The Profilist

by Adrian Mitchell

  By way of contrast, some evenings I made my way into the darker, undifferentiated mass of the town, away from the barrel organs and oyster stalls along the foreshore, through the back lanes with their rackety out-of-the-way tippling houses and tempting dark doorways, past the boarded-up shops, along stone pavements half shining in the dimness to wherever my steps took me. I was solitary, but not lonely. There was always something to catch my attention.

  I recall one evening not long before my own departure, standing in the shadow of a wall and looking out across the water, if that deeper pitch of darkness could be called a shadow, for this was well past dusk. The town officials and the military had taken down a small part of the dockyard wall and opened up a vista for the people, just near the Round Tower. That gave a splendid view of all that was coming and going in the harbour. On this particular night, with a bit of a mizzling rain drifting about, and a skittish breeze, I had the waterfront to myself, or this part of it at least. A line of prison hulks loomed unnaturally high in the water—they carry no superstructure, and nor are they weighted with guns or ballast, except I suppose for the irons those poor souls have to wear. I could make out the glimmer of horn lanterns hanging over the poop decks. The hulks, heeling a little at their moorings, are kept well out from shore, not just to discourage the inmates, but to keep the stench away too. As it was, all sorts of disgusting evidence was floating in from them. The famous Portsmouth tides have their work cut out cleansing away that filthy slick.

  That vileness rather aptly extends the meaning of the word ‘noisome’, for there were mindless yells and clamouring from its all too identifiable source, soon enough subdued, only to break out once again. The night was punctuated by the tolling from some swaying buoy, and the sound of water sloshing around, and strange buffetings from here and there across the harbour, the constant grating and dismal groaning of the great anchor chains against the catholes, and the slap of ropes against masts, and the mewing of restless gulls soaring and sliding this way and that across the Pool, and disappearing into the misty rain.

  All around the harbour choppy waves were slopping up against stone groynes and weedy piles, and echoing around under cavernous wharf timbers, and further round toward the Camber, rattling the shingle. Old warehouses were mouldering away, the gaps where boards had fallen off like a mouth full of bad teeth. That was a memory to take away with you. Portsmouth is the last of England for so many departing souls, seamen and emigrants alike, among them those who made the far voyage I was about to embark on.

  I don’t exactly mean the convicts, though they had the same seas to cross. When Captain Phillip came out of his bolt-hole in the New Forest to command the founding fleet waiting for him here at Spithead, he sailed for Botany Bay. To any incurious loiterer along the quayside, it might seem that frightful sink was near enough to where I would be going; but in fact it is separate enough from my given destination, a thousand miles away or more, that we should steer well clear of it. I had no wish to fetch up on those shores.

  This too was the last of England for Captain Bligh’s Bounty mutineers. I did not find either of those reflections especially heartening. I suppose the Victory, bobbing up and down across the way at Gosport, could be seen as a much more gallant kind of vision, though Nelson would not have been quite satisfied about the outcome.

  I might say in passing that we rarely saw any prisoners. At times you would catch sight of a boatload being ferried ashore, on their way to labour at some worksite or other, in the Navy dockyards or extending the massive stone fortifications. They were usually sullen, hunched over, and understandably taking no great pleasure in their trip. I doubt they much appreciated that they were bundled aboard a jolly boat. They were more animated on their way back to the hulks, calling out to their mates, bawling across the water, making a bit of a hullabaloo and waving their caps. A few had revolutionary red stocking caps; how they had come by them is a mystery. Not many years ago French prisoners were held in Portsmouth, and through the extraordinary invisible system of pilfering and bartering that seems to go with these ne’er-do-wells that might have been one source for those oblique displays of defiance. From what we have heard of Botany Bay, those are skills which ought to stand them in good stead.

  Though having said as much, there was much the same kind of covert activity in the military and naval stores. The fishermen of Portsmouth found it easy to acquire new ropes, and you would be surprised, or perhaps not, at what could be discovered in the pawn shops. And undoubtedly much more than was displayed would have disappeared up the spout.

  But I digress. The whole bleak but stirring outlook on that evening left a strong impression on me, which of course is why I have remembered it. It either captured or created a mood, I cannot be sure which. At that point it meant more to my head than to my eye. What I thought the view required was perhaps a ship burning out to sea, in order to make a scene. That is what people do, regrettably, they improve on what was before them when they tell about it. It is of course what artists have to do.

  Which thought stayed with me long after the particular moment. So I ought not dramatise the occasion too much. It was a scene, and it was a moment, and that is as much as I should claim for it. I did not stand there for too long; it was not as though I was looking at anything new. I twitched my mantle about me, and turning on my heel, crossed the damp stone pavement to the nearest dockside rowdy house, to cheer myself up.

  There, if you discounted the din, it was like walking into a gallanty show, with the figures all jerking about like shadow puppets in the subdued lighting, and waving their arms and throwing back their heads. That was an entertainment in itself, a show that you didn’t try to make any sense of. Seamen, matlows we called them—and at a safer distance, skates—were rocking on their feet, bandy legged and unsteady with either the drink or the strangely motionless planking beneath their feet. Dockyard mateys who had not yet got very far on their way home complained to wagon drivers about their pay and the hardship of earning it. And in their turn the wagon drivers complained. Clerks and shop assistants and messengers jostled together, and tried to catch the attention of the barmaids, and hard-faced women peered around the side of the doorway and tried to catch the attention of any of the men. It was all an animated play, but probably not the England you would choose to carry away with you in your head. The mind’s eye is another thing altogether.

  I had promised my father that I would not stay out very late. That was regularly a point of contention between us when a concept like ‘late’ had begun to apply. I insisted that I was now of a sufficient age to be independent in my actions. He, a conscientiously difficult man, and responding to my argumentativeness rather than my argument, arrived at the stage, if not the temperature, of retorting that if I were so independent I could take myself off and be independent. That was when matters between us had come to a head.

  He had a point. He disapproved of my choice of company, though I had found them a set of jolly good fellows. I was not insisting he share them with me. I certainly had no thought that he should join us atop our coach to the Goodwood race meeting. We used to dine from time to time in a private room at a hotel, where we all got well primed and rattled on. We toasted each other with witty speeches and told amusing stories and, as the evening wore on, sang merry songs. Nothing worse than that, if you will allow a few evenings given over to playing at the card tables. Some of my chums had been senior students at my father’s school.

  He worried I might be led astray into temptation—but then that was not exactly a new burden for him. He had been giving doleful voice to that preoccupation for as long as I can remember, when he led our family prayers. A man of conviction, undoubtedly. I began to think that these anticipations of doom derived as much from his professional character as from his paternal affection.

  What I now regret having said, was that I thought he was more concerned about his own reputation than mine. That he was more concerned to stand well with his congregation than with his son. Tha
t he was so accustomed to giving instruction, both as a Baptist preacher and a headmaster, he had become insensitive to how it was that young men—me in particular—were to learn about life. That experience was the key. And so on and so forth. It is all so familiar (there’s an interesting reflection, that these kinds of issues are so often family matters) and yet I thought I was behaving in a manly and independent way in standing up for myself against my father’s opinions. And against his judgement. As though that has never happened before.

  But then it hadn’t, not in our family.

  He considered my opposing him a disgrace. My mother’s grieving over the death of my two youngest brothers from the recent outbreak of smallpox, was of course summoned up to throw added emotional weight against me. I would break her heart. Distressing as the risk of that was, I was offended by the crudity of such a blatant play on my feelings, the last throw of his dice I might say with some insolence. And the uncalculated result of his clumsiness was to make me all the more resolute in standing my ground.

  I hope I did not sound too impertinent. Though there can be little doubt about that. But I was desperate to be allowed to be myself, or to be allowed to become whatever self I was going to be. Once we had locked horns, there could be no stepping back. You know how it is with fathers and sons.

  I have no doubt that I grieved him. I know he irritated me, standing there with his hands clasped together in front of him, as though complacently believing in his own moral superiority, and the satisfaction of being able to pronounce forgiveness when I was truly humbled enough; but his face had taken on the ashen colour of an adversary not at all sure of lasting the distance. Afterwards I had my own regrets about it all. At the time I could not allow myself to dwell upon my own conduct. I had too much at stake—too much to lose, and indeed too much to win. I told myself I would make my own way in the world, but if the truth be told, I did not care to have my behaviour construed adversely, criticised, and censured. We were at odds, and long odds at that. And really, I did not take kindly to being at the centre of so much attention, not then, not now and not at any time.

  So we had words. Tears too. And me flouncing out of doors like a young miss. Within several weeks my father had met with the emigration committee that had been posting notices about the founding of the new colony in South Australia, and satisfied himself that there was half a continent of distance from the notorious penal settlements, and that the authorities had reassuringly appropriate Protestant convictions, and that the Company which was promoting the colonisation was sufficiently well subscribed. In consequence he set before me the unconditional challenge for me to prove my spurs, if I was so intent on doing so, and in his current frame of mind, what better place than the furthest corner of the world. More in sorrow than in anger, as he made unacceptably evident, he presented me with my booked passage, and several manuals on emigration, and of course yet another reminder of how I grieved my mother.

  And that in brief is how it was that I found myself, without my parents or perhaps one should say in spite of them, aboard a sizeable vessel, with a cabin in the intermediate class, bound for South Australia; a little scarred by the smallpox and more deeply scarred by the affray with my father. He gave me his blessing, stiffly, but I think he was in fact more moved than he wanted to admit. As was I. But he was above all else a man of profound conviction, which means that he would not modify his opinion on anything.

  My parents did not come down to the dockside with me, where all was a jostle and jumble of belongings and cargo and paraphernalia, with sailors staggering up the gangplank bent almost double under large trunks. It took a parcel of them to slide what looked like an oversized piano crate up the slope. Once that interesting manoeuvre was accomplished, men, women, children and the occasional dog clambered up uncertainly. There were shouts and calls and cries, and barking, and young gentlemen shooting at seagulls to amuse themselves, and in amongst the clamour down on the dock a band tootling away. I have to think that when Noah went aboard he managed matters much more expeditiously. The steerage passengers were in and out and up and down every hatchway they came across, struggling with their canvas cabin bags, the children running about and giving fair warning of what a nuisance they were likely to prove.

  We appeared to be competing with our common ancestor in the livestock stakes, too: I observed a cow, some goats, pigs, sheep, chickens in various pens along the deck, and a forlorn-looking horse poking its head out of some tatty curtains at one end of its padded box. A cat sitting up on one of the ship’s boats supervised all this commotion. I had not expected we would be travelling with our very own farmyard. Fresh provisions for the better sort of passenger, no doubt. I hoped the horse was not intended to grace our table at some distant stage of the voyage. He had already been patted on the nose too often and fed more apples than was altogether good for him. So that already before we headed out to sea he was presenting a good imitation of what it means to be fed up.

  And with an even more ridiculous ragged fanfare, the mooring ropes were slipped, and we were under way, sliding out into the harbour. The parting of the ways; the parting of the seas.

  Once out into the main road I looked about for the whirlpool I had been told we might come across before we were well clear of the Solent. I am not exactly sure just what I expected. Something rather dramatic. Something best avoided. Perhaps that is what we did, avoided it, wherever it was.

  My disappointment was soon countered by the notorious unsettling seas of those parts, and the rapidly increasing dark. It was too chilly to linger on deck and think sentimentally or sadly of home, and England, and the future. Everything was foreshortened, including most of the sails—the light, the vista, the juddering waves. Instead of a world stretching all before us, it felt on the contrary as though our passage, like the day itself, was closing in; and in our scurrying below decks to find what comfort there we could, it seemed as though we were clambering into some kind of box. Cribbed, cabined and confined, we were. And damp. It would be weeks before we fully emerged from our close quarters and felt ourselves stretch out again into the fresh clean air.

  In the meantime, there was nausea, and much that was nauseating, unpleasant to recollect and unacceptable to recount. Seasickness is not amusing. Several infants died of it; the parents’ misery more than redoubled. I was not as ill as some, until at our mess table the next day I happened to look too long into my bowl of soup, the surface tilting one way as the lantern overhead swung back the other, and the fretful shadows all sliding this way and that. It was that dipping, slithering movement of perception rather than the crash and tinkle of cutlery and crockery that became so distressing; the steward bumping into the chairs and jolting us as he lurched unsteadily about the table. One by one we made our various sorties back to our own cabins, in little running steps which had us ricocheting off the various inconvenient ship’s timbers as the vessel rolled and heaved about. The steward of course assured us that we ain’t seen nuffing yet; and I am afraid he was right.

  So we threaded our way through those long dark nights and long darkish days, the ship bucketing about and heeling this way and then that, plunging and struggling and shaking itself, lifting and falling and trembling, and you wondered if anyone was attending to the helm. Not that there could be any way of discovering this, since with the waves crashing and hissing across the decks we were ordered to stay below until conditions improved. Which in the fullness of time, they did; though the unhappy passengers in steerage had had no great confidence in that. The ropes strung along the decks as safety lines did not reassure. The brave young bachelors, when they shuffled up on deck, looked as forlorn and dismal and wretched as the worst sufferers of mal de mer, blinking in the watery light and gulping mouths full of fresh air, their faces the colour of a new sail. They had resolutely passed the while imbibing more than was good for them, and their recovery took a little longer than we other misérables required. In point of fact I had felt too low to join in their club, though I had been invite
d to do so. I took up that invitation at a later date, when we were all in the doldrums.

  I did not look quite so draggled as the chickens looked. Those were all quite crest-fallen. The wild seas had rinsed out the stock pens too, but without washing all the filth overboard. There was work to do everywhere, setting everything to rights. I took a couple of bruised apples—they had been rolling unceremoniously about on the floor for several days—for the horse in his loose box. He looked none the happier for his recent adventures, with his head hanging low and his legs splayed out to brace himself against any untoward lurching; my old sea horse, I called him. I wondered what he would look like when he got ashore, whether he would have a rolling gait like a sailor. I doubt whether that would recommend him to a fancier. He was bound for hack work, I should think, though previously you might have thought better of him. Perhaps he was a cautionary model for what could become of all of us.

  I did not draw the same conclusion from the chickens. As they disappeared one by one into the galley pots, so there would be more room in their cages, and in time the coops would come down and leave increased deck space for us. A consummation devoutly to be wished.

  Meanwhile, the Nobs had taken to some preliminary parading on the quarterdeck, birds of a different feather, the ladies posing with their parasols and trusting that a puff of wind would not make off with their bonnets, or indeed expose them to a worse disgrace. Their self-confidence was not absolute, however, for it amused me to observe that whenever possible they kept themselves positioned strategically hard up against the railing. I have no doubt there is a proper nautical term for that railing, as there is for every blessed thing on a ship. But as I did not intend to spend any more time than is necessary in this wooden world, so I did not bother to acquaint myself with its more arcane terms. Though doubtless that would have been one way to fill in the time.