It was 4 a.m. on a January morning and I had just arrived outside Covent Garden Market. The weather was miserable and the car was being lashed with rain and whipped by howling winds. This really wasn’t a good day to be frozen. Maguire and the crew had been there all night, rigging, lighting and preparing the set. We had to shoot through the night to avoid interfering with the daily running of the business. The approach to the freezer was a long dark corridor lined with hooks and meat rails, the detritus of a previous use. It was all a bit ominous. At the end of the corridor were heavy, overlapping black plastic doors, defined by the shafts of light that crept around their warped edges.
The crew were on the other side, busying themselves with the final preparations. They were all dressed in heavy winter coats and mountain boots to protect them from the cold. ‘Hello Donal,’ said Maguire, ‘we’re nearly ready. Can you strip off down to your underwear please?’
Bags of ice lined the inside of the room and there was no comfort to be taken from the concrete floor. My only defence against the cold was a pair of black boxer shorts. I was connected to a body monitor, which was measuring all my core body functions and relaying the readings to a computer outside. Cameras would relay my ever-increasing discomfort to the medical supervisor, Dr Frank Golden PhD. He is a worldrenowned specialist on cold and how to survive it. The Cork born doctor and academic has spent his career in the British Navy and he seemed to have a healthy distain for the ludicrous experiments that television inflicts upon its presenters. I was hoping that he would be the voice of sanity in this initiation ceremony of sorts, as I had already given up on Maguire.
The plan was to immerse my body in simulated arctic conditions. This meant temperatures of -18°C and below. Sensors were placed all over my body to determine my external temperature, while thermal imaging would indicate the temperature of my heart and other vital organs. With the latest technology, Dr Golden would be able to see how the cold affected my body and he could then determine whether I was resilient enough to endure the worst polar conditions.
With a loud thud, the freezer door slammed shut behind me. I was determined to remain in the cold store for as long as possible. I had caught wind that the film crew was taking bets on how long I could last and the big money was on 20 minutes. No one had bet on me overstaying the half-hour mark. So naturally I made that my goal.
Little happened for the first few minutes, but once the cold took grip I did begin to wonder what on earth I was doing in here while the doctor and Maguire sat outside drinking hot tea, occasionally glancing at the safety monitors. The clock ticked by; five minutes passed. I was now very cold but put on a brave face.‘Oh, yes, I’m fine,’ I replied over the intercom when they asked how I was. Maguire decided to help things along a little by turning on the cooler fans to simulate an arctic breeze. A few minutes later I began to shiver uncontrollably.
After 20 minutes at -18°C I felt like I had the flu. After 25 minutes it felt more like swine flu. I was suffering, but there was a little pleasure in knowing that no one would be getting rich at my expense. Just after the 25-minute mark, Dr Golden came in to examine me at close quarters, hindquarters included.
‘Count down from one hundred in increments of seven please, Donal,’ he said.
‘One hundred, eh, ninety-three,’ long pause, ‘eighty-six?’ I ventured.
It was a lucky guess. I had lost my ability to count. I was shivering, blue all over and my bones were rattling. But according to the doctor, I was safe to continue for a while longer.
‘Have you been circumcised?’ he asked me as I stood there with my frozen hands clasped over my frozen manhood. I wondered exactly where this was leading. ‘Because if you have, we should get you out right away,’ he continued.
Being uncircumcised meant that I had a little more insulation on my most sensitive of extremities, which would afford me a further few minutes of icy pain.
The experiment continued apace as they turned up the fans to the max and introduced a blizzard-like wind-chill factor. The temperature dropped to -45°C. I suspected that this was less in the interest of acclimatisation for my impending trip and more for the amusement of Maguire and the crew. I was not yet a father and feared that after this experience I never would be.
The doc asked me a question through the intercom, but all I could manage by way of reply was a string of mispronounced expletives, as I was unable to control my jaw at this stage. ‘Flock! Flecun hell!’ was the best I could do. I could hear them laughing over the speaker as I was left to freeze my nuts off. I found out what hell will feel like the day it freezes over.
In the end we were all near collapse: the good doc and Maguire were doubled over with laughter and I was a shivering wreck, my legs barely holding me up. My immediate concerns were focused on the condition of my little fella. It had retreated so much in the freezer that my sex was indistinguishable from that of your average East German lady shot-putter. It looked like the cold had induced some kind of accelerated reverse puberty.
‘For feck’s sake!’ I screamed, ‘This isn’t a joke!’
Unperturbed by my panic, Golden took out his laser gun, stuck it into my pants and shot me in the shooter. The ‘laser’ hit my penis and held its gaze on my meat-and-two-veg for longer than I felt comfortable with. Okay, it wasn’t a laser gun – the instrument was in fact some kind of space-age thermometer. He took a reading and said: ‘Your core temperature has dropped below safe levels, so we need to get you out of the cold store.’ I didn’t need the Buck Rogers technology to tell me that.
‘Forget my core. What about my little fella?’ I asked.
‘There is a hint of early-onset frostbite, eh, eh, ahem,’ he coughed, trying to disguise a snigger. ‘A hot shower and a cup of tea should perk it up,’ he assured me.
What little I could see of it was blue, so I wasn’t convinced that I was home and dry. Nonetheless, I had completed just over 30 minutes and survived the training and immersion phase of my arctic odyssey. My initiation as a guinea pig was complete and I was declared healthy enough to embark on my Wild Weather adventure.
Apart from serving their primary purpose of proving me fit to have my bits frozen off, the tests reminded me that things were going to get tough for me on this assignment. And the tougher they got, the more Maguire was going to enjoy it.
When the script arrived, one of my lines jumped out at me. It read: ‘I am about to be buried alive, frozen solid and plunged into the white heart of winter.’ Suddenly filming undercover with football hooligans seemed like a day on the set of Teletubbies.
* * * * *
A week or so later, Maguire called me up and asked: ‘Can you skydive, Donal? We’re planning to jump in a month or so.’
‘Of course I can,’ I said, lying through my teeth.
My first challenge was to jump out of a helicopter at 15,000 ft, fall through the air at 150 mph and land on an arctic ice cap – with the nearest hospital a thousand miles to the south. No problem. Maguire wanted this footage for the opening sequence of the show and I wasn’t going to let on that falling out of the sky wasn’t second nature to me. How hard could it be?
I went online and frantically searched for crash courses in jumping out of planes. While Maguire was organising a skydive as close to the North Pole as possible, my internet search threw up a one-day accelerated freefall skydiving course several climates and times zones away on the Florida coast. Well, there was no time to spare, so I jumped on a plane and by the weekend I was at a skydive school in DeLand, Florida, learning the basics of how to fall out of a plane.
‘Relax! Relax harder!’ the instructor bellowed at me as the plane reached jumping altitude before my first dive. Like any eternal optimist, I talked a great game until I had to actually do it. When the time came to jump, I gingerly stepped back into the cabin, only to be forcibly pushed out of the plane by two 6 ft-something instructors.
‘Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck,’ I screamed, convinced I was on my way to a premature grave. A secon
d later, though, I found myself mellowing into a marshmallow-like state. Everything went pleasantly fuzzy and I felt like I could fall through the air forever. The instructors were so chilled that they jumped in their shorts and they were surfing the thermals as comfortably as they undoubtedly surfed the waves on the nearby golden coastline. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, as I blissfully surveyed the landscape as if it were my own private kingdom. I was thinking: ‘Hello birds, hello sky – look at me flying!’ and the fast approaching ground didn’t bother me in the slightest. I had completely forgotten that my single key task was to pull the chord to unfurl my parachute. They talk in the skydiving business about being ‘sucked to the ground’, meaning that you lose all sense of perspective and time during freefall. It is a very pleasant experience – until you hit the ground. This is what was happening to me. The problem was that I didn’t register the fact. Thankfully, the instructor did, and he was forced to take matters into his own hands. ‘Pull, pull,’ his semaphore instructions indicated. I smiled and did nothing. As the ground came closer, he became agitated and dived towards me at over 120 mph, pulled my ripcord and dived out again. ‘How strange. What was he up to?’ I thought. My canopy opened and I was saved from my own squidgy synapses just in time.
Any fantasies about defying gravity had long evaporated by the time I found myself in a helicopter over the island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean a month later. The island is part of the Svalbard Archipelago and is the last outpost of civilisation before the North Pole. It was summer, so it was bright nearly 24 hours a day. Below me were thousands of square kilometres of ice, a few wandering polar bears, some reindeer and arctic foxes enjoying the midnight sun.
We were waiting for a weather window – a sustained period of clear sky that would allow the jump to go ahead. I was working the odds and the inclement weather was to be my great escape – I hoped. The meteorologists said that it was unlikely that we would be able to go ahead: the forecast was for low-lying cloud, which would prevent any parachuting. I was praying that they were right. Of course I kept those thoughts to myself. Outwardly I was upbeat and gung-ho, but weighing heavily on my mind was a recent sky diving incident in the Antarctic, in which three divers died 60 seconds after jumping from their Twin Otter aircraft. ‘They did nothing stupid,’ according to a report. ‘The three chutes simply didn’t open and the trio penetrated 3 ft deep into the Pole’s hard-packed crust.’
And trust my luck, a weather window, the likes of which no one had seen in five months, opened up. In an almost biblical fashion, the clouds parted and brilliant sunshine suddenly illuminated the vast expanse of white ice below. Now I know Maguire is still a practising Catholic, but this was taking the biscuit! His God had intervened especially for my discomfort and within minutes I was standing on the cross rail of a helicopter hovering 15,000 ft above the North Pole, strapped to a stranger (this was made a condition of the jump following my private admission to John that I had forgotten to pull my ripcord in Florida), ready to jump.
‘Have I lived?’ I asked myself. ‘If I die now, can I truly say I have lived a life without limits?’ My musings lasted all of two seconds because before I knew it I was falling through the air at the speed of a Formula 1 car. If I was going to die, this was as good time as any. And if I did hit the icy carpet below before my parachute opened, I comforted myself with the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to live with my decision in any case.
In the end I landed safely. At that moment the aerial crew and I were high on adrenaline, fear and cold. There were high fives all round. ‘Wooohooo, did you see that?’ I said to the ground crew as Maguire reviewed the rushes from the jump. He wasn’t happy.
‘Donal, you didn’t do the piece-to-camera we discussed last night. Dude, it’s no good just smiling at the camera! I need your lips to move,’ he said.
In the excitement I had forgotten that I even had any lines. Maguire wanted another take, and another and another. In fact I ended up jumping out of that plane five times. I thought this was pushing my luck a little. I have never been so happy to see the sky cloud over as I was that day.
In John Maguire’s perfectionism lay my misery. After three jumps, the camera crew felt that enough was enough but then they hadn’t spent years in a monastery, like Maguire. He had his vision and it was our tough luck that we were part of it.
Five jumps later, it was over. I decided I would never parachute again. The sport has given me more beginner’s luck than anyone is entitled to, so I decided to call it quits then and there.
* * * * *
After that I remained firmly grounded at sea level. If anybody was going to keep my feet firmly on the ground it would be the citizens of Ittoqqortoormiit, a tiny, remote Eskimo settlement in Eastern Greenland. The people here were going to show me how they managed to survive in such difficult conditions. Historically, the town had been home to a large Inuit population, but over generations it declined until the Danish helped to resettle the municipality with 80 Inuit people in 1925. Since then the population has grown to just under 500.
The people here are now caught halfway between their ancient ways and the modern world, and alcoholism has become a huge problem in this cold climate. The Inuit parliament banned alcohol from the territory in an effort to protect the community from itself. Alcohol, however, was defined as anything over four per cent proof, so now it just takes the locals longer to get drunk.
The people are, in essence, nomads locked in a sedentary lifestyle. At the time, my own life was so nomadic that I often craved the routine and stability that they were so uncomfortable with. It is a stunningly beautiful place, and away from the death threats and bodyguards of London, I felt myself truly relax for the first time in years. At the end of the earth I had finally found a place where I didn’t feel the need to continually look over my shoulder.
The men of Ittoqqortoormiit feel most at peace when hunting for seals or polar bears. From Russia to Norway through to Northern Alaska, the polar bear is a protected species, but here the Inuit are allowed to hunt the beautiful beasts from their sleds pulled by the traditional huskies, and armed with their choice of modern rifles.
Ole Brolund, one of the elders in this tiny outpost, took me out to hunt with him. After travelling 5 km out of the town on the sled, we stopped to survey the scene. For hundreds of kilometres in front of us there was a flat sea of ice. The occasional iceberg punctuated the horizon, creating a scene of breathtaking beauty. While I admired the vista, Ole was on the look out for polar bears. His moustache was already encrusted with ice, but he showed no sign of suffering from the cold. I was wearing four layers of thermal clothing, a balaclava and gloves with a chemical heat pack, and I was still struggling to get my words out through my chattering teeth. Ole, much to my disappointment, was dressed in a blue Northface-style jacket; they reserve the traditional sealskin and fur garb for tourist brochures.
As we glided further out onto the vast expanse of whiteness, another sled passed us, heading in the opposite direction, carrying the carcass of a large male bear. The beast’s yellow teeth stood out sharply against the pristine snow. I couldn’t help feeling sad at the sight: the great animals seem such easy targets in the vast open expanses. But I’m not in a position to judge the traditional ways of an ancient people.
In a bid to strengthen diplomatic links between Ireland and Ittoqqortoormiit, I politely commented on how well-behaved Ole’s dogs were. I was lying. They were in fact savage, snarling creatures that had snapped at me whenever I got too close. I think he knew I was fibbing and, after giving it some thought, he turned to me and said: ‘I often watch that programme on the Discovery Channel, One Man and his Dog, and I really wish that my dogs were as well-behaved as that.’ You know the world is getting smaller when you can share cultural references with an arctic hunter.
When we arrived back in the town, thankfully empty-handed, I noticed a potted cactus in the window of the yellow-painted wooden building that was home to Ole and his family. The cactus looke
d as out of place here as I did, but it was thriving – and I was loving every minute of my icy adventure. In fact I was beginning to feel very much at home here, and, as we left, I promised myself that I would return soon.
On the way home, we had a stopover in Iceland and decided to make a weekend of it. Before the country went bust, it was a great place to party, and we partied hard, quickly making up for the absence of hard liquor in Greenland!
* * * * *
Back in London, the editors started to sort through the footage, only to find that some of the rushes had been spoiled. This series was being shot on film, which can be vulnerable to very low temperatures. We couldn’t do the series without including the Arctic, so we would have to go back and film some new sequences. Well, it was the best bad news I ever got in broadcasting.
But first we had to get there, and there is no way over the thousands of square miles of ice other than by air. We flew into Mestersvig army base, 1,600 km inside the Arctic Circle, on the eastern coast of Greenland. The tiny Cessna plane was struggling under the weight of our filming gear and the kilos of warm clothes we had packed. The runway was a hundred-metre-long strip of flattened snow. At the end of the strip, an ice-covered cliff rose up out of the ground towards the sky. There was little room for error.
I am not a nervous flyer but this was testing. We rocked and rolled like a carnival ride as we descended onto the runway. The pilot, an American, took great pleasure in telling us about the many aircraft that have come to a tragic end in this neck of the woods. Now I like a storyteller as much as the next guy, but I felt he should be concentrating on getting us down in one piece. After two loud thumps and a few panicky ‘Oh my Gods’ , we came to a sudden stop just a few metres from the cliff face.
Hitman, Gangsters, Cannibals and Me Page 12
