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my legs wobbling like jelly and my guts as green as my gullet. I was alright after we got to Tromsø and, from there, we traversed up and down the fjords in
lovely calm waters – all the way round northern Norway, through the Arctic Ocean to Vardo in the Barents Sea. Our mission was supposed to be fishery protection, but we were really keeping an
eye on what the Russians were getting up to.
    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