We left Woolwich behind us; its barracks, Arsenal, Museum of Artillery: we dodged the trundling ferry, and scorned the gaunt mushroom field of Telecom discs on the north shore. We relished the clear water of Gallions Reach. There were no other craft. A torn-paper outline of advancing headland. A carpet of clouds.
It could not last. Even Jerome, safely upstream, had his unexpected encounters: he found ‘something black floating on the water’. A suicided woman, around whom he spun a sentimental fable. But I was staring into the dark spaces between the wave crests, letting the ink run, willing some apparition to justify our voyage, as we retraced the fatal track of the Bywell Castle, midstream, closing on the beacon at Tripcock Ness. Navigation lights. The Princess Alice, visible over the murky ground — a land vessel caught among the dead branches, the hooks of thorn! Her red light and her masthead light. ‘Stop the engine! Reverse full speed!’ The thing was inevitable. We passed through the wings of tragedy. I could not turn away. It was too easy to enter the consciousness of Captain Harrison, who also travelled here from the domestic safety of his Hackney villa. I was repeating his account of the journey. And I was aware of it.
Harrison of the Bywell, I learnt, resided in Cawley Road, Victoria Park. One of those strong, ugly, family houses taken on in later years by exiled Poles. The hobbled green of Well Street Common lay to stern; the ocean of the Park broke, tamely, over the bows. The house, a brick-built collier, rode at anchor, between voyages. But it could catch the tide at an hour’s notice from the owners.
Cawley Road survived into the 50p edition of the London A — Z, but it has subsequently been purged — leaving Henry Milditch, the thespian bookdealer, who lived directly behind Harrison, and who stalked his destiny like a herring gull, with an unimpeded view of the Park.
Milditch, red-bearded (as of this A.M.) — worried, wrinkled like a preserved fruit — stared over Captain Harrison’s shoulder at the familiar prairie. He was sunk into the immortal melancholy (stateless, land-locked) of a man who knows that, however well his affairs prosper, it is only a matter of time before the Cossack hordes thunder out from the Lido. Grass liquefied before his tired eyes. The Burdett-Coutts Folly was an island — on which the child, Jerome K. Jerome, claimed to have met and held a prophetic conversation with Charles Dickens. Authors of Destiny!
Milditch saw none of this. In his hand was a telephone. He smiled as he lied. In an empty room he made appointments. He withdrew books he had already sold. He smoked a cheap cigar. Captain Harrison, the dead man, was cleared to sail to his fate.
The sense of wellbeing, the anticipated pleasure of a short voyage, was such that Harrison carried his wife with him in a growler to Millwall on the Isle of Dogs. An unlucky thing, a taboo broken: a woman brought on board. A rival to the jealous spirit of the river. (As they clipped through the south side of the Park, the Captain noticed a gang of workmen repointing the stone alcoves, the London Bridge trophies.)
The Captain asked Christopher Dix, a pilot of thirty-four years’ experience, to scour the riverside drinking dens for ‘runners’: family men, far gone in drink, who would sail to Newcastle, but no further. Purcell, the stoker, was — even by the long standards of his craft — outrageously drunk. Skewed, damaged, blotto. He stank of doom. Wharf rats backed away from his reeling shadow. He rambled incontinently. Two strong-stomached runners supported him up the plank to the Bywell Castle. (Do or Die? Pass the bottle.)
The first collision came when the Bywell Castle’s propeller inflicted a cut on the port chine of a barge that drifted across her path as she ran on the ebb tide from the outer Millwall Dock. This was a sober rehearsal. Grander sacrifices were required. The collier dutifully aligned herself with the High Victorian demand for drama (and with our desire to write about it). Panther-feasting poetasters, trained for years on stock drownings and suicide sonnets, let rip in a flood of privately printed chapbooks. The gross weight of public sympathy was forcing the boats together (like the mating of pandas) before they so much as let their hawsers drop on the quayside. All that good will could not go unrewarded: 640 deaths was the most reliable estimate. Rescue services can justify themselves only among the dying. The health and security of any society is measured in regular cathartic doses of mayhem. The Alice was split and its human cargo spilled into the water.
The account of what happened after the sinking belongs to Purcell. The strange incident in the cutter. Purcell and Mullins (a Somerset runner) pulled downstream for Erith. They trawled for corpses — finding four, including a young woman, ‘warm and supple as though she was still alive’. They were in awe of a tall stranger, handsome, flame-bearded, who sat with them, though they did not know him, nor where he came from. The men spoke later of his enveloping ‘boat cloak’ and the stovepipe hat that he clutched to his head. His hair was unusually long. Certainly, his manner was that of‘a gentleman’. He spoke only once — sharply — in warning to Purcelclass="underline" ‘Hold your row.’ The keel scraped on the slipway. The boatswain crossed himself. Moonlight. Two gas lamps illuminated the landing place. The stranger had vanished. And was never seen again. Neither among the crowd giving statements, nor in the Yacht Tavern, nor even at the Inquest.
Purcell. The bodies taken from the cutter and placed in a handcart. A constable painstakingly entering the particulars into his notebook. Age, height, weight, clothing. Mullins carried an old man, more dead than alive, on his back to the tavern. ‘Better to have let him ride in the cart,’ said Purcell. ‘They’ll measure his length before the night’s out.’ They took brandy and later beer. Purcell seemed strangely elated. Said he had spilled some silver in the bottom of the cutter. Returned to the river; alternately lifting a pint pot and a lantern. He found a halfpenny down among the scuppers. Was visibly shaken. His dampened moleskin trousers bulging comically over his engorged member.
Before dawn he had accused the Captain and the pilot of being drunk. These were serious charges. ‘Take care what you say, man.’ ‘Boozed, sir? Every blood bung. Soaked — all of us.’ Purcelclass="underline" shivering in shirt, moleskins, calico cap. Borrowed a jacket off Harris the confectioner, got some warmth from the fishtail burners: ‘a pleasant yeasty smell’. Accepted cake and ginger beer. Returned. This time he was not followed. The body of the young woman on the landing stage, under a policeman’s cape. Her feet and her ankles uncovered. ‘Warm and supple.’ Hot brandy to her lips. ‘Boozing all the afternoon long, guv’ nor. As I’d report before my Maker.’ He had the skirts up, bruised her white thighs with his thumbs. Sniffing at her — a dog — for warmth, for the smell of life. He would not look in her face. Rolled her. They thought he was after jewellery, hidden coins. It was worse. Or: it was the only human reaction. He let down his trousers. ‘A call of nature,’ he claimed. To piss back into the river. Turn spirit to water. He climbed on her. Mounted. Entered. Spent. They drew a bucket to pitch over him. Mullins put a fist in his mouth. The cur! He spat blood. Tobacco juice. Called out, justified. Daughter! He believed there was life in her still.