by Sten Nadolny
Aunt Eliza described her journey from Theddlethorpe All Saints, where she lived, to Spilsby, a trip on which she had seen nothing. Still, her speech droned on like an unravelling kite-string. Listening to Aunt Eliza, one could learn that when people talk too fast the content becomes as superfluous as the speed. John closed his eyes. When his aunt at last noticed this she left, exaggeratedly quiet and a little hurt. Matthew came on another day. He spoke sensibly, with pauses. By no means, he maintained, does everything have to go very fast at sea. He only said: ‘One has to be able to climb ropes on a ship and learn many things by heart.’ Matthew had an especially strong lower jaw; he looked like a well-meaning bulldog. His eyes were sharp and sure. There was no doubt where he was looking and what caught his attention. Matthew wanted to hear a lot of what John had to say and waited patiently until his answers were ready to come out. John, too, had many questions. Evening came.
Knowing about the sea was called navigation. John repeated that word several times after Matthew. It meant stars, instruments and careful thought. That pleased him. He said, ‘I’d like to learn how to set sails.’
Before Matthew left, he bent over John more closely. ‘I’m shipping out to Terra Australis now. I’ll be gone two years. After that I’ll get my own ship.’
‘Terra Australis, Terra Australis,’ recited John.
‘Don’t run away again. You can become a sailor. But you’re a bit too caught up in thought, so you must become an officer or your life will be hell. Try to make it through school until I come back. I’ll send you some books about navigation. And I’ll take you on as a midshipman on my ship.’
‘Please, say it again,’ begged John. When he had understood it all clearly, he wanted to get better again at once.
‘He’s much better,’ the doctor announced proudly. ‘Against cascara rind no bad blood can win.’
3
Dr Orme
Buttons done up wrong: start all over again. Neckerchief tied neatly, breeches fastened properly? Before breakfast, the outer person was checked by the assistant master. Caught out: no breakfast. For every wrongly done button: a slap on the nose. Hair not combed right: knock on the head. The collar of the doublet outside the frock-coat, stockings pulled up tight. Innumerable dangers lurked already at the beginning of the day. Shoes with buckles, cuffs, coat-tails, and the hat, that trap!
Getting dressed was surely good exercise for later. School had its disadvantages, but John was firmly convinced that one could learn something useful for life anywhere in the world, hence also at school. Even if this had not been so, escape was out of the question. One had to wait, if not out of desire, at least from prudence.
No news from Matthew. But why should there be? Two years, he had said, and they weren’t over by a long shot.
Learning in class. The room was dark, windows high up; autumnal storms outside. Dr Orme sat behind his desk as if in an altar niche, with an hourglass in front of him. The grains of sand had to get through the narrow waist to accumulate in the same pile below that they had formed above. The resulting loss of time was called Latin lesson. It was getting chilly, and the fireplace was near the teacher.
The older boys were called monitors. They sat high up against the wall and looked down on all the others. Assistant Master Stopford sat near the door and took down pupils’ names.
John was staring closely at the curved lines of Hopkinson’s ear when just at that moment a question was directed at him. Still, he got the drift. Careful now! If he answered hastily he’d stutter and choke; that would bother his listeners. On the other hand, Dr Orme had made it clear during the first week once and for all that ‘When somebody says something that’s correct, he has no need to look good.’ He could live with that.
Reciting, conjugating, declining, using the proper case. When he got that done he had time for Hopkinson’s ear curves, or for the wall beyond the window with its wet bricks and its vines tossed by the wind.
Studying during times off in the evenings. Archery allowed in the courtyard. Dice and cards forbidden. Chess permitted; backgammon prohibited. When he got permission, John went out to his climbing-tree; when he didn’t, he spent his time reading or practising. Sometimes he tried to learn speed by using his knife: one hand spread out on the table, with the other he stabbed the triangles between his fingers with his blade. The knife had been swiped from the kitchen. The table suffered noticeably. And now and then he hit one of his fingers. Well, it was only his left hand.
He also wrote letters to Mother and to Matthew. Nobody liked watching him when he wrote, and he loved writing, especially in fine script. Dipping his goose-quill into the ink, wiping it off, then inscribing his letters, folding the sheet to seal it – nobody could bear to watch all that.
Turning into somebody else at school, that was hard. Here it was just as it had been in Spilsby: they knew his weakness; nobody believed in his exercises. They were all convinced that he would always stay the same.
Learning how to get on with the other pupils. Aboard ship he’d be involved with many people, and if too many of them didn’t like him it might be troublesome.
The other boys were done quickly with everything, and they noticed at once when one of them lagged behind. Names were said only once. If he asked, they spelled them. He followed their fast spelling even less well than their slow enunciation. Put up with the others’ impatience. Charles Tennyson, Robert Cracroft, Atkinson and Hopkinson – they all sharpened their claws on John whenever possible. It seemed to him as though they always looked at him through only one eye, and with the other communicated among themselves. If he said something they tilted their heads, and that meant, ‘You’re boring; get it done quickly.’ The most difficult was Tom Barker, now as before. If John gave him what he asked for, he acted as though he had asked for something entirely different. If he spoke to him, he was interrupted at once; if he looked at him, he found a mere grimace. In the dormitory, John and Tom had to sleep next to each other because they were both from Spilsby. They shared a chest between their beds. Each of them knew what the other owned. Perhaps this was good preparation for sea voyages: space was tight there, too, and some people couldn’t abide each other.
Nothing could make John miserable; his hope was the size of a giant. Obstacles he couldn’t overcome he simply ignored. Most of the time, however, he knew how to manage. He had memorised a hundred expressions. They lay in readiness and proved most useful, for John’s fluency with them encouraged many listeners to wait a little until he got to the point of his answer. ‘If you wish.’ ‘Much obliged.’ Or ‘That stands to reason.’ ‘Many thanks for your efforts.’ One could say all that quickly. He also knew the names of admirals well. Everybody talked a lot about victories, and so he wanted to know and to be ready to supply the admirals’ names at once.
He also wanted to learn how to make conversation. He loved to listen, anyway, and was pleased when bits and pieces he caught fitted together to make sense. He was careful about tricks. Simply saying yes and acting as if he had understood didn’t work. Too often something was expected if he said yes. But if he said no, they pounced on him even more. Why no? Reasons! No without a reason was even more quickly exposed than an unfounded yes.
I don’t want to make anyone believe anything, he thought. If only others don’t try it on me. They must ask me and hold on to wait for my answer. I must get that worked out, that’s all.
The tree. The way to it led through Evangelist Alley and then through a street called Breakneck Lane. Climbing didn’t make him faster; he knew that by now. But that didn’t make the tree useless. As he moved from branch to branch he found that coherent thought was better there than on firm ground. When he had to breathe heavily he perceived the order of things.
From this lookout-point he could survey the town of Louth: red brick, white window-sills, and ten times more chimney pots than in Spilsby. All the houses looked like the school, only shrunken. They also lacked the walled-in courtyard and lawn. The school had three high
, sharp-cornered chimneys, as if it contained a forge. There was a lot of hammering.
‘Correction Day’. There were two of them: rod day and cane day. Could a plant grow in freedom and become a cane? Strange, too, how many names there were when it came to punishment. The head was called a ‘turnip’ or ‘poet’s box’; the backside was called ‘register’; ears were ‘spoons’; hands ‘paws’ – those to be punished were malefactors. John had enough on his hands with current words. This additional vocabulary seemed to him a waste.
Punishment itself he ignored. Mouth closed, his eyes turned to a faraway world – that was how one got over correction days. It was humiliating that the moderators held the delinquent as if he wanted to run away. John ignored them as well. There were also punishments outside the regular order. Being late for prayers, not having signed out before going to the tree, being caught at a game of dice: then one got it ad hoc. On the school’s seal was written ‘Qui parcit virgam, odit filium’ – ‘He who spares the rod hates the child’. Dr Orme remarked that this was pig Latin: parcere takes the dative.
Dr Orme wore silk knee-breeches, lived in a house on Breakneck Lane, and, it was said, conducted experiments with clocks and plants – both of which he collected assiduously. An ancestor, they said, had been one of the ‘eight captains of Portsmouth’. Although John never found out what the captains were supposed to have done, the gentle schoolmaster assumed something navigational for him: often John even saw in him a secret ally.
Dr Orme never shouted or thrashed anyone. Perhaps he was less interested in the children than in his clocks. He left it to his assistant master to enforce the necessary discipline and came over to the school only for lessons.
John wanted to learn better how to behave with people like Stopford; they were not undangerous. On one of his first days at school he said in response to a question by Stopford: ‘Sir, I need a little time to find the answer.’ The assistant was irritated. There were crimes by pupils that didn’t give even him any satisfaction. Asking for more time, that was no discipline to speak of.
Thomas Webb and Bob Cracroft kept thick notebooks in which they entered something every day in fine script. On one of the covers was written ‘Sayings and Thoughts’ or ‘Common Latin Phrases’. That made a good impression. So John started a voluminous copybook with the heading ‘Noteworthy Phrases and Constructions to Be Remembered’, which included quotations from Virgil and Cicero. When he wasn’t writing in it, the notebook was buried in his chest under his linen.
Dinner. After long prayers, only bread, small beer, and cheese. Meat broth twice a week; vegetables never. Anyone who broke into the orchard and stole fruit got the cane. At Rugby, Atkinson told them, the pupils had locked up their rector in the school’s cellar two years ago. Since then they were given real meat three times a week and were thrashed only once a week. ‘Is he still in the cellar?’ asked John.
In the navy, too, they had mutinied against admirals!
The dormitory was large and cold. All around them they saw displays of names of former pupils who had accomplished something because they had studied diligently. The windows were barred. The beds jutted out into the room. Every sleeper was accessible on both sides. No one could turn to a protective wall to stare at it or cry. You made believe that you slept until you did sleep. The light burned incessantly. Stopford wandered up and down to see where the pupils had their hands. John Franklin’s travels under his covers were not noticeable; he withdrew them from sight with his slow, deliberate movements.
Often he learned while falling asleep, repeating what he had been taught, or he talked to Sagals.
He had once dreamed that name. Meanwhile, he imagined a tall man, quiet, clad in white, who looked down from above the dormitory ceiling and could listen to even complicated thoughts. One could talk to Sagals, for he never suddenly disappeared. He said hardly anything, only now and then a single word, which, however, made sense even if it was completely outside John’s own reflections. Sagals didn’t dispense advice, but John believed he could distinctly recognise what he thought by observing his face. At least he could tell whether it was more ‘yes’ or more ‘no’. Sagals could also smile in a friendly, enigmatic way. But the best part was that he had time. Sagals always hovered above John in the dormitory until he had fallen asleep. Matthew, too, would come back soon.
He now understood navigation. He had started with Gower’s Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Seamanship. A miniature ship was attached to the cover. It had adjustable yards and a movable rudder. With them John practised turning and tacking. The book itself was the ocean; when he closed it he could cover up deep water. He had read Moore’s Practical Navigator and had tried Euclid. He found arithmetic easy, because nobody pushed him. Sometimes he confused plus and minus and he never entirely got rid of the feeling that it might be doubtful whether the difference between such small signs really mattered. Ships drifting off course, wrong compass bearings, taking noon sights – all that he could figure out. In the spring he spoke to the bright leaves of his tree more than a hundred times, repeating, ‘Spheric trigonometry, spheric trigonometry.’ He wanted to pronounce the name of his field of interest without a slip-up.
A new teacher was expected, a young man named Burnaby. Perhaps he taught mathematics.
Navigation: when they used that word in Louth, they thought of the inland canal from the Lud to the mouth of the Humber. So much for Louth. For all that, the sea was only half a day away. After another talk with Sagals, John resisted the temptation. He wanted to go on waiting for Matthew.
He also wanted to persuade Tom Barker to join the navy with him.
In his notebook John now entered only English sentences for his own use, as well as explanations of his obstinacy and of his sense of time which he could give easily if needed.
Atkinson and Hopkinson had been to the seaside with their parents. No, he had never taken notice of the ships, said Hopkinson. Instead, he talked about bathing-machines – cabins on wheels pulled into the sea by a horse so that the bather could let himself slip into the water unseen. And the ladies bathed in flannel sacks! Those were the things that interested Hopkinson. Atkinson talked exclusively about the gallows on which the murderer Keal from Muckton had been hanged before being quartered and cast out to be devoured by the birds. ‘That figures,’ John answered, politely but a little disappointed. Atkinson and Hopkinson were no ornaments of a seafaring nation.
Andrew Burnaby usually wore a gentle smile. He said right at the beginning that he was there for everybody, especially for the weaker pupils. So John saw his smile often. It usually looked a bit tense, for anyone who is always present for everybody has little time. He didn’t favour physical punishment, but he was ambitious in his use of time. The hours marked by the sand in the hourglass no longer mattered; it was now a question of minutes and seconds. For answers to his questions, he secretly or expressly set an appropriate time limit, and if responses didn’t come in time they had to be worked up later. John always went over the time limit and then answered one or two earlier questions unexpectedly, out of order, for nothing could keep him from solving a problem, even if it had already become inappropriate. That had to improve! He wrote in his copybook, ‘There are two points in time: a correct time and a missed time,’ and underneath, ‘Sagals, Book I, Chapter 3,’ so it would look like a genuine quotation. He also no longer hid the book under his linen, but put it openly on top. Let Tom read it if he wanted to! Did he anyway, perhaps?
It was raining on Jubilate Sunday, the third Sunday after Easter. John went to the fair with Bob Cracroft. The water dripped from the tents. They splashed about in puddles. John wasn’t happy, because he thought about Tom Barker and himself. If there is an ideal human being among us, and not just in Greece, he thought, he has long, shapely limbs, laughs softly, and can be as mean as Tom. Ever since he had started to admire Tom, he had looked at himself with displeasure. The way he came at you, for example: his legs wide apart, his round eyes, his head askew like a d
og’s. His movements seemed glued to the air, and he talked like an axe thumping on a chopping-block. He didn’t find much to laugh at, and when he did he laughed too long. His voice had become hoarse, as though a rooster were crowing inside him. That wouldn’t matter at sea. But then there was something else new which kept happening unexpectedly, a swelling which disappeared only very slowly. Of all things, to be conspicuous in such a place! ‘That’s normal,’ Bob had remarked. ‘Revelations, Chapter 3, Verse 19: “Those whom I love I reprove and chasten.”’ Again proof of the Bible’s total unintelligibility. John regarded the bustle of the fair with his glassy fixed look, as if he were about to catch a ball. Spavens, the one-legged man who had written a book of seafaring memoirs, stood by the fence. ‘The money has croaked,’ he announced. ‘Everything’s twice as dear, and my publisher pretends to be deaf.’