barge to take command of the frigate Amphion, which had been Captain Hardy’s ship. The men were sorry to see him go, because he was a good captain and Captain Hardy was said to be a strict man for discipline. But Nelson had chosen to have Hardy, and nothing mattered more to any of the men than the honor of being on the same ship as Horatio Nelson.

  It was hard to believe that less than a year earlier I had hardly even heard of him.

  When I was growing up, the only songs I ever heard were the lullabies my mother used to sing to the little ones, or the hymns in church. I still heard hymns, and sang them too, at the chaplain’s service on deck on Sundays, but for the first time I discovered other music as well, in the forecastle—“fo’c’sle” for short—when the men got together just to be themselves. Three or four of them could play a pennywhistle, and one of the topmen had a fiddle and was really good. He would play hornpipes often, and some of the men would dance. And a few sang songs—sad songs usually, about their sweethearts, or some heartless girl who had forsaken them.

  Jonathan Stead was one of these, to my astonishment; he had a warm, deep voice, and his mournful face made the sad songs seem even sadder. Sometimes he played a pipe between verses. It was strange to see big strong sailors sitting quietly listening to him with faraway looks and even tears in their eyes.