Anyway, along with the meat we had our usual side dish of reindeer moss. But this moss was a bit different because it came from the dead reindeer’s stomach and was already semi-digested. That didn’t make for much of an improvement – there was a slight faecal aroma to it. Give me cod liver oil any day.
Afterwards we sat around the stove gnawing at knuckles of vertebra. Lars pulled out a long thin bit of leg sinew and used it as dental floss. Then I flung a slice of liver at Fred because he was getting on my nerves and he grabbed it off the floor and flung it back.
I think we’re turning into cavemen.
Fred has been in radio contact with London again. We’re due to attack on the night of the fourth of January. The heavy water stores will be collected from the plant on the sixth of January for shipping to Germany, so we have to get in before then. That gives us three more nights here before we move hut.
Åse Jeffries
31ST DECEMBER 1942
This morning we had a huge breakfast of liver and brisket. Jakob and Lars have gone hunting again. Meanwhile Fred and I have done some housework and taken the meat outside and hung it in two sacks from the roof. Freddie’s legs are beginning to look a bit more normal and he’s no longer finding it hard to walk. He puts this down to eating all that moss.
The meat is frozen now, but the sacks have dripped buckets of blood, so there’s a truly grisly area just by the window where we chop up bones. Here the snow is all red and the meat sacks have weird beards of red icicles. Anyone visiting the hut would think it was inhabited by a bunch of savage trolls. And we’re certainly beginning to look a bit troll-like – I’m the only one who’s used a hairbrush since we got here.
After lunch I went outside for a pee. I’d just finished when I saw what I thought was a beaver standing up on its hind legs on the brow of the hill.
It’s really difficult to work out how big things are in the snow – in all that whiteness there’s nothing to give you a proper sense of scale – but this beaver did look very substantial.
The next thing I knew, the beaver was down on all fours and coming towards the hut. And there was another peculiar thing: this beaver had a lolloping, loose-limbed walk, rather like a bear’s.
When it was about 200 metres away, I gave a little yelp.
Heepers jeepers! It was a bear.
Don’t run! I thought. I know I mustn’t run. Bears can move at up to fifty kilometres an hour, so he’d catch me in seconds.
I stood completely still.
The bear came padding up to the meat cache, its nose close to the ground. It had tiny, beady eyes and a long snout.
The bear sniffed around the ground, licking the blood off the snow. Then it reared up on its back legs and reached up for the sacks of meat.
I couldn’t stand there and wait to be eaten. Now was my moment.
Dead slowly I took a step towards the door of the hut.
That was a very, very stupid thing to do.
The bear’s head swivelled. It had seen me! It dropped back on to four paws and ran for me.
About two metres in front of me, it reared up on to its back legs, gigantic and terrifying, like a full–sized billiard table upended and toppling towards me. Only this billiard table was really angry and it had humungous claws.
I had nothing to lose. Absolutely terrified, I tried the technique of Maximum Noise, Maximum Trouble:
“Who do you think you are! Go away! GO AWAY!” I screamed, waving my arms in the air to make me seem bigger than I was.
For a second this did the trick. The bear stared at me with its blank little eyes. Bears have corrugated cardboard for brains, and this fellow certainly wasn’t going to be solving quadratic equations with Fred.
Then what did I do? I know this sounds crazy but I thought a little surprise might put him off his guard. Why not show off before you get eaten? Might as well leave this world in style…
So I bent my legs and did a back flip.
It wasn’t a perfect performance. The snow was too soft to get a good take off and somehow I under-rotated and landed splat on my stomach in the snow.
I looked up at the bear.
It blinked moronically, then bared its teeth. I remember thinking how pink its mouth was…
Then came the terrible moment: the bear lunged for me.
I heard a gun go off, but the bear was crashing towards me. I ducked down, burying my head in my arms.
But the blow didn’t come.
I crouched, shivering, my eyes barely open.
The bear lay crumpled in the snow in front of me.
And then who should appear, but Frederick Haukerd. He was carrying a gun.
“Hmm,” said Fred, leaning over the bear. “I got it in the stomach. He took ages to drop, didn’t he? Must be the slow metabolic rate. A bear’s heart only beats once every four seconds. Very odd to find one round here. Not really their neck of the woods. Should be further north. Perhaps this is a particularly bad winter.”
Did Fred then add, “Are you OK, Åse?” or “That must have been a nasty shock – have a cup of tea.” Of course not.
Instead, he took a small measuring tape from his pocket. “I’ve never had an opportunity to get this close,” he enthused. “Look at this! The claw’s eleven centimetres long. Now Åse, if he’d got your carotid artery you’d be—”
UNUSUAL FACTS ABOUT BEARS BY FREDERICK HAUKERD
1. Bears are surprisingly noisy. They bark and make popping noises with their jaws. Suckling cubs make a sound a little like humming.
2. Brown and black bears can DOUBLE their weight between the spring and the autumn.
3. Unlike sheep, no two bears look the same – you can always tell them apart because of their distinctive faces and fur markings.
4. Bears tread in each other’s footsteps. Where a bear has left tracks in the ground, another bear coming later will tread in exactly the same places. In soft ground this means that bear tracks can be as deep as twenty-five centimetres. No one knows the reason for this curious behaviour.
5. Black bears aren’t always black. They can be cinnamon coloured or even white (sometimes called “spirit bears”).
6. Towards autumn, bears become “hyperphagic” – their bodies crave food and they are obsessed with eating. At this time of year a brown bear will eat 15,000 calories in a day – six or seven times what an adult man normally eats.
7. Bears are not fussy eaters. They will consume entire anthills, eating the earth along with the insects.
8. Bears sometimes “bluff charge”. This means that they come racing towards their victim and then stop or veer off at the last moment.
9. Nobody understands how bears survive hibernation. When large mammals sleep for a long time, they normally build up uric acid in the muscles which in turn damages the internal organs. Bears can cope with months of sleep without this happening.
BROWN BEAR
“Thanks, Fred!” I interrupted. “No doubt you’re delighted I haven’t died of shock.” It sounded a bit thin given that he’d just saved my life. So I added, “By the way, I think your Marmite jar’s in one of the explosive bags.”
Fred looked pleased. “Splendid! Now, will you help me measure its skull? Then we can examine the contents of its stomach.”
I made a dash for the hut.
Tonight Jakob and Lars came back with two more deer. I never thought I would say this, but I think we have too much food.
Åse Jeffries
1ST JANUARY 1943
The carcasses are coming in handy in all sorts of ways. We’ve put the skins down on the floor (the bear is nice and thick, but very smelly). And, as the window keeps frosting over, I’ve made a little lamp by chewing up reindeer fat (Lars’s tip – it makes the fat easier to burn) and using a piece of string as the wick. Freddie has turned the bear’s bladder into a balloon for his new baby brother. He says the bladder would also make a wonderful flotation device and that if I get attacked by a second bear (perish the thought!) he’ll make a pair
of bellows for the stove. He also muttered something about constructing a bagpipe.
In fact the sky’s the limit when you’re as bored as we are. If we stay here much longer I think we’ll be making model boats out of the bone chippings.
Fred’s legs are fine now – the swelling has gone. And there’s been a lot of communication with London, normally late at night. We’ve been told the Germans are getting edgy, so they must be getting ready to ship the heavy water. They’ve replaced the Austrian guards at Vemork with crack German troops and altered the times of the sentry changes. The garrison at the Mosvatn dam (about fifteen kilometres away) has been increased and anti-aircraft guns and searchlights have been set up. There’s also a signals tracking station – so they must suspect there’s a secret transmitter somewhere around – but they haven’t searched the mountains yet. Having spent more than three weeks up here, I can see why.
London has told Fred that the commander at Vemork is off to Oslo on Thursday for a long weekend, so the crack guards might be a bit less cracking and a bit more beer-filled than usual.
We now have three days before the attack and tomorrow we leave the hut. It seems unimaginable. It feels as though we’ve been here since the dawn of time. Our world has shrunk to the size of these few floorboards. I now know every seam in the floor here and I can tell you what’s on page 32 of the August 1942 edition of Angling Times. That’s hardly going to help me face crack German troops…
Jakob P. Stromsheim
2ND JANUARY 1943
A clear, cold day and we’ve done the hut move – eight kilometres, mostly downhill and through crisp snow, taking the toboggan and some chunks of bear and reindeer meat with us. Our new residence is not a bad hut, but it’s at Fjosbudalen, only five kilometres from Rjukan. We’re on a very steep slope, on the opposite side of the valley from the Vemork plant, and we are no longer safely tucked away up in the wild plateau, so the Germans are more likely to find us. Now we have to be really careful. One of us is on watch all the time and we’ve blacked out the windows with bits of old blanket.
This evening we sat down with the plans and aerial photographs. The Vemork power plant is like a fortress. It’s on a shelf of rock, dug into the mountainside in a very dark and precipitous valley. Below the plant the cliff face is vertical. If one of the guards dropped a cigarette butt over the edge of the mountain it would fall 200 metres straight down into the River Mane at the bottom.
So we have a choice:
1. We can approach the plant from above, where the slope is more manageable. But the Germans must be expecting an attack from here because they’ve mined the mountainside and set up machine-gun batteries and booby traps, as well as every sort of tripwire you could imagine. The odds aren’t good either: four of us against thirty troops!
2. We can approach via the suspension bridge that crosses the gorge and leads to the road through the valley. But this is maximum visibility and we’re certain to get gunned down by the two Germans who patrol the bridge.
So that only leaves us with what Åse calls the “impossible option”.
3. We sneak in from below, cross the deep, fast-flowing river at the bottom of the gorge and climb a completely vertical cliff. The only good thing going for this plan is that the Germans, who must believe that nobody would be so foolish as to try this route, don’t seem to have paid much attention to defending the cliff.
I’ve asked Lars to go and have a look at the gorge tomorrow and see if he can chart a route for us. In the meantime there’s nothing much we can do except rest and try not to panic!
Åse Jeffries
3RD JANUARY 1943
Lars was back by lunchtime, glowering slightly less than normal. He thinks the cliff is doable – just.
The ice on the river at the bottom of the gorge is breaking up, but there’s still one point where we can get across. Lars did it twice today and he thinks the ice will hold until tomorrow night, especially if the weather stays cold.
As for the ascent, Lars has found a place a few hundred metres downstream from the suspension bridge where there are some small trees and shrubs growing up the cliff face.
“I thought that if trees could grow in that gorge, then we could climb it,” he said. “I had a go and it wasn’t easy, but there were enough toeholds to keep me going.”
“Well, that’s pretty good news,” I said. “But firstly you weren’t carrying a pack of explosives on your back, secondly you weren’t climbing at night, and thirdly I’m about half your size, so how am I supposed to get up that cliff?”
Lars grimaced slightly. “You’ll probably make it,” he said.
Huh!
“Well, that’s sorted,” said Jakob, who didn’t seem worried that I might not make it. “But what about the escape? Should we try and creep back down the cliff face? Or should we just take the quickest route and shoot our way out across the suspension bridge? The odds are heavily against us…”
In the end, Jakob decided that we should try to go back down the cliff, unless we were already in a shoot-out. It seems less brave, but being sneaky and small and unexpected are our best weapons. (There are, very occasionally, moments in life when I have to agree with Colonel Armstrong.)
Once the attack is over we’ll divide into pairs and make our way to Sweden. If we ever get that far…
For supper Jakob and I cooked a fantastic stew (Fred was busy telegramming London) with some dried peas (thank you, Fjosbudalen hut) and a huge amount of reindeer. I can’t understand why we’ve let Fred do all the cooking up till now, when there’s always the danger that he’ll experiment with some new bizarre flavouring. But when I said this to Jakob, he just winked at me. He’s too tactful to get drawn into arguments.
We’ve gone off the bear meat a bit. It’s very strong – like ten-year-old mutton. Maybe getting faddy is a sign that we’re not so desperately hungry as we were. A week ago I would have eaten anything!
Åse Jeffries
4TH JANUARY 1943
Tonight WE LEAVE FOR THE RAID! We’ve waxed our skis and packed and rechecked our bags. Pickaxes, ropes, knives, explosives and the last of the chocolate, specially saved for tonight. In our trouser pockets we’ve each got a little gauze pad and a glass phial of chloroform so that we can knock out a guard completely silently. Then there are always the cyanide capsules… (We keep them in different places. I’ve sewn mine into my coat pocket, and Lars has his in the cuff of his shirt. Jakob and Fred have these special, tiny inner pockets in their trousers.)
We’ve tried to think of everything. We’ve even chosen passwords in case we should get split up in the dark and need to confirm who someone is. The question is “Leicester Square?” The answer: “Piccadilly”.
But let’s get back to the one thing I’m trying not to think about: the raid. After lunch Jakob said he needed to talk to everybody. He was looking really pale and I knew he was going to say something important.
He took a breath and started. “If we are caught tonight we’ll certainly be killed. And before we’re killed, we’ll be tortured. We don’t know what they’ll do – but that interrogation at Drumincraig will be nothing compared with what could come our way. Lars, I’m sure you can put up with a lot of pain—” Lars looked at the ground and said nothing “—but however brave we are, none of us can be sure that we won’t cave in and talk. So I think we owe it to each other, to our families, to Norway and to all the Allies to take our own lives before that happens. If you are captured and can’t get away you must put that pill in your mouth and bite hard. Remember to bite it. Swallowing is not good enough – the rubber on the capsule is very thick and it could pass straight through you.”
He paused. “I want you all to promise.”
And just then I had what I thought was a humdinger of an idea. “Let’s swear on this,” I said, and I brought out of my bag a little Victorian dolls’ house Bible that has been with me through my worst times at Roxbury Hall and which I sneaked into my rucksack at Drumincraig. The book is tiny – on
ly about the length of my little finger, and the paper is so thin and the print so small you can only just read it. But it’s still a Bible.
I held it in the palm of my hand and said, “I hereby swear by Almighty God that under no circumstance will I let myself be taken alive.”
After me, Lars took the Bible and swore on it too.
But Fred, who is never straightforward and never makes anything easy, promptly declared that he was an atheist.
“The Bible does not constitute verifiable fact,” he said. “I’m not swearing on anything I don’t believe in.”
“All right, Freddie,” said Jakob, for ever the peacemaker. “Is there anything in your bag you would be willing to swear on?”
Fred thought for a minute, then rummaged around in his rucksack. I thought he was going to produce his Marmite jar – which is definitely verifiable fact – but instead he brought out the rather pungent bear’s bladder balloon that he’d made for his baby brother. He made his pledge on that.
The last to take his oath was Jakob. He took out the little button compass from his pocket and placed it upright in his palm. As he did so, he and Lars exchanged what you might call a Look. Since I read Jakob’s entries in the log I’ve been really curious about the compass and wanted to have a good snoop at it. But the atmosphere was very tense and Jakob looked like he didn’t want to be asked any questions at all. So, just for once, I restrained myself and kept quiet. I deserve a medal!
Åse Jeffries
4TH JANUARY 1943
As we’re going to be up all night it seemed sensible to lie down and get some rest. We’ve spent the afternoon in our sleeping bags by the fire, but nobody has slept a wink. I tried to, but I was in such a state of nerves that at times I could hear my heart thumping away as if it were a rat trying to break out of my ribcage.
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