Gluten-free bread and cereal were available
but you wouldn’t want to have been a vegan. Luckily, I’m a very weak one,
especially when away from home.
It was a far-cry from my memories of
Norwegian food: black rye bread, smelly goat's butter and balls of reconstituted fish with the texture of tofu (fiske-boller*), occasionally leavened with shrimps or
mackerel from the fishing boats.
‘Golly,’ I said. ‘We won’t want lunch.’
‘You think not?’ said Frog, never
known to be without an appetite, loading up his plate.
We ate in the conservatory, pulling a
curtain against the glare and watching the morning sun silvering a dead-calm
sea. The small black heads of the early swimmers glided about like seals.
We had the day to ourselves as
the rest of the family wasn’t arriving till the next day, the day of the party.
I’d arranged that deliberately so that I’d have time to recover from the
journey before the excitement (or perhaps I should say agitation) of meeting
lots of people. I was terrified of coming down with a migraine and wasting the
whole trip. For the same reason I was back on the beta-blockers, which on the
first attempt I’d abandoned after a month because of the horrible side-effects.
Those effects hadn’t kicked in to start with however and I was now on only a short
course of a half-dose, so I was hoping for the best. Even so, I didn’t like
taking them. I didn’t feel like myself.
We decided, after our breakfast, to explore
the environs, so took a path that led out of the hotel garden around the back
of the beach. As we scrambled over rocks, up steep wooden steps and into a
pinewood where we found wild raspberries, I was back in my childhood. Then
however we’d gone everywhere in bare feet as they were the best way to
negotiate the smooth granite surfaces. Now, I wore my stout walking sandals.
The wood came out at the back of the
village so we decided to look for a shop. I, as navigator, needed a map as the
one I was using came from my mother’s house and was dated 1976. Frog had fallen
in love with the pennant he’d seen flying from the hotel, a stylised triangular
version of the Norwegian flag, and wanted one for his collection.
We didn’t find a shop, or a church, or a
village hall, or any sign of communal activity. We didn’t even see many people.
Was that because this was a village of holiday homes? But if that was the case,
where were the crowds, the ice-cream kiosks, the stalls selling buckets and
spades, the cafés? It was all very strange.
What we did find, up a turning into another
wood, was a lake. It wasn’t stunningly beautiful, but it was dead quiet and
deserted. There was a jetty from which I presumed people swam, but nothing
would have induced me to swim there. The water was black and I hardly dared put
my hand in it for fear of the creatures I might disturb. We sat on a stone
picnic table and thought about fairy tales.
 |
| The lake, the jetty and the stone picnic table (and Frog) |
But we did swim, that afternoon,
in the sea. Remembering how hearty the Norwegians were, I hadn’t expected it to
be warm, but it wasn’t bad at all, and it was free from the stinging jelly-fish
(brenn-munnet) that had terrified me
as a child. After the swim, Frog caught up on some sleep and I lay with my head
in the shade on the lawn outside our room and tried to read. I wasn’t
ready for the beach and all the bronzed, blond, beautiful Norwegians.
In the evening after supper, we took a
footpath around the coast the other way and came to a small harbour filled with
boats. Again, even though there were houses, we saw only a handful of people.
We walked back at 10pm in daylight.
We’d survived another day.
* I’m spelling Norwegian words
phonetically because I learnt them not from reading but by ear, as a child, and
I don’t know how to spell them properly.
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