Victory (15 page)

Next day, Molly and Grandad catch the Portsmouth train from Waterloo Station: a handsome blue and white train, with orange and red doors. It has a voice, a metallic but soothing female voice which speaks from the ceiling and tells them that this is the 9:08 train for Portsmouth Harbour, and adds a list of the stations at which it will stop on the way. Molly feels a twitch of excitement as they begin to move. She is sitting next to the window. Grandad is beside her, reading
The Times
.

Gradually the tall buildings of London fall away as the train hums along, and Molly is looking at a landscape that she has not seen for a long time; the familiar rows of small brick houses, with tiled roofs, and clay chimneys with television antennas attached to them, and outdoor drainpipes running down from each roof. Blackberry bushes bloom along the edge of the railway track. It is a very ordinary English sight, but she looks at it with pleasure and affection. Fields slide by, green fields with sheep grazing in them.

Grandad folds
The Times
and tosses it onto the table in front of them. “Tell me why you want to see the Victory, Moll,” he says. “What's this book you've been reading?”

So Molly eagerly tells him the story of going to Mystic Seaport, and the rain driving them into Mr. Waterford's shop, and
The Life of Nelson
that she bought there because he reminded her of Trafalgar Square and home. But even now, even to her grandfather, whom she trusts more than almost anyone in the world, she says nothing about Samuel Robbins's piece of Nelson's flag.

Outside, a little village flashes past, all thatched roofs and bright blossoming gardens.

“Oh!” Molly says in delight.

“Picture book,” says Grandad, nodding.

“There are no villages in America,” says Molly. “Not like that.”

“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.

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 for 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.