RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  But soon he was back in uniform and boarding the three o’clock boat, bound for France.

  Nearly sixty years later, eighty years old, Owen introduced me to poetry; after all, he’d been a teacher himself. In the wood-and-glass-panelled classroom of my school – run by monks in black cassocks powdered with chalk dust – our civilian English master, a harried-looking man in an academic gown, handed out the poems. Their clarion words – ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ – spoke to my teenage self-drama; they seemed to be written by someone like me, not a remote poet from the past; he was part of my resistance against the normal world. Poets could time-travel, I realised, like the starman. They also died young. In a world in which I was promised five years left to cry in, his words were ambivalent, the way I felt. I heard his voice over war cries from autumnal football pitches. I peered at his photograph, the one in all the books, its half-smile receding with each reproduction of this ordinary, handsome man.

  I still cannot look enough. I had no idea of how like or unlike me he had been. I did not know him for a boy from a semi-detached house where he read his books in his boxroom, or that he walked the same shore as I did.

  I turn to tell him, as he stands by my side on the beach, that he is better off, that the century isn’t worth waiting for.

  A few days after returning to France, Wilfred finished his poem ‘Spring Offensive’. In it, he wrote of the soldiers he served; men who had come to ‘the end of the world’, where they ‘breasted the surf of bullets’. ‘Some say God caught them even before they fell’; others succumbed in the sea of mud. The dead were drowned and forgotten, as he wrote in the last line he would ever compose.

  Why speak not they of comrades that went under?

  The final attacks of the war were made by soldiers wearing life-jackets taken from cross-Channel ferries, advancing in the fog through flooded fields. Owen went back into battle, accompanied by ‘Little Jones’, his manservant pledged to protect his officer’s life. Moments later Jones was shot. The two men lay together on a hillside as the servant’s blood poured onto his master, ‘the boy by my side, shot through the head, lay on top of me, soaking my shoulder, for half an hour’, Wilfred wrote to Siegfried. ‘Catalogue? Photograph? Can you photograph the crimson-hot iron as it cools from the smelting? That is what Jones’s blood looked like, and felt like.’

  He became his myth. Leading his men on with a new, ‘seraphic’ lance corporal by his side, further ahead of the line than anyone else, he roared, fighting ‘like an angel’, capturing a German machine gun and personally inflicting, as his citation would report, ‘considerable losses’ on the enemy. For this he became a hero; for this he won a medal he would never wear. He was an avenging angel, tooled up, dealing death. In the dark, chilled to the bone, another corporal produced a blanket and shared it with his officer. And before the dawn, in the hour between wolf and dog when the night sank to its coldest, acting Captain Owen led his men back under the stars, ‘through an air mysterious with poison gas’, recalling enough of his astronomy to assure them that it was early morning. In between the frenzied, halting action he read Swinburne, another poet sensually attached to the water. It was the only book he had left; only poetry was any good now. In another lull in the fighting, his platoon were entertained by the bizarre sight of seaside pierrots and soldiers performing in drag, all but limelit by the falling flares, like the ghosts they all already were. He had never loved his men more, and longed to tell them the war was about to end, any day now.

  Four days later the company took shelter in a cottage on the edge of the Mormal Forest, which might have contained magical animals, ready for the last battle. Holed up in a vaulted brick cellar, Owen and his men planned their next attack. It was the fourth of November. Back home, boys were getting ready to light fireworks.

  The Sambre–Oise canal ran through the flatlands, forty feet wide and eight feet deep, too deep to ford; a man might be lost in it. Six months before, the occupying German soldiers had jumped into this water. Naked, some still wearing their caps. Laughing. Alive. They might have been modern youths tombstoning into Torbay. This could be the Wannsee or the Serpentine. Young willows sprout from the bank.

  Weeks later, as they retreated, their sappers flooded the land to forestall their pursuers. More than ever, this world was water, and its assailants sailors. The advancing British built makeshift rafts from poles and petrol cans, like lads messing about on a river. On these they tried to cross the canal, only to come under fire from young men like themselves.

  Owen was last seen standing on one of the rafts before he was shot.

  The dark water flowed below him, overlooked by silent trees.

  THEHANDSOMESAILOR

  The branch line to Portsmouth Harbour just stops. Its rails cut off, as if the train had carried on into the sea. The station hangs over the water, its platforms resting on a rusting pier. At the far end there’s a big old wooden clock which used to advise passengers of the time of the next ferry, but its hands have long since stalled.

  Through the windows let into the side of the station you can look out, depending on the tide, to a seaweedy waste where mudlarks once wallowed for pennies thrown to them by onlookers; or to a swelling steely sea, buoying up the bulk of HMS Warrior – an ironclad, forty-gun Victorian deterrent so effective that it never saw action. Its long, low presence is now tethered impotently to the quay. Uniformed men patrol the historic dockyard beyond. This is still a working place, although its boathouses and roperies, semaphore towers and smithies, ship shops and basins long since ceased to be essential, outmoded by the ominous presence of modern warships, their sea-green superstructures surmounted by gun turrets and radar domes.

  Encircled by a high wall, the dockyard is an insular citadel, with its own subsidiary isles. To the north, tucked into the harbour’s inner shore, is Whale Island. It lost its nominal shape in the eighteen-sixties when it was expanded with debris dredged by convicts. What exists now, joined to the mainland by a causeway, is a functional place, surrounded by silty mud still seeded with wartime bombs; a dead zone where ships go to die and where, on family visits to Portsmouth, I’d see stranded submarines like abandoned bathtime toys. I may have been conceived by the sunny seaside, but my mother, brought on a visit to a submarine when she was heavily pregnant, nearly gave birth to me here, underwater. It’s a wonder I wasn’t born with a caul.

  In the late nineteenth century, Whale Island became home to a Sailors’ Zoo, stocked with animals that had been presented to ships’ captains as gifts for the royal family. Centuries ago such beasts might have ended up in the Tower of London as part of the monarch’s menagerie, but now their fate had fallen to men whose wandering had turned their hearts sentimental. According to a 1935 edition of The Times, the zoo ‘grew out of the sailor’s fondness for pets of all sorts, and the care he gives to their well-being’. Somewhat worryingly, it also overlooked the parade ground of the island’s gunnery school, as if its inmates might provide exotic target practice.

  It was a reflection of the navy’s secret love of eccentricity, bred by its romance with the sea. ‘For lions and other animals there are spacious iron cages, much like those of the Zoological Gardens. The marsupials have large grass paddocks to roam in; for the aquatic birds there are big ponds, and there are large aviaries for birds of other species.’ It must have been odd for locals to hear the island’s strange noises from over the water, as if a little bit of Africa or the Arctic had been towed into the harbour. The collection was a growling, squawking index of colonialism, complete with a Shakespearean bear pit. ‘Among its first carnivora’, notes The Times, was a polar bear named Amelia, given by Inuit people to HMS Grafton in 1904. Her fellow inmates included one of Captain Scott’s sled dogs who had done brave duty in the Antarctic, and a parrot named Calliope Jack, the sole survivor of HMS Calliope after it sank in a Samoan storm. Jack was the zoo’s veteran: he lived for thirty-nine years on Whale Island, and died in 1919. Another resident, Tirpitz the pig, was rescued from a
German warship off the Falklands in 1914. Kept onboard as food, he had been left below when Tirpitz was scuttled, and managed to make his way to the upper deck. He swam for an hour towards a British ship, one of whose officers nearly drowned trying to save the frightened animal. Tirpitz too spent the rest of his life on Whale Island, before performing his final service on a dinner table.

  The island had become an animal League of Nations, a melancholy ark. In 1940, its last captives met an abrupt end: on 27 May, lionesses Lorna and Topsy, polar bears Nicholas and Barbara, and sun bears Henry and Alice, were summarily shot. It was a logical move. Apart from fears that the animals might escape and terrorise the city, the country as a whole anticipated food shortages and air raids during which, civilians were informed, no pets would be allowed into the shelters, nor would they be included in rationing. Along with the non-human occupants of Whale Island, domestic animals became the first casualties of war. All around Britain, owners gave up their dogs and cats to be put down. In 1939 – within a week of the publication of an official government pamphlet advising ‘it really is kindest to have them destroyed’ and recommending the ‘“Cash” Captive Bolt Pistol’ as ‘the speediest, most efficient and reliable means’ of doing so – three-quarters of a million pets were shot or gassed, long before the first bombs fell.

  There are no caged animals in Portsmouth Harbour now. Rather, centre stage in the port’s stalled drama stands the single most significant historical artefact in Britain: HMS Victory, which I boarded that morning, for the first time since I was a boy.

  Victory still stands close to the sea, but unlike Warrior it lacks the reassurance of the waves lapping its hull; its magnificence is marooned in a dry dock. This morning part of its prow is rudely exposed, the bride stripped bare of layers of paint, subject to constant conservation work. The ship’s regal state is somewhat diminished by this care and attention, like a proud octogenarian forced into a nursing home; and by the fact that it has been upstaged by a third warship, one which didn’t manage to stay afloat at all: Henry VIII’s flagship, Mary Rose. After marinating in the Solent for four centuries, the wreck was hauled from the turbid water, and now lies under cover in climate-controlled gloom, its splintered timbers slowly being sucked dry of salt water as their expanded cells are pumped full of silicone. If this is surgery on a grand scale, then the low hum of machinery in the darkness lends the extended shed the air of a giant intensive-care unit.

  Arrayed around her – I fall into the gendered terms, seduced by these ships, as much mothers as mistresses, and their crews as lost boys – are the objects the drowned crew left behind. They’re displayed in faintly-lit glass cases, like one long aquarium. I’m peering into the aftermath of disaster: from the surgeon’s velvet skullcap to personal sundials, Tudor wristwatches; from immaculately preserved longbows made from French yew to skeletons of the six-foot archers who used them, their overdeveloped right arms testament to their profession. Peter, my archaeologist friend, points out grooves where strong muscles were attached, and jaws where the bone grew over empty tooth sockets so smoothly that in some the entire lower mandible became one gummy structure.

  These objects are dumb, but they speak of the last moments of five hundred men, their names lost to the sea. A hide jerkin which once spread over the substantial chest of its anonymous owner was impressed with his ribs as he came to rest in the mud, leaving his shape in leather. In a nearby case is another nameless skeleton: the ship’s dog. The label supposes it was kept to control the rats foraging on scraps dropped by sailors, but it is easy to imagine how it was loved, too, for its own sake.

  Given the contemporary attention lavished on this Tudor wreck – the sort of ship that might have foundered off Prospero’s isle – her eighteenth-century counterpart seems vaguely forgotten, as if she’d been wheeled out of the ward and left to fend for herself. Dismasted and deprived of her figurehead, Victory is naked, exposed to tourists’ stares and all-seeing smartphones. And where Mary Rose is plumped up with silicone, Victory is continually rebuilt in her own image, much as we are always regenerating ourselves. Her wounds heal over; her ship’s knees are as scarred as my own.

  As I climb the gangplank – a route once restricted to officers with gold braid around their sleeves – I feel underdressed in my shorts and sandals, expecting someone to bark at me, ordering me to adjust my attire.

  Ducking under the doorway, I bend to enter the hallowed maw of what is as much sacred architecture as historic ship. This revered interior, a lowered cathedral, requires genuflection. The layered decks demand obeisance to their holy timbers; the headbutting beams force me to bow. Most historic sites forbid you to touch, but here you cannot help it. You are in constant contact with the structure with hands and head and feet, perpetually aware that you are being admitted to a shrine.

  ‘It’s two hundred and fifty years old,’ an American woman tells her young son as they ascend ahead of me. It’s not clear whether this is a remark or a reprimand.

  Winding through the wooden aisles towards the stern, we’re drawn into a burst of light like a nave. In Nelson’s Great Cabin, a personable, eager young rating in white shirt and black slacks (a term for which such an item is made) stands at ease, legs apart, behind the admiral’s table – a position which, two centuries ago, he could have occupied only if he were waiting on his superiors or awaiting sentence. Today’s handsome sailor imparts his information on a rolling, need-to-know basis, repeated with renewed enthusiasm for every new arrival.

  The details are anecdotal, engaging. He tells us all about the en suite facilities the admiral had at his disposal; how he preferred to sleep in a specially designed low leather chair because his constant struggle with seasickness made his swinging cot an uncomfortable resting place; and how the entire interior was transformed for battle, its panels and partitions folded away and cannon rolled in as it became a war room.

  All this is delivered with cheery briskness. I feel I want to take a breath for our guide, but he clearly enjoys his performance; he is, after all, flanked by superior set-dressing. In one corner stands a tall vitrine, just shy of the height of our instructor. It holds a headless dummy draped in a replica of Nelson’s full-dress uniform: a blazing, glamorous get-up, from his cutaway coat and red silk sash to the diamond chelengk on his cocked hat, plucked by Selim III, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, from his own royal turban and awarded to the admiral for having won the Battle of the Nile. Stuck in his bicorne like a comet caught in its felted brim, its fêted recipient was the only infidel on whom this starry decoration had been bestowed. The outrageous assembly of eighteen diamonds – then valued at eighteen thousand pounds – was animated by a clockwork mechanism which slowly revolved its centrepiece, all the better to catch the light, while its thirteen wired rays – each representing an enemy ship defeated in the battle – trembled like studded feathers. Nelson loved to wear this ‘plume of triumph’, at a time when it was not usual for an officer to bedeck himself so. Sir John Moore, the British general, met Nelson in Naples shortly after the battle and gruffly described him as ‘covered with stars, medals and ribbons, more like a Prince of Opera than the Conqueror of the Nile’.

  The glittering commander-in-absence illuminates the space, casting glorious rays on the proceedings. Far from the gloom of the rest of the ship, his day cabin is flooded with light: the stern is one long wall of glass, a giant Georgian bow window. The walls are delicate duck-egg blue; the floor canvas, painted to resemble the black-and-white tiles of an elegant interior. It might as well be a Regency drawing room as a working war office; a suitable setting for a Prince of Opera covered with stars.

  But out of its princely glow, the mazy darkness returns, brown and murky. I climb on through the ship, feeling my way along the decks, as disorientated as if I were lost in a multi-storey car park; only here the floors are laden with three-ton guns rather than Fords or Audis. Victory’s sides are spiky with cannon which once disgorged a dragon’s breath, each discharging a pulverising death. The e
ntire ship is an organic war machine, almost animal itself, looped and bound with hemp and canvas and wood and iron, soaked to the skin with tar and blood and sweat and piss. If a whale ship was slick with spermaceti oil, then this vessel, this container, was lubricated with the oil of humans.

  I’m funnelled through midshipmen’s cabins with their neat cupboards and plank bunks, past the galley – the only place on the ship where fire was allowed, in an oven the size of a carriage – down to the whale-belly bilges laden with pig iron and what looks like railway ballast, laid to steady this lurching leviathan. I’m led by an invisible, smelly sailor, head and body bent, along gangways and alleys and into dead ends where all manner of misdemeanours and conspiracies might have taken place while the officers were busy in their drawing room above, planning their next engagements over a glass of port. Finally, bending ever lower, I reach the place where he lay. It is marked by a gilt-framed copy of Arthur William Devis’s painting on an easel, displaying, a still from a Regency movie, a re-enactment of the admiral’s death.

  Devis, an enormously successful but reckless artist who was let out of debtors’ prison to create his canvas, was allowed to board Victory on her return from Trafalgar so that he could sketch the principal players, both living and dead. Like Trelawny, he’d had his fair share of drama. He had served on an East India ship and survived an attack by New Guinea islanders during which he was wounded in the face, leaving him with a locked jaw. During his career he had reached great heights – he was paid an astonishing £2,530 for his portrait of the governor-general of India, General Charles Cornwallis – and great depths, having been imprisoned as a bankrupt. Now came Devis’s last chance to make a mark on posterity – and pay off his debts. His commission was the most prized in England. He would have to do it justice.