by Bob
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.
I was ashore in Gib on my birthday and everyone was giving me rum. I was drinking heavy by then and wanted to get to the bars in town quick from the dockyard. So I stole a motorbike and was speeding along when I ran into a naval lorry and got thrown into the air. I wasn’t wearing a crash helmet and I suffered multiple injuries, including a fractured skull and a broken arm, and I was messed up fairly bad. I came to in a military hospital and I was in a hell of a state – all plastered and strapped up. After a while, a military doctor came to see me.
‘Have you ever thought about your drinking, Tovey?’
‘Yes, sir, it’s all I thinks about.’
‘We pumped a washbowl full of rum out of your stomach.’
‘Waste of time drinking that, then.’
I was in a rehabilitation centre for a year, where they gave me electric shocks to the deltoid muscle to keep it alive and, while I was there, there was an inspection by the brass. I was told to sit to attention in a chair at the end of the bed, with back straight and eyes forward. I was having none of that. The RSM came over, screaming at me to sit up and poking me in the ribs with his fancy stick. I grabbed it and broke it in two and threw it at him.
‘If you do that again, I’ll shove your stick up your arse sideways!’ I cheeked him.
He growled away and I thought I’d be in for it. But he never came back and nobody said nothing about it.
When I was well enough, I was flown back in handcuffs on a Vickers Viscount aeroplane to a naval prison in England. There was me and another stoker on the plane and an officer in charge of us.
‘If I remove the handcuffs, you won’t try to escape, will you?’
What a clobhead – we’re thirty thousand feet in the air, going at three hundred miles an hour, without a parachute between us. What did he expect we’d do, try to hijack the plane? We landed for some reason at Biarritz and us two prisoners made a run for it when the doors opened. But we were grabbed by a couple of armed Gendarmes and thrown back onto the plane. At Gatwick, we were handed over to an officer called Commander De’Ath. He scowled at us.
‘My name is De ’Ath. Remove the comma and that’s what will happen to you if there’s any messing about.’
It was the spring of 1960 and I’d just turned twenty-two. I remember Princess Margaret got married at the time, and they took us first to Notting Hill in London, where I was put in a police holding cell, before sending me down to Portsmouth naval prison. I had to strip naked when I went into Portsmouth and shave off all my body hair. Then I was de-loused with DDT powder, which is banned now. My bed was three wooden planks and a hollowed-out piece of wood for a pillow. I had a metal piss-pot that I had to use for shaving as well – washed out and shined with brick dust and soap. Breakfast was half a cup of tea and two hardtack biscuits; dinner was bread and gruel and, in the evening, we had more gruel with the other half of the cup of tea from breakfast time. They put bromide in the tea to stop us getting frisky and we had to go round an assault course every day.
Everything was done on the run – you double-timed outside and they threw a cigarette at you and you had to catch it. A marine would hold a taper and you had to jump up to get a light off it while you were running round and you had two minutes to smoke it on the double. It was a hard place, but it got me fit again after the accident. I was like a whippet with a big head when I finally come out of there.
But I still couldn’t do what I was told. A short while after getting out of Portsmouth, I hit a mouthy officer and, when he went down on the deck, I pissed on him and I was given sixty days in Dorchester Prison. Dorchester was civvy jail and a doddle after Portsmouth. They put me on an outside working party and I was chopping up trees near Chantmarle Police Training Centre in Dorset. One of the trainees was a bloke I served with on the Jutland. He saw me and came over.
‘What are you doing here, Bob?’
‘I’m doing time, what d’you think!’
He told me to volunteer to clean the toilets at the centre, which I did, and every morning he’d leave a flat bottle of rum and twenty cigarettes on top of a cistern. I’d get the rum down me quick and I wouldn’t care about anything after that for the rest of the dibby day.
Once I did my time in Dorchester, I was dishonourably discharged from the Navy. I’d already sold my uniform because I knew I wouldn’t need it no more. They kept me on the mess deck before the dismissal ceremony and the sailors were giving me rum there. I was drunk when they marched me onto the upper deck of the Rothesay in bare feet and overalls with marines each aside of me, and I can’t even remember the captain reading the discharge order. But I was out!
I’ll always be glad I joined the Navy, because it made me hard and world-wise after being an only child and I got to go to places I never would have seen otherwise. But I’m also glad I got kicked out.
&nbs
p; Bob, second left, as a 16-year-old boy sailor
4
Bob – The Poacher
My grandfather was a big man, round the middle. Not the same grandfather who went down on HMS Monmouth, the other ’un. He used to drive a dray for the Arnold Perrett Brewery and he needed three horses to get it up over the steep village hill from the brewery at the bottom. The dray was always piled high with big barrels that he could lift on his own, because he was a very strong man as well as being burly. Once over the hill, he’d let one of the horses go off the chains and it would find its own way back down to the brewery – then he’d be gone for days, delivering to all the pubs for miles around. He got free beer at every stop and he could drink a great quantity of pints.
One day he was going up a steep incline called Anchor Hill and another drayman was coming down. They crashed into each other, with barrels rolling everywhere and horses neighing and rearing in the shafts and the two men cursing and blaming each other. More than likely they was both pissed. My grandfather had to go to court and the magistrate said, ‘Were you drunk, Tovey?’
‘Impossible, your worship. I’d only had two gallons.’
So, you see, I didn’t lick it up off the ground – the drinking.
I married Violet Mayer in 1962 in a register office in Plymouth, while I was still in the Navy. She was pregnant when she came back to my village with me after I got thrown out and we went to live with my father at his butcher shop. My son Brian was born in 1963 and my daughter June was born in 1965. Violet and me was constantly rowing and the marriage didn’t work out. She took off in 1969 and, when she went, I was left to bring up two young children on my own. I was a hard-drinking man in them days, having learned how to booze in the Navy. I could drink twenty pints of ale in a single sitting – or standing at the bar for that matter. Then I’d have a fight in the street with some idiot who looked at me crooked. There didn’t have to be no reason for me to fight; it could come over anything – a remark, or a laugh, or a cough. Or nothing at all. I broke a bloke’s jaw once who’d spilled my beer and never said sorry. It’s not something I’m proud of now, but it was the way I was back then. Sometimes I’d drink so much I couldn’t see and I’d turn into a different man with the alcohol inside me. My eyes would turn cold and hard like marbles and I didn’t know what I was doing, even though I thought I did.