Wild Norway

I made it to Norway eventually and swept into a round of parties, meeting cousins of all shapes and sizes (my maternal grandmother having been Norwegian). The weather was atrocious – even worse than in the UK – but here are some pictures of the beautiful landscape.

 

On the first day I walked with my brother and sister-in-law and two English friends of my aunt to this lake, which Frog and I had found near the hotel five years earlier. In spite of non-stop rain, I thought the lake was prettier this time. Perhaps the heatwave on my previous visit had withered the greenery.

 Lake, jetty and granite

The jetty is for swimming. The Norwegians are very hearty and, even though the temperature was about 14, as we walked back two boys were leaping in and out of the water.

The rock in the foreground is not broken concrete but granite, which comes to the surface everywhere.

 

Here is the hotel garden on my last day, when of course the sun came out, and here is another lump of granite. How the trees manage to grow on it, I have no idea.

 

Hotel garden

As children, we spent our summer holidays by the sea in Norway and clambered over the rocks in bare feet, as this was the best way we found to grip them.

Also on my last day, I found this enticing path signed ‘Kyststien’ which I guessed meant coast path. I wished I’d found it earlier.

 Coast path

Most of the interior of the country (below the treeline) is forested with pines but here, by the coast, were some broadleaved trees – oak, silver birch, rowan. Also scrumptious wild raspberries, another feature of my childhood.

  

This is the beach in front of the hotel, but I didn’t brave the sea.

 

Hotel beach

On my penultimate day, I went for lunch with one of my aunt’s daughters. She lives on the outskirts of Kristiansand.

Here is her view.

The view from my cousin's house

 

And here is the path from her garden to forest and mountain.

The path from my cousin's garden

On my last morning, I walked round Kristiansand with my brother and sister-in-law. 

Here is the harbour, not what you’d expect next to a city.

 Kristiansand harbour

People were picnicking and swimming.

As you can see, nowhere in Norway is far from nature, although according to a cousin that is changing as the population expands.

That breaks my heart, as (in my experience) Norway is one of the last wild places left in this part of the world.

Return to Norway

Five years ago Frog and I went to Norway for the 75^th birthday party of my aunt who lives there. (I wrote about it in this blog - see 'Seven Days in Norway' in the column on the right.) Last week I went on my own for her 80^th birthday party. It was the first time I’d travelled abroad alone since my early twenties. I was petrified.

We took off from England in rain and wind, the sort of weather we seemed to have been having for weeks, and the plane juddered through the clouds.

For once I had a whole window to myself, not half a window, or a bit of wall, or a window over someone’s shoulder.

So when we came out of the clouds, I saw this and my brain took off. I left the normal world behind and felt as if I was in outer space.

 

In outer space

We landed at Amsterdam in more rain and taxied around the vast concourse.

As usual, in spite of the announcement asking people to remain seated until the plane had stopped and the fasten seatbelt signs had been switched off, people clicked open their seatbelts, stood up and began getting their luggage out of the overhead lockers.

I stayed sitting -- I was in no hurry as I had a four-hour wait for my plane to Kristiansand in Norway – and managed to snap this man in his cartographical jacket (and trousers to match).

Frog would have been proud of him. He didn’t approve of drabness for men.

 

Cartographical man

And this twin of our plane. I love the name ‘Cityhopper’.

Cityhopper

And (from the terminal) this sign on a bus. All the buses were powered by either wind or sun, which I suppose meant they were electric. I applauded the airport’s environmental efforts.

 

Powered by Dutch windmills

In spite of that, however, hardly any of the many water fountains around the terminal that I remembered from my first visit, were still working.

Never mind. I had a long walk to my gate (24 minutes according to the board, which stretched in several volumes across a wall), so perhaps I’d find one en route from which I could refill my bottle.

 

A fragment of the board

Schipol airport was the same incomprehensible chaos that I remembered from before. Then I’d had Frog to find the way. Now I was on my own. I started walking.

Norwegian Independence Day

Today is Norwegian Independence Day, when Norwegians celebrate the 1814 constitution which gave them freedom from Denmark and Sweden. It’s their biggest national holiday and marked with parades and flags.

On the day after Frog died (four and a half months ago) a Norwegian flag arrived in the post. My grandmother was Norwegian and I have many relatives living there, so I knew that Frog had ordered the flag as a surprise present for me.

I haven’t flown a flag since Frog died and the Norwegian flag has been sitting on a shelf, still in its plastic wrapper. Today I hoisted it – not because of my new independence but because I know that seeing it will make Frog proud and happy (wherever he is).

It took some doing and the flag fell down after my first attempt, but here it is now. It’s made me proud and happy too - for lots of reasons. 

And here is my aunt's flag, flying in Norway this morning.

May every cage be open

Two years ago, I renewed my acquaintance with Norway, the land of my mother’s mother (see right), and one of the many things I loved about that beautiful land was its wildness. And not just wildness: I discovered that the whole of the mountainous, wooded, laked interior is common land, where you are free to roam, camp, ski, picnic, swim.
 
Britain used to be like that too, until the thirteenth century when powerful people began to appropriate the countryside for themselves, ‘enclosing’ and fencing it and excluding everyone else. And the process continues, in ways both big (like roads and housing estates) and small.
 
When we first came to live in our current house over forty years ago, two farmers owned most of the land around and – with amazing kindness - let me wander where I liked. Now the land is broken up, with hedges fenced (instead of patched with old bedsteads, pallets and cattle feeders that I could climb over) and gates padlocked and the areas where I can walk reducing every day. What’s more, I get shouted at for walking on the road.
 
The poet John Clare went mad when the Northamptonshire countryside where he was born and brought up was cleared for intensive farming and shut off to the common people. George Monbiot in a superb article (in the Guardian in 2012) likens this process to the way indigenous peoples are torn from their land and culture, and their souls destroyed.
 
I feel the same sometimes and, before I get into one of my rants, I thought I’d share with you my collection of pictures on the subject. At the end of which, I will try to produce a happy ending. Promise. 

My current hope for the future is rewilding – allowing large areas of land to revert to their natural state, bringing back flora and fauna once extinct in this country like beavers and storks, removing fences, letting rivers take their own course, letting drained marshlands flood again. Returning the countryside to a richness and diversity we can hardly imagine now. And then joining up these areas, so that richness and diversity are the norm.

I can only hope that we humans are allowed back too to these wild lands.

And here to finish is a picture of a van I saw in Glastonbury - that bastion of human diversity.

It's worth following the link to mobiusloop.co.uk. Is this their van? The small print (bottom right) reads 'Mortimer Sparrow' and 'the vanishing green art'. It's worth following this as well. As far as I can gather, Mortimer is a 'vegan tattoo artist' who also paints pictures. She has a facebook page, I think (but I don't, so I couldn't check properly).

Norway update: Högfeldt, Lidberg, Larsson and a vimpel

In the summer of 2018 Frog and I travelled to Norway, the land of my mother’s mother, to attend the seventy-fifth birthday of my aunt who lives there.

    When I was a child we used to travel there as a family every summer and in my teens I went there several times in both winter and summer to stay with relatives, but I hadn’t been back for nearly half a century.

    In my youth I took the country for granted but now I was bowled over by it – its natural beauty and wildness, the lack of commercialisation, the sense that here was a fairer and more egalitarian country than poor old Britain.

    Since then, having decided that Frog and I are too old and poor to emigrate, I’ve been grasping for any connection to that gorgeous land, in particular two Scandinavian artists Robert Högfeldt and Rolf Lidberg.

Robert Högfeldt and Rolf Lidberg

Högfeldt (1894-1986) was a Dutch/Swedish cartoonist, a print of whose hung in the family kitchen for as long as I can remember.
    Swedish Lidberg (1930-2005) is best known for his enchanting troll paintings, two small posters of which Frog and I had come across and bought long ago.
    With our new enthusiasm for all things Scandi, we began to hunt for proper prints of both artists but to date all we have found is two postcards, one of which arrived in the post this morning. So here they are.

First, one by Högfeldt entitled ‘Glädje och Sorg’. ‘Og’ is Norwegian for ‘and’, so ‘och’ may be the Swedish equivalent, which may mean that the other two words are names. Are they people Högfeldt knew, one wonders.

'Gladje och Sorg' by Robert Hogfeldt

The card below (published 1984) is called ‘The Bookworm’ and is from a watercolour by Lidberg.

'The Bookworm' by Rolf Lidberg

Judging by the delightful write-up on the back of the card, Lidberg was a much-loved man.

The back of the Lidberg card

Carl Larsson

And while on the subject of Scandinavian artists, here are two cards from a box that my brother J found in my mother’s effects and gave to me. By the Swedish Carl Larsson (1853-1919), they are perfect portrayals of the relaxed prettiness of Scandinavian interiors, and remind me of my aunt’s house. The original watercolours can be seen in Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum.

'The Studio' by Carl Larsson

'Cosy Corner' by Carl Larsson

Incidentally, my aunt is now apparently plotting her eightieth-birthday celebrations. Whatever they are, I hope Frog and I are invited.

The vimpel

And here is the vimpel (the triangular version of the Norwegian flag which we discovered flying from so many houses during our visit), which Frog bought when we were in Norway and which is now flying proudly from our new flagpole.

A Norwegian 'vimpel' and our new flagpole 

Links

For more on our visit to Norway, click here.

For more on Högfeldt, click here.

For more on Lidberg, click here.  

Rolf Lidberg and his trolls

Two years ago Frog (with a little help from me) knocked down the wall between our bathroom and the smallest bedroom in our house. A year later the builders began work on our new, expanded bathroom. Now, two years later, the new bathroom is finished and I have begun sorting the debris that resulted from the building work and from emptying a bedroom.

Two years ago the bathroom and adjoining bedroom became one . . .

Because the bedroom was so small, it was used mostly by visiting children, with the pictures on the wall reflecting this. Among the debris I rediscovered these enchanting troll paintings, which last saw the light of day a year ago as illustrations for my series of blog posts on the visit Frog and I paid to Norway, the land of my mother’s mother. 

I have researched (and blogged here about) a Scandinavian print of my mother’s of which I have only a copy as all five of us children wanted to give it a home after my mother's death. I hoped to find an original print of my own but unfortunately I haven’t yet done so. 

'Happy families', a Scandinavian print of my mother's

The troll pictures are small posters which Frog and I found in an Exeter shop about thirty years ago. Now, after our visit to Norway and with my new-found enthusiasm for that part of the world – so beautiful, wild and uncommercialised - I wondered if we could do some research on these pictures too.
 

‘D’you think we could find original prints of these?’ I asked Frog last week, and the next day through the magic of the internet he came up with the name of the artist, Rolf Lidberg.

I then did some research of my own and discovered from Wikipedia that he was Swedish and lived from 1930 to 2005. He illustrated five children’s books, whose English titles are: Trolls (1984), A Troll Wedding (1992), The elf book (1995), The Troll Valley (2001) and The trolls go fishing (2001). We think our pictures probably come from the last one. Cards of the illustrations and secondhand copies of the books are available but again, as yet, we haven’t found any prints.

My mother did read Norwegian books to us when we were children, translating them as she went, including a mysterious one about a Mrs Green, a Mrs Brown and a Mrs White, but the Rolf Lidberg books are too recent seeing as I was born in the 1950s so I never came across them. I also have vague memories of carved wooden trolls appearing on the table at Christmas, as well as small gnomes which my mother called 'nisse’ (pronounced 'nisser'). (It’s only recently that I've discovered that 'nisse' is a Norwegian word and that ‘Nissen Huts’ are prefabricated barrack-type buildings designed by a Colonel Nissen, not log cabins at the bottom of the garden suitable for little people as I had always imagined.)

According to Scandinavian folklore, trolls are scary human-sized creatures who live in the woods, but what could be more adorable than Lidberg’s trolls, with their patched clothes and sweet smiles? Lidberg himself, according to Wikipedia, was hunchbacked and sported a bushy beard. Was he modelling the trolls on himself and if so isn’t that a wonderful example of celebrating ourselves as we are and not worrying about conforming to conventional ideas of beauty?

It’s a shame that the word ‘troll’ has now come to mean something quite different.

. . . and here as it looks today is the same part of the bathroom as that in the picture above

SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY List of posts

1  Landing at Kristiansand and driving to the Strand Hotel Fevik 

2  A gargantuan breakfast, two walks and a swim

3/1  Migraine and shopping in Arendal

3/2  The party

4/1  Alpine scenery and islands

4/2  The dinner

5/1  Exploring the interior

5/2  A city built on rock and water

6/1  Movik fort

6/2  A wild and beautiful country and a benevolent system

7   Saying goodbye

Epilogue

SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY Epilogue

Because there have been too many words and not enough pictures in this series of posts, here are three pictures to finish with.

Back home, Frog models his vimpel (the pennant version of the Norwegian flag).

Now all we need is a flagpole.

And finally here are copies of two Norwegian prints which I have. They are much faded and my scanner has cut their edges off, and my aunt would probably call them sentimental, but to me they epitomise the country: wild beautiful nature, outdoor living, twilight, fairy tales come to life.

The creatures are I think friendly trolls, and those of you who’ve been paying attention to these posts will notice some of the food I’ve mentioned - rips (redcurrants), fish, Norwegian cheese (Jarlsberg), rye bread.

Click here for the list of posts in this series

SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY: DAY 7 Saying goodbye

It was another perfect day. At breakfast we watched battalions of swifts swim across the sky. After breakfast Frog and my aunt went to a DIY store to buy an Allen key so that Frog could mend a light. I finished my packing and then went to the summerhouse.

The summerhouse was a miniature version of the main house, hidden in trees at the top of the garden and used as a writer’s retreat and spare bedroom. I sat on the squishy white sofa and studied the bookshelves, the woodburner, the blue and white china.
     As a child I’d found Norway tough.
    Even though at home we lived in the country and spent most of our spare time outdoors, the Norwegian children were tougher than us, both mentally and physically. They would leap off rocks into deep ice-cold water without a qualm. They skied as soon as they could walk, up steep hills and down precipitous slopes.
    None of the houses we stayed in had flush loos. Some didn’t even have running water. Food was limited and often strange to our English palate.
    As a teenager I’d found the boys boorish. I preferred the romantic Mediterraneans.

    Now either things had changed or I had, or both. I’d fallen in love with this beautiful country - that was a quarter of my heritage.

I’d said we had to leave at 2pm, even though I knew it was much too early. I didn’t want to outstay our welcome. I wanted to allow my aunt time to have her afternoon rest. So after a sumptuous lunch on the verandah of the summerhouse (yet another place for eating out) – smoked salmon, smoked mackerel and the remains of the cake my aunt had made for the birthday party the night before (blurtcarker – a Norwegian speciality consisting of sponge, fresh fruit and cream) - we loaded our hire car and climbed in.

    I could see my aunt was trying not cry, just as my mother always did when I took my leave, so at the last minute I jumped out and said, ‘I feel more at home here than I do in England.’

    ‘So do I,’ answered my aunt. ‘That’s why I live here.’

The journey to the airport took half an hour, returning the hire car ten minutes, check-in two minutes. We had three hours to wait for our plane.

Ours was the next flight and no one else had arrived as early as us, so the airport was deserted. We whisked round the one shop without buying anything then found a seat next to the window and rummaged for our books. The other side of the glass the sky was clear blue as it had been all week and the line of trees beyond the runway a deep rich green. I wanted to be out there.

Eventually people began to arrive and go through to the gate waiting area so we followed them. The waiting area was a strange silent place, watched over by humanoid granite statues. Nearly everyone was plugged into a computer.

The gate waiting area at Kristiansand airport

Frog and I shared his emergency rations - a smoked salmon and cucumber sandwich he’d made after lunch – and then I texted my aunt to tell her what stage we were at. (She’d refused to let me strip our bed, in case we had to return. I wanted to reassure her that we nearly on the plane.) We felt embarrassed to be showing such signs of life.

This way round we had only a two-hour stopover at Amsterdam's Schipol. We were old hands at the airport so didn’t need to explore and Frog had a bad foot (as he sometimes does) so we sat quietly by a window again and tried to read.

At 11pm I stood in Bristol Airport carpark in the dark with the luggage, waiting for Frog to find the car. A chill wind whipped round the corner of the building from which we’d picked up our key and I rummaged in my bag for the fleece and quilted gilet that I hadn’t touched all week.

    We’d made to Norway and we’d made it back. Now I had to work out what it all meant.

Click here for the Epilogue

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.

Click here for the next instalment