Chapter 10

The following morning, not far from the village, there was an iron girder bridge across a small creek. When we first saw it, Granny was a little suspicious that the ironwork looked dreadfully rusty, but the real trouble was only apparent when we actually reached the bridge: the deck was wooden, and it was completely rotten. There were places where it had fallen right through, and the rest of the wood certainly didn’t look fit to carry a truck.

The creek wasn’t very deep, but the land each side of the road was so thickly wooded that we couldn’t simply ford the creek alongside the bridge.

We’d left the rest of the convoy behind at the point where we entered the woods – old woodland that had obviously already been woodland before the cull, with big trees – because it was clear that we wouldn’t be able to turn around at least until we got out of the woods. Granny reversed the tanker back to the edge of the old woods, then set off along the edge. We reached a place where we could get down to the water very quickly – but the trees were thick on the other side.

‘Not to worry. We can go along the stream itself until we reach somewhere we can get up the other side. But we ought to hook ourselves together with the winch cables in case of difficulties.’

We changed the order of the convoy for the ford, putting the Bandvagn with the bowser first, then the tanker, and bringing up the rear with the Unimog and finally the other Bandvagn, all tied together with the winch cables apart from the final Bandvagn.

‘Probably quite unnecessary, but better safe than sorry!’

We’d never had the whole convoy tied together, all moving at once before: they’d always either had just the front vehicle moving, pulling out the winch cable, or just the vehicle behind pulling the winch cable in as it moved. All the drivers said it was actually a bit tricky making sure that the cable in front of them stayed taut, or at least not so slack they ended up driving over it.

The water wasn’t terribly deep anywhere, but when we reached a place where there were only little, young trees on the south bank, the bank was quite steep. The Bandvagn didn’t have any trouble getting up it, but the bowser’s chassis hit the ground a couple of times.

‘Doesn’t matter. That’s only mud.’

Getting the tanker up would have been impossible without the Bandvagn in front for the winch cable. The worst bit was when the Unimog came up. The Unimog itself was no trouble, but the trailer got stuck – really stuck. All four wheels of the Unimog were just churning mud, and the winch was stalled.

The rear of the trailer was in the water, which the goats seemed to think was a special arrangement for them to have a muddy drink.

Granny turned the tanker round so she could attach the tanker’s winch cable to the front of the Unimog and add another winch pull, but Laima stopped her.

‘I think something will break before we pull that free, if the Unimog can’t pull it with the winch as well as the wheels. We should back off and put some timbers down.’

But the Unimog just churned mud again when it tried to reverse. In the end, the only way they managed to get the trailer unstuck was to pull it backwards with one of the Bandvagns, minus its own trailer. The Bandvagns were the only vehicles they trusted to take back into the creek.

The trailer wheels were now almost completely immersed in the water, which by this time was really muddy. To get the timbers out of the trailer, we’d have had to get the goats out and tether them, and put the chickens in their pen – all while working waist deep in muddy water. Nikolai had another idea: pull up a few small trees with a winch cable, and use them instead of the timbers.

It took most of the day to get the trailer out of that creek, and when it finally emerged, we could see the extent of the damage it had suffered. Its front wheels were pointing inwards, pigeon-toed. Its front axle was bent, presumably where it had snagged on a rock hidden in the mud.

‘Well, that’s the end of that trailer,’ Grandad opined, but Granny said, ‘No, we’ll just take its front wheels off and carry on until we can find a replacement. It’s not too heavily loaded for two wheels. It means it’s not properly balanced, but a bit more load on the hitch won’t hurt the Unimog.’

They had to take the whole axle off after a few kilometres, because the brake drums kept on hitting the ground. That took quite a while, because none of the nuts would undo, and Uncle Sid had to cut the U-bolts with a hacksaw. It was an awkward place for him to work, underneath the trailer, and he broke two hacksaw blades before he’d finished. We’d got dozens in stock though, and nobody was bothered about a couple getting broken.

‘Well, at least we’ve got plenty of spare wheels for that trailer again!’

‘We’ve got no brakes on the trailer any more, though. There aren’t any on the rear axle.’

‘I really don’t think that matters, with a Unimog in front of it! I’m not at all sure they were working anyway.’

With all the delay at the creek, the roads not in very good condition, and the rain, we only managed to do about forty or fifty kilometres that day. We got just a few kilometres past a place called Stary Sambor, and stopped just before a bridge over a biggish river, whose valley we’d been following since Stary Sambor. Between the road and the railway bridge there was a nice grassy meadow by the river, with better grass for the goats than we’d found in most places. Radiation levels were still close to what Granny thought natural levels ought to be.

Grandad and Mum and Dad sat on the bank of the river and fished, while Granny and Uncle Sid crossed the bridge and disappeared into the woods with the guns. Laima walked back up the road into the village we’d just come through with a spade and a bucket, without saying a word to anyone. Aunty Anna and Lieđđi started to cook, and the rest of us played on the grass with the goats.

We were, I think, all fairly happy. We’d come to terms with the loss of our beloved Granny Merly, or at least we weren’t thinking about her the whole time any more. Life was easy, and the expotition was going okay – as well as could be expected.

Laima came back with a bucketful of potatoes and carrots. ‘I thought I’d spotted potato plants in somebody’s garden back there. It’s amazing they’ve survived all these years though. And they’re not a bad size considering the soil’s not been broken for so long, and it’s still only midsummer. The carrots were a complete surprise.’

They were little thin fingers of carrots compared to what I remembered from our farm and from Laima’s, but there were lots of them. Nikolai wanted to know if one bucketful was all there was.

‘I think there’s quite a lot more, but it’s getting dark. Time to put the animals away. We’ll go back with both buckets tomorrow morning before we leave. There are onion plants and some other things, too, but apart from the carrots and potatoes everything else seems to have gone a bit wild and weedy.’

We weren’t short of food, but fresh vegetables were a luxury while we were on the journey.

Granny and Uncle Sid had had no luck with the guns. ‘Didn’t see hair nor hide of so much as a squirrel.’

The fishing hadn’t produced anything, either. ‘We saw fish, nice big trout I think, but they weren’t interested.’

Steamed potatoes and carrots made a good breakfast. Nikolai and Laima went and dug up several more bucketfuls. Granny and Uncle Sid had more luck fishing in the morning than the others had had the previous evening.

The hunting party still saw nothing to shoot at. ‘Odd, considering how many deer and rabbits we’ve seen elsewhere. And this is ideal habitat for them.’

An oddity it remained. If it wasn’t just chance, we never found out what the reason might have been.

That day we got into the hills – the first real hills since the mountains in Norway and Sweden. Up and down, up and down. I remember particularly descending a series of hairpin bends down into a valley with a big river. Then we began to climb more seriously, up, up, up. The state of the road got worse as we climbed, but it was still a lot better than it had been in many places in Sweden and Finland. Finally we reached the summit, and began to descend. The descent was steeper than the climb, and the road wiggled back and forth in a long series of hairpin bends.

Exactly what happened nobody knows. I was in the tanker at the front, and the first I knew that anything was wrong was hearing screams from the intercom, ‘Stop, stop! Help them!’

Laima was driving, and stopped as quickly as she could. Even though we were going down slowly in a low gear, we couldn’t stop very quickly because the hill was so steep. Granny leant forward to look in the rear view mirror, and was out of the cab before Laima had managed to stop the tanker completely, with the fire extinguisher from under her seat in her hand.

Grandad and Dad were already down from the Unimog and one of the trucks, also with the fire extinguishers.

The first Bandvagn was a ball of flame. The fire extinguishers were completely ineffective against such a fire.

Lieđđi and Mum and little Liz had been in the cab. They’d managed to get out, but Lieđđi’s and Mum’s clothes were ablaze. They rolled on the wet grass and managed to put out the flames, but they were both very badly burned.

Mum had managed to fold herself protectively around little Liz, and Liz wasn’t very badly burned at all, but Mum herself was in agony.

I can’t write much about the next few days, because the memory is too painful.

Somehow Granny Merly’s death, while very sad, was manageable. She wasn’t really old, but somehow it was her time to go. And of course I never saw her while she was dying. One evening she was there, and the next day she’d gone. That was the same for all us littlies.

But we experienced the whole of Mum’s last few days. It wasn’t her time to go at all. And we all knew she hadn’t gone peacefully in her sleep.

Laima and Suonjar did all they could, but that wasn’t really much. Even if they’d had the knowledge, they scarcely had anything useful, not even enough proper sterile dressings. Granny and Laima agonized over whether the ancient morphine in the first aid kits was usable, and in the end decided that it was most unlikely to do any good, and would very likely make things worse.

Lieđđi’s condition was much less serious, but still bad. She insisted on her own idea of how she should be treated, and it worked – after a fashion. Whether any other treatment that was possible in the circumstances would have been any better, who knows?

She got Gealbu to cut some pieces of reindeer skin out of the lávvu, then made Suonjar boil them and use them to dress the burned areas, laced on with strips of reindeer leather.

‘Of course it hurts like hell! What do you expect, when I’ve been burnt like this? But it’ll heal.’

And it did. She’s got fantastic scars now, and her left hand is a bit like a claw because the scar on her left palm doesn’t stretch like skin should, but mostly she’s fine.

Little Liz’s burns really weren’t very bad at all. They made her cry a lot, not surprisingly considering she was only four. But I think the fact that her Mum couldn’t cuddle her was a bigger problem than the pain of the burns. Everyone else cuddled her; she was getting cuddles from someone or other most of the time. But she’d lost both her best cuddlers in less than two weeks.

The back of her right hand is the only place she’s got a visible scar now.

Mum is buried in an actual cemetery on the outskirts of Uzhok, just at the foot of the hill we’d been descending. Grandad and Dad and Nikolai made her a gravestone very like the one they’d made for Granny Merly. We littlies saw this one being made, and laid. Since we’d all seen Mum’s dying agonies, the grown-ups didn’t see much point trying to shield us from her memorial.

Here lies Fiona Jane Collins
22nd September 1993 – 9th August 2024
beloved of Gregory Paul Collins
firstborn of
Peter Samuel Collins and Nguyễn Thị Perseverance
sister of Sidney Peter and Jacob Anthony
mother of Michael John and Elizabeth Rose
sorely missed

We’d gone into the village in the hope of finding a hospital, a doctor’s surgery, or a pharmacy where there might be more dressings. We found comfortable beds for a short stay, but no sign of a hospital, and if there was a doctor’s surgery or a pharmacy, they must have simply been in ordinary houses and we didn’t find them.

We also found sheets, water, and the means to boil it. Boiled strips of cloth were the best dressings we could make – apart from Lieđđi’s boiled reindeer skins, of course.

Would Mum have been better off with boiled reindeer skins? She didn’t want to try, and nobody wanted to force her. Lieđđi thinks it wouldn’t have made any difference, but whether she just says that out of kindness only she knows.

Lieđđi was however firmly of the opinion that had they been wearing reindeer skins instead of nylon and polyester at the time of the fire, they’d have been much less badly burned, and Mum would almost certainly have survived. Granny and Laima thought she might very well be right. Gealbu set to work converting the lávvu into reindeer skin clothes for all of us.

‘When we’ve arrived wherever it is we’re going, we can all wear whatever we like most of the time. But while we’re travelling in these trucks, who knows when we might have another fire like that?’

Granny and Laima both thought that the Unimog and the trucks were much less likely to have major fires, with diesel engines rather than petrol and steel bodies rather than fibreglass, but Lieđđi and Gealbu weren’t moved. ‘Unlikely isn’t impossible. Gealbu says he’ll make them for the Bandvagn crew first, but he’ll make them for everybody.’

Lieđđi and Suonjar were still translating Gealbu’s gestures for the rest of us, but we were all getting the gist of what he said most of the time anyway. Emma and Dang were already as fluent in Gealbu gestures as they were in English. They adored him, and he them.

Grandad, Nikolai and Laima took the Unimog back up the hill to where the fire had happened, to see what if anything could be salvaged from the wreckage. The worst material loss was all the spare wheels in the trailer. The tyres had all burnt completely, leaving nothing but a mess of steel wire, already going rusty.

The rear unit of the Bandvagn itself had also burned very badly, and a lot of jars of pickles, preserved fruit and jam had cracked in the heat. The seals had gone on a lot of the remainder, but there were a fair number Laima thought worth rescuing. ‘We’ll have to eat these first, because the lids are going rusty now. But no sense wasting them.’

A large number of the books had survived – more or less. Many of them were too badly damaged, either by the fire or by the rain, but in the middle of the stack they hadn’t burned and had only got slightly damp if at all.

‘The ones we can rescue, we can dry out overnight tonight, and leave tomorrow morning.’

Laima thought the nuclear physics and medical tomes worth taking, even though some of them were charred down one side and much damper than most of the books we were salvaging.

There was a woodstove in the house we were camping in, and plenty of dry wood, and the books did indeed dry out nicely overnight. A lot of them have had slightly crinkly pages ever since.

We left Uzhok the next morning with heavy hearts. The weather was as sombre as we were. It was the beginning of August, yet the clouds were heavy and dark, and made Lieđđi and Suonjar think it was going to snow. Laima said that that really wasn’t possible at that time of year.

‘Maybe on the tops, but not down here in the valley bottom.’

The storm broke when we’d gone just a few kilometres. I didn’t remember ever having seen hail like it. We actually had to stop, because Laima, who was driving the tanker, simply couldn’t see.

The hail didn’t last for very long, but the road was covered in big hailstones by the time it changed to rain. The rain didn’t stop all morning. It just poured and poured. In some places the road was like a river, and sometimes there were torrents pouring out of the woods, spreading debris across the road.

I didn’t remember ever seeing debris strewn across the road in such quantities anywhere before, and asked whether this was the first storm there’d ever been quite this bad.

Granny and Laima laughed.

‘No! Some of this junk has been here for ages, since the last storm or the storm before that. It’s the place that’s different, not the storm. But I guess you don’t remember southern Norway very well. There were places there just like this, where we had to drive over the top of piles of stuff in the road, or even sometimes dig it away before we could get through. It’s worse when the streams wash the road away.’

I did remember the washouts – lots of them in Sweden.

Finally we had to stop again and wait for the downpour to stop, and for the torrent in front of us to diminish. Granny wasn’t sure we’d be able to get past even when it had, but she was certain it wasn’t safe with the stream in spate.

Suonjar and Nikolai and Gealbu were in the surviving Bandvagn, and so out of communication with the rest of us. Granny got out into the pouring rain and ran to tell them why we were stopped.

‘I’ll stay there with them until the rain stops, or at least calms down a bit.’

The rain stopped and the sun came out in the early afternoon, but the stream just kept rushing across the road. Some of the small trees and stones got washed off the road, but as fast as they went, more arrived to take their place.

We all gathered in the back of one truck and Aunty Anna and Uncle Sid cooked a meal.

By the time we’d finished, the torrent had subsided somewhat, and Granny decided it would be possible – and more importantly, safe – to drive over the top of the rubbish in the road.

‘We’ll have to shift that tree first. The trucks would get over it okay, but the bowser or the little trailer might get stuck.’

The winch on the front of the tanker, with its cable routed round a tree at the side of the road beyond the mess, pulled the tree out of the way easily. We were on our way again.

Granny had hoped to get at least as far as Uzhgorod that day, but by the time we reached Perechin she thought it was time to find a good patch to put the animals out to grass. It was hard to find a place with enough reasonably level space between trees to put up the chicken run – our usual method of finding a flood meadow by a river was no good, because the river was running high and they were all flooded. We did eventually find a patch of weeds in the middle of the town, with only a couple of very small trees in an area big enough for the run. Nikolai broke the tops off them so they fitted inside it.

The youngest nanny goat – the only nanny who wasn’t giving milk – managed to knot her tether up round a tree some distance away from the tree she was tethered to so thoroughly that she couldn’t get her head down to ground level to eat. She’d done such a good job of knotting the rope that Laima and Suonjar decided the best thing was to untie her and put her on a new rope while they disentangled the old one.

That night I dreamed about Mum, and the fire. I woke up everybody in the truck with my screams, and then little Liz started crying too. Granny Persie tried to cuddle us both, and little Liz went to sleep again, but I didn’t want to be cuddled. I lay awake listening to the night.

There was the noise of the river, some distance away but very recognizable. Every now and then I could hear thunder, but it wasn’t raining and the thunder sounded distant.

One of the chickens started squawking, and then all the others joined in, and the goats started bleating. That woke everyone up again, and Dad got up and looked out. With no moon, and heavy clouds again, he couldn’t see anything, so he lit the pressure lantern.

‘Can’t see anything. Probably a fox, maybe a wolf, but whatever it was it’s run off now. Didn’t like the lantern. Wouldn’t have been able to get into the trailer anyway.’

‘Or a rat. That could have got into the trailer, and the chickens wouldn’t have liked that a bit.’

Back to the top

On to Chapter 11