from the City called the shipwrights a canting crew because, they said, they were rogue builders, outside the Company of Shipwrights and the law of the City. But to me they were magicians who carried great ships in their heads. In the yard at Blackwell I watched these visions become hulls, then skeletons, growing prows and masts, as I ran for buckets of pitch or an adze for Matthew in his sawpit.
When snow covered the Isle of Dogs and ice gradually thickened over the Thames it was always warm here. With bare feet and wearing nothing but breeches I filled and carried baskets of wood and coal for fires to melt the pitch, mould the iron and make the steam that would bend the wood, miraculously to me, into the shape of the shipwrights’ drawings.
With fires going on through the night when a ship had to be finished, no wonder it looked like hell on earth to the wealthy City people who commissioned the ships. And smelt like it. When an east wind blew, smoke from the lime pits of Limehouse combined with that given off by the coal to make a choking, noxious brew.
We lived in hovels and many were miserable, but I was happy. Unlike my fellows, I was not beaten. Matthew beat Susannah sometimes, particularly when his wages were paid and he had been to the Black Boy or the Green Dragon; but he never beat me. He would shout at me and curse me, and his hand would go to his belt or pick up a piece of wood, but at the last moment he would stop himself, give me a strange look and walk away muttering.
Once I asked him why he never beat me.
He laughed as if he was never going to stop. ‘Dost thou want to be beaten?’
‘No, no, Father, but everyone else is.’
He hit me on the head, knocking my hat off, but it had no more force than the slaps Susannah gave me.
‘There,’ he said. ‘Dost like it?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘but that was no beating.’
He stopped laughing. ‘Thou art a curious child,’ he said.
I did not think I was curious, but curious things happened to me. Most of the children I knew had only a vague idea when they were born, or how old they were. There were too many of them. But I knew I was born in the year King Charles was crowned, towards the end of September. I say towards the end, because the day seemed to vary. It was always when the weather grew chill, the mist clung to the marsh and the dry seed pods of bog plants rattled in the wind. I would be up at first light, my lids gummed to my eyes, taking the snap of bread and cheese from Susannah when she would say: ‘The will o’ the wisps have been, Tom.’
My eyelids would fly open, I would drop my snap and rush to the front doorstep. There was a cake with icing on which TOM was written, in bold letters of yellow marchpane. It was the most delicious cake – I have to say the only cake – we ever ate. The inside was bright yellow, and full of fruit. We had no oven and the baker in the High Street sold only bread and pies. I searched on the marsh, but never could find the will o’ the wisps’ oven. Matthew warned me never to catch them, or even see them, or they would bake me as well, and TOM would be inside as well as outside the cake.
But I was determined to catch them and, one foggy September, real will o’ the wisp weather, I begged Susannah to wake me. I must have been five or six and all that week I rose shivering and stared bleary-eyed through the holes in the oiled paper of the window.
On the fifth morning I dozed off, waking with a start. I leaned out of the window. The cake was there – I had missed them! The street was empty, except for a woman in a hooded, grey cloak and a peaked stove hat like a witch’s. She must have heard me, for she stopped and began to turn. At the last moment I ducked away trembling, afraid she was a will o’ the wisp in disguise, and would turn me into a cake. By the time I told myself this was stupid (I was always having such conversations with myself, as lonely children will) and looked again, she was disappearing into the swirling mist.
One Easter Sunday after the service I saw the cake in the church hall. It looked exactly the same, the marchpane glittering, but they had made a mistake with the name. Instead of my name it said GLORIA. I picked up a knife by it. Whether I was going to put my name on it, or cut a slice, I cannot remember, but the knife was twisted from my hand by the minister, Mr Ingram, who proceeded to thrash me. Susannah heard the noise and pleaded for me.
‘This is Tom.’
‘Ah. Tom. Yes. I remember.’
What he remembered I was not to learn for a long time but, again, I got that curious look. Through my tears I tried to tell him it was my cake, not Gloria’s. He was startled I could read, and it happened like this:
Susannah’s great treasure – practically her only possession – was her Bible. She could not read, but knew whole passages by heart from the services at the church and where to find them.
‘Blessed are the poor and meek,’ she would say, tracing her finger over the passage, ‘for they shall see God.’
I would stare in wonder at the passage, knowing we must be blessed for I could see well enough how mean was the tiny room where the wind blew through gaps in the oiled paper at the window, even though I could not see God.
I thought if I could only understand the words, I would see Him. One day I pointed to a passage and said to Susannah: ‘I . . . am . . . the . . . good . . . sh-sh—’
‘Shepherd!’ she cried out.
She was so steeped in parables she thought it was a miracle. I had suddenly been given the gift of reading. Shaking, tears of joy glistening in her eyes, she pulled me into the street for the neighbours to hear.
A sceptical woman opened the book at a passage Susannah had never recited. When I looked dumbly at the page, Susannah first thought I was being stubborn, then that she had done wrong by making a show of me like a travelling bear and God had taken His words back as a punishment.
She was so stricken by this and by the grins and jokes of the neighbours that I went to the passages she had so often recited to me that I knew by heart, and pretended to read them. I even put in stumbles and hesitations so that Susannah, with joy on her face again, could correct me.
The neighbours were awestruck and, not wishing to lose this reputation, I applied myself diligently to try and make the pretence real. And on that day, when I thought my cake had been stolen, Mr Ingram began to teach me himself. He explained that the cake was a simnel cake, with saffron and fruits of the East, a symbol of resurrection, of rebirth. I could not understand what this had to do with the cake on my doorstep, nor who Gloria was, unless it was one of the will o’ the wisps. He laughed and said it was not a name at all – it was short for Gloria in Excelcis Deo – Glory be to God on High.
And that was my first lesson in Latin.
One day, when I was ten, a great gentleman came to inspect the Resolution, a five hundred-ton armed merchantman in which he had an interest. It had his flag fluttering from the mast; a falcon with an upraised claw. I saw the gentleman staring at me as I put down a bucket of boiling pitch and went off to collect another. He said something to the shipwright, who called over Matthew. Curious, I took my eye off the pitch I was tapping, which splashed over my bare leg. I had been burned before, but never as badly as this.
Yelling and screaming I ran to the pump to douse it, but the gentleman had me see the barber-surgeon who dressed the wound and gave me a cordial, London Treacle, a mixture of herbs and honey dissolved in wine, which some of the men said they would wound themselves to have. It was the first wine I ever drank, and I lay in the shipwright’s
