“I suppose not,” Grandad says. “Mind you, we don’t have prairies or cowboys or Rocky Mountains either.”
Molly says, “There are no cowboys in Connecticut.”
“Carl’s house looks very agreeable, from the pictures,” Grandad says mildly. “And you have a pretty room, yes?”
“Yes, I do,” Molly says. “But it’s all so different. Everything in America is too big.”
Grandad rubs his thumb down one side of his beard, as she remembers he always used to do when he was busy thinking. Watching him, Molly finds all her deep miserable homesickness crystallizing into an astonishingly simple idea. In a moment, she has suddenly found the answer to all the problems of her life. Why did she never think of this before?
She half-turns herself to face Grandad, and he looks at her small intent face and thinks: what’s coming?
“Grandad,” Molly says, “could you and Granny adopt me?”
He blinks at her. “Adopt you?”
“So that I could live with you. I wouldn’t be any trouble, honest. My room is already there, for me to live in, and I could go to my old school on the Tube, and help Granny in the garden—and chop things up when you’re cooking—”
Grandad can’t smile at this, he is too appalled. “And what about your mother?”
Molly sees her wonderful idea lose some brilliance, as if a cloud had swallowed up the sun. In her heart she knows she could never leave her mother, but even so she persists with this sudden new dream.
“I’d see Mum for all the holidays,” she says.
“Sweetheart—Kate loves you. It would break her heart.”
“I don’t think it would,” Molly says doggedly. “She loves Carl too and she doesn’t mind America. And she’s got Donald. Looking after Donald is a fulltime job.”
The train’s metallic voice says, “The next station is Havant. Please change here for Chichester and Brighton.”
“Parenthood is a fulltime job,” says Grandad, reflecting that it is also lifelong. He is suddenly very concerned not just for Molly, but for his daughter.
“Please, Grandad,” Molly says.
“We’ll discuss it,” he says cautiously. “We’ll all discuss it. But today’s mission is HMS Victory. Do you remember the Nelson bicentennial last year? Sea Britain, and all those celebrations? Victory won’t be so crowded this year, with any luck.”
So they both take refuge in a little talk about Horatio Lord Nelson, though still Molly does not say anything about her piece of the flag. Nor about the strange fragments of dream which have begun to haunt her at intervals, more and more often now, like surfacing memories she did not know she had. All she knows about these hauntings is that they are something to do with Samuel Robbins and HMS Victory, and that they are becoming more and more important to her.
They have stopped at Havant, which seems to consist of a very long platform and not much else. “This train is for Portsmouth Harbour, and the next stop is Fratton,” says the voice, and there is a little chirpy sound as they begin to move again. Grandad has taken hold of Molly’s hand, and they are sitting together in silence, with her question about adoption hanging between them like an unexploded bomb.
As the train leaves Fratton, and sets off for Portsmouth and Southsea, a couple of chunky people in raincoats come stumbling through the carriage. They pause beside Grandad. “Excuse me, sir,” says the man, in a strong Texas accent. “Do we take the next stop for HMS Victory?”
“Not the next one. You want the last stop, Portsmouth Harbour.”
“The ship is right in the harbor, then?” says the woman. Molly eyes them both with smug English superiority. Typical American tourists, she thinks.
“Indeed it is,” Grandad says politely.
The Americans collapse into the two seats opposite, and the man looks at his watch. “Almost eleven o’clock,” he says. “This train was due in at ten thirty-nine.”
Molly says in her clearest voice, “Trains are late in America too,” and Grandad surreptitiously smacks her hand.
“They certainly are,” the lady tourist says amiably. Her husband says nothing, and Molly lapses into a private fantasy about his being banned entry to HMS Victory.
Raindrops begin to spatter against the windows of the train. When they arrive at Portsmouth Harbour they have to pull up their collars and set out into driving wind and rain, dodging puddles, toward the Visitor Centre. Molly is filled with excitement, but when they line up for tickets to see the Victory she is dismayed to find a person in a white gorilla suit prancing about and greeting the visitors. A gorilla? For Lord Nelson? Clearly everyone here is classified as a tourist, not just the Americans.
But she can see masts ahead, reaching up over the wet roofs. She tugs Grandad along, and a tall policeman in a rain-cape smiles at her impatience. “Straight along the walkway, m’dear,” he says.
And there is HMS Victory. She is amazing, enormous, with three masts reaching up into the sky from the great bulk of the ship. Her sides slope outward, mustard-colored, black-striped, filled with square black gunports. Molly stands still, gazing up. The rain spatters her face, but she does not notice.
The wind is singing in the rigging: a wild, commanding, timeless noise.
Grandad looks at Molly’s face, and smiles.
He leads her under the towering bowsprit, below the figurehead where carved cherubs support the royal coat of arms, past gigantic iron anchors suspended over the side. Molly follows him as if she were walking in a dream.
Grandad heads toward a square black entrance in the side of the ship, and Molly pauses, taken aback, feeling it shouldn’t be there. But there it is, so she goes on, after him, into a dimlit space that he tells her is the lower gundeck. A sailor takes their tickets, and gives them a leaflet with a plan of the ship.
And Molly stands on board HMS Victory, looking, listening, feeling against all reason that she has been here before.
Sam
1805
We never did catch the French ships; all we saw of them, in the end, was a few planks floating in the sea. And I never did set foot on any island of the West Indies, though we passed by a lot of them, with their green-topped cliffs and their exotic names: Barbados, Trinidad, Grenada, Antigua. But I saw pelicans diving into the sea with their great bills pointed down like swords, and black man o’ war birds slowly circling high, high up in the sky. And once when the lookout called in excitement down from the mast, out over the sea we all saw a glittering jet of water go up into the air, again and again, from a whale, spouting.
We did pause once to take on supplies, but then turned east again and chased the French back across the Atlantic Ocean.
“Why did they come all the way across, just to go back again?” I asked at supper.
“Beats me,” my uncle said.
Mr. Hartnell said, “There’s talk that maybe they were drawing us away while they invaded England.”
“No!” I said in horror.
“No indeed,” he said. “Those talkers are wrong. There’s the rest of His Majesty’s Navy out there, to keep Boney off. But our Admiral is in a right old hurry—watch how he piles on sail every day.”
So he did, too. And gun practice was regular even though it used up precious powder and shot, and so was practice with the cutlass and the pike. Even us boys, for whom a cutlass was too big and heavy, were trained to use a dirk or a knife.
“For see you here,” said the bosun’s mate, knife in hand, teaching us the quickest way to kill a man, “if the Frenchies are swarming over the side and one comes at you screaming, the only thing that matters is for you to kill him before he kills you. So you holds your knife like this, and you sticks it in there, and you pulls it upwards and then out again—”
This was the one part of the training that made me feel sick, but I knew he was right. I had been in the Navy for more than two years now, I had turned twelve and then thirteen; I had grown a hand’s breadth in height and I had a real sailor’s pigtail that my uncle plaited fo
r me every Saturday. But we had never fought a battle; I had never been in action.
Action was coming soon, that was for sure. I was half afraid of it and half excited.
I loved HMS Victory. When first I was pressed into the service and began to learn about the sea, I was puzzled by the way the men talked of a ship not as “it” but as “she.” But now I understood. A ship is not just a floating house, she has a character, like a person. She may be well-behaved or cranky under sail, she may answer swiftly or lazily to the helmsman at the wheel, she may be tight and dry or leaky-wet. When you lie awake in your hammock at night, you can hear the ship talking all around you; she creaks and squeaks and groans, all the time, and up aloft, her rigging sings in the wind.
And because we lived inside the ship and were therefore in her protection, I felt that in a way she was also our mother.
I missed my own mother bitterly, every moment, in the beginning. Even now, after two years, I thought of her very often, and wondered over and over how she was, and how my sisters were, and even my father and my brother. I wrote letters, whenever there was a chance for mail to go back to England, and my uncle had them sent with his own letters to my aunt Joan, hoping that she could somehow reach our house. Though my mother could not read or write well, and my father not at all, I hoped that by now my sisters would have learned. But I never had a letter back, though once my aunt wrote and told Uncle Charlie that she had visited and found them all well. That was kind of her, for it was a hard journey. It was a long grief to me to have no way of hearing from Mam.
Perhaps that lack was one of the reasons for my love of HMS Victory. She was always amazing, this small city of people in one floating wooden frame, but there were two moments above all when she was truly beautiful. The first came when we were to leave after we had been at anchor, or at any rate not under way, with all sails furled. There would be that wonderful order from the captain or the admiral on the quarterdeck: “All hands make sail!”—followed by the high calls on the pipes of the bosun and the bosun’s mates. Hundreds of feet thundered over the deck, hands reached for the rigging, then came: “Away aloft!” and the seamen flung themselves up the shrouds of the three great masts, maintopmen competing against foretop and mizzentop to see who could get there first. I held my breath as I watched them on that dangerous upward rush, every time, half longing to be one of them, half terrified of the risk of a fall.
Then came: “Trice up! Lay out!” and the tiny figures aloft would swarm out along the yards, till the masts and rigging looked like a tree in autumn thronged with migrating birds. And the last order was the one I waited for with most delight: “Let fall, sheet home, haul aboard, hoist away!”—for then suddenly, to a chorus of moving ropes and blocks and beams, all the sails of the ship would drop, rise, fill, all at once, billowing out to catch the wind. And Victory under full sail carried four full acres of canvas—held up by those twenty-seven miles of rigging, cared for and mended and remade by my uncle and the other ropers.
My other favorite moment came when the ship was indeed under full sail, cutting through the ocean, rising and falling in the swells, with a bone in her teeth, as the men said—meaning the white spray she threw off on either side of the bow. I saw neither of these favorite moments in my first year on the ship, being trapped below decks by my duties. But now that I was older and no longer owned completely by the cook, I was on deck far more often, happy in the smells of the sea and the spray, that were so much more agreeable than the multifarious below-decks stinks of the ship and her men.
And I knew that someday, when I was bigger, I would work and beg and pray to become one of the topmen running up those masts. This was where I lived my life, now; this was where I belonged.
When I said this to my uncle Charlie, he smiled rather sadly and shook his head. “More power to thy young heart, Sam. As for me, I shall be back on land to my Joan the minute I am able.”
I could understand his feelings; after all, he was nearly forty years old. But none of us was close to being able to go home again, not yet.
Five weeks after setting sail from the West Indies we were back once more at Gibraltar, and then we sailed north, to meet Admiral Cornwallis’s Channel Fleet one evening in August, off Ushant. It was early evening when we reached them; we fired our salute across the sea and it echoed round the fleet like thunder. All the ships of our squadron stayed there with the fleet except Superb, who sailed on with us to England, and three days later we put Admiral Nelson ashore at Portsmouth Point after two and a quarter years at sea.
Even then, only the officers were allowed to leave the ship—and only some of the officers, at that. None of us men and boys was allowed to leave at all. Britain was at war, and the Navy would not risk giving any of its seamen—specially those who had been unwillingly pressed—the chance of deserting. So although women were allowed to visit the ship, and my aunt Joan came and brought presents for Uncle Charlie and me, I had no hope of going home to see my family. And I knew that even if my mother had been able to visit Portsmouth, three days by coach from our home, my father would never have let her go.
But it was good to hear the seagulls wheeling and crying overhead, off the Hampshire coast. Nowhere else in the world, it seems to me, do the gulls call with the same voice as they do over the waters around England.
Less than a month after we came home, we set sail again. On the 15th of September 1805, very early in the morning, the Admiral’s barge was lowered over the side from its place on the main deck, and its crew of seamen dressed very neat in white trousers and striped shirts pulled away toward Southsea, which is a part of Portsmouth. There they picked up Admiral Nelson from the beach, which the men said was thronged with hundreds of people cheering and wishing him well; and with Captain Hardy he came back to us, looking very splendid in a blue coat shining with the stars and ribbons of all the awards he had won.
I had just a glimpse of him as he came over the side, with the bosun’s pipe shrilling and the marines all lined up in their red and white uniforms, and I felt proud and frightened at the same time. My uncle and all the other men in our mess had said that we were off to fight the biggest of all the battles against Bonaparte; that the Admiral knew the whole French and Spanish fleets were gathered in the Spanish harbor of Cadiz, and he was taking us down there to blow them out of the water.
“And mark you,” Mr. Hartnell had said in a sad deep voice, looking I thought straight at me, “a lot of the men on this ship will be blowed out of the water at the same time.”
So we sailed south, and by September 27th we were off Cadiz, joining the British fleet that had been waiting there under Admiral Collingwood—though we fired no welcoming salute this time, nor got one, because our Admiral had forbidden it. The sea was filled with great ships of the line; it was a grand sight. For three days running we had their captains arriving at HMS Victory for dinners, one of them celebrating our Admiral’s forty-seventh birthday, and there was an endless piping and saluting as they came aboard.
Captain Hardy had the ship’s paint touched up, though whether that was for a birthday celebration I do not know, and because I was strong but light I was one of those lowered over the side with paint and brush, to hang over the waves trying to dodge the spray. The sides of the ship were broad stripes of yellow and black, and within the three yellow stripes were all our gunports, which had to be painted black with no black smears or dribbles. It was no easy job, hanging there sitting on a board with ropes strung through it and lashed round your waist. The worst danger was not of falling into the sea, but of catching the rage of Lieutenant Quilliam if you splashed yellow paint on a black stripe, or left a black toeprint on a yellow one as the sea swung you against the side.
The boat crews bringing the captains from the rest of the fleet told us that the other ships were being painted to match Victory ’s pattern. Every ship had to paint its masts buff-colored as well, to make sure they looked different from the hooped masts of the French and Spanish fleets.
&n
bsp; I said to Jonathan, next to me when we heard this, “Surely everyone can tell their ships from ours?”
He looked at me as you might look at a baby who calls a chicken a duck.
“This is for the thick of battle, Sam,” he said. “A ship is just a ship if its colors are shot away.”
But of course I had not seen battle, yet. I cannot tell you the difference that makes, in a mind, in a heart.
We sailed to and fro, out at sea off Cadiz, fifty miles out, watching the captains of our fleet come and go as the Admiral summoned them to HMS Victory to tell them his battle plans. I knew we were waiting for the enemy ships to come out of Cadiz harbor, but we were so far offshore that we couldn’t see them over the horizon. All we could see were the distant sails of Lord Collingwood’s smaller British fleet, between us and the coast.
“That’s Nelson for you,” said the captain of our gun crew, as we paused in one more mock drill. “He knows just where to sit so that the Frenchies can’t see him. They can see Old Coll’s fleet, but they have no idea how many ships we have all told.”
“But we can’t see them either,” I said, and then wished I had not spoken, because I was only the powder boy.
He answered just as if I was a man, though; we were a team, he was treating us all alike. “He’s got fast little frigates like Euryalus watching Cadiz,” he said. “If the frigates see the enemy come out, they clap on sail and signal Coll, and he signals us. And we chase!”
And that, in the end, was what happened, on October 19th in the morning. I was below decks, off duty, stealing a visit to Hugh to help him feed the chickens. Even though I no longer worked for the cook at all, I liked to be reminded of the farm and home. But suddenly the bosun’s pipes shrilled out above our heads, calling all hands, and heavy feet came clattering down the stairs. And I knew, with a sudden hollow feeling in my stomach, that this was the first step on the way to battle.
The poor chickens and their coops were snatched away in a squawking flurry, and a great banging and hammering began. Partitions and hatchways and even ladders were lashed up high or cut completely away, to leave as much space as possible for us to run out and fire the guns. I was sent to help roll hammocks and carry them up to the deck, to be stuffed into the netting along the sides of the ship—something we did every day, but extra important now as a protection against splinters and shot. Other men were loading furniture from the officers’ quarters down into the hold.