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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SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY: DAY 6/1 Movik Fort

‘There’s a beautiful valley you could explore,’ said my aunt as we sat outside eating breakfast on another scorching day.

    ‘Mmm,’ said Frog and I. We’d done beauty the day before.

    ‘Or’, continued my aunt, ‘just near here there’s a German fort.’

    ‘Yes,’ we said as one.

   

My aunt led us there in her car.

    ‘On your way back’, she said as she left us in the carpark, ‘look out for an island with a prison. During the war the prison was full of Russians and, at the end of the war when the Germans left, they starved to death.’

    She looked grim which made me think it was the Norwegians’ fault but then a lot of the Norwegians had starved too. People who lived by the sea had fish, but otherwise according to my mother ‘they had nothing to eat but mushrooms’.

    Frog and I put our hats on and climbed a path through dappled shade. A concrete building loomed.

Close up the building was even more ominous.

    ‘It’s 90 krone to visit the museum,’ explained a young woman behind a table at the top of the path, pointing to the building. ‘The rest is free.’

    I’m not keen on museums but it seemed churlish to refuse, so we paid our 180 krone (£18), receiving in return leaflets in English. Then, leaving behind the sun and the warmth, we entered the dark dank building.

The first thing I saw was a swastika painted on a wall.

My god, I thought. They really were here. 

Frog made us visit the rooms in order - the radio room, the air-conditioning room, the cooling water room, the generator, the diesel tanks, the emergency barracks – while he read out information from the leaflet, but I hardly listened. I was lost in something like horror.

    We could walk right up to the machines and touch them. Everything seemed to have been left just as it was 75 years ago, ready for re-use if necessary. This wasn’t a museum: it was a war film come to life. I could hear the leather boots clanging on the metal floor, and the harsh German commands bouncing off the stone walls. The Guns of Navarone said Frog.

The leaflet brought us to the rotunda where the shells were loaded and to the gun itself. Again, there were no restrictions as to where we could go and we climbed all over.

I was aghast at the scale and precision of the engineering and at the way everything was planned down to the last detail so that the whole thing ran like clockwork. And all for killing.

I left Frog to it and went out into the sunshine. Here, the gun looked almost worse as you could see its size.

But the views were fabulous. 

Most historical sites disappointed but this one - like the Parthenon in Athens - far exceeded my expectations. It was outstanding in every way.

I read the glossy leaflet and discovered that the gun is the second biggest in the world with a range of 55 kilometres. It was built to guard the Skagerrak, the sea channel between Denmark and Norway that gives access to the Baltic (and the German coast). There was a twin gun in Denmark.

From a map in the glossy leaflet

I also discovered that the ‘cannon museum’ was part of a complex of barracks, ammunition stores, anti-aircraft-gun bunkers, another cannon building, a pigsty, a smithy, a sports field, a mess, a sick bay, a water reservoir. All built by Germans, Norwegians and Russian prisoners.

Frog reappeared and we set off to explore – in completely the wrong direction. Frog took a quick look at what we had by now calculated was an anti-aircraft-gun bunker

and then we tried to retrace our footsteps. Except that we missed the path. It was turning out to be my sort of walk.

We sat on a rock and shared an apple my aunt had pressed on us. Next to us a rowan sapling grew out of a discarded piece of German concrete like a sign of hope. 

Through the trees we glimpsed the deep blue of the sea.

With the heat and the colours and the scent of pine, we could have been in Greece. I’d always said that Greece reminded me of Norway – mountains and islands - and now Norway was reminding me of Greece. Then I remembered another similarity. Both had been occupied by the Germans during the war and both still talked about it.

Back on course we approached a second gun building whose gun had been sunk on its way and so never installed. It looked like a monument to Fascism.

As we neared the building I could see swallows streaming in and out. Another sign of hope I thought, but I didn't want to go inside the building.

We climbed up and down, over and around, looking at bunkers, buildings and ruins. I looked at the wildflowers too, which were doing their best to recolonise the area.

I think this is a wildflower not a garden escape but I haven't yet identified it. I saw it everywhere, not just at the fort.

Then we went wrong again. Was it us or was the map at fault? Never mind. It meant we missed the other people (all two of them) and approached buildings from the back, where we could squeeze in to have a look. Or Frog could. If there was any doubt about getting out again, I preferred to stay away so as to get help if necessary. I couldn’t stop thinking about those Russian prisoners.

Frog entering a bunker for the storage of shells

A railway, built to transport shells from the bunkers to the gun, still ran around the site.

I knew that the train, which now took visitors around, wasn’t original, but it still gave me a shudder when it came up behind us.

We used the railway to find our way back to the museum entrance where we sat at a picnic table and took stock. We’d spent three hours at the site.

    ‘Did you like it?’ asked the young woman at the ticket table.

    ‘It was amazing,’ I said. ‘It made the war so real.’

    The woman looked shocked, as if I shouldn’t have mentioned the war.

    ‘Where are you from?’ she asked.

    ‘England,’ we said.

    ‘Oh,’ she said, surprised. ‘Most of our foreign visitors are German. We hardly ever get English people here.’

I spotted the prison island on our drive back. Half in ruins, the prison covered the island. It was the same colour as the rock and appeared to be growing from the sea. No effort had been made to tidy it up or remove it. It looked sad and lonely and grotesque, like something from Gormenghast.
    The leaflet had called the German fort a ‘Memorial to Barbarity’. Here was another.

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SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY: DAY 5/2 A city built on rock and water

It was hard to believe you were in the middle of a city. From the bottom of my aunt’s garden all I could see was trees.

The view from the bottom of the garden

Even when I climbed to the top to find out what lay beyond, only a couple of roofs peeped through the greenery.

The view from the top of the garden

The garden clung precariously to the underlying granite and formed itself around it . . .

A garden on top of rock

 . . . the grass being in an even worse state than ours at home because of the thinness of the soil.

Drought-ridden grass

Still, there were currant bushes full of fruit, black and red, and a cherry tree dripping ripe cherries. I ate three and saved the stones, wondering if I could grow a similar tree back in England.

The house too was built around the rock, with a basement at the bottom of a rock face and the next two storeys starting at its top. This was also where the main area of garden was to be found.

We ate outside – a fish whose English name my aunt had forgotten, roast potatoes and salad – and both Frog and I had second helpings. It had been a long time since our breakfast and all was scrumptious.

Supper outside. (Note photographer just visible in one of the window-panes.)

My aunt then sent us down to have a look at the waterfront. In a tunnel under the road some black children were making whooping noises and listening to the echoes. Frog added some noises of his own and the children’s father smiled at us. Frog had found a common language even if I hadn’t.

The first thing we saw when we got to the water was a large grey and white duck. I wonder if that’s an eider duck, I thought, native only to the north and provider of filling for eiderdowns (as duvets used to be called). We always slept under eiderdowns (dewner) as children, bought during our visits to Norway as they weren’t yet available in England. Until recently - when it went on the compost heap - I still had my childhood one with its Norwegian label.

The duck, which took off at speed when it saw me get my camera out, so this is a fuzzy distance shot

Houses on Kristiansand's waterfront

Frog and I were pretty tired by now so, after marvelling at some waterfront houses – so secluded, so countrified, we hastened back and helped my aunt with the watering. This was a laborious process, involving a watering-can over uneven flagstones and up and down steps, lots of pots, some prize shrubs and some flowerbeds. I couldn’t bear thinking of my aunt with her knees struggling over it every day (although she’ll be furious with me for saying that) and Frog promised to try and get her hose sorted ASAP.

Inside, the house brimmed with the relaxed Scandinavian prettiness that we try so hard to imitate in the UK and never quite manage – white-painted wooden floors and walls, a white porcelain woodburning stove, candles, rugs, books, pictures. My aunt seemed to be travelling around it trying out different rooms for sleeping – she said it was because of the heat - so we had a choice of bedrooms. We chose a sloping-ceilinged skylighted one on the top floor, aired by a through-draught from the room opposite.

Since making Norway her home my aunt had made repeated visits to the UK, particularly recently during the final two years of my mother's life, helping us children with her care, but it had taken me fifty years to return to Norway. I’d only ever travelled to escape my family. But now something had brought me back.

I slipped between my aunt’s pristine white sheets and fell into a deep sleep.

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SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY: DAY 5/1 Exploring the interior

‘I don’t want you till later this afternoon,’ said my aunt, at whose home in Kristiansand we were to spend the last two nights of our trip. ‘The house will need airing and I’d like to have a rest.’

    Fair enough. She’d been arranging the party for months and now there had been two days of intense social activity. In the last few years she’d suffered three major bereavements and a major illness. She was 75 and had two dodgy knees. A rest was the least she needed.

    In any case, Frog and I wanted to explore the interior of the country.

    ‘Why don’t you try Herefoss?’ suggested my aunt. ‘I haven’t been there myself but it’s supposed to be very pretty.’

    After a couple of hours of confused goodbyes – some were leaving, some were staying; people were heading to Kristiansand and Oslo, by bus or train or car; who was giving a lift to whom? – Frog and I escaped to our old friend the E18 and then turned on to the 404, a red through-route on the map, intending then to turn off it on to a cross-country brown route. But I missed the turning. This map, even though expensive, was nothing like our dear old Ordnance Survey ones. Or perhaps it was the terrain that was different.

    Maybe it was a good thing I’d missed the brown route. The red road was tiny – one track only. It rose steeply and had more twists and turns than a Devon lane. But we didn’t see another car and the views of rock and forest were wild and exciting. I had a feeling that I was annoying Frog with my squeaks of admiration so I didn’t ask him to stop so that I could take a photograph. Anyway, this was just the start. Things would be even better when we got to Herefoss.

  

We were puzzled. Because of the size of the name on the map, I’d expected Herefoss to be a bustling small town, with a gift shop and a couple of cafés. But all we’d found was a large wooden church and a scattering of houses – not even a village by UK standards - at the boggy end of a fjord.

    

Herefoss - a scattering of houses and some boats (and Frog)

The boggy edges of the fjord with an interesting punt-like craft furnished with sofas

Herefoss church with its rowan tree and graveyard

The sun was merciless so we parked the car and sank on to a wonky wooden bench next to the graveyard in the shade of a rowan tree, with the church behind us and the water in front. We didn’t speak. We couldn't any more after all the talking we'd done recently.

    The place was utterly peaceful. Two bicyclists pootled past. A woman came to water some flowers on a grave. Thankfully, she didn't engage with us except for a quick glance and a small smile. Another woman dragged a pink suitcase on wheels down a wooden jetty and on to a boat which then zoomed down the fjord, hardly rippling the surface.

    After about an hour we roused ourselves and went to look at the church. We walked all round it trying to get in but all of its three doors were locked – and alarmed to judge by the pictures next to them.

    We then tried to read an information board at the front but, strangely, it was all in Norwegian. There were several dates in the text including a 1200s one (1296?). Did that mean this church dated to the thirteenth century? It was impossible to know. I had yet to work out the difference between old and new Norwegian buildings. They all looked more or less the same to me.

    We wandered round the graveyard and noticed that at least half the stones bore the surname ‘Herefoss’. Not a good, sign, I thought. Or perhaps it was. Perhaps it was a sign of continuity and connection to the land.
    Frog said afterwards that our time sitting on the bench at Herefoss was for him one of the highlights of the whole trip to Norway.

We headed back to the main road, passing a dark-brown muscled man dressed only in black shorts powering up the road on wheeled skis. I’d not seen that before, ever.

    There was some sort of event in Kristiansand that day which would mean congestion and road closures according to my aunt’s daughter, who also lived in the city. So my plan was to approach from the west, reaching my aunt’s house without going through the city centre. On the way there was a star on the map which I presumed meant viewpoint. I imagined a small carpark with an honesty box and maybe a plan of the view showing what you could see in different directions. Bravely, Frog agreed that we could head on to brown (unclassified) roads and look for it.

    We went round and round and up and up and did we find it? Did we heck. All we found was trees and more trees. But somewhere - I can’t remember where – we chanced upon a lake. It was simply stunning but there was no one else around.

    ‘If this was England,’ I said to Frog, ‘you’d hardly be able to see the water for boats.’

The lake, viewed from the road

By the side of the lake

We stopped by the side of the lake and I wandered into the woods for a secluded pee. Goodness knows why I bothered. Some sort of atavistic instinct perhaps. Maybe I was hiding from the bears and the wolves and the lynxes.

    I recognised the blueberry bushes that covered the ground. I remembered climbing the nearest fjell on rainy days as a child to pick blueberries for our middag (supper) as a change from rips (redcurrants), a hedge of which grew at the bottom of my great uncles’ house and which we ate raw with icing sugar for pudding. These blueberry bushes however were dried up and fruitless.

We’d got the hang of the sat-nav lady by now. We’d realised that she was incapable of pronouncing Norwegian place names. The noises she made bore no resemblance to any known language. They didn’t even sound human. So we concentrated on the screen instead.

    A short way out of Kristiansand we stopped in a layby. Frog set the sat-nav with my aunt’s address while I texted her.

    ‘Fiveish?’

    ‘Perfect,’ she texted back. ‘I’ve just had a lovely sleep.’

    We’d had an extraordinary day. I'd been overwhelmed by the beauty and peace of the country's interior. There was zero provision for tourists. We hadn’t seen a single café or sign of commercialisation the whole day. We'd hardly even seen a human. The country had kept its integrity and nature was the star, exactly as it should be.

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SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY: DAY 4/2 The dinner

There were about twenty of us on one long table in the dark formal dining-room. There was one other party in the room but otherwise it was empty. Everyone else was out in the daylight on the terrace overlooking the sea. I suppose we would have been too disruptive outside, although there was room.

Our waiter was the husband of the Romanian waitress that Frog and I had made friends with, and to whom she’d introduced us on our second night. Having been a wait-person myself I knew what a nightmare parties were to deal with. People are far too busy talking to each other to place their orders; some want starters, some don’t; everyone wants their food at the same time which is not physically possible; and then there’s all the faff about the bill. But he was calm and charming and remembered exactly what everyone had ordered, which was quite a feat considering that he was doing it all in a foreign language (or foreign languages).

    ‘He’s Romanian,’ I said to my Norwegian neighbour, nodding at the waiter as he stood opposite us taking an order.

    ‘I hope he’s not a gypsy,’ said my neighbour.

    What? I was stunned. I hoped the waiter hadn’t heard.

    ‘Why do you say that?’ I asked ‘Do you have personal experience?’

    ‘I’ve met some of them through my work,’ he said, ‘but they’re all liars and cheats, living on benefits.’

    I felt sick. I couldn’t argue with him – it wasn’t the time or place and I didn’t have personal experience of gypsies either positive or negative and maybe something was going on in this country that I didn’t know about – but I had to say something, so I told him about the father of my sister-in-law K who came to Britain from Germany as a Jewish refugee before the Second World War and worked for the rights of gypsies (among others).

    ‘Just so that you don’t put your foot in it,’ I concluded.

    ‘Hmph,’ said my neighbour.

    At which point our Romanian waitress came over. While her husband was dark, she was a dazzling blonde.

    ‘What d’you think of him?’ she whispered in my ear, nodding at her husband. ‘All right, huh?’

    ‘Definitely,’ I said. ‘And lucky.’

    By which I certainly didn’t mean anything racist; I just hoped it was a nice thing to say.

    ‘Yes, lucky,’ repeated my neighbour.

    I didn’t know what he meant by that.

I turned to my Norwegian cousin M on the other side. She’d trained as an engineer, as far as I could remember, and we in the UK had all been intrigued to hear that her textbooks had used the pronoun ‘she’ throughout (rather than ‘he’ or ‘he and she’ or even ‘she and he’). What a country, we’d thought. She had three teenage daughters and a full-time job. How did she manage?

    ‘Oh, the company’s very flexible,’ she said, ‘and in any case here in Norway we believe in having a life outside work. I never have to stay late.’

    This was very different from the experience of her English husband who was an employee of an international company which demanded long hours. He’d even had to commandeer a special room at the hotel so that he could work during their stay.

    My aunt had told Frog and me about the Norwegians’ dislike of fjord cruises (which disrupt the lives of the locals and add nothing to their economy) so I asked about trips to see the northern lights (Frog’s dream) and to go dog-sledging through the snow (mine).

    ‘Oh they’re fine,’ M and her husband said. I hoped they weren’t simply being polite. ‘Go to Tromsø. You’ll like the people there. They’re something special.’

    M then told me about her trip to Svalbard, Norwegian islands within the Arctic Circle.

‘Because of the polar bears', said cousin M, 'we couldn’t go anywhere without an armed guard – even from one hotel building to another. When we went out dog-sledging the women weren’t allowed to get off the sledges to pee, and the men could only pee if they had an armed guard with them.’

    The trip had been a reward from work for a group of them. ‘But I wasn’t happy about it,’ she said. ‘It’s such a fragile ecosystem there. I didn’t feel we should be putting any strain on it.’

    The words ‘fragile ecosystem’ gave me a jolt. They’d tripped off M’s tongue so naturally and I couldn’t imagine any British person using them in normal conversation. It wasn’t the only time I was going to hear those words, either. Like the Second World War, fragile ecosystems brooded in the Norwegian psyche.

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SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY: DAY 4/1 Alpine scenery and islands

I realised when I woke up that I’d forgotten to take my beta-blockers after the party the night before. Oh well, I thought. Maybe they’ve done their job, and it’s not the end of the world if I fall ill now. I’ll stop them. I can go back to being just me, not me plus some alien chemical. (There speaks someone addicted to her morning cup of coffee and her evening glass of wine.)

Breakfast – with many of guests having stayed overnight in the hotel - was a continuation of the party with some of us just as voluble and some of us not. After which I decided that I’d like to head off and explore the woods some more. (Apparently all woods in the country belong to someone but you have the right to roam in them - I think.)

I inveigled Frog, my brother J and his wife K (the author of the poem the night before) into accompanying me. Sadly the woods came to an end fairly soon and we were out again in the broiling sun. All four us wore hats and three of us suncream but I hadn’t seen a single Norwegian in a hat and they all had shamelessly bronzed bodies and faces. Perhaps they needed the sun after the winter, or perhaps the sun simply wasn’t as damaging in this northerly latitude, even though at the moment it felt as if it was.
    I remember my mother was always obsessed with the sun. If the sun was out we, and she, had to be out in it. Perhaps it was her Norwegian heritage.

The sensible hats worn by Frog and me whenever we were out in the sun (photographed in the UK)

We found ourselves in a flat green area with small fields and a sprinkling of houses, hemmed in by the ever-present rocks and fir trees.

    ‘Ooh,’ said K, ‘How Alpine.’

    All the houses – in fact all the houses Frog and I had seen – were in traditional style, smallish and wooden, with pointed roofs, and painted red, white or yellow. The design must have worked and it certainly made the most of local resources, or perhaps there was a law to say they had to be built like that.

    It was a pretty spot and obviously a boon to the Norwegians to have some flat areas where they could grow vegetables, but personally I preferred the wide wild spaces. It was to these that we now headed but before we got to them we came to a road which we decided to take, the walk already being much longer than planned, and after much discussion, use of a compass and study of the timetable at a bus-stop managed to agree on which way to turn in order to get back.

A boat-trip had been arranged for most of the close family, English and Norwegian, for the afternoon, setting off from Grimstad, which turned out to be a stunningly pretty – and stunningly busy – seaside village.

    The signposts on the way had whisked us on to the E18 which was a nuisance as it was a toll road and we had no idea how much the tolls were (our presence on the road being automatically detected and the toll deducted from the security deposit we’d paid the car-hire company). I’d wanted to take us the pretty route, by the back roads, but hadn’t yet got the hang of the map.

    What with the tolls, and the traffic, and all the people milling about, and the heat, Frog and I had a small altercation about where to park the car which was shaming as we were giving a lift to J and K. Frog then entered into another tussle with a parking-ticket machine, with my brother trying to help, and I decided to make myself scarce and try and find the boat. Time was getting short and we had no idea what sort of a boat it was. Eventually I found a Norwegian cousin, and we all found the boat, just as it was leaving. 

    The boat turned out to be a delightful chuggy fishing-boat-type vessel, with a sun-bleached wooden deck. It was a sort of bus-boat in that it dropped people off at all the islands in the bay in the morning and then picked them up again in the afternoon.

    There certainly were a lot of islands, most of them little more than lumps of granite, topped with a couple of stunted trees and some withered grass. I remembered chugging out to one in a clinker-built pram in my childhood for picnics and days out. I'd loved it. It was child-sized. You could explore every inch and make it your own. It was like a safe boat, or the back of a friendly whale.
    All the people on the islands were decorously clothed in swimming costumes, which surprised me, but perhaps they’d put them on for the boat. As we waited at the islands (presumably like a bus, the boat ran to a timetable) I could see that the water was perfectly clear but black again when you got close up, like the lake. Why was that? Was it because of the colour of the underlying rock? It didn’t tempt me to swim but I expect I would have got used to it.

    At least here on the east coast in the south they didn’t have the dangerous tides we have in the UK. We shelter them from that apparently.

    On the boat, seriously outnumbered by all of us, was a black family, obviously on a sight-seeing trip like us. Sadly, we didn’t mix. I tried to smile at the children but I didn't know what language to address them in. I’d noticed some black people in Arendal, and because they looked North African (slim and neat) I’d presumed they were refugees. They appeared well fed and well clothed and happy enough but I wondered how well they integrated and what they thought of this distinctive, isolated and self-sufficient northern land? It wasn’t like the UK where we’re all mongrels, where we’ve had immigration for centuries and where we sort of belong to the continent of Europe, whether we like it or not.

    I’d asked Peder Johan at the party why Norway chose not to be in the EU and he said it was because they needed to keep control of their fishing waters. I envied the country such simplicity. 

     Frog had found out from his neighbour at the party the name of the pennant flag he was looking for. It was called a vimpel (from which we get our word 'wimple').* Then, he got talking to the skipper of the boat and discovered where to buy one. Then, after a long and somewhat confused detour on the way back from the boat trip trying to find the shop, he was at last the proud owner of something he'd wanted ever since we'd arrived. (Thank you to J and K and Norwegian cousin Ar, passengers in the car, for their patience.) 

Thank goodness the hotel was on a beach. As soon as we got back, I dived into the sea, in desperate need of refreshment, mental as well as physical. It had been wall-to-wall people for the last 24 hours and I wasn’t used to it. I was frazzled.

    As I dripped across the grass back to our room, I met one of my sisters.

    ‘There’s a meal arranged for all of us in the hotel dining-room at 7 tonight,’ she said, ‘with drinks first in aunt's room.’

* Frog wants me to make it clear here that - in Norway at least - you can fly a pennant 24 hours a day: you don't have to take it in at night like you do a flag. Many of the Norwegian houses flew one.

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SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY: DAY 3/2 The party

The party’s dress code was ‘summer best’, so Frog, never one to fade into the background, decided to wear a psychedelic caftan he’d made for himself some twenty years earlier for a '60s-themed street market in our village.

Frog's party outfit

The guests were to number 75 (chiming, whether by accident or design I don’t know, with the age of my aunt), part family, part friends, and before it started we family assembled on the hotel's lawn for a formal photograph. There was much kissing and hallo-ing and catching up with decades of news, then giggling as the brave photographer tried to marshal us into some sort of order. A nearby guest, obviously trying to get some sleep, shut his window pointedly and we all giggled some more.

The family photograph

We then had drinks on a terrace and met my aunt’s friends.

    I talked (in English) to a Brazilian woman who’d arrived as a teenager as an exchange student and stayed ever since.

    ‘I felt at home the moment I arrived,’ she said.

    ‘What did you like about the country?’ I asked.

    ‘It’s so calm and well organised,’ she replied.

    After that we filed into one of the hotel’s beautiful dining-rooms and searched for our named places. I was opposite a Norwegian cousin whom I knew and next to one of my aunt’s friends whose mouthful of a name - Peder Johan Pedersen - I never quite got until I read the guest list afterwards. ‘He lives on a beautiful island,’ my aunt had explained to me, ‘and does a lot of work for the environment.’ Many Norwegians live on islands, I remembered – Norway has many to choose from – but usually only in the summer, I thought.

    ‘Were you brought up on the island?’ I asked.

    The table’s conversation was being conducted in a mixture of English and Norwegian, with the Norwegians apologising to me whenever they lapsed into their own language.

    Peder Johan nodded.

    ‘How did your parents make a living?’

    ‘My father was away at sea to start with and then he kept mink for their fur.’

    Like in Britain, escaped mink have now become a problem in Norway, he said, because they eat all the fish.

    Peder Johan himself kept an ancient breed of sheep called Viking sheep which can stay out all winter and from whose wool the Vikings wove their sails.

    He told me the story of his wife’s brother who during the Second World War aged 19 had rowed (sailed?) across the North Sea in November with a couple of friends in order to escape having to ‘work’ for the occupying Germans - ‘work’ usually meaning fighting against the Russians on the Eastern Front. The boys had landed at Lindisfarne, and Peder and his wife had recently made a trip there.

    This was the first of many stories I was to hear about the war.

    Food was interspersed with entertainment by the guests – poems, songs, speeches, a dance – again in English and Norwegian, much of it about my aunt’s extraordinary life. Her mother had died when my aunt was just nine and after a spell living with relatives in Norway my aunt had come to live with my family, my mother - her sister - being sixteen years older than her and married (with a baby – me – the first of what was to be five children). In consequence, I’d always thought of my aunt as a strange sort of older sister. In her twenties she’d returned to Norway and taught English at Kristiansand University. Now she was a prose writer and poet in both English and Norwegian.
    She'd written her autobiography and it had been published in Norway (where I think she is quite famous) and although she'd translated it into English - and we'd all read it avidly - she hadn't yet looked for a UK publisher. My sister-in-law K wrote and illustrated an enchanting poem based on the autobiography and performed it at the party. All the guests received a printed copy.

Part of my sister-in-law's enchanting poem about my aunt's life

As the stories about the past unfolded, I had to keep mopping my eyes, and when I looked around I saw that my brothers and sisters were all doing the same.

    On the terrace after supper one of the Norwegians – dressed like all the other men there in a plain shirt and jacket – gently teased Frog about his garb, and it occurred to me that might these supposedly stiff Norse people be more tolerant and easy-going than the supposedly open-minded British? We’d had a delightfully informal evening and I wondered what the equivalent occasion would have been like in Britain. More rigid and traditional, I feared, with a stricter dress code and more of a prescribed routine to stick to. More likely to give me a migraine.

    Frog and I had suffered a great deal from prejudice, as you will know if you’ve been reading earlier posts. In addition, with my height and my passion for solitude, wild places and snow, I’d never felt wholly English (which I suppose I’m not).

    Here, I might feel happier, more able to be myself.

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