SWISS ALPINE BAR FIRE

To those experienced skiers amongst us, the news of the fire in an Alpine bar in Switzerland, though horrifying, will have hardly come as a shock. Most of us will have shaken our heads sorrowfully and privately believed that it was an accident waiting to happen.

For 30 years, I organised and ran annual ski-ing trips at Malvern College, and I am too painfully aware how these things go. By their very nature, school ski-ing trips are not up-market; they are invariably cut-price, thus comprising bargain-basement air fares, accommodation and facilities. The boys didn’t care. They were looking forward to a week’s fun on the slopes with their mates. Basic accommodation and food did not worry them; after all, they were educated in a boarding school, so what was the problem? This reminds me of a story. I have a friend with whom I play tennis. In a shocking domestic incident, a distant relative of his had set about his uncle with a spade and killed him. The assailant was jailed for life. Many years later he was up for parole, which was granted. “How did he survive in prison?” I asked my tennis partner. “Well,” he replied with a little smile, “He went to boarding school.”

Quite.

Looking after and being responsible for 40 testosterone-fuelled teenage boys is a heavy burden, one that I tried not to worry about too often. When I and my faithful sidekick, Mike, would relax over a beer at lunchtime in one of the bar/restaurants on the pistes, he would sometimes look at me and say, “If any education health and safety officer enquired of you, Mr Murtagh, where are your charges at this moment, what would be your answer?” I would make a vague sweeping gesture all around the ski area and reply, “Somewhere on the mountain.” The fact was that it was impossible to police their every move and to follow them everywhere. They wouldn’t have taken too kindly to close supervision and in any case, some of them were better skiers than us and would soon have left us for dust. Or powder.

I always took the view that this was a school trip, not an educational expedition. It was a holiday. The boys had paid money to go ski-ing with their mates in the holidays and school rules no longer applied. They could not possibly have been applied in any case. We set down some house rules and trusted them to abide by them. Which by and large they did. If I said that I wanted everyone down off the slopes by 5.00pm, they were and rarely did anyone miss the deadline.

Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t all worry and misgiving and soul-searching. What better way to spend the day than high up in the mountains where the air is clean and fresh, the sun is shining, the snow is crisp and even and the views spectacular? On such a day all

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the planning, administration, hotel problems and odd disciplinary mishap seemed to melt away. As long as the snow didn’t melt away. One week, it rained…and nobody goes ski-ing for the rain. We could have got plenty of that camping in the Brecon Beacons.

Apres ski! It was in the evenings that we earnt our corn. By and large, we were situated in the cheaper resorts where the evening entertainment was basic and limited to bar after bar of questionable décor and limited capacity, usually accessed by a single flight of ill-lit stairs leading to a subterranean drinking hole, jam-packed with youngsters of both sexes intent on getting drunk as swiftly as possible. This being at altitude where the blood runs thin and the bar staff keen on a rapid turn-over of booze, a state of inebriation was easily and swiftly achieved. There seemed to be no legal age limits for the consumption of alcohol or if there were, the edicts were more honoured in their breach than in their observance. In our hotel, I would try to impress upon the staff not to serve alcohol unless the boy provided proof that he was eighteen. Some of the waiters listened; some didn’t. In the resort bars, we might just as well have howled at the moon. They wouldn’t have heard us anyway – the din was cacophonous.

Our job, Mike and I, was to sweep through the town, visiting all the bars and moving our charges along. We weren’t stupid. We knew that they would simply move onto the next bar – after all, no self-respecting College boy would want to hang around in a bar once his Masters had pitched up – but at least we could watch out for anybody showing incipient signs of drunkenness and forcefully urge his mates to take him back to the hotel and put him to bed. Which, to be fair, they generally did. But having entered a bar, we could not so very easily quit the scene without buying a beer and whilst we sipped away, we would look round and the same thought would cross our minds. This place is impossibly crowded. There’s only one narrow entrance and exit. The décor looks shabby and is probably flammable. What sort of fire drills have been practised? What would happen in the event of….? Swiftly we would put such thoughts to the back of our minds, drink up and move on.

Let me provide you with a snapshot of one bar in one village of one ski resort in one part of the Alps – I forget where, but I shall never forget that evening. I think the descriptive word ‘bar’ is a total misnomer; ‘dive’ would be more apt, doubly so because we had to dive down into some sort of subterranean cave, dimly lit, meanly furnished, tackily decorated with sticky flooring… and heaving with bodies, all a lot younger than we were. We cast our eyes around. No Malvernians among the clientele, as far as we could determine. “Even our boys wouldn’t be seen in this den,” shouted Mike. At least those were what I thought were his words; I couldn’t really hear above the din.

Before we could turn on our heels to retrace our steps, two foaming litre glasses of lager had been thrust into our hands. The identity of the person bestowing such largesse was unclear. “Merci!” I said to the mass of skiers. Our attention was caught by a large log, with enormous nails driven into the surface, only their heads protruding. I thought it was

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probably some piece of bizarre Alpine sculpture until a great bear of a man stepped forward and seized a fair-sized axe hanging on the wall. With deliberation, he placed a nail, retrieved from a bucket alongside, slowly pushing it into the wood, so that it stood up as straight as he could manage. He then lifted the axe high above his head and uttering a roar that would have done no disservice to an invading Viking brought it crashing down on the head of the nail. He didn’t miss. Sparks flew; a loud clang accompanied the hit followed by cheers of approbation from the assembled multitude.

This game of Hit the Nail was obviously going to continue all evening. Mike nudged me and inclined his head at a nearby alcove where two Lesbians were engaged in what used to be called ‘heavy petting’. There was much fumbling of clothing. Ski gear was never designed for impromptu sex. At length, they disengaged and made their way over to the pool table for a game. It seemed to proceed with ever worsening player etiquette. They started to swear at each other – even my rudimentary French understood some of the words – then they attacked each other with their cues. Breaking apart from nearby peacekeepers, they picked up the balls and started to throw them at each other, badly aimed, it had to be said, but everybody was now ducking.

Mike looked at me. I looked at him. We were of one mind. We fled the joint. Once again, I believe that ‘fled’ would be over-egging our escape. A dark, narrow, icy stairwell did not afford a swift exit. We toppled out onto the frozen snow and promptly took a tumble. I don’t think we were pissed. It was very icy. The journey back up the hill to our hotel was conducted in an awkward, crouching manner, rather like attacking infantrymen. Not only was the road icy, it was also dark. Furthermore, we were doubled up with laughter.

We had regained some sort of decorum by the time we reached our hotel, done a head count and accounted for all our boys, whom we sent straightaway to bed. The next day, recollecting in tranquillity, we shook our heads as we reflected on an extraordinary evening. At the time we shuddered – I still do – at the lack of safety that these dives afforded. Drunken fights, flying bottles, panic, stampede, worst of all fire, would have been catastrophic. There are hundreds of thousands of such overcrowded bars in countless ski resorts all over the Alps. The only surprise is that such a calamity that befell the Crans Montana resort in Switzerland has not happened before. The sad irony is that the Swiss are famously more orderly and law-abiding than the Austrians, the French and the Italians. Even more tragic is the revelation that some of the victims were 15 and 16-year-old kids. What on earth were their parents thinking of, letting them loose on New Year’s Eve in crowded, smoky, beer-fuelled bars where sobriety was not the name of the game?

Of course it would never have happened in America. Apres-ski? It doesn’t exist. There are no bars in American ski resorts. Well, there are, but they are situated in soulless hotels. Furthermore, there are strict rules governing juvenile drinking. No alcohol can be served to anyone under 21. Everything is fiercely policed. Why, even two of our boys

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were arrested by the police – later released after our English pleas - for having a snowball fight. There is no night life. Everybody goes to bed at 9.00pm. The towns are deserted. The boys could only order Cokes and Kentucky Fried Chicken. They were even forced one evening to go to the cinema, sorry, the movies. “Sir, we could have seen this film back home in Malvern,” they grumbled. It made our lives, the chaperones of a ski-ing party, that much less fraught. But we, Mike and I, had to admit to ourselves that the boys had a point. It was all a little dull.

Dull and safe? Or lively and chancy? You take your pick. By its very nature, ski-ing is an activity that lives on the edge, quite literally so, if you understand the physics of hurtling down a mountain on skis. You clip on your skis and take your chances. Once dusk has fallen, skiers, who are not by nature cautious beings, are not inclined to buy a Coke and then slide off to bed at 9.00pm. A crowded bar seems to be a much more attractive proposition. Fire risk? Who contemplates such a thing when you are a teenager and the evening stretches out in front of you? Look, I’ve just conquered a black run, the most notoriously difficult on the mountain. I’m indestructible.