The Discovery Of Slowness (3 page)

The wind tugged and shoved. John trudged southwards. He'd certainly be lucky, so it had to be Skegness. He hardly ever took his eyes off the waves eating incessantly into the land. Now and then he rested on one of the wooden pilings set up at regular intervals to hamper the sea's work on the sand. He looked on as new channels, pools, and holes constantly opened up, soon to be transformed back again into smooth, shining surfaces. Triumphantly the gulls screeched, ‘That's right!' or ‘Go to it!' Best not to beg at all. Straight onto a ship: there'd be food
there. Once they had taken him, he'd travel three times round the world before they could send him back home again. The houses of Skegness were already shimmering behind the sand dunes. He was weak but confident. He sat down, and for a while he stared at the fine-ribbed sand and his ears took in the sound of the town's church bells.

The landlady at the inn in Skegness saw the way John Franklin moved, looked him in the eye, and said, ‘He can't move another inch, that one. He's half starved.' John found himself seated at a table with a rough cloth and a plate with a slab on it that looked like thick-sliced bread but was made up of small pieces of meat. He was allowed to keep his shilling in his pocket. It tasted cool, sour and salty, and was to the gullet what the bells were to the ears and fine-ribbed sand to the eyes. He ate with deep pleasure, smiling through his meal, unbothered by the greedy flies. The future, too, now looked rich and beckoning; he could view it all in a single glance, like a meal arranged on a plate. Already he was off to faraway continents. He would explore and learn speed. He had found a woman who had given him food. So a good ship couldn't be far away.

‘What's this called?' he asked, pointing his fork at the plate. ‘That's a jellied dish,' said the landlady. ‘Brawn, made of pig's head. It'll give you strength.'

Now he had his strength, but no ship was to be found. No further luck in Skegness. Brawn, yes; frigate, no. But that couldn't deter him. Not far off should be Gibraltar Point, and many ships passed there on the way to the Wash. He'd look around there. Perhaps he could build a raft and get himself out to the shipping-lanes; they'd see him then and have to take him along. He wandered out of the village and turned south: Gibraltar Point.

After half an hour of walking in the glistening sand, he turned to look back. The town had already become blurred again in the haze. But just in front of it a point moved, clearly recognisable. Someone was coming very fast. John watched this movement with concern. The point became more and more oblong; it hopped up and down. That was no person on foot. Hurriedly,
John stumbled to hide behind the wood pilings of one of the breakwaters, crawled flat on his stomach up to the water line, and tried to burrow in the sand. Lying on his back, he scratched the ground with his heels and elbows, hoping that the sea, with a few long, licking waves, would let him sink into the sand with only his nose showing. Now he heard barking dogs coming nearer. He held his breath and stared fixedly at the sky, woodenly, as though he himself were the breakwater. When the hunting dogs yelped in his ear, he gave up. They had him. Now he saw the horses, too.

Thomas had ridden in from Great Steeping; Father had come from Skegness with the dogs. Thomas pulled his arm; John didn't know why. Then Father took over. The thrashing came at once, right here under the afternoon sun.

Thirty-six hours after starting out on his escape, John was on his way home, sitting in front of his father on that ever-swaying, jolting horse, and through swollen eyes he gazed at those distant mountains riding back with him to Spilsby as if taunting him, while hedgerows, brooks and fences which had cost him hours flickered past, never to be seen again.

Now he had no self-confidence left. He no longer wanted to wait till he was grown up. Shut in with bread and water so he'd learn something, he didn't want to learn another thing. Motionless, he constantly stared at the same spot, unseeing. He breathed as if the air were loam. His eyelids closed only once every hour; whatever went on, he let it pass over him. Now he no longer wanted to be quick. On the contrary, he wanted to slow down until he died. Certainly it wasn't easy to die of sorrow without help, but he'd do it. Outside the passage of time, he would force himself to be late and soon drag himself along until they'd think him dead. The others' day would last only an hour for him, and their hour would be minutes. The sun raced across the sky, splashed into the South Seas, zoomed over China, and rolled over all of Asia like a bowling-ball. People in the villages twittered and wriggled for half an hour; that was their day. Then they fell silent and dropped with fatigue, and the moon rowed hastily across the firmament because the sun was already panting up on the other side. He
would become slower and slower. The alternations of day and night would eventually become just a flickering, and at last, since, after all, they thought him dead, his funeral. John sucked in the air and held his breath.

His illness grew more serious, with violent stomach cramps. His body cast out whatever was inside it. His mind became cloudy. The clock of St James's – he saw it through the window – no longer told John anything. How could he still be identified with a clock? At half past ten it was still ten o'clock. Every evening was just like the evening before. If he died now, everything would be as it had been before his birth. He would never have been.

He was feverish, as hot as an oven! They laid mustard-plasters on him, poured tea made of mullein and linseed into him. In between he gulped down barley water. The doctor ordered the other children to stay away. They were told to eat currants and bilberries; that was supposed to prevent infection. Every four hours a spoon passed across John's lips with a powder made of Columba root, cascara rind and dried rhubarb.

Illness wasn't a bad way to regain one's perspective. Visitors came to his bedside: Father, Grandfather, then Aunt Eliza, lastly Matthew the sailor. Mother was around all the time, silent and awkward, but never helpless and always peaceful, as though she knew for sure that now everything would be all right after all. They felt superior to her, but they needed her just the same. Father won, but always in vain. He constantly assumed a lofty position, especially in his talk, even when he wanted to say something kind: ‘It won't be long before you're at school in Louth. There you'll learn declensions; they'll knock those into your head, and a lot more besides.' Protected by his illness, John could study them all with detachment. Grandfather was hard of hearing. He regarded anyone who lisped or mumbled as a provocateur. And anyone who dared to understand what a mumbler said was a traitor: ‘That's how he gets into the habit.' During this lecture, John was allowed to see his pocket watch. On its richly decorated face, the watch bore a Bible quotation starting with ‘Blessed are they …' It was in a crabbed script. Meanwhile, Grandfather told him that when he was a boy he had run away from home to the seashore.
He, too, had been caught. The report ended as abruptly as it had begun. Grandfather touched John's forehead and left.

Aunt Eliza described her journey from Theddlethorpe All Saints, where she lived, to Spilsby, a trip on which she had seen nothing. Still, her speech droned on like an unravelling kite-string. Listening to Aunt Eliza, one could learn that when people talk too fast the content becomes as superfluous as the speed. John closed his eyes. When his aunt at last noticed this she left, exaggeratedly quiet and a little hurt. Matthew came on another day. He spoke sensibly, with pauses. By no means, he maintained, does everything have to go very fast at sea. He only said: ‘One has to be able to climb ropes on a ship and learn many things by heart.' Matthew had an especially strong lower jaw; he looked like a well-meaning bulldog. His eyes were sharp and sure. There was no doubt where he was looking and what caught his attention. Matthew wanted to hear a lot of what John had to say and waited patiently until his answers were ready to come out. John, too, had many questions. Evening came.

Knowing about the sea was called navigation. John repeated that word several times after Matthew. It meant stars, instruments and careful thought. That pleased him. He said, ‘I'd like to learn how to set sails.'

Before Matthew left, he bent over John more closely. ‘I'm shipping out to Terra Australis now. I'll be gone two years. After that I'll get my own ship.'

‘Terra Australis, Terra Australis,' recited John.

‘Don't run away again. You can become a sailor. But you're a bit too caught up in thought, so you must become an officer or your life will be hell. Try to make it through school until I come back. I'll send you some books about navigation. And I'll take you on as a midshipman on my ship.'

‘Please, say it again,' begged John. When he had understood it all clearly, he wanted to get better again at once.

‘He's much better,' the doctor announced proudly. ‘Against cascara rind no bad blood can win.'

B
uttons done up wrong: start all over again. Neckerchief tied neatly, breeches fastened properly? Before breakfast, the outer person was checked by the assistant master. Caught out: no breakfast. For every wrongly done button: a slap on the nose. Hair not combed right: knock on the head. The collar of the doublet outside the frock-coat, stockings pulled up tight. Innumerable dangers lurked already at the beginning of the day. Shoes with buckles, cuffs, coat-tails, and the hat, that trap!

Getting dressed was surely good exercise for later. School had its disadvantages, but John was firmly convinced that one could learn something useful for life anywhere in the world, hence also at school. Even if this had not been so, escape was out of the question. One had to wait, if not out of desire, at least from prudence.

No news from Matthew. But why should there be? Two years, he had said, and they weren't over by a long shot.

Learning in class. The room was dark, windows high up; autumnal storms outside. Dr Orme sat behind his desk as if in an altar niche, with an hourglass in front of him. The grains of sand had to get through the narrow waist to accumulate in the same pile below that they had formed above. The resulting loss of time was called Latin lesson. It was getting chilly, and the fireplace was near the teacher.

The older boys were called monitors. They sat high up against the wall and looked down on all the others. Assistant Master Stopford sat near the door and took down pupils' names.

John was staring closely at the curved lines of Hopkinson's ear
when just at that moment a question was directed at him. Still, he got the drift. Careful now! If he answered hastily he'd stutter and choke; that would bother his listeners. On the other hand, Dr Orme had made it clear during the first week once and for all that ‘When somebody says something that's correct, he has no need to look good.' He could live with that.

Reciting, conjugating, declining, using the proper case. When he got that done he had time for Hopkinson's ear curves, or for the wall beyond the window with its wet bricks and its vines tossed by the wind.

Studying during times off in the evenings. Archery allowed in the courtyard. Dice and cards forbidden. Chess permitted; backgammon prohibited. When he got permission, John went out to his climbing-tree; when he didn't, he spent his time reading or practising. Sometimes he tried to learn speed by using his knife: one hand spread out on the table, with the other he stabbed the triangles between his fingers with his blade. The knife had been swiped from the kitchen. The table suffered noticeably. And now and then he hit one of his fingers. Well, it was only his left hand.

He also wrote letters to Mother and to Matthew. Nobody liked watching him when he wrote, and he loved writing, especially in fine script. Dipping his goose-quill into the ink, wiping it off, then inscribing his letters, folding the sheet to seal it – nobody could bear to watch all that.

Turning into somebody else at school, that was hard. Here it was just as it had been in Spilsby: they knew his weakness; nobody believed in his exercises. They were all convinced that he would always stay the same.

Learning how to get on with the other pupils. Aboard ship he'd be involved with many people, and if too many of them didn't like him it might be troublesome.

The other boys were done quickly with everything, and they noticed at once when one of them lagged behind. Names were said only once. If he asked, they spelled them. He followed their fast spelling even less well than their slow enunciation. Put up with the others' impatience. Charles Tennyson, Robert Cracroft,
Atkinson and Hopkinson – they all sharpened their claws on John whenever possible. It seemed to him as though they always looked at him through only one eye, and with the other communicated among themselves. If he said something they tilted their heads, and that meant, ‘You're boring; get it done quickly.' The most difficult was Tom Barker, now as before. If John gave him what he asked for, he acted as though he had asked for something entirely different. If he spoke to him, he was interrupted at once; if he looked at him, he found a mere grimace. In the dormitory, John and Tom had to sleep next to each other because they were both from Spilsby. They shared a chest between their beds. Each of them knew what the other owned. Perhaps this was good preparation for sea voyages: space was tight there, too, and some people couldn't abide each other.

Nothing could make John miserable; his hope was the size of a giant. Obstacles he couldn't overcome he simply ignored. Most of the time, however, he knew how to manage. He had memorised a hundred expressions. They lay in readiness and proved most useful, for John's fluency with them encouraged many listeners to wait a little until he got to the point of his answer. ‘If you wish.' ‘Much obliged.' Or ‘That stands to reason.' ‘Many thanks for your efforts.' One could say all that quickly. He also knew the names of admirals well. Everybody talked a lot about victories, and so he wanted to know and to be ready to supply the admirals' names at once.

He also wanted to learn how to make conversation. He loved to listen, anyway, and was pleased when bits and pieces he caught fitted together to make sense. He was careful about tricks. Simply saying yes and acting as if he had understood didn't work. Too often something was expected if he said yes. But if he said no, they pounced on him even more. Why no? Reasons! No without a reason was even more quickly exposed than an unfounded yes.

I don't want to make anyone believe anything, he thought. If only others don't try it on me. They must ask me and hold on to wait for my answer. I must get that worked out, that's all.

The tree. The way to it led through Evangelist Alley and then
through a street called Breakneck Lane. Climbing didn't make him faster; he knew that by now. But that didn't make the tree useless. As he moved from branch to branch he found that coherent thought was better there than on firm ground. When he had to breathe heavily he perceived the order of things.

From this lookout-point he could survey the town of Louth: red brick, white window-sills, and ten times more chimney pots than in Spilsby. All the houses looked like the school, only shrunken. They also lacked the walled-in courtyard and lawn. The school had three high, sharp-cornered chimneys, as if it contained a forge. There was a lot of hammering.

‘Correction Day'. There were two of them: rod day and cane day. Could a plant grow in freedom and become a cane? Strange, too, how many names there were when it came to punishment. The head was called a ‘turnip' or ‘poet's box'; the backside was called ‘register'; ears were ‘spoons'; hands ‘paws' – those to be punished were malefactors. John had enough on his hands with current words. This additional vocabulary seemed to him a waste.

Punishment itself he ignored. Mouth closed, his eyes turned to a faraway world – that was how one got over correction days. It was humiliating that the moderators held the delinquent as if he wanted to run away. John ignored them as well. There were also punishments outside the regular order. Being late for prayers, not having signed out before going to the tree, being caught at a game of dice: then one got it ad hoc. On the school's seal was written ‘
Qui parcit virgam, odit filium
' – ‘He who spares the rod hates the child'. Dr Orme remarked that this was pig Latin:
parcere
takes the dative.

Dr Orme wore silk knee-breeches, lived in a house on Breakneck Lane, and, it was said, conducted experiments with clocks and plants – both of which he collected assiduously. An ancestor, they said, had been one of the ‘eight captains of Portsmouth'. Although John never found out what the captains were supposed to have done, the gentle schoolmaster assumed something navigational for him: often John even saw in him a secret ally.

Dr Orme never shouted or thrashed anyone. Perhaps he was
less interested in the children than in his clocks. He left it to his assistant master to enforce the necessary discipline and came over to the school only for lessons.

John wanted to learn better how to behave with people like Stopford; they were not undangerous. On one of his first days at school he said in response to a question by Stopford: ‘Sir, I need a little time to find the answer.' The assistant was irritated. There were crimes by pupils that didn't give even him any satisfaction. Asking for more time, that was no discipline to speak of.

Thomas Webb and Bob Cracroft kept thick notebooks in which they entered something every day in fine script. On one of the covers was written ‘Sayings and Thoughts' or ‘Common Latin Phrases'. That made a good impression. So John started a voluminous copybook with the heading ‘Noteworthy Phrases and Constructions to Be Remembered', which included quotations from Virgil and Cicero. When he wasn't writing in it, the notebook was buried in his chest under his linen.

Dinner. After long prayers, only bread, small beer, and cheese. Meat broth twice a week; vegetables never. Anyone who broke into the orchard and stole fruit got the cane. At Rugby, Atkinson told them, the pupils had locked up their rector in the school's cellar two years ago. Since then they were given real meat three times a week and were thrashed only once a week. ‘Is he still in the cellar?' asked John.

In the navy, too, they had mutinied against admirals!

The dormitory was large and cold. All around them they saw displays of names of former pupils who had accomplished something because they had studied diligently. The windows were barred. The beds jutted out into the room. Every sleeper was accessible on both sides. No one could turn to a protective wall to stare at it or cry. You made believe that you slept until you did sleep. The light burned incessantly. Stopford wandered up and down to see where the pupils had their hands. John Franklin's travels under his covers were not noticeable;
he withdrew them from sight with his slow, deliberate movements.

Often he learned while falling asleep, repeating what he had been taught, or he talked to Sagals.

He had once dreamed that name. Meanwhile, he imagined a tall man, quiet, clad in white, who looked down from above the dormitory ceiling and could listen to even complicated thoughts. One could talk to Sagals, for he never suddenly disappeared. He said hardly anything, only now and then a single word, which, however, made sense even if it was completely outside John's own reflections. Sagals didn't dispense advice, but John believed he could distinctly recognise what he thought by observing his face. At least he could tell whether it was more ‘yes' or more ‘no'. Sagals could also smile in a friendly, enigmatic way. But the best part was that he had time. Sagals always hovered above John in the dormitory until he had fallen asleep. Matthew, too, would come back soon.

He now understood navigation. He had started with Gower's
Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Seamanship
. A miniature ship was attached to the cover. It had adjustable yards and a movable rudder. With them John practised turning and tacking. The book itself was the ocean; when he closed it he could cover up deep water. He had read Moore's
Practical Navigator
and had tried Euclid. He found arithmetic easy, because nobody pushed him. Sometimes he confused plus and minus and he never entirely got rid of the feeling that it might be doubtful whether the difference between such small signs really mattered. Ships drifting off course, wrong compass bearings, taking noon sights – all that he could figure out. In the spring he spoke to the bright leaves of his tree more than a hundred times, repeating, ‘Spheric trigonometry, spheric trigonometry.' He wanted to pronounce the name of his field of interest without a slip-up.

A new teacher was expected, a young man named Burnaby. Perhaps he taught mathematics.

Navigation: when they used that word in Louth, they thought of the inland canal from the Lud to the mouth of the Humber. So
much for Louth. For all that, the sea was only half a day away. After another talk with Sagals, John resisted the temptation. He wanted to go on waiting for Matthew.

He also wanted to persuade Tom Barker to join the navy with him.

In his notebook John now entered only English sentences for his own use, as well as explanations of his obstinacy and of his sense of time which he could give easily if needed.

Atkinson and Hopkinson had been to the seaside with their parents. No, he had never taken notice of the ships, said Hopkinson. Instead, he talked about bathing-machines – cabins on wheels pulled into the sea by a horse so that the bather could let himself slip into the water unseen. And the ladies bathed in flannel sacks! Those were the things that interested Hopkinson. Atkinson talked exclusively about the gallows on which the murderer Keal from Muckton had been hanged before being quartered and cast out to be devoured by the birds. ‘That figures,' John answered, politely but a little disappointed. Atkinson and Hopkinson were no ornaments of a seafaring nation.

Andrew Burnaby usually wore a gentle smile. He said right at the beginning that he was there for everybody, especially for the weaker pupils. So John saw his smile often. It usually looked a bit tense, for anyone who is always present for everybody has little time. He didn't favour physical punishment, but he was ambitious in his use of time. The hours marked by the sand in the hourglass no longer mattered; it was now a question of minutes and seconds. For answers to his questions, he secretly or expressly set an appropriate time limit, and if responses didn't come in time they had to be worked up later. John always went over the time limit and then answered one or two earlier questions unexpectedly, out of order, for nothing could keep him from solving a problem, even if it had already become inappropriate. That had to improve! He wrote in his copybook, ‘There are two points in time: a correct time and a missed time,' and underneath, ‘Sagals, Book I, Chapter 3,' so it would look like a genuine quotation. He also no longer
hid the book under his linen, but put it openly on top. Let Tom read it if he wanted to! Did he anyway, perhaps?