The Last English Poachers (5 page)

And it was as cold as a gamekeeper’s heart, even down in the stoke-hold. Now, some people would think it would be nice and warm down there, but we was over the Arctic Circle, remember, and
it was freezing because there were big fans all the time blowing on the furnaces. And the minesweeper was only a little ship, so it was rough again every time we came down a fjord and went back out
into open sea. But I survived.

On the way out of Tromsø, we passed the island of Hakoya, where the
Tirpitz
, the biggest battleship built in Germany during the Second World War, was sunk by Lancaster bombers
dropping Tallboy bombs on her in 1944. We sailed close to where she was being broken up by a joint Norwegian and German salvage operation and it was something to see, for a country lad like me.

You might be saying this has nothing to do with poaching, but the Norwegian fjords are very deep, so we could sail close to the land as we went up and down them. I noticed that the areas beyond
the shoreline were covered with birch and pine forests and, I thought to myself, there must be plenty of game in there, just waiting to be trapped. And there was – mountain hares and willow
grouse and moose and all sorts of other animals.

Now, the grub on board ship weren’t much to get giddy about, so I thought if I could only get over there I could bag a few birds and we could have a treat for once. So when we anchored off
the island of Seiland I decided to do a bit of poaching. We promised the watch we’d bring something back for him and lowered a lifeboat in the middle of the night and me and Tommo rowed
across to the island. I’d already made some wire snares and we took bits of bacon and porridge oats as bait, hoping to catch some game during the course of the night-time.

Seiland is mostly uninhabited, apart from a few remote areas, and I might have known my way round the English West Country, but I didn’t know my way round this place. I decided, not
knowing the terrain and where the animals run, it might be better to set the snares near water. So we searched till we found a small stream and, once the wires were in place, we moved away downwind
to wait. Tommo had a bottle of Norwegian
hjemmebrent
, which is a local moonshine made from potatoes and sugar and is said to be strong enough to stun a moose. And that don’t surprise
me, seeing as back then Norway was said to have one of the highest rates of alcoholism in the world. We drank it to keep out the cold while we were waiting and, sometime later, I heard a sound like
I ain’t never heard before. It was a soft howling, not like a dog, but more like a yodelling coyote – low and muted.

We made our unsteady way back to the traps but, instead of finding a mountain hare or a big grouse, like I expected, we found a beaver caught up in one of the wires. It looked like an old animal
and I soon put it out of its pain and gutted it there on the spot. By now, it’s time to be getting back to the ship, but the
hjemmebrent
had really kicked in and we were both
disorientated. We stumbled about for a while in the darkness with the dead beaver, before collapsing into a stupefied coma.

The captain of HMS
Pickle
sent out a search party the next morning and they found us still snoring close to the boat we’d rowed ashore the night before. We were taken back and
given two days in the brig. I gave the beaver to one of the men who came after us and told him to make sure it got to the cook in the mess hall. When I got out, I went along to see if there was any
of it left. And there was – the whole thing. None of the sailors would skin it and the captain told the cook to keep it for me and make me eat it as a punishment. They all gathered round to
watch, thinking I’d be sick, like I was on the voyage through the Norwegian Sea. I skinned the animal myself and threw it into a pot and boiled it for a while. Then I cut it up and fried it
in a pan. It tasted a bit like beef to me, maybe a bit stronger and more sinewy. But it was as good as anything else I’d eaten on board the HMS
Pickle
. I cured the pelt with salt and
made a hat out of it, with the tail hanging down the back of my neck, and they called me ‘Beaver Bob’ after that. I had that hat until I went aboard the
Ark Royal
and some
thieving bugger stole it.

Once we got round to Vardo in the Barents Sea, we was given some shore leave. Now, there was nothing much to do in Vardo, but it did have the northernmost illegal boozer in the world – so
where do you think we went? It was just a wooden shack, really, and the choice of drinks was very limited. It was mostly stuff called akvavit and it tasted like petrol. We was drinking this akvavit
for a couple of hours when an Eskimo came in. He started giving it the big ’un about how he’d been six hundred miles over the polar ice cap with his reindeer and how he’d hunted
sea-lions and bears and narwhales on the way. I was very drunk by then, so I called him a liar. He turned to me with a serious scowl on his scarred face.

‘Who call me liar?’

‘I did.’

With that, he had me by the neck and a hunting knife up to my throat.

‘You be dead if you not just a boy.’

‘I’m a better hunter than you.’

Tommo and some of the other sailors stood up and the Eskimo put me down. He laughed.

‘We see.’

He drank with us and, during the course of the session, I must’ve agreed to go out hunting with him the next day, even though I couldn’t remember doing any such thing.

We slept on the floor of the hut and, as it’s winter time and mostly dark, it’s difficult to tell whether it’s day or night. The Eskimo wakes me after a few hours.

‘We hunt.’

‘Where?’

‘Mainland.’

We goes across a stretch of water between the island of Vardoya and the Varanger Peninsula in a boat called an
umiak
, made out of driftwood and waterproofed with seal oil. We paddle it,
one of us either side, in the twilight of the northern winter and with him at the bow. He has an old over/under combo-gun, which combines a .22mag rifle barrel on the bottom, with a 12-bore shotgun
barrel on the top, and I has nothing but a knife.

We tether the boat when we gets across and starts to trek inland. The country’s flat, without much cover, and I can’t see how we’re going to bag anything. The sun’s
scarce at this time of year when, suddenly, we puts up a brace of grouse. The Eskimo’s a crack shot and he brings down both birds with his hybrid gun. We trek on, with me carrying the grouse,
and the terrain becoming more marshy, with trees now and brown gorse, and I catch glimpses of animals in the distance – reindeer and wolverine and arctic fox, along with all kinds of birds,
many of which I ain’t never seen before and can’t identify.

The Eskimo gives me the gun to test me out and I shoot an arctic goose. But the sound of that shot attracts the attention of some men across a stretch of water. They start to shout and wave
their fists at us.

‘What’s up with them?’

‘Better to go now.’

‘Are they gamekeepers?’

‘What is gamekeeper?’

He starts to jog back in the direction we came from. I jog after him, carrying the dead birds. I find out later that some species on the peninsula, like arctic fox, are protected because
they’re being hunted to extinction for their pelts. I also find out there’s territorial rivalry between some Inuit tribes and the Sami. So the people who are shouting at us might be
some kind of rangers or other native types. I never get to know for sure.

Anyway, we’re running back towards the boat but, just before we gets to it, we disturb a brown bear that’s feeding on a reindeer carcass. Well, this animal’s a good eight feet
tall when it stands up on its hind legs and growls at us. The Eskimo unslings his gun and takes aim, but it jams when he pulls the trigger. The bear’s about fifty feet away and begins coming
towards us. The Eskimo backs away. Slowly. I follow him, walking backwards and keeping my eyes on the bear at all times. We’re close to the boat when the bear starts its run towards us.
It’s moving fast and can easily outstrip us. The Eskimo turns and flees at full pelt. I throw the dead birds at the bear and run after him. The bear stops to sniff the birds and that’s
enough time for us to jump into the
umiak
and paddle as fast as we can, out into the stretch of the Barents Sea between the peninsula and the island of Vardoya.

We laughed about it when we got back to the hut and drank a few glasses of akvavit – we were laughing with relief, not because we thought it was funny. But the Eskimo didn’t brag
about hunting musk ox and walrus and moose no more, because I saw the way he ran when the big bear came after us.

We stayed up in Norway on the HMS
Pickle
for quite a while and I had my sea legs by the time we sailed back over the Norwegian Sea. On the way back, we came across a trawler with fresh
cod and the officers wanted some. So I was sent with a few other sailors to get the fish. We had to row across to the trawler and the cod was all frozen when they threw it down to us. It was like
concrete blocks landing in the water and we had to fish ’em in with nets and take ’em back to the
Pickle
.

When we finally got back to Portsmouth, I found out my mother had died. She had an abscess up her nose and the doctor dropped the scalpel when he was lancing it. This caused an
infection, which spread to her brain. She had to have her head cut in half and her eyes taken out for them to get at the damage they done to her. She went through a terrible time and then she died.
I was about eighteen. They gave me leave to visit her grave and I thought about not coming back. But they’d only have come and got me and threw me in the brig again.

In September 1957, Operation Strikeback was happening off the coast of Norway and I was transferred to the
Ark Royal
, an Audacious-class aircraft carrier. Strikeback was a major NATO
naval exercise to simulate an all-out Soviet attack. It involved two hundred warships and six hundred aircraft and seventy-five thousand men from America and Britain and Canada and Europe. It was
the largest peacetime operation and the most ships assembled together since the Second World War. But we were struck with an epidemic of Asian flu and some men died because of contagion. The messes
were converted into emergency isolation wards and ventilation systems turned on at full power. We also had to go onto the flight deck for physical exercises every day because the officers and
medics believed this would keep the lurgy at bay. I managed to escape infection because I slept on the upper deck on a camp bed, instead of going below, and because of the keeping clean routine I
learned the hard way early on. The epidemic had run its course by the end of the operation and the
Ark Royal
was sent on patrol in the Mediterranean.

While serving in the Mediterranean, I got to visit places like Naples and Genoa and Rimini and Capri and Malta, and I remember going to see an active volcano on an island called Stromboli, off
the north coast of Sicily. There was a group of us, including this big queer able-seaman called Arthur. After watching the lava eruption for a few minutes, Arthur turned to the rest of us and said,
‘I’ve seen brighter lights in a stoker’s eyes.’

And I wasn’t all that impressed either – or with any of the places I went. I longed for the fields and woods of south Gloucestershire and the hunting and poaching, which was the only
life I really wanted to know. I realised then that joining the Navy was a mistake, but I was in now and couldn’t get out. I was put on canteen duty in the Med and one of my jobs was to take
all the accumulated rubbish across to the shipyard when we docked. The bin was heavy and I got fed up lugging it back and forth, so one day I just threw the lot overboard into the sea, bin and all.
I got charged with losing one of Her Majesty’s bins and was fined £2/10s. But I was getting into trouble all the time for fighting and not being properly turned out and the Navy was
losing its patience with me.

After the
Ark Royal
, I got transferred to HMS
Belfast
, a light cruiser in the reserve fleet. It could do 30 knots and, when it fired a broadside, it went right over in the
water and we got thrown about like rag dolls if we didn’t hang on to something. But the food was good, better than any other boat I’d been on. She was due to go on a tour of the Far
East in 1959 and I fancied having a go at hunting water buffalo in Borneo and sambar in Ceylon, before they became endangered species. The thing is, I just couldn’t behave myself and I was
transferred off the
Belfast
before she went on tour and was sent aboard HMS
Jutland
, a battle-class destroyer, searching for unexploded mines round the Channel Islands.

Sometimes bombs got washed up on the beaches and we had to go and investigate. On one particular day, the ship was running slowly and we were being lowered in a motorboat. I was on the engine,
under the canopy, because I was a stoker. But the shackles didn’t slip properly and we all got tipped into the water. I came up from under in a bubble and grabbed on to a floating diesel can.
The rest of them, a midshipman and a load of able-seamen, were all round one lifebelt. An officer was screaming at us from the deck, ‘Don’t panic, men! Don’t panic!’

We all got hauled back aboard eventually and I went straight up to the officer and smacked him on the jaw.

‘No one was panicking except you, you bloody idiot!’

I got three months in the brig for that, and it wasn’t long after I got out when I came offshore drunk and being abusive. So this same officer got them to put me in a straitjacket and hung
me from the deckhead on an eyebolt and I was twisting round and round and round all night. Next morning they let me down and I had to sit on a coil of rope for half an hour to get my bearings,
before going up some stairs to the upper deck. Well, the officer who had me hung up was coming behind me and I turned round and kicked him in the mouth and knocked all his teeth out. They put me in
the spud locker for a few hours, before taking me to the captain. I said it was an accident, but I got forty days in pompey, in solitary confinement, and I had to pick oakum from big pieces of
rope. They used the oakum to caulk the planks on the upper decks and sealed it with pitch. Anyway, they got fed up with me on the
Jutland
and I was transferred to HMS
Rothesay
, a
frigate, which took me over to Gibraltar.