by Harry Beaves
‘Just remember, we get a huge allowance for food. Now just go back inside and do the shopping or we will not be eating tonight at all.’
So it was with the cost of everything, but, even though our allowances offset this, it was still uncomfortable to part with the money for everyday items that at home would be a third of the price. The high cost of living made social life in Norway very different. There were very few restaurants and a modest pizza would cost around £20. Wine or beer with a meal was only for very special occasions. Alcohol in the clubs and discos was prohibitively expensive, yet you would still see some of the locals hopelessly drunk as the custom was to pre-load on home distilled spirits which, of course, had a kick like a mule. The authorities seemed to turn a blind eye to this and it was commonplace, in the confectionery section of the supermarket, to find whiskey, brandy, rum and other flavourings that could be added to the moonshine.
Whilst the family was living in Norway there were two possible options for our sons’ education. Aged seven and eight, they could either go to a local Norwegian school and be taught in Norwegian (though the teaching staff would have been fluent in English), or attend a boarding school in the UK, which would be ninety per cent funded by the MoD. Since John had difficulties at school with a form of dyslexia, we felt the problems would be compounded by the language difference, so we opted to send them to St Lawrence College in Ramsgate. It was a desperate decision as they seemed so young and every time they left there were tears, from us all, but relatives who met them off the plane and saw them back to school always said they were cheerful and chatty and looking forward to seeing their friends again. The school would ring us to confirm their safe arrival and would always say they were happy and well with no obvious signs of homesickness.
The Beaves brothers on the summit of Galdhøpiggen (2469m), Norway’s highest mountain.
When they came out for holidays we were able to have the most wonderfully adventurous time in the wild Norwegian countryside, walking the high mountains in the summer and skiing at Easter and Christmas so that there was always something to tell their school mates about when they went back. One Christmas I made them keep a graph of the maximum and minimum temperature outside our holiday accommodation near Lilliehammer, but they gave up after five days as it had stayed steady at minus seven degrees throughout! I ran two memorable adventure weekends in the summers for the children of BMTC staff, which involved them following clues through the countryside along a route which involved climbing, canoeing, making animal traps and an abseil of sixty feet from a bridge into a canoe on the river below. The climax was a dawn attack with flour bombs on the ‘baddies’ (represented by the drivers and cooks) around the centre’s HQ. None of the children was over ten years old so it was fantastically exciting for them.
Children’s holiday activities in Norway. John Beaves (aged 9) abseils from a road bridge into a canoe.
Children’s holiday activities in Norway. John Beaves (aged nine) practices a ‘jungle river crossing’ in the fjord. His rucksack is kept dry in the plastic bag and provides some buoyancy while he hauls himself over on a line stretched between the shores.
The first Easter the family stayed in a cabin at Gautestad around which was a network of prepared ski tracks for public use. We were joined by our friends, Erik Due-Tonnesson, who was a local Norwegian doctor, his wife Avril, who was from New Zealand, and their daughter Nicole. It was a glorious day so we set off on one of the 15km ski loops. At around midday, we stopped, took off our skis and sat on our rucksacks for lunch. Erik got the children organised to find twigs and dead wood from the nearby birch trees then carefully made a bed of several layers of green twigs with dry dead wood and birch bark on top. He then took out a tin containing some tinder and a flint and steel and lit a small fire. The birch caught quickly, but the green twigs did not, so the fire didn’t sink into the snow. Then, to our surprise, he took out a pack of sausages out of his rucksack and we skewered them on green twigs and barbequed them over the fire. After we had eaten the sausages we toasted the marmalade sandwiches that Barbara had made for us – all sitting on snow a metre or so deep. Erik was a typical Norwegian who, even though he was a doctor, was full of backwoodsman’s skills. He told us that his brother, an engineer, took his annual holiday with his wife and two young children touring the coast of Norway in Canadian canoes. They would take a week’s food for a two-week holiday and catch the rest with rod and gun – not the sort of holiday many British professionals would take!
Training in the Norwegian countryside was made easy because the laws of trespass are very loose. The underlying principle seemed to be that the land of Norway belonged to the people of Norway and that the people had a right to set foot on any part of that land, provided they did not do any damage or enter buildings. For the hill walker this was wonderful, but there were unusual effects for the householder. Few houses were fenced and people felt at liberty to take short cuts through private gardens if they so wished. The house we lived in was on one such short cut and it was very disturbing to see a shadowy figure pass by the window in the darkness. Around that time the IRA began attacking British military targets in Europe and had murdered a number of off-duty servicemen, so such events gave an uncomfortable feeling. On the lighter side, the Pay Warrant Officer had a house with a wonderful view and a large lawn at the front and it was not unusual for him to look out on a Sunday morning and see a couple of locals sitting on his garden furniture enjoying the vista.
Philip Beaves with Eric Due- Tonnessen barbecuing on a metre of snow.
Norway provides unparalleled opportunities for the extremes of adventurous training and we were able to run several special courses that took full advantage of this. These were amongst the most demanding courses run by any service training centre. In the spring groups would undertake a long ski expedition across the Hardanger Vidda, a distance of over 80km through some of Norway’s wildest countryside, often in extreme weather conditions. In the early summer we ran a Special White Water course for about twenty advanced canoeists. The course toured southern Norway looking for rivers in spate and paddling the biggest water that could be found, though I didn’t take part in this as I was never a strong canoeist. In the summer we climbed in the rugged mountains of the
Jotunheim.
Picture taken by Bob Kinnaird on the Setesdalheiene on the day that the Germans were avalanched. Scientists say that there is no such thing as cold, just an absence of heat!
On the summit of Store Skagastølstind (2405m) in the Jotunheim with Steve Tillett.
On one occasion I was accompanying a Nordic Ski-Touring Course on a day when the lesson they were being taught concerned emergency snow shelters and survival. The course members were all competent at Nordic skiing and were led by S/Sgt Henry Branigan, one of our best and most experienced instructors. Henry was a small, slightly-built Scot who had spent two years attached to the German Army during which time he had become a ‘Bergführer’, having completed his Alpine Guides Carnet, one of the most highly-regarded qualifications in mountaineering.
The course was based at Hovden, a popular resort in the Setesdal region with hundreds of kilometres of prepared ski tracks all around. These tracks varied in length, but were always clearly marked with eight-foot coloured poles. Henry intended to follow one of these tracks for about two kilometres before striking off, uphill for a short distance to an area where he would teach the lesson. We parked a minibus at the start of the track and set off in a heavy snow storm. We battled on eventually leaving the track and heading uphill. Conditions had deteriorated and we found ourselves in driving snow and near whiteout, but despite this we pressed on. At one stage visibility was so poor that we could not see if the ground was flat or sloping so Henry took his safety rope, threw it as far as he could in front of him in order to give some idea of the gradient. It was obvious that we could not continue and despite the fact that we were relatively close to a main road and civilisation we were in a very serious situation.
Fortunately we found a depression in the snow which was probably a small stream bed, took our skis off and placed our rucksacks in two lines opposite each other. Henry then got out a Zardsky Sack which is rather like a tent with no poles and functions as a group survival shelter. We sat on our rucksacks and threw the sack over us, tucking the edges under our feet. Out of the biting wind and with the heat of our bodies warming the shelter we cheerfully found our flasks and sandwiches and had lunch. Things were fine, but we still had a lot to do to get to safety. I looked at Henry. He finished eating and I noticed he carefully left a sandwich and his chocolate bar, just in case things went wrong and he needed it later. It was an old soldier’s trick, something that I always did.
Lunch over, Henry briefed the group. It would be very dangerous for anyone to become separated so it was important we stayed close together and kept an eye on the person behind as well as the person in front. We carefully packed our sacks, before folding the Zardsky Sack and finding our skis. Henry was at the front carefully following his compass, while I brought up the rear, also watching the compass as a double check. Conditions were appalling and we kept falling as it was impossible to judge the terrain in the flat light. I fell backwards on one occasion and when I got to my feet was facing the wrong way. It was a brief moment of panic when I couldn’t see the others until I turned and glimpsed the group trudging on through the gloom.
We had probably skied less than a kilometre when we found the blue poles that marked the track and were able to follow them back. I was mighty relieved to reach the minibus and we all gathered round it laughing and joking on an adrenalin high.
Meanwhile, Henry quietly opened his rucksack and ate his last sandwich, the acknowledgement that we were safe again.
Captain Bob Kinnaird and I planned to ski out from Hovden and stay the night at the remote Sloaros mountain hut where we would meet one of the of the ski-touring courses who were coming from the opposite direction. The next day we intended to ski back to Hovden on the same route with the course. We spent the night in Hovdehytta, a mountain hostel where we met and talked to a group of Germans who we, discovered, were intending to go the same way.
The weather the following day was atrocious with driving wet snow, but we decided to set off in the vain hope that things might change. In fact they got worse. Our route took us into a valley at the end of which a steep slope led up to the beginnings of the huge plateau that led north to the Hardanger Vidda. We had been skiing for about two hours and my plan would have been to take a route that hugged the side of the valley so that we gained ground gradually, but Bob had other ideas. He had been caught in an avalanche in Scotland some years previously and had a very lucky escape, so he was acutely aware of the potential hazards. It had been snowing hard for several hours and the temperature was relatively warm, factors that could make an avalanche likely.
There was no questioning the logic so we plodded up the safe ground in the centre of the valley then took a steep zigzag line to the plateau where we met the full force of the wind. Ahead of us was a three-hour ski, with driving snow in our faces for most of the way, before we would finally reach the Sloaros Hut. It was going to be very hard and unpleasant so we decided to cut our losses and head back to Hovdehytta.
We got back at about 4pm and were surprised to find the German party had arrived before us. We chatted over coffee and discovered that they had left earlier than us that morning and taken the line that I had favoured rising up the side of the valley. They had been caught in an avalanche, albeit a small one with moving snow only about knee-deep, but they had been taken a distance down the slope. They were uninjured, but were shaken and one of the party had lost a ski. They were unable to find it in the avalanche debris so they had spent the rest of the day retracing their tracks, helping the person with one ski to get back to the safety of Hovdehytte. But for Bob’s sound judgement we might have suffered a similar fate.
Bob Kinnaird was the Chief Instructor. Popular, jovial, energetic and with an enormous wealth of knowledge and experience, there was no better man to have by your side. Brought up in Yorkshire, he was immensely proud of his Scottish roots and had established his reputation on the staff of JSMTC(S) before he came to Norway. He could cover all bases as he held advanced qualifications in a number of outdoor activities. Unfortunately, employment in the JSMTCs had taken him off the normal career path and he had left it too late to return to the mainstream, even if he had wanted to. His corps, the Royal Signals, decided that it could no longer employ him and, sadly, he left the Army in his mid-thirties. There were many jobs in outdoor activities that he would have excelled at and he could have been made a special case, had someone seen fit, but in the end the system was too inflexible and the Army lost the best outdoor instructor of his generation. Straight from the Army Bob became the chief executive of the British Association of Snowsports Instructors, one of the most important jobs in winter sports. His star continued to rise and he subsequently became Warden of Glenmore Lodge, the Scottish National Outdoor Training Centre, another highly prestigious appointment.
The big NATO winter exercise, which I referred to in Chapter 30, normally took place in northern Norway, but in 1991 it took place over a huge area of the south-west that included us. Soviet observers were permitted to visit and watch certain elements of these exercises and also visit military bases in the exercises area. One morning at about 8.30am I received a phone call from the exercise HQ to tell me that the Russian observers had decided they wanted to visit BMTC and take a look at what we did. Explanations that we had no military role cut no ice and only made them more suspicious. They would be with us from 10.30 to 12.00, during which time I was to brief them, show them round and answer any questions. I was told it was extremely high profile and very sensitive so it was best behaviour and mind my ‘Ps and Qs’.
John Beaves being a Richard Head at Frogner Park, Oslo with the Vigeland statues.
The Beaves brothers in Wales on holiday from Norway aged nine and ten.
The party was fronted by a Russian General who could have been straight out of a James Bond film and was accompanied by interpreters and NATO escorting officers. I welcomed them and took them into the HQ building for a very unpleasant cup of British Army coffee, then, as our students were all in the hills, I decided to deliver the standard visitors’ brief that I used. My theory was that despite the sophistication of the Cold War they still might not to be able to withstand death by view foil (Power Point was yet to be invented). If nothing else, it would mean that there was less time available for them to look around and ask questions.
After my talk there was just time to walk around the site. ‘This is the canoe store, General. This is the drying room, General. This is the cookhouse, General, and here is where we moor the midget submarine.’ We finished outside the HQ building where the staff parked their cars. The General spoke to the interpreter and pointed to the end car which happened to be mine.
‘The General asked how you are getting on with the problem over your German number plates,’ said the interpreter.
My jaw dropped and I said something like, ‘Very well, thank you, sir. Everything is in hand.’
With that, the General presented me with a small Russian pennant and the party drove off.
I couldn’t believe the question about the number plates. British servicemen in BAOR had always been obliged to register their private cars through HQ BAOR. They were then issued with a special British Forces Germany (BFG) number plate, which was a perk as it avoided both British and German road fund tax. These number plates easily identified the occupants as British servicemen or their families, a considerable risk given the threat from the IRA to target servicemen abroad. Our private cars at BMTC were registered with BFG plates, though we used them in Norway.
I had recently expressed my concern to the British Embassy in Oslo and to BAOR on the subject, particularly since BMTC was very much on a limb, away from the protection of larger, more formal military units. Because of the securit
y implications, the correspondence between us had been classified ‘Confidential’. Somehow that protected information had been passed on to the Soviets and the General had obviously been comprehensively briefed even when visiting a tiny unit like us. It brought home the reality of espionage activities during the Cold War.
I have always jogged and kept myself fit throughout all of my service and Norway was no exception. I was in my mid-forties and working with some of the fittest men in the Army so it was difficult to gauge my level of fitness, but I was beginning to feel that old age might be catching up. I seemed to have difficulty when I began jogging, but after a short while I would warm up and run satisfactorily. I would sleep badly the night before I was going out with a course on a long walk or ski because I was anxious about my ability to complete the task. This was actually nonsense as, although I didn’t set the pace, there was never a case when I couldn’t keep up. I believe, now, it was my body warning me of health problems of which I was unaware and the anxiety was the submarine reminding me again of its lurking presence.
It was in 1989, while we were in Norway, that Communism in Eastern Europe collapsed. The soldiers in their floral sleeping bags in BAOR had obviously frightened the Russians more than I had realised! The effect of this was brought home to me one day when I was talking to Maj Peter Hawker, my opposite number at AMTC (Silberhütte), the services’ mountain training centre in the Harz Mountains close to what was the East German border. He told me that the previous weekend he and his wife had ridden their tandem into East Germany and cycled up to the huge listening station on the Brocken. The soldiers who remained there swapped cap badges etc through the wire perimeter fence. The Brocken listening station had long been a symbolic reason for the existence of NATO Forces in Germany. (See Chapter 4.)