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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