I told him I had served on the USS Manhattan in the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, but my service was not all fighting. Most days we did more damage to the currency of the South than to their fighting forces, by isolating them from the world.

Blocking supply lines and trade, the young man assured me with an expression of the utmost seriousness, was important war work too. And so it is.

Many’s the day, though, that we would blockade just by putting to sea, with no sighting of a Southern vessel or a ship coming to trade. We ran drills on the deck, or swabbed it clean when it was already clean, or sat there with our shirts off, going brown in the sun. We had some Negroes in our crew and some said I had so many days with my shirt off I looked like a kind of cousin to them.

At the end of it all, in 1865, we put in at Hampton Roads on the way to our northern homes, and visited a photographic studio for portrait sittings to mark the end of our service. Some men, their hair had gotten so light with all the southern sun that they darkened it with Cristadoro to stop it appearing grey in the photographs. Mine was black as ever, and the photographer joked that he’d have to turn the lights up or he’d be taking a picture of a Negro. It was the Black Irish in me, the Spanish blood brought to Ireland after the Armada. My father had darker skin than I do, and both of us coloured up in the sun. The boy had not heard that expression before, Black Irish.

But he wanted a battle story, and he got that also, though not one that put a medal on my chest. Battle of Mobile Bay. August 5, 1864. I was all of sixteen by then. I was on the Manhattan, a monitor, an ironclad, fresh out of commissioning. Battle stories are complicated things when someone sits down to write them but, on the day, there’s the waiting and waiting, with the fear of an awful death gnawing at you, and then you’re at your station. Stoking or loading, whatever your station is. You have it to do and you do it and keep repeating it until the captain says to stand to, and that’s the totality of it. That’s all a battle is. A naval battle, anyway. I was a captain’s clerk and my role in the battle was to act as messenger, relaying messages from the pilot house to the gun turret, messages concerning targets and intentions. The turret had two fifteen-inch guns by Dahlgren. Fifteen inches. That’s not a small gun. Shell weighed three hundred and fifty pounds.