Infernal Revolutions

by Stephen Woodville

  The tough twitched with anger but did nothing. Awkwardly, we proceeded up the gangplank, though as I passed I attempted to calm ruffled feathers by wishing the tough well in his six o’clock fight. For some reason this only seemed to irritate him, and I was subjected to a barrage of verbal abuse for my pains. Tutting, glad after all that he had been humiliated, I hurried up the gangplank to the safety of the Twinkle. I was just about to turn and retaliate in kind when a hand was clamped on my shoulder.

  ‘Good of you to join us, Oysterman.’

  I looked round to see Sergeant Mycock glaring down at me. No sooner had I registered the appropriate degree of fright than Pubescent Pete stepped forward to intervene.

  ‘I’ll take care of this, Sergeant. You may return to your other duties.’

  I smiled broadly at this blatant display of protectionism, and I was about to punch Pete playfully in the shoulder when I realized I had misjudged the mood of the situation.

  ‘You find it amusing?’ Pete demanded, his bright red face glowering up at me. He really did appear to be apoplectic with rage, and I wondered if this was the same boy I’d seen tumbling down the hillside squealing with delight. Even Hartley had donned an expression of heavy foreboding. Then I saw the reason why: behind him stood a red and blue reception committee of army and navy staff officers, all of whom wore the same depressing look of outraged officialdom. Individually, it mattered not a jot to them that I was late; collectively, each with an eye on the others’ reactions, ‘twas supposed to be the most heinous crime on earth.

  ‘Stand to attention!’

  ‘Oh shut up,’ I heard the sailor mutter as he strode off to his quarters, seemingly answerable to no-one. ‘Leave him alone and let’s weigh anchor.’

  Grateful for any support going, I watched the sailor disappear down a companionway with something akin to love. Spirits boosted accordingly, I stood to attention with a great deal more confidence than I would have displayed otherwise. ‘Where is the rest of your uni****?’ continued Pete in a rough approximation of normal speech; for on rest his voice quivered ominously, and on what was probably meant to be uniform it shot off the scale completely. It would not be long now before Pete was a man.

  ‘My uniform, Sir? Left on quayside with Mr Lickley, Sir. Presume Mr Lickley now has it about his person, Sir.’

  ‘And where have you been that your uniform was such a disgrace to wear?’

  I squirmed, and attempted to deflect his impertinent questioning.

  ‘Just into town, Sir. Then got lost in town, Sir. Hence late now, Sir.’

  ‘Did anyone give you permission to go into town?’

  ‘No, Sir.’

  ‘Then you should not have gone, should you?’

  ‘No, Sir.’

  ‘Who did you go into town to see?’

  ‘A friend, Sir.’

  ‘Are your fellow soldiers not friends enough?

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘Wander off like that in America, Oysterman, and you will be dead before you can say George Washington.’

  Deeply touched at his concern, I scutinized Pete’s eyes for a conspiratorial wink, proof that this was a performance purely for his masters’ benefit. All I saw, however, was a gaze focused at infinity, and shimmers of fright playing across it.

  ‘AND WE CAN’T AFFORD TO LOSE MEN UNNECESSARILY OUT THERE,’ he unexpectedly blurted out, before controlling himself and explaining why. ‘Current estimates indicate that we outnumber the Rebel army by two to one, but their recruiting capability is far greater than ours…’ Pete seemed to be wandering off the point, and getting above his station in the process, but who could blame him? A discussion of the strategy of the American War was far more interesting than the examination of my petty offence. Oblivious to the shuffles and murmurs of the bigwigs behind him, Pete blundered on, ‘…Intelligence also tells us that their weaponry includes the latest French and German ordnance, such as the fearful….’

  A spluttering cough from one of the watching dignitaries tightened the rein on Pete’s mad gallop into hot water. A new wash of red swept over Pete’s face, and he instinctively put his arm round Hartley’s head for support.

  Almost there, lad, was the message I tried to convey to Pete with my eyes, aware that he was suffering a far greater trial than I. Compose yourself and let’s get it over with.

  ‘But anyway,’ he went on. ‘Heed well this, er, warning not to act without orders again. If you do – act without orders I mean, not, er, heed well – then the punishment will be, er, severe. Dismissed.’

  A groan of disappointment swept the deck as Pete ran off with Hartley to his quarters. His rockyfaced elders, clearly expecting a keelhauling at least, chuntered amongst themselves about Pete’s lenience and lack of authority. His cards were being marked already as a Man Who Is Afraid Of Administering Punishment, and we had not even set sail yet. All this Pete knew, for the poor lad was openly blubbing when I sneaked into his cramped cabin half an hour later to offer my condolences. His sword was sticking horizontally out of a wooden beam, and his hat lay upturned on the floor, desolate.

  ‘Really, Pete,’ I said, doing a sort of tap dance across the boards as the ship lurched horribly, ‘I would not have minded being given a couple of lashes. Quite an honour, really, to be whipped before even setting sail.’

  I made as if to pat his back, but only succeeded in arousing Hartley’s jealousy. The hound’s jaws clamped together like a gintrap not half an inch from my hand.

  ‘I wanted to Harry, I really did. But how could I order the flogging of someone who is friendly with Burnley Axelrod? My hands were tied.’

  Some of my sympathy for Pete ebbed away, but still I was affected most sensibly by the youngster’s plight.

  ‘My career is over,’ he choked. ‘Over, over, over.’

  ‘No, it isn’t, Pete. You have plenty of time to redeem yourself; assuming you did make an error of judgement in the first place.’

  ‘Of course I did. I should have had you keelhauled. I know that now ‘tis too late.’

  ‘Just because you did not please the crowd does not mean that you were wrong. Something you will learn when you grow up is just how wrong the crowd – even though it be composed of supposed gentlemen – can be.’

  ‘I wish I were grown up now, Harry.’

  ‘No. Don’t ever wish that. You do not understand what you’re saying. Adulthood is just problem after problem, interlaced with boredom and disappointment, made bearable only by regular shots of liquor and opium. Promise me you will never say that again.’

  ‘I promise, Harry. But adolescence is not all wine and roses, you know. Look at these blackheads, listen to this voice. I despair of ever being taken seriously.’

  ‘That’s because you are operating in a world of men. You’re a precocious wretch, Pete, and by rights you should not be here at all. Most boys of your age are helping their fathers on their farms, and going out at night supping and drabbing. You shouldn’t have responsibilities of any sort at your age, let alone responsibilities over men’s lives. ‘Tis only natural for you to make mistakes, or at least make decisions that go against the grain.’

  ‘My father is no simple farmer, though,’ said Pete haughtily. ‘He’s the great judge Sir Walter Wriggle, famous for the strictness with which he carries out enclosure legislation. With a father like that I’ve a lot to live up to.’

  He was too young to appreciate that the chances against his hallowed father being in reality anything but an arrogant whorenotching slob were too small to be easily calculable. I knew this because my mother had entertained numerous such figures in her time, and they were all the same – fat, redfaced, loud, lecherous and crude. Even as a child I was aware how waferthin was the ice on which the respectable all skated, and I had no doubts that Pete’s father had crashed through long ago; how else to cope with the mindnumbing tedium of reading an Enclosure Act, let alone enforcing it? But I kept my thoughts on the matter to myself, conside
ring it undesirable to burden Pete with too much ambiguity in his hour of distress. If he thought his father was a great man for enforcing acts that reduced thousands of people to a state of beggary, then, for now, let him; he couldn’t have many more such years of untroubled ignorance left to him.

  Soothed perhaps by the memory of his great father, Pete began to pull himself together. He blew his nose with his handkerchief then swayed over to the washbasin – Hartley at his heels, solicitous – to dab his eyes clean. Once done, he loosened his stock, and began shooting glances in the direction of the wooden cot hanging from the deck beams. Obviously wanting rest, and perhaps fearing further embarrassment if I saw him trying to climb into it, he became desirous for my departure.

  ‘For you, Harry,’ he pronounced, awkwardly offering me a shilling piece drawn out of his pocket.

  ‘You insult me, Pete. I’m not your servant.’

  Pete looked hurt, and I was afraid I was setting him off again.

  ‘As you wish. But you won’t tell anyone about what’s happened, will you? If people know I’ve been crying I may as well kill myself now.’

  I assured him his only-too-human lapse was safe with me.

  ‘Good. Thank you, Harry. Now, I must rest, and think of ways to restore my reputation. If you do want to see me again, perhaps ‘tis best to make a discreet appointment first, for appearance’s sake. I should not really be mixing with you lot at all, you know. But you’re the only friends I have.’

  ‘You will soon make friends among the other officers, then you will be stroking us every five minutes.’

  ‘Oh no, I’m not that ambitious.’

  Pete seemed to reflect on these words for a moment, then a sort of Or am I? frown raced across his brow. He started to wheedle. ‘But you did say you would not mind being whipped slightly, did you not? Perhaps if I’m called upon again to instil discipline you, er, would not mind being a scapegoat….for my sake.’

  ‘Friendship is one thing, Pete; stupidity quite another.’

  ‘But you said…’

  ‘I was referring to this afternoon’s incident, not giving you carte blanche to flog me whenever you felt like it.’

  ‘But you said…’

  ‘Look, Pete, forget what I said. Whatever it was I’ve changed my mind. I do not want to be flogged to further your career. Besides, Mr Axelrod would not be pleased if he found out.’

  This shut the youth up. So, leaving him cursing the perfidy of adults, I surreptitiously groped my way back to my own cramped quarters on the middle gun deck. As I did so, I decided to brave a peek out to starboard, as it pleased the sailors to call the right-hand-side of the ship. Instantly I wished I hadn’t, for the vast heaving expanse of sea that had opened up between land and the Twinkle shot a spasm of queasiness through me. Now experienced in matters of the stomach, I knew pretty well what this would lead to, but as for the moment my head was still clear I took the opportunity to ruminate about Pete’s predicament while I could. How curious were the interactions of daily life and the motivating factors that made people do what they did! The theme, the longer I thought about it, was pure Night Thoughts gold, and my pen hand began to itch accordingly. But alas, as I had already discovered to my no great surprise, the Twinkle was no more the place for cool composition than the Martyr, and frustration burned within me once again. At this rate, I would be thirty and past it before I could lay my masterpiece at the altar of English Literature, and what good would Fame be to me then? Probably better anyway was the transient version of it I was now experiencing belowdecks, where I was relating in ever more imaginative instalments a fairy tale about my conquest of Nutmeg Nell. There an eager audience awaited me, not an invisible readership, and I could see them relishing every lying word I was telling them. Indeed, I could understand their enjoyment, for I was almost one of them myself, knowing little more than they did of what would happen next. Suddenly cheered at the prospect of entertaining an appreciative platoon of redcoats, I hurried to my performance with renewed nimbleness. I only hoped I could get a chapter out before I spewed all over them.

  9

  Atlantic Crossing

  A creaking old ‘64 that went down a storm with enthusiasts for real sailing, the Twinkle did nothing for me except remove a coat of bile from my stomach. It had been built at Chatham in 1742 as a coal collier, and converted and reconverted several times since as wars demanded. This blurring of purpose had created a vessel of notorious handling, a fact I would vouch for at any hearing, so often was I lurched almost overboard in seas so calm we were drifting backwards. Reviled by sailors, vomited continually upon by soldiers, it was loved at least by rats, which swarmed around its decks in prodigious numbers. Control of the hordes was attempted by the laying of a poisonous paste comprising of arsenic, lump sugar, wheatmeal and water, but though several thousand rats were killed by this means, it also accounted for the lives of two little stowaways who had hidden in the hold, and was therefore subsequently abandoned in favour of simple cudgelling.

  But at least the stowaways were out of the living hell that was life belowdecks, and many of us sincerely envied them. No more did they have to suffer the miseries of damp, seasickness, hunger, thirst, heat, cold, headaches, constipation, lice, mouth-rot, boils, the flux and typhus – all of which tormented the rest of us before we had even reached Ireland. And as if these standard privations of life afloat were not enough, we were commanded by Captain George Dobermann, one of the most feared and fearless men in the British Navy. A toothless old cliché of a salt with a limitless capacity for Madeira and whoring, Dobermann was the man most credited with making the British Navy what it was today, viz. savage and merciless. On reputation alone we were terrified of him, although we were assured by the crew that he was some degrees below his usual level of cruelty on this trip. This was perhaps due, some opined diffidently, to the recent death of his wife after forty years of marriage; only diffidently, because by a rough calculation he could not have spent more than six months with her in all that time. Whatever the true reason, however, it unnerved me to see a former tyrant shuffling pathetically along the quarterdeck every afternoon, lonely and preoccupied. What was going on behind those sad, rheumy eyes? What malice was left in that drowsy wasp? What if we encountered an enemy ship, and Captain Dobermann, bereft of anything to live for, decided to seize the opportunity to do something crazily daring with his obedient Twinkle crew? ‘Twould clearly be a no-loss scenario for him, for if he failed to take us all with him to the bottom of the ocean he would be commended for his bravery by an impressed Admiral Howe, and subsequently lionized by all stratas of society, with inevitable return of his spite and spark. This was a dread that lived with me for the whole voyage, but, as it turned out, I need not have worried. The only enemy ship we met on the crossing was an American whaler returning home to Nantucket, and not even a Captain Dobermann deprived of a will to live could have wanted to attack that.

  Although the Captain scared me witless, at least he was out of sight most of the time. His crew, on the other hand, were constantly in our faces, with such similar temperaments to the Captain that I often wondered whether they were by-blows of his. Aggressive and unpredictable, they mostly spat tobacco juice at us in contempt whenever we pleaded for deliverance from misery. If they did talk to us, it did not take long for disputes and fights to develop, for they would argue to the death, with astounding ignorance, over subjects of extreme triviality (Was blue or red the better colour? Could dragons really fly? Which was the best star in the sky?), and constant floggings were the tiresome result. They were argumentative amongst themselves anyway, advised one friendly midshipman called Maddocks, but when soldiers were involved they were ten times worse.

  ‘Natural competitiveness? A desire to be Top Dog?’ I suggested shyly.

  ‘Something like that, I suppose,’ agreed the midshipman, lounging easy on a capstan, ‘or perhaps just the age-old antipathy of Bluebottles for Lobsters.’

  ‘And vice-vers
a!’ shouted Ned Lester, irate over a recent flogging he’d received, ‘Don’t forget vice-versa, the Bluebottled Bastards!’

  Eventually it was decreed by our respective commanders – albeit in more formal language – that if we couldn’t play nicely together, we’d better just ignore each other, which we did. I still watched them though, because I found them fascinating. In their blue jackets and wide blue-and-white-striped pantaloons they would scuttle off here, there and everywhere at the pipe of an officer’s whistle, like ever-ready bandy-legged little monkeys. They were as brown as nuts, tremendously agile and strong, and had even more of a devil-may-care attitude than soldiers. They also had a curious air about them that was hard to put a finger on; perhaps something to do with them being part insular – having never left the confines of their ship for years – and part cosmopolitan – having sailed around the world and mixed with men, and of course women, of different nationalities. Whatever it was, with their straw hats, fluttering neckcloths, flashing earrings, talismanic tattoos and strange argot-ridden language, I thought they quite outdid my fellow soldiers for panache and sauciness – though of course this was an observation I kept strictly to myself.

  Despite my close watch on their comings and goings, however, I did not spot my iron-fisted friend of embarkation day, making me wonder if he had been some sort of guardian angel, helping me to fulfil my destiny. Then again, on storm-tossed nights when I was wet, cold and shivering with fear, the wood creaking violently all around me, I realized the ridiculousness of this notion: if spectral, it was more likely that he had been an evil spirit, urging me on to destruction. Then, on day six of the voyage, I spotted him on the forecastle, gazing out to sea in a very noble and aloof manner. Just airing myself at the time with the rest of my company, doing nothing in particular, I called across:

  ‘Sir, did you not help me with the ships at Pompey?’