Victory (5 page)

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.”

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.

It was dark. The water was very black and it smelled dank, like a ditch. We were pushed down into the boat, to sit there in a huddle between the sailors taking their places at twelve big oars. A wind was picking up, and small waves smacked at the sides of the boat. The tossing was strange to me, for I had never been in a boat before in my life. We were
pushed off from the jetty, and the boat lurched to and fro as the sailors raised their oars and waited for the order to row. There was a lantern swaying over the back of the boat, but we were in the front, in shadow. Will was near me; I noticed he took care to press himself against the side of the boat, well ahead of the first oarsman.

Suddenly my uncle gave a great shriek from the other side of the mass of chained men. “A rat!” he howled. “I am bitten! There are rats in this boat!”

There was a hubbub at once. Everyone fears rats. The other men began to shout and shift about. “Rats!” they cried. “Beware the rats!”

The boat tossed from side to side, even though it was a broad, heavy thing, and the officer in charge shouted angrily. The marines in the boat thumped out at the men with their gunstocks to keep them still—though I noticed that even they peered warily round the bottom of the boat as they did so. In a while, there was a command—“Oars—ready—row!” The seamen began to pull, and gradually we moved out into the middle of the river, heading for the estuary where the great ships were at anchor.

Will was no longer beside me. It was too dark for me to see where he had gone, so I curled myself into an unhappy lump on the bottom of the boat, and thought about my mother, and tried not to cry. I found out later that Will was no longer in the boat at all. In the moments while everyone was distracted by my uncle's shriek, he had slipped over the side into the water. My uncle told me afterward that they
had planned it together, whispering hastily in the only few minutes they could snatch. Unlike the rest of us, he said, Will could swim like an eel. He was the son of a fisherman and had grown up on and in the water every summer. He knew that if he had just an instant's chance to get into the sea, he could dive down and swim silently away below the surface. So my uncle gave him his chance.

The water was choppier as we headed out into the estuary. I grew more and more miserable as the boat tossed, and I felt sick. Before long I threw up in the bottom of the boat, and made my poor neighbors miserable too. I lay there curled up in a ball with my eyes shut, feeling gobs of seawater splash over me, and I clutched my arms round my shoulders and cried like a baby. I didn't care who heard me. I wanted my mother, I wanted her arms round me, I wanted to be at home.

By the time we reached the towering side of a great ship I could neither see nor hear what was happening, what with the rising and falling of our boat, which now seemed so small, and an enormous eerie sound overhead that was the whistling of the wind in the ropes of the ship's rigging. One by one we were sent up the huge side of the ship, clinging to a kind of rope ladder; it was hard to catch hold of it from the tossing boat, and I would have fallen into the sea if my uncle had not been close behind me, helping.

And once up on the deck of the ship there was no relief, nor any care for us, for we were herded down a narrow stairway into a miserable space where we were shut behind
a grating, with about a dozen others who were there already. There they left us all night, with only a leather bucket of water and a panikin to share it with, and a basket of what was called bread but was biscuit hard as wood. If they counted us they must have noticed one was missing, which meant trouble for someone in charge. I hope it was the fat young officer, though I never saw him again.

My uncle said to the sailor who locked us in, “What ship is this?”

The man stared, then laughed. “Damme, what loons have they sent us? This is Captain Sutton's ship, cully—HMS Victory.”