Read The Last English Poachers for Free Online Page B

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