Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [52]
Neal's father, he said, had once been a strolling player. Then, when Neal's mother died, his father enlisted in the St. George's Light Dragoons. Later his father joined the
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Navy because he thought it offered more opportunities for prize money. After he had been wounded in an engagement, he was admitted to the Naval Hospital, where his scanty allowance barely enabled him to buy tobacco for himself and supply Neal with a weekly two shillings on which to live in a room on Fisher's Alley.
Thus, Neal said, he counted himself fortunate to receive seven shillings a week from Mr. Penkethman, even though that pay was three weeks in arrears.
When the tide was wrong, so that the fops and rakes couldn't sail down from London to Greenwich and sail back again to London the same night, the theatre was closed and he was free to fish for Mr. Langman. On theatre days he fished for himself and turned over his catch to Mr. Penkethman's players, who repaid him by teaching him how to walk and enunciate and have stage manners.
There was something about the way he said the words "fops" and "rakes" that made me wonder what he or his father had endured at their hands; but when I asked him that question, he said abruptly that the whitebait had stopped running. Would I, he asked me, take him as far as Watling Stairs? When I said Yes, he neatly slid the dinghy off the step without any help from me. Watling Stairs, Neal said, was where Langman daily went to collect the catches of his fisherboys.
I saw Neal meet Langmana swarthy tall man with a dubious half-smile on one side of his mouth; and I never dreamed, as I watched him empty Neal's little bag of fish into a larger sack and give him a few coins from a leather wallet, that I'd ever see that troublesome man again.
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Chapter 2
Through all my boyhood and youth Greenwich and its waterfront had been my stamping ground.
Everything about the river was familiar and fascinating to methe merchantmen and ships of war that moved perpetually or lay at anchor all around the tip of the Isle of Dogs and up past Deptford on the one hand and down past Woolwich on the other: the constant movement of watermen bearing gentlemen on an outing to see the beauties of the palaces: the watermen's hoarse crying of "Oars, Sculls! Sculls, Oars!"; the sloops, loaded with brightly dressed men and women, who, screaming like seagulls, waved at me as I passed; the towering three-deckers, with their carved and gilded stern galleries and their bright red sides: their fluttering lines of newly washed sailormen's togs: the never ending passage up and down gangplanks of women and hucksters, wives, trulls, boatmen, visitors: the vessels battered from long voyages beating up to their anchorages; those setting off for unknown ports with new canvas gleaming from their squared yards and noisy with the shouts of angry mates and drunken sailors.
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They were sights and sounds to which I looked forward all through each long winter, when I crouched beside my sea-coal fire in Christ Church, reading and forever reading those tiresome books that had been preserved for generations in the Bodleian's underground caverns.
Greenwich being what it was, I never defied my father's orders to stay indoors after dark; for sailors, whether King's men or merchant seamen, were a scurvy lot, and one who ventured on the streets at night too often found himself in the grip of a press gang, beaten black and blue, stripped of his clothes, and thrown into a vermin-ridden cable tier so far below the water line that his cries were as nothing compared with the gurgle of the tide against the bow.
Greenwich,