HMS Victory is a three-decker 104-gun warship and it’s huge. I’d never seen anything so big made out of wood by human hands. No power tools, just tools made by hand and worked by hand. When my ticket was punched I was given a printed guide. I have an ingrained resistance to manuals and guides, so I just followed the crowd up the gangway and into the lower gun deck. I have a problem with seeing things: when I go to an exhibition of paintings I clock the pictures briefly but I don’t really study them, don’t properly get into them until I look at the reproductions in the catalogue at home and recall to life the images recorded by my mind. So now in HMS Victory’s lower gun deck I trudged by dim lanterns past the thirty-two-pounder guns and their tackle, the rammers, sponges and the hammocks slung above them, all of our many tourist feet treading the planks where men long dead had walked and run and fallen. I couldn’t see anything or feel anything, there was no privacy in which to see and feel.
Up and down steep stairs and companionways we went and at some point stood numerously in the orlop deck in front of the place where Nelson died. There was the oaken knee against which he leant as he lay dying. By it stood the painting of that scene by A. W. Devis. To the right was a painted wreath around the words, ‘HERE NELSON DIED’. The lighting was too bright, it magnified the absence that prevailed. Foolishly I had hoped to feel Nelson’s heroic death at the moment of victory but I felt only my own emptiness. You can buy a ticket to walk up and down and all around HMS Victory but the moment of Nelson’s death is not for sale.
Still we kept trudging, and after a while the world and his camera, wife, children and I stood on the quarter deck. ‘This is where Nelson was shot,’ said an American voice, ‘by a marksman in the rigging of the Redoubtable.’
‘Le Redoutable,’ I said.’Mizzen top.’ No one seemed to hear me. ‘HERE NELSON FELL, 21st Oct 1805,’ said the brass plaque.
On the way out I passed the great cabin and the stern lights through which Nelson must often have looked at the wake of his passage in all weathers. Now they showed today’s grey rainlight that gleamed on his table, his telescope and sextant.
Then I was out in the rain again. At the shop I bought a book on HMS Victory and a video tour of the ship. I walked back to the station and in a short time was on a train back to London. I closed my eyes and waited for delayed heroic inspiration. What came to me, dark and shadowy, were the frames and timbers I had seen in the hold. These were of oak, their forms heroically achieved by the concerted skills of men with axes, saws, adzes, drawknives and augers who shaped them into the structure that would be planked up as the flagship of the fleet. The beautiful drawings in the book showed the lines, the framing, planking, masting, yards and spars of the ship they had built. Englishmen now alive had in their genes the army of skills that had flourished in this English nation.
Two hundred years ago my people, the Jews, had no nation. Their skills were scattered throughout the diaspora. In Biblical times there were Jews who built ships and sailed them: Hiram shipped ivory, apes and peacocks to Solomon from Ophir. There were Jews on the sea and by the sea, working in Akko, Joppa and other ports. Jesus’s disciples were mainly Jewish fishermen who got their living in boats. But in my genes there was no army of Jews with axes, saws, adzes, drawknives and augers two hundred years ago.
I sat there in a funk for a certain time, then there came to mind Martin Buber’s books on the Hasidim. Aha! I said, and smote my forehead (one or two people looked at me): there are ships and ships; there is a great unsinkable oak-ribbed copper-bottomed ship of the mind, strong to weather any storm and impervious to all broadsides. Who built this ship? The zaddikim! Theirs the axes, the adzes, the augers, the strength of arm for the great unsinkable ship of the mind.
Who were these men? Rabbi Israel Ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov! Dov Baer of Mezritch, the Great Maggid! Pinhas of Koretz and his school, yes! Such as these and other illustrious zaddikim were the men. Swarming up the rigging, they manned the yards and stood ready. With them behind me and the Louisville Slugger ready to hand I felt that I could deal with whatever had to be dealt with.
But as I was putting the zaddikim back on the shelf Rabbi Moshe Leib slipped out and said,
To know the needs of another and to bear the burden of their
sorrow, that is the true love.
‘We weren’t talking about love, Moshe,’ I said. ‘And besides, Troy Wallis is a big sorrow for Barbara and I’m bearing the burden like a true lover.’
‘So you’ll bash in his brains with your baseball bat, yes?’
‘Strictly in self-defence.’
‘Which means he’ll have to attack you.’
‘Or Barbara — the way it was in The Rainmaker.’
‘And what, he’ll also have a baseball bat?’
‘He doesn’t need one, he’s very big and very strong — he’s a professional bouncer. I’ll have to play it by ear and see how the situation develops.’
‘It sounds to me like a disaster waiting to happen.’
‘So tell me, Rabbi Moshe, from the depths of your wisdom, what should I do?’
‘Who knows? Sometimes a disaster is just something you have to get out of your system.’
‘With this kind of advice you became famous?’
‘I came off the shelf to talk to you about true love and sorrow, not baseball bats, OK? Your first priority is Barbara’s sorrow.’ And with that he was gone.
8 Barbara Strunk
I was going to phone Phil before I left for work but then I didn’t; it was one of those times when I wasn’t exactly depressed but I was anxious and scared and sad: I didn’t know where I was with Phil and I didn’t know where I was in myself. Is the world real? I wondered. What is this that’s looking out of my eyes? ‘Never mind,’ I heard myself say. ‘Time to go to work.’
As always, I took the District Line to Notting Hill Gate where I changed to the Central Line. When I came out at Oxford Circus the ordinary rhythm of a July Thursday seemed to have been disrupted. Some people were walking quickly and looking anxious; others stood in little knots and talked with many gestures. Listening to them I learned that there had been bombs in the Underground. I tried to ring Phil on my mobile but the network had been shut down.
When I got to the Lichtheim brothers they had the radio on with all the details: three bombs in the Underground and one in a bus; many dead and injured and the Underground system was now shut down. I phoned Phil on the landline and got his answering machine. ‘Are you all right?’ I said. ‘Call me at work!’ then I thought that he might be out doing one of his workshops and not near a phone. Maybe in a tube train.
I was enraged by the bombings. I flung my arm out as if to push away this intrusion; how dared they do this to my London! Then as details kept pouring in my mind filled with the screams of the wounded and the panic of those climbing over bodies to walk the tracks in darkness. And more dead and injured in the double-decker bus that stood in the sunlight by Russell Square with its top blown off. My hands were shaking so badly that I couldn’t do anything with artificial eyes so Karl told me to go home. The sunny day was a mockery and the ordinariness of a London Thursday was gone. It was as if London was an anthill that had been kicked by a giant foot; there was nothing gigantic about the bombers, they were just creeps with evil minds. It was Terror that was the giant: Here I am, it said. I have always been here but now you will pay attention.