Victory (4 page)

The walls of our cottage were made of wattle and daub, thick enough to keep out the wind, and the roof was of thatch, and leaked. Often my brother and I had to climb up on the thatch and stuff hay into a place where we thought the leak might be. For the seven in our family there were two rooms, one at the front for cooking and eating and the other for sleeping. The front room had the hearth, so between the two rooms there was only half a wall, to let the heat go through. All of us slept there in the back on straw mattresses, in a row: me on the end, then my three little sisters Mary, Alice and Beth, then Mam, my father and my big brother Dick.

I took Mary and Alice to school in spring and autumn, but Beth was too young, only a baby. There was another baby to come soon; my mother's belly was swelling again. My father was always turning to her at night, whether she wanted it or not. He would start to snore as soon as he was done. Once, afterward, I reached out across my little sisters' heads to stroke Mam's hair just for a moment, and she kissed my hand and I could feel that her cheek was wet.

I hated my father. He was all shouting and hitting; there was never a kind word out of him. He worked hard, but that was the most you could say for him, in my opinion. My elder brother Dick was the same, always picking fights with me because he knew he could win. Our tiny humpbacked schoolteacher Mr. Jenkin was worth five of them, though
Dick would have thrashed me if I had told him so. Mr. Jenkin said I was the best reader he had ever had, but my only sight of school now was in taking the little girls. My father said I had had more than enough schooling, and wanted me always out digging or getting firewood.

Soon he would have me off with him and Dick to be a laborer on the farm. I was there often already, helping with the hens and the sheep, but this was a good year for catching rabbits and my father knew I was skillful at that. So he gave me time for my snares, and I skinned the rabbits and fixed the skins to a board and rubbed ashes into them, and if they were any good Mam would make us a jerkin or a hat. The most important thing was the meat; she made a stew whenever I caught a rabbit. My father and Dick always ate most of it.

It was winter when my uncle came. Winter was the worst time, always wet and cold. However much straw we laid on the earth floor of the cottage, water came in under the door and turned the earth to mud; it was almost better when the ground froze. My mother kept a fire burning in the hearth for as much of those short days as she could manage, but you had to be close to it to be even half warm. She made broth to warm us up, if my father brought home a carrot or turnip or two from the fields. On the day I am telling you about, Dick brought home a slab of bacon that one of the cooks at the big house had given him when he delivered a sack of potatoes. She thought him a likely fellow, I dare say; girls did, sometimes. They didn't know him the way I did.

“Good lad!” my father said, when he smelled the bacon and heard where it came from. “That's the kind of son to have, not one that sits sewing like a girl.”

He meant me. Mam was hemming sheets for the big house, and it was a lot of work so I was helping her. She'd taught me how to sew when I was a little fellow, wanting to copy whatever she did.

“The sewing pays money,” my mother said.

My father gave a scornful snort, and let go a great fart for good measure. He took the best seat by the fire, and Beth came climbing into his lap, not out of affection but because it was the only place to be warm.

Then there was a man's voice calling outside, and the door opened, and in out of the cold rain came the dripping figure of my uncle.

I didn't know who he was, but my mother let out the most joyful cry I had ever heard in my life.

“Charlie!”

She ran to him and flung her arms round him, wet jacket and all, and they stood hugging each other for a long minute while we children gaped, and my father sat unmoving by the fire.

My mother and my uncle Charlie were brother and sister, you see. They had grown up together very close, in their big family in the town of Chatham, on the coast. But somehow my mother met my father and married him, and he took her away from Chatham to our cottage. Until this day, Mam told us, she hadn't seen her brother Charlie for
thirteen years. Certainly none of us had ever seen him before—though we knew about him from the stories Mam had always told us about her family, faraway people, separated from us by limitless time and space.

Suddenly now one of them was real. I stared at him. He was a short, stocky man, with broad powerful shoulders and a cheerful kind of face. Like Mam and me, he had blue eyes and straight light brown hair.

Mam told him all our names, and he nodded to each one of us, and smiled. Then Mam took the pot off the fire, and divided the soup between eight dishes instead of seven. She took a very small one for herself. I could see my father keeping a sharp eye on how much bacon went into his own dish, and Dick's, and Charlie's: I knew Mam had cut off and saved most of the fat bacon to use later, so only the meaty bits, which we hardly ever saw, were in the pot with the broth and potatoes.

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, young 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.