Losing Nelson (29 page)

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—”

“Protect their ears.”

“What?”

“I put it in my project. The teacher told us. They wore the bands over their ears instead of earplugs.”

“Quite right, your teacher is quite right. Not that cotton headbands were much good—the men would bleed from the ears after the battle, quite copiously, yes, gushes of blood, did your teacher tell you that? No? Well, you can put something in your project that he doesn’t know or at any rate doesn’t say.”

“He says our sailors were the best in the world and we had better officers.”

I could not remember when I had last looked into another human face for as long as I had now looked into this boy’s. Again I felt the impulse of warning; again I blunted it, held it off with speech, but in a voice not like my own.

“And then there are the types of shot—cannonballs for damage to the body of the ship, chains to cut through the rigging, grapeshot for killing the crews …”

I could feel my larynx working and was aware of my mouth stretching and contracting, but it was as if I were listening to someone else on a bad line. Then I suppose I stopped talking altogether; there was a sort of resonant hush, faint and steady, like a distant sea. Through this the guide’s voice came, from somewhere behind me. I wrenched my gaze from the boy’s face, looked again at the tarred rope’s end, the hemp match, the grapeshot in cloth bags, strangely like testicles, lying on their racks behind the thrusting black muzzle of the cannon: things placed here for display, for devotion. It was true what in my agitation I had said to Bobby. This was a shrine, a memorial to forms of warfare long superseded. Here, in the still heart of the ship, one knew it. The
Victory
, so painted and burnished, so scrupulously maintained, was dead.

“Three tons of metal on wheels,” the guide said behind me. “Imagine the recoil of it, imagine what happened to the men in its way if once it got free.”

How much time had passed in this talk with Bobby I had no
definite idea; not very much, I suppose. No-one paid any attention to us when we moved back to rejoin the group. Miss Lily glanced at us and smiled. After some minutes more we went down to the cockpit in the orlop, where the dying Horatio was carried. And now at last there was unity among us and harmony of feeling, an absence of that coarse human propensity to belittle things, bring them down to our own mediocre level. No-one was so grossly insensitive as to make jokes down here, not even that clown of a nephew or son.

He was carried down to die among the dying. Space was made for him in a narrow corner. The pallet he died on is still there, and a low lamp is kept burning. He received his wound while the issue was still in doubt, but he was alive when they came to him with the news of the victory, the greatest British naval victory in history, the annihilation of the enemy that he had hoped for, prayed for. Some of the words of that last prayer he wrote before the battle ran through my mind:
May the great God, whom I worship, grant to my country and for the benefit of Europe in general a great and glorious victory
 …

The prayer was answered. The Franco-Spanish fleet was destroyed, their dead and wounded five times ours—the French lost twice as many men by drowning alone as we lost in the whole action. A triumph to ease the pains of his wound, the approach of death.
Thank God I have done my duty
. As we stood there in silence, the spirit of devotion rose in me, as it always had in this place, finally setting to rest the disturbance I had felt earlier, whispering to Bobby on the dark gundeck. I knew in that moment that I had been foolish and perverse to think this great ship was dead. Our small group, standing in awkward silence at the place where the hero died, was part of a vast annual pilgrimage. Millions of people had stood where we were standing in this obscure corner of the ship, far below the water line. Millions … That was hardly to be called a death. He had not died, he never will, not while our country’s great past is still remembered.

The tour finished on the quarterdeck, at the point where he received his wound. How vast the world seemed after the closeness and darkness belowdecks, how vast it must have seemed to them on that morning of Trafalgar as they prepared for battle. We stood round the polished brass plaque flush with the deck, marking his exact position when the ball struck him.

“Captain Hardy was walking with him,” the guide said. “Hardy was a big man, a good foot taller than Nelson. More of a target, you might say. It’s the luck of the draw, isn’t it? They were walking side by side here on the quarterdeck. Ten paces forward, ten paces back.”