Read Online Victory by Susan Cooper - Free Book Online

said. He had a funny accent, like singing. “All this ship have to be clean as a whistle, all the time, or we get the cat.”
    â€œThe cat?” I said.
    â€œCat-o’-nine-tails,” Tommy said, and made a horribleface. “Flogging, by a whip wi’ nine lashes to it. Or for boys, a beating with cane.”
    He put the mop into Stephen’s hands, and we both knew without speaking that we would make sure to use it well.
    So then I got the birds into the bucket of water while it was still hot, and showed Stephen how to pluck the feathers. He was slow and clumsy but he tried hard, and I began to think he might be better than his sly looks. He was a city boy sure enough; he said he had been living on the streets for half a year after running away from home. He was thirteen years old but very small for his age. He had been caught stealing bread, and put into the Navy instead of prison or a poorhouse.
    But we were all in prison on this ship, really.
    When we delivered the two naked hens to the cook, with their giblets and feathers clean and separate, I suppose he thought we were worth having as help. He set me to feeding the chickens, cleaning out their cages and collecting the eggs—with promises of a beating if I ever broke or stole one—while Stephen scoured pots and scrubbed the tiled floor. Within a day we were mucking out the pigs and the sheep too, and we soon found we had one of the worst jobs on the ship.
    I had to be out of my hammock before sunrise and get to the galley by four in the morning. That was when Mr. Carroll and Tommy began to light the fire and heat water for the men’s breakfast. After that the whole day was full of messy, reeking work, through dinner at noon, supper atfour o’clock and bedtime at eight. As boys we were classified as “idlers”—a poor joke, considering how hard we worked. Idlers are the lowest form of life in the Royal Navy: the people who do all the jobs that have nothing to do with sailing the ship. And as third-class boys—there were three classes—we were the lowest of the low.
    About thirty of us boys slept on the upper gundeck, right underneath the ship’s deck, in canvas hammocks slung above the shining black cannons that poked their muzzles out all along both sides of the ship. They were big guns, firing iron balls that weighed twelve pounds each—though the guns on the decks below were much bigger, twenty-four-pounders on the middle gundeck and huge thirty-two-pounders on the lower. When they had gunnery practice Stephen and I had to keep out of the way, but the noise was stupendous and I longed to watch those powerful cannons being fired. Nearly every other boy was attached to a gun crew as a “powder monkey,” to fetch gunpowder every time the gun was fired. I was very envious of them.
    The leader of the boys seemed to be a redhead called William Pope; he and a bunch of his friends bossed us all around. They stole anyone’s jacket or shirt if they fancied it, or any little keepsake a boy had from home, like a knife or a kerchief, making me almost glad I had nothing but the clothes I stood up in—and slept in too, most nights. We had to wash our clothes and ourselves once a week for inspection, but otherwise there wasn’t time. Stephen and I smelled bad as a result, so the bigger boys made life miserable for us.Even though some of them had disgusting jobs of their own, they would scream and honk and hold their noses when we came near.
    â€œShite smells bad enough,” said William Pope, shoving me away from him as I passed, “but pig-shite is worse!”
    So we had to sling our hammocks in a tiny cramped space next to the far bulkhead, just the two of us. Though maybe that was better than hanging close-packed like the others, so tight together that if you so much as coughed you would set the whole line of hammocks swinging.
    I had never thought, at home, that I would ever miss our