Victory by Susan Cooper

was netting to hang on to. The men would reach over their heads and grab a beam in the ceiling, but I was not quite tall enough. Sometimes I had to go on all fours. It was miserable all the way along the coast of France, and then of Spain and Portugal—not that I could see the coast, nor anything but waves and spray.
    But gradually I got used to it and managed to stay upright. One day I saw Tommy laughing at me, as I skiddedalong the deck on my way to feed the chickens.
    â€œYou got your sea-legs, Sam!” he said, and I realized I had come half the length of the tilting ship without holding on to anything at all. Later that day, as we thrummed along under our creaking load of canvas, the clouds broke, and I saw the moon rise in the twilight sky. A big fat white moon it was, over the restless sea, and I looked at it through the dark mesh of rigging and thought that it was beautiful.
    Then a bosun’s mate flicked his cane against my bare legs and snarled, “Move, boy!” and I was back in the Navy again.
    Though I still worked for the cook, I was no longer the slave of the mess at which he and his hangers-on ate. Thanks to my uncle and James Hartnell the rope-maker, I had a new family: the six men of their mess, number seventy-eight. I could hardly believe my good fortune. At the start of each month any man could change his mess, if he disliked the men he was with, or wanted to be with a friend elsewhere, but boys were not important enough to get that chance. I was just lucky that Lieutenant Quilliam had noted my connection to my uncle at the beginning—and it helped that we had joined the service, and were not written down as pressed men.
    So now, at midday dinnertime and at supper, I would run down from the galley to the lower gundeck, where there was a roar of voices as the wooden mess tables were unhooked to swing down from the ceiling between the great cannons. The grog issue came right after dinner and supper,so these were the most cheerful times of the day. The men sat at benches on either side of the table; I sat on a barrel, at the end. They took turns weekly to be mess cook, the one responsible for bringing the food from the galley, and I used to go with each one of them; I was still a cook’s boy, after all, and that was useful even if Mr. Carroll was in a bad mood. I helped to clean up too; the mess tables had to be spotless for inspection.
    They were good men in that mess, none of them very young, all of them craftsmen. My uncle and Mr. Hartnell were the only rope-makers; the others were sailmakers. William Smith, a sturdy, amiable man from the West of England, was the master sailmaker; his mate was Andrew Scott, and Jonathan Stead was one of their crew—he was the oldest, a tall, stooped man with a thin fringe of hair round his bald head and a sad, lined face. In all the time I knew Jonathan I never saw him smile, not even at the funniest joke, not even after the second grog issue of the day. But he never cuffed me or even yelled at me, and when he found I had no knife of my own to eat with, he gave me an old one he had in his kit, after sharpening it very fine and giving it a canvas sheath so it would not cut me.
    Early in the morning before breakfast, the mess cook went to collect sugar, butter, bread and flour for his mess from the purser’s stores. If it was one of the four days of the week when we had meat, he also needed to pick out our share from the “steep tub” where chunks of salt pork or beef had been soaking overnight. To make this fair, every messcook reached a long fork over the edge of the tub without looking, and he had to take the chunk that the fork pricked. A metal tag called a tally, with the number of his mess on it, was attached firmly to that chunk of meat, and along with all the rest it was boiled, for hours. Then at dinnertime we went to fetch it, and sometimes a bag of vegetables—also tagged—which had been boiling too.
    Ship’s