SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY: DAY 6/2 A wild and beautiful country and a benevolent system

High tea and birthday pizza

My cousin An, my aunt’s daughter, had invited us to tea, so after a brief wash-and-brush-up back at my aunt’s, we loaded the sat-nav with An’s address and set off across Kristiansand again. An had taken the trouble to visit us several times in the UK, so I was more than pleased to return the favour.

    ‘She lives in a much better area than me,’ said my aunt, ‘except for her road.’

    The road looked fine to us –wide and peaceful, big houses with gardens. An lived in the top flat of one of the houses with her young son HJ. She showed us around and on to her spacious verandah with its green views where she was drying her washing.

My cousin's spacious verandah

HJ wasn’t well. What with the heat and the party he’d been overdoing things.

    ‘And then today he went swimming with friends,’ said An.

    ‘Where did they go?’ I asked, ever curious.

    ‘There’s a lake nearby,’ she said.

    ‘Did they go on their own?’ I asked.

    ‘Oh yes,’ said An.

    Wow, I thought. Even though Frog and I had been able to wander where we liked as children, free from adult supervision, we’d been brought up never to swim in fresh water (polio, pollution, steep-sided quarries). English children today might have been able to swim in fresh water but they wouldn’t do it alone. (I don’t know about the rest of Britain.) It reminded me of the Australian bush, where I’d worked in the 1970s. There we’d leapt into rivers and waterholes without a qualm.

    An shared a garden and a basement with the other inmates of the building. Frog, who loves underground areas of all kinds, lifted the basement hatch (a semi-recumbent door at the foot of the house wall) and climbed down to explore.

    ‘Yes,’ he reported. ‘Separate rooms. Washing machines. Lots of space.’

     In the garden An had the section with an apple tree and some shade, but she was also allowed to pick currants (black, white, red) from bushes in the other half.

Looking towards An's part of the garden

 ‘The building was put up in the 1950s,’ An explained. ‘They planted the fruit trees and bushes at the time, and made sure we had space to store bicycles.’

    How benevolent, and what an investment in health. So many of the roads had cycle tracks as well as pavements and we saw cyclists everywhere. The Norwegians were getting fatter, according to my aunt, but they still looked pretty healthy to me.

    We sat at a table under the apple tree

Sitting under the apple tree

and my cousin brought food and drink down in a large basket. A good ruse, I thought. She could even have lowered the basket from the terrace. We had green tea, brown rolls, salad, Norwegian white goat’s cheese, and some of An’s home-picked and home-made rips (redcurrant) jam which was deliciously tart. I complimented her on it.

    She was pleased as it was a first attempt. ‘Mum was very rude about it,’ she said.

    I wasn’t sure why. I had a feeling my aunt didn’t like rips but it was more likely that, as a career woman and writer, my aunt was scoffing at An’s attempt to be domestic.

    Norwegian meals were confusing. They had huge breakfasts, lunches (sometimes), early suppers (with the confusing name of middag – ‘midday’) and late suppers. And now here we were having high tea. It didn’t matter however. We were more than ready for it.

    An worked for an environmental organisation which had just acquired the right to give Norwegian companies an internationally recognised certification. She was attending a short course at the university (at the end of her street) on EU environmental law, hoping to become the organisation’s expert.

    ‘People seem much more in touch with the environment here than in the UK,’ I commented.

    As my aunt had explained, Norwegians spent summers on the coast and winters in the mountains where they ski, often along lighted trails. (That was why the inland lake we’d seen had been so deserted.) People appreciated the open-air life.

    An nodded. ‘Yes, maybe.’

    An had travelled widely before settling in Kristiansand and studied for long periods in the UK, so was much better qualified than I was to make such comparisons. I was pleased she agreed with me.

    ‘I suppose it’s because you didn’t have an industrial revolution,’ I continued.

    An nodded.
    That evening, when we were talking about the war yet again, An's grown-up son mentioned that someone had done a calculation at one time as to what the Germans had actually contributed to Norway in the way of infrastructure (roads and railways) and heavy engineering plants.

    The night before my aunt had told us about one of her visitors, a Canadian, who was aghast that the Norwegians didn’t make more money from their trees.

    ‘How are we supposed to get the timber out?’ my aunt had said.

    Having seen something of the terrain, I knew what she meant. Which led to another reason for not cutting down the trees – the fact that the trees didn’t grow out of lush soil, like in the UK, but balanced precariously on rock.

    I put this to An. ‘And you can’t cut the trees down because the soil would then blow away and you’d be left with nothing.’

    ‘Yes,’ said An. ‘We have a fragile ecosystem.’

    They did, and they knew it, and they’d turned their disadvantage into an advantage. Unlike many, they still had a wild and beautiful country.

Back at my aunt’s we showered and changed – it had been a long hot day – and then we attempted the watering. Frog found some hose in my aunt’s garage and managed to get it to stay on her outdoor tap and I then climbed my aunt's rocky garden in my best flimsy sandals trying to spray flowerbeds, pots and shrubs rather than my newly washed hair and my best white trousers. An was coming over shortly with HJ and her visiting older son Ar who lived in Oslo and whose 21^st birthday it was. They were bringing pizza and we were going to have a party.

We sat outside again, at a different table. My aunt cracked a bottle of champagne that she’d been saving.

    ‘What did you do today?’ I asked Ar.

    'I hiked for 5 hours with a friend,' he said. 'There's a sort of mountain in the middle of Kristiansand.'

    I only half believed him but still. How many English boys would do anything approaching that - even if they could - on their 21^st birthday?

    Ar, who had an Italian father and was about 6 and a half feet tall and good looking, was a budding actor. He’d reached the semi-finals of Norway’s Got Talent (doing breakdancing, I believe) something of which we were all very proud. He told us about his recent role in a film about a Norwegian Resistance hero, when he’d played the assistant to a German torturer.

   ‘So Norway’s still making films about the Second World War,’ I said.

    Ar explained that the state sponsored much of the Norwegian film industry and in return the films had to have some historical or factual content.

    Norway was once a poor country but now, because of gas and oil, it was rich. But that wealth did not fall into the hands of the few. As I was beginning to understand it, people were heavily taxed and the money was used for health, education, benefits – and, it appeared, the arts. That explained the lack of commercialisation. Norway was expensive for the Norwegians too. They didn’t have money to spend on things like shopping and eating out.

    I struck me as a brilliant system.

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