I could not help feeling the irony of it. Horatio walked the decks in all weathers, enduring everything that sky and sea could visit upon him, from the tropics to the North Pole, and here were we, discussing the perils of an April day in Portsmouth. I made a sort of face at Bobby. “Does your mother go on about scarfs to you too?”
“She does, yeah. Coats and hats as well. She feels cold, so she thinks everyone else does.”
He spoke as if he were my age, or I were his.
“Don’t you be cheeky,” Miss Lily said. She smiled at him and he smiled back, and I saw that these were two people who got on well together.
“Well, we are made of sterner stuff, aren’t we?” I said, man to man. I saw now that he was wearing a scarf, a blue and white one, tucked inside the collar of his anorak.
While I was waiting to get the tickets, I fell to wondering what it really signified, that expression—to take care of yourself. Of course Miss Lily had meant nourishing food and wrapping yourself up. But that is not the self, only the body. Harm is done to the self before we have a say in it; after that the choices are limited. It was in order to help me take care of myself that poor Penhas steered me back to Horatio.
When I turned back to them, I seemed to notice Miss Lily all over again. In that great glass hangar of a station, with its strange, bleak plenitude of light and strains of vaguely martial music, she looked bright-eyed and ready for anything in her jaunty beret. The other people I saw moving through those light-filled spaces seemed faint and somehow glaucous, leached of colour, but she was deepened. Bobby stood close beside her, solemn and still. For some reason he had turned his cap back to front—the long peak lay over the back of his neck. His eyes were on a dishevelled pigeon that had found its way in and was strutting about among the feet of passers-by.
Nothing much was said in the train. There were others in our compartment, and the presence of strangers imposed a constraint on us, who were not much more than strangers ourselves. She was sitting opposite, and sometimes our eyes met. Bobby fished out a folded magazine from his anorak pocket. It had a picture of a dinosaur on the outside and seemed to be mostly pictures inside too. We got sandwiches and tea and a Coke for Bobby from a trolley that passed down the corridor.
Portsmouth was distinctly chilly. A cold wind straight from the sea met us as we stepped from the station, striking through the poor defences of my jacket and pullover. My eyes watered. Naturally I denied any slightest discomfort when Miss Lily—inevitably—remarked on this nasty wind and asked me if I didn’t feel perished. No, no, very bracing, very refreshing. It got even colder as we approached the harbour. Miss Lily tucked her chin into the collar of her coat; Bobby took some quick steps forward and then back, as if casting for a scent. He was still wearing his cap the wrong way round.
It is not possible to go aboard HMS Victory and wander about as and when you want; you have to go in a group with a guide, and these tours take place at regular times through the day. We had an hour to wait before the next one, and I suggested a visit to the Naval Museum on the quayside. This houses the whole splendid story of our wars at sea, from the timbers of Henry V’s flagship, the Grace Dieu, to maps of naval operations in the Gulf War. But in view of the limited time, we naturally made for the Nelson Gallery.
It was warmer in here, but the sea light followed us, striking through the walls of glass that ran round the gallery on three sides—the same desolate light he must have seen on so many days, the light that lay around him as he waited that March day at Chatham to join his first ship. We mounted to the upper gallery, where the figureheads and pendants and cannon are displayed. I pointed out the ensigns and flags hanging there and explained to Miss Lily and Bobby what they stood for, whom they had belonged to. They always stirred my blood and quickened my imagination, not these naval standards only but all flags, all insignia of battle, the tattered banners of obscure regiments collecting dust in country churches, the monuments to the fallen in quiet squares, with their scrolled lists of the dead, the poignancy of these symbols wreathed in sacrifice and mourning.
Overhead and on the walls all round, the emblems hung motionless. I pointed out the ensigns on their poles, the white ones and the red, some with the Union Jack set in the upper left-hand corner, some without. “Do you know why that is?” I asked Bobby. He shook his head. His eyes seemed dazed, perhaps from the flooding of light through the huge plates of glass that surrounded us. “They started to include the Union Jack after 1707,” I said. “That was the date of union with Scotland.”
I felt cheerful and happy explaining these things. The gallery was empty; we had it for the moment to ourselves. The things that had been plaguing me, my restlessness and foreboding, my failure so far to extricate him, haul him free from the swamps of Naples 1799, all this receded and I felt at peace. Moreover, the light had changed; a thin sunshine had struck through the cloud and through our glass walls, and it fell here and there among the objects on show. Faint and pallid in itself, it brought brilliance to the painted figureheads, the pitted snouts of the cannon, the pink-faced uniformed effigies lining the gallery. I pointed out the broad pennant Horatio would have flown, as commander of a squadron, when he went into action at Cape St. Vincent, and the two flags, one below the other, that made up his favourite signal, the first in vertical stripes of red, white, and blue, the second a blue cross on a white background: Engage the enemy more closely.
“He was a great believer in close engagement.” I looked at Miss Lily as I said this, wanting her to share my feeling for the impetuous genius of Horatio, for the scenes of heroism that had taken place beneath these vivid emblems. However, she seemed no more than politely interested.
It was when I glanced at Bobby that I saw where my true audience was. He was chewing some substance now, very slowly. There was no mistaking his interest in these flags. In that pale face of his, with its thin ridges of bone at the temples and cheeks, the greenish eyes were serious and intent. “How close could they get?”
“They could still go on firing broadsides when they were practically touching.”
“But it is better to avoid fighting altogether,” Miss Lily said. “Things can generally be settled by a bit of common sense, and nobody gets hurt.”
“We couldn’t have settled Napoleon’s hash by any amount of common sense.”
“There’s always somebody’s hash to settle, isn’t there? That’s one thing that never changes. Might be the French, might be the man next door. It’s the Bedouin syndrome.”
“What on earth is that?”
“Me against my brother, me and my brother against our cousin, my family against the rest of the tribe, my tribe against everyone who isn’t Bedouin. That sums it all up for me, all these flags and things.”
“Common sense is the virtue of the common man,” I said, “and that is one thing Horatio Nelson wasn’t.” I was rather vexed with Miss Lily for these inappropriate remarks of hers among the emblems and engines of battle. “Where did you pick up this Bedouin business?” I asked her.
“Heard it on the radio. Years ago now.” She was looking from Bobby to me with the expression of mild obstinacy that characterized her. “It stayed in my mind,” she said. “Because it’s true, that’s why.”
“We had a different style of fighting,” I said to Bobby. “The French gunners preferred to fight at long distance, cutting away our masts and rigging and so disabling our ships. Our tactic was always to get in close, taking the enemy’s fire at first, until we were near enough to do massive damage. Lay a Frenchman close enough and you will always beat him. One of our favourite sayings. And by God, it is true. I got that saying from Locker.”
Bobby was still chewing, even more slowly now. “Who is Locker?”
I looked, smiling, at Miss Lily, expecting her to answer. But she said nothing at all. Her face wore a slight frown, as if she were puzzled about something. This silence on her part struck me as distinctly odd. She must know who Locker was; I had referred to him several times
in the earlier sections of my book. At this moment of uncertainty, I was again aware of the sunlight but now as a source of confusion; my mind wavered among real and fabricated things, the staring figureheads, the stiff models of midshipmen and marines, the woman and boy before me. I knew I had to be careful how I answered. “Horatio’s friend and mentor,” I said. “He was captain of the frigate Lowestoffe, thirty-two guns, which Horatio joined in April ’77 as an eighteen-year-old lieutenant. Locker was forty-six, and they became lifelong friends. Horatio had a great gift for friendship.” I was aware of the difference as I said this; I had no friends at all. But of course it was the price one paid for being on the shadow side.
The time for our visit to the Victory was drawing near. We left the museum, walked back along the quay, and joined the party waiting to go aboard, about a dozen people loosely grouped in the shadow of the mighty hull. No sign of a guide as yet.
She towered above us, fresh-painted in black and pale gold, stripped of sail but fully rigged, the Union Jack at her bow, the white ensign at her stern. I had seen her a number of times over the years, but the sight thrilled me again now: the exact intervals of her gunports, the scarlet and gilt of her figurehead, the fretted window frames of the captain’s cabin—his, Horatio’s, cabin. In this splendid ship the nation honours the time of her greatness, now gone forever, when she was mistress of the seas; honours too her greatest hero, a man fashioned for heroism just as this great wooden ship with its tiers of guns was fashioned for destruction. Instruments both … They cut pieces off him, didn’t they? Miss Lily’s question came at me again, uninvited, deeply unwelcome. I was turning to her, perhaps with some vague idea of expunging the offence by the sight of the offender, when the guide appeared at the top of the companion-ladder—he had been lurking within all this time—and beckoned us to come up, recommending caution as he did so.
A motley crew we clearly were, now that we converged on the ladder and I was able to take more note. Two couples who looked married; a younger couple who might or might not have been; two stout elderly ladies with identical-looking grey perms in company with a younger, talkative man, perhaps a son or nephew; a woman, short and whiskery, with notebook and pencil at the ready; and a silent tall man on his own. In anoraks and overcoats and hats and scarfs they had come together on this cold day to pay their respects to Horatio. However, we were unfortunate in the constitution of this group; I sensed it from the start.
“Up you go,” the son or nephew said in jovial tones to the ladies he was escorting. He glanced behind and gave the rest of us a wink. I hate these self-appointed jokers and professional jolly chaps. Urged on by him, the unwieldy permed ladies started up the ladder. They mounted with excruciating slowness, making the rest of us wait. At the top, in the confined space of the upper gundeck, we reassembled in a ring round our guide. Some members of the group made exaggerated sounds of exertion, especially one of the older couples, who had already been infected by the joker. “Mind your head, dear,” the husband said as we ducked under the beams. “You never know when you might need it.” It is always the case; you start off with one fool, then the spirit of emulation sets in and you end up with several.
The guide was a sandy-haired, square-faced man in a buttoned-up double-breasted blazer with coronet and shield stitched in blue and red on his breast pocket. “Well, here we are on HMS Victory, Lord Nelson’s flagship,” he said. “I am intending to conduct the tour in English, if that is okay with everyone.”
“We was sort of hoping you would do it in French,” one of the perms said. Everyone laughed at this except me and serious Bobby and the lady with the notebook. Miss Lily laughed with the others, and I was sorry to see this.
This laughter, in which she shared, was the real beginning of my suffering that day, because the guide too, as we descended to the bowels of the ship from deck to deck, stooping lower and lower as headroom diminished—he too turned out to be a comedian, delivering his commentary in a stale mix of joke and drama, no doubt derived from a hundred past tours. The joking was blasphemy, the drama was superfluous. On this ship where Horatio fought his last battle and took his last breath, all the imagination needs is the stimulus of facts.
In regard to these, the guide was competent but not wholly reliable. He said Horatio was “just turned twelve” when he joined the Raisonnable as midshipman, whereas in fact he was twelve years and three months when he was entered on the muster-roll and nearly twelve and a half when he actually joined the ship. Then he told us that the firing rate on board the Victory was a shot a minute, whereas in fact our gun crews at their best could deliver a broadside every seventy-five seconds, the French needing almost twice as long—a crucial element in the ultimate victory.
Nor did he succeed very well in conveying to his audience, accustomed to central heating and refrigerated food and the privacy of bathrooms, the nature of daily life on board a ship like this, the suffocating promiscuity of the lower gundeck, where several hundred men, among them a good number of disturbed or violent persons, lived in a proximity from which there was no escape, sleeping in hammocks slung from the beams and eating at mess tables put up between the guns. At sea, with the gunports closed, it would be dark and hot, the air would be thick with the stench of unwashed humanity. And the latrines, only six of them, out in the open, in the bows, six “seats of ease” for upwards of five hundred men …
In spite of the guide’s shortcomings, I did nothing to interrupt him but now and again shook my head at Miss Lily. At one point, my forbearance growing thin, I drew her and Bobby a little apart, in a darker space between the guns, and began to mutter some of the essential facts. But Miss Lily was only half listening to me; she was trying at the same time to hear what the guide was saying. He was telling them about the procedure for burial at sea.
“They put two cannonballs at the foot to weigh the body down. Then the tailor is brought in and he stitches the corpse into the hammock, beginning with the feet. When he gets to the face—”
“Excuse me, how many guns were there on the ship?” This was the lady with the notebook; she was in a world of her own. It was the third time she had interrupted the guide with a question, severely factual, quite unrelated to the discourse of the moment and always timed to ruin some high point in the narrative.
“One hundred and four, madam. The Victory was a first-rate, and a first-rate ship of the line had to have a hundred guns as minimum.”
She wrote this down, peering at her notebook in the light from the open gunport, just as she had peered a short while previously when writing down the cost of the ship’s construction, £63,000 in the money of the time, about £50 million today. What could she want with this information? She wore thick glasses, and there was a whiskery glint about her jaws. It was pathetic, really.
I began my muttering again, trying to secure Miss Lily’s interest, divert her attention from the guide. “That piece of rope there, you see it is blackened at one end—it has been dipped in tar in order to harden it.”
“Why did they do that?” Bobby asked. In the half-light I saw his eyes fixed on me. Miss Lily had moved away. She was listening to the guide, who was still rambling on about sea burial.
“When he gets level with the nose, he puts his needle through it as a final test of life before stitching the canvas over the face. If the face twitches or the eyes water … I can give you a practical demonstration if you like. The hammock is here before us. I’ll be the tailor. Any volunteers?”
Laughter. Again I see Miss Lily laughing among the others. She belongs in the crowd …
The laughter is cut short by the lady with the notebook, who this time performs a service. “How much canvas was used in the sails?”
“Madam, roughly four acres of canvas were needed to make the Victory’s sails.”
General expressions of astonishment. Bobby was still standing close, and he was looking at me, not the guide. On an impulse hardly understood at the time, I drew him farther from the group, away from the light
of the gunport. I began in low tones to tell him about the loading procedure, illustrating with gestures in the dimness the action of pushing a charge into the bore, then ramming it home, then jabbing a stiff wire down the vent to pierce the flannel cartridge before priming and firing.
It was strange—I forgot myself completely, acting this out for Bobby. I explained, in no more than a murmur, the mechanism of the flintlock, the spark that ignited the priming.
“Flintlock.” He lingered on the word. I saw the gleam of his eyes in the dimness. He was still wearing his cap back to front in that ridiculous fashion. “Did the flint always make a spark? What happened if the flint didn’t make the spark?”
“They used a piece of hemp as a match. There is a piece of it over here.”
We moved a little farther away. We were standing close together, speaking very quietly so as not to disturb the others. His face was turned up to me, very pale, glimmering slightly. He was looking towards the source of light, the open gunport and the thirty-two-pounder cannon within it, resting massively there on its blocked wheels. It suddenly seemed to me that I knew Bobby’s face from somewhere long ago; it was the face of someone I had once known well. I felt a certain threat to my balance as I stood there on that motionless deck, then something more, a feeling of urgency, an impulse to raise my voice, speak a loud warning. I had to go on talking, I could not look away from his face.
“This is a kind of shrine now. You must try to picture it as it was when the ship was in action—the heat and the din, the deck heaving, the guns roaring, the crews barefoot so as not to slip in the blood, the powder monkeys running up with cartridges from the magazines.”
“They were boys, weren’t they?”
“Boys like you. Younger than you. They had to be small and light to get up and down the ladders quickly. Men and boys alike wore bands around their heads to keep the sweat—”