Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [2]
The sections of the mast were pale yellow; they lay in trestles under the rough plank roof – the shed was open at the sides. It had been raining heavily and the men had made a causeway of wood blocks down the churned slope of the bank. Erasmus had felt embarrassed at the theatrical way his father had brought his face so close up to snuffle at the raw wood. At twenty-one he was reticent, not given to gestures, moreover just then in a state of inflamed sensitivity, being in the early phase of his undeclared love for Sarah Wolpert.
‘Prime quality.’ Kemp straightened himself for the pronouncement. ‘When this tree was cut it was drinking sweetly. You can smell it in the sap. If you want to test the soundness of the timber, smell the sapwood. Isn’t that right, lads?’ He had made himself an expert on timber too.
It was imported fir from the Baltic. ‘Fir for a mast,’ Kemp said. ‘Fir is one thing breeds better out of England. By God, there are not many.’
Those round him laughed. They all knew him. They had seen him about the yards, with his quick movements, darkly flushed face, something careless in his dress without being slovenly, the short unpowdered wig, the long, square-cut outer coat usually hanging open.
‘See, my boy,’ he said to the aloof Erasmus. ‘Come over here and see. The pieces are all cut and ready. Here are the two parts of the spindle. D’you mark the taper on them? They’ll be coaked together in the middle here, and bolted after. Look at these woundy great fellows, d’you know what they are? See the thickness of them.’
His accent was still that of the rural Lancashire he had left as a child but warmer and more precipitate than is common there. He explained to his son how the spindle would be assembled and the massive side-trees jointed round it, how the mast would be thickened athwartships and fore and aft with heels of plank, then further secured by great iron hoops driven on the outside. And the mast was braced stronger in his mind with every word he spoke, every mark of assent from those around him, and his ship made proof against the violence of men and weather, ensuring a speedy passage and a good return on his outlay – and only Kemp could know how desperately this was needed.
Not knowing, Erasmus was bored and ill at ease – he had no natural friendliness towards inferiors as his father had. Remorse for the boredom would come too, in its season, and even for the ignorance, his failure to understand this striving to make the ship indestructible.
The signs were there for anyone to see. Kemp was a busy man but he would find occasion several times a week to ride down from his house in the town or his place of business near the Old Pool Dock to spend some time in Dickson’s Yard on the river bank, where his ship was being built, poking about, chatting to the shipwrights. Wealth had not dimmed his need to be liked, his desire to appear knowledgeable; and for a man who had come from nothing it was a gratifying thing to command this labour, to see the flanks of his ship swell on the stocks from day to day as by the patient breath of a god.
Not that there was much unusual about her. Ships had not changed significantly for a long time now. They were still built of wood, still powered by the action of the wind on sails of flax canvas attached to masts and yards supported by hemp rigging. Columbus, set down on any vessel of the time, would not have found much to puzzle him. All the same, these Liverpool ships had some special features: they were built high in the stern so that the swivel guns mounted on their quarterdecks could be the more easily, the more commodiously as might have been said then – a word curiously typical of the age – trained down on their waists to quell slave revolt; they had a good width of beam and a good depth of hold and