Losing Nelson Read online

  “It is March 1771. His father, the Reverend Edmund, has accompanied him from Norfolk to London, to the inn from which the coaches leave for Chatham. There, in the yard of the inn, father and son say good-bye, with sage advice on one side and earnest promises on the other. Now the boy is quite alone. He is twelve years old, small for his age, delicate in appearance.

  “The coach goes jolting along—it is a six-hour journey to Chatham, time enough to ponder the future. Perhaps he wonders if he has after all made a mistake. But to admit the possibility of mistake was not much in his nature, nor is it in the nature of heroes generally. They know they have been singled out; in the furnace of their destiny, mistakes are either consumed or transmuted to the intentions of providence.

  “When he arrives at Chatham, he asks people at the staging inn for directions, but no-one has so much as heard of the ship. Carrying his baggage, he makes his way down cobbled streets to the docks …”

  By a coincidence that to my mind far transcended chance, the Victory was also lying in the Medway at this time. In seeking his first ship Horatio passed close to his last, his death-ship, which had been commissioned in the year of his birth. I was tempted to include mention of this pattern of timings, in which I too, as his parallel walker, was involved. But I decided against—it could not be done briefly; it would have disturbed the balance.

  “Still lugging his valise, he asks passing sailors if they know where the Raisonnable lies. One of them points. The boy strains his eyes. Across the grey, wind-scourged water of the Medway, he makes out the ship lying at her moorings. But now comes the real problem: how can he get to her? There are no boats. The ship is too far away for him to attract the attention of anyone on board. For a time that seems endless he waits there in the icy wind, completely helpless and forlorn.”

  At this point, as I was dictating my text to Miss Lily, there came to me a sensation not altogether unfamiliar but more pronounced that evening than ever before: my voice, the quality and sound of it, had become more present to my mind than the words it was saying, the meaning it was seeking to convey. From being a strand of sound edged with silence, it was filling the whole room, there were no borders to it; it was not my voice at all but someone else’s, someone whose borders of silence lay elsewhere. I saw Miss Lily’s hands pause, move away from the keys, and come to rest at either side of the keyboard. I looked at her hands—this was an evening for noticing things about Miss Lily. Strong hands but not ill shaped. Like the rest of her. I came back to myself at the sight of them, and in the momentary blankness of this return I felt a sudden rush of pity for Horatio and myself and all the lost children. But pity for him was wrong; I had never felt it before, he was not to be pitied. In that lonely moment, under that hostile sky, the steel of resolution had entered the child’s heart. It was an essential moment in the heroic career. Miss Lily had not looked up. With a sense of having got away undetected, I resumed my dictating.

  “Finally a passing officer takes pity on him and arranges for a boat to carry him across the river. For the first of many times, he climbs aboard a warship. Step by step, as he climbs the companion-ladder, he is entering a new world. He is a child—it is natural that a sort of dread should descend on him, he does not know what will be required. However, the captain is his uncle, after all. Uncle Maurice will guide and advise him.

  “But Uncle Maurice is not on board; he is not expected for some days. No-one has heard of the new midshipman, no-one shows the slightest interest in him. He waits for someone to take notice of him, tell him where he should go, what he should do. Eventually he is told to carry his luggage down the two steep ladders that lead to the midshipmen’s berth on the orlop deck. Here all seems chaos and confusion to him. It is dark down here, below the water line. The beams are low, and there is a smell of tar and damp rope. Someone shows him how to sling a hammock, how to stow away his things.

  “For the rest of that day and all the next he walks the deck. The weather could hardly be worse—‘fresh gales with squally weather and snow,’ according to the ship’s log. No-one pays any attention to him. He walks about on the tilting deck, he looks across the choppy waters towards where London lies, and beyond that, Norfolk.

  “Then at last, to much ceremony of saluting and a great shrilling of bosuns’ whistles, Captain Suckling comes on board. With his appearance everything changes, the ship takes on life and purpose. He summons his nephew aft to the great cabin. This is on the upper deck, where only the captain can have his quarters. The tallest man can walk upright here, and it is flooded with light. The wide bow windows occupy the whole width of the ship, beautifully framed in scrolled wood, elegantly curving, giving broad views across the river. From the dark, cramped, malodorous place where he has been peering and creeping below, the boy mounts into space and light …”

  I paused here, and Miss Lily paused with me, and for some while there was silence. I was not yet satisfied with this passage. I wanted to convey the contrast somehow more vividly, as vividly as it was present to my own mind. For in this contrast lay the whole meaning. The chintz and mahogany of that beautifully appointed cabin, furnished in masculine style but with great elegance, the great swaths of light, the order and the calm. The strangely different uncle, metamorphosed from the country squire the boy knew, resplendent in his blue, gold-trimmed uniform. Uncle Maurice was transfigured, he was a god, he had come aboard and breathed life, he lived up here in the pure ether. As the diminutive Horatio listened to his uncle explaining the workings of the ship, he understood the meaning of power and godhead. It was the first lesson of his naval career and one he never forgot.

  I was about to resume when Miss Lily spoke, breaking the silence. “That was really interesting, if you don’t mind me saying so. I could just see that poor lonely boy, walking about in the chilly wind, not having the least notion what to do with himself. My brother used to live near Gravesend, it can get bitter down there. I hope he had a good coat on.”

  Her imagination, as usual, had been stirred by the drama of weather. But had she got the essential point, I wondered, the being summoned into light, that crucial early experience of the privilege that went with command? It irked me that she should seem so sorry for him—it reminded me of my own earlier moment of weakness.

  “They took hardship better in those days,” I said. “They were tougher, more enduring. They didn’t expect to be cossetted, as people do now. There was no Granny State to shelter them from the cradle to the grave.”

  “Cradle to the grave? You been on the South Bank lately, round Waterloo Bridge? You won’t see much of Granny there, unless it is her that gives them the cardboard boxes. Anyway, I wouldn’t have liked it, I do know that.” She grimaced in saying this and wrinkled her nose, a sign of serious emphasis. I didn’t know if she meant the period as a whole or just Horatio’s experience. “Why didn’t he just go and find some corner where he could sit down?” she said. “Somewhere out of the wind?”

  “He didn’t want to appear idle. Character was character in those days.”

  “I can’t see the point of suffering for nothing. If he had kept out of the wind, I would have thought more of him. They cut pieces off him, didn’t they?”

  “Well, the surgeons had to take off his arm after the failure of the attack on Tenerife, and then there was the eye, but that—”

  “I don’t mean pieces of his body, I mean pieces of himself as a person.”

  “I don’t understand what you are getting at.”

  “He was an orphan, wasn’t he? His mother died when he was nine, and he was only twelve when he went away to sea. After they parted that day in London, his father never knew him again as a child—it was years before they met again, he was grown up by then. You can’t take a boy away from home and the world he has grown up in without him losing some bits of himself. I don’t know whether you’d call it cutting pieces off or just sort of putting him in a narrow place where he couldn’t grow.”

  Miss Lily paused. I saw the rise and fall
of her breathing. She was impassioned. “He was hemmed in, that’s all I am saying,” she said.

  Avon Secretarial Services, from Camden, were remarking on the narrowness of Horatio Nelson’s life. It was so absurd that I could not feel angry. In fact, I think I smiled. “A narrow place, was it? Horatio served five months as a midshipman on the Raisonnable, then he sailed as captain’s servant on a West Indiaman bound for the Caribbean archipelago. He went from Florida and Yucatán to Venezuela, then to the Bahamas and the Antilles Islands. He saw birds of paradise and coral snakes and armadillos. He saw forests of palm. When he returned, still only fourteen, he piloted a longboat on the Thames, transporting stores from the Pool to the Delta, learning to deal with crosscurrents and shoals. In the following year he took part in an expedition to the Arctic, where he saw polar bears and fields of ice and the sun at midnight. Then he joined HMS Seahorse and went to the East Indies with her, from Bengal to Bushire. And he was still only sixteen. Would you really call that a hemmed-in life, Miss Lily?”

  I had become excited in my turn, stirred as always by these gorgeous travels. “If he was hemmed in, what are we?”

  “What was it you called me?” Miss Lily was smiling slightly but looked at the same time rather perplexed. I realized then that I had made a slip.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s what I call you when I think about you. It just came out.”

  “When you think about me?”

  “You know, when you need to think about someone or something, you generally give it a name. Might be Socrates or dialectical materialism or Manchester United. Your name in my mind was always Miss Lily.” As I was saying this, I realized in a confused kind of way why I wanted her to see what a wonderful person Horatio was, how marvellous his life had been. He and I were so close, she could not admire Horatio without admiring me.

  Miss Lily’s expression changed; her smile faded. I had the impression that my confusion of feeling was reflected in her eyes, which continued to look steadily at me. Not experienced on her part, simply reflected. “Well,” she said, “I’m not going to call you Mr. Charles.”

  “Charles will do.”

  My face felt hot. I could not remember when I had last invited anyone to call me by my first name. It was Miss Lily who brought things back to order. “What he didn’t have was a normal life, that’s all I am saying,” she said. “By the way, I meant to ask you, what is a midshipman exactly?”

  I was aware that this was a sort of diversion, but I was grateful for it. I explained that midshipmen were junior ratings, mainly intending to be officers, that they lived together in the cramped and crowded quarters of the orlop, that they were of all ages from children of ten or eleven to full-grown men, the raw material of the officer class.

  Miss Lily listened carefully enough, but her comments, when they came, only served to prove how tenacious she was in argument. “That’s exactly what I was getting at,” she said. “I didn’t mean narrow in the physical sense. I meant emotional. He was narrowed down in his emotions. Stands to reason, really, doesn’t it? If you are pushed out too soon, certain kinds of feelings aren’t much use to you anymore, so they sort of get lost. Must have been the same with all those boys, those that went to the midshipman—it just isn’t normal.”

  “That’s how the navy got its officers—the ship was the school. That was the system and it worked—it gave us Camperdown and the Battle of the Saints and the Glorious First of June. Above all, it gave us Trafalgar, it gave us supremacy at sea into the twentieth century.”

  “Be that as it may,” Miss Lily said, “I can’t help thinking it sort of blunted them. I am glad my Bobby doesn’t need to go through it.”

  “Your Bobby?”

  “That’s my little boy. He is just twelve. The same age Nelson was when he went to sea.”

  “I didn’t know you had a child.”

  Miss Lily glanced away as if momentarily distracted. “It didn’t come up before.”

  I was quite staggered by this news, which was somehow completely unexpected. “You must have been very young when you had him.”

  “I brought him up myself,” she said, as if this fully solved the question of youth. “Me and Mum. His father pushed off at an early stage, which was just as well, in my opinion—and I even thought so at the time. I was wondering—Bobby is ever so interested in ships and battles. He has been doing a project on Nelson at school. When I told him, you know, that we are going to Portsmouth to see the Victory, I could tell he really wanted to go. He didn’t say much, but I could tell. It would be so good for him to have a man to show him round …”

  And so it was decided. Still in a state of mild shock at the news of Bobby’s existence, I agreed on a date for the Portsmouth trip. We would go—the three of us—on the first Sunday after my talk.

  13

  During those years my Aprils always began with a battle, third in that great quartet of his victories I enacted on my table: April 2, 1801, the Battle of Copenhagen, last of his triumphs before Trafalgar. He had been appointed second-in-command of the Channel Fleet at the beginning of the year, with the rank of vice-admiral. Tempting to think there was some motive of humanity on the part of the lords of the Admiralty in this appointment, which cut short the misery of his marital break-up, allowing him to escape—without seeming to be running away—from the public scandal of his affair with Emma and the cruel caricatures by now so frequently appearing in the London papers, where the trio were depicted together, Sir William the desiccated connoisseur, surveying the world through his lorgnette, Emma fat and billowing and given to dramatic attitudes, Horatio grizzled and thin, with one eye and one arm missing. Travelling players … He was grotesque, Horatio was grotesque in that company. I accepted it, I had accepted it for years, it had never made any difference between us; I set it down to his angelic disorder on land. What else would an angel seem, out of his element, portrayed by mediocre men, but grotesque?

  A great relief it must have been to escape from these devastating lampoons. But there was reason enough in the appointment without looking for kindness in it. England by now was fighting for her life, for her very existence. With Napoleon’s defeat of the Austrians at Marengo, the anti-French alliance had collapsed; we stood quite alone, with a great fleet preparing against us in the Baltic ports and a new army of invasion gathering across the Channel. Not until 1941 was this country again to be in such danger.

  Once more he comes to the rescue, so slight, so maimed—what an overwhelming debt he has laid on us! At the beginning of February, he learns that he will be sailing for the Baltic in an operation designed to discourage the Scandinavian states from allying themselves with France and Russia and closing their ports to English shipping. These are not traditional enemies, but the crazed Czar Paul, shortly to be assassinated, is besotted with Napoleon and has leagued Russia with him. And he, the scoundrelly Corsican, diabolical bogeyman to generations of our ancestors in infancy, has come to a logical conclusion—the cursed French, they are never short of logic. England rules the seas, yes, well then, we will make the seas useless to her, we will close the Baltic ports to her trade. Grain and timber: without the one she cannot feed her people, without the other she cannot build masts for her ships.

  Our first move is to threaten the Danes. Perhaps a show of force will be enough. The commander-in-chief, Admiral Sir Hyde Parker, who has played safe all his life, is a good enough man for that; but they have Horatio as second-in-command, knowing—as everyone in the service knows—that where he goes, victory goes with him. A fortunate appointment, because the show of force is not enough; the Danes reject our terms, they are set on resistance, they prepare to defend their city.

  I had to start quite early in the morning. The first shots were not fired until shortly after 10 A.M., but the signal was given at 9:30 and there was a long approach before that. The battle in any case took quite a while to lay out, because it involved the Danish land defences. I was slower even than usual that morning because I had laid a
wake most of the night, then fallen asleep at about 5:00. The alarm went off as usual, but I could not come to the surface; I lay between sleeping and waking till after 8:00, then panicked at the idea of being late for the battle and went down to the basement carrying my coffee with me. I did not even stop to heat the milk.

  I had everything I needed. I had modelled the Danish shoreline years before in compressed paper, exactly to scale—the inlet into the harbour of Copenhagen, the headland with the formidable Trekroner battery defending the approaches. I had the shore guns too, small-scale models made in lead, which I had bought at Wrights in Holborn. The shape of the Middle Ground I had first traced and then cut out of thick cardboard, which I had left its natural sand colour.

  It is this tapering lozenge of sand-coloured cardboard, this Middle Ground, that constitutes the main difficulty for the attackers. I take care to place it in exact position. It lies here, sharp end to the south, between the Danish shore batteries and the Swedish coastline, dividing the strait into two channels, the western or inner one narrower and shallower, heavily defended by the floating batteries, which I put in place now to the south of the city. Here they are, one after the other, moored broadside on. Formidable obstacles to any approach from the south. However, to approach by the outer, more easily navigable channel means bringing the English ships under devastating fire from the guns of the Trekroner fortress guarding the harbour.

  Horatio is all on fire to attack; his superior hesitates, prevaricates—he will not risk the heavier ships in those shallow waters. Once again that classic combination of prudent principal and risk-taking second; only at Horatio’s last battle will this conflict be resolved and all power rest in the hands of the risk-taker. But he has more on his mind now than impatience with Sir Hyde Parker. He has received word from London that Emma has been delivered of a baby daughter, whom she will call Horatia. He is a father for the first time and wild with joy. Also, and at the same time, he is tormented by jealousy. The Prince of Wales has ogled Emma at a reception, and Horatio fears she may fall prey to the wiles of this practised lecher. He even suspects Sir William, his devoted friend, of acting the pander out of deference to royalty.