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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SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY: DAY 3/1 Migraine and shopping in Arendal

It was the day of the party and I didn’t feel too good. I’d hardly slept and now I had the beginnings of a migraine. The only thing I felt like doing was plunging my head into a bucket of cold water. So instead we decided to hop in the car again and head up the coast to Arendal, the nearest town. Frog was determined to find his flag.

Arendal was hot – and busy. At last we’d found some people (not that I wanted to). They thronged the quays of a sprawling inleted blue and white harbour filled with bobbing boats small and medium. While Frog wrestled with a parking machine, with most of town’s population, it seemed, clustered round offering help and advice, I sat on a concrete step in the shade. Then we headed for the town-centre.

At least, we thought it was the centre. It was so low key, it was hard to tell. The shops were discreet, like the headquarters of posh banks. They didn’t scream their wares in garish colours, not to say music, like those in the UK. We found what we thought was a mall (I can’t remember what gave it away) and there we found a map shop. Hooray. For 229 krone (£23) I could now discard my 40-year-old Bil- og Turistkart, my sketchy Google printouts and our confused sat-nav lady. Or so I thought . . .

Maps old and new

In the mall we also found a Vinmonopolet and for £33 bought my aunt – with whom we were going to stay after the party – two bottles of wine.

    Because they have such a problem with alcohol misuse in Norway it’s only available – at vast expense - in state-run shops with restricted opening hours. I do remember from my childhood the sight of drunken men staggering about at all hours - which was slightly unnerving. But I hadn’t seen anything like that this time. And anyway we can hardly talk any more in the UK about the excess consumption of alcohol and its mis-timing. Nor do I blame the Norwegians, with their long cold dark winter to endure.

    It had been however a little shocking as we entered Kristiansand airport on our arrival to be shepherded straight into a duty-free alcohol shop, where the Norwegians loaded up trolleys with glee as if on Supermarket sweep. Frog and I didn’t quite have the gall.

In the centre of what we thought was the centre was a granite statue that looked rather rude from the side. Wow, these Scandinavians, I thought. But when we went round to the front of it, it turned out to be a fine male torso.* There was also a market selling different types of foreign food, which was a pity as we were on the lookout for brown Norwegian goat’s cheese (gjetost) which Frog loves and which is difficult to find in the UK.

No flags either, so Frog headed off at speed up side roads and along the front looking for something like a chandlery, and I stumbled after him.

Eventually however we had to admit defeat and, back at the hotel, I careered into the sea and put my head underwater. The relief. I almost felt human again. Which was lucky as in the sea I encountered my two sisters who’d just arrived after touring some of Norway with their children. The party was starting . . .

* Perhaps now is the time to apologise for the lack of pictures. I was so busy taking everything in that I didn’t have time to take photographs, and it’s only now that I realise what was important. In any case, because there were no other tourists around, it seemed rather crass to go around snapping. Things do improve.

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SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY: DAY 2 A gargantuan breakfast, two walks and a swim

Breakfast the next morning (included in the price of our room) was gargantuan. A buffet, laid out in the centre of the hotel’s formal dining room, it included: fruit from all over the world; bowls of plain and fruity yoghurts; muesli; croissants, home-made biscuits and fresh waffles; darkest-brown home-made bread stuffed with seeds; darkest-brown home-made crispbread stuffed with seeds; jams and marmalade; Norwegian cheeses; smoked salmon and smoked mackerel; salamis; tomato, cucumber and lettuce; eggs stuffed, boiled, fried and scrambled; bacon, sausages, meatballs; coffee, tea.

    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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SEVEN DAYS IN NORWAY: DAY 1 Landing at Kristiansand and driving to the Strand Hotel Fevik

Last night at midnight Frog and I returned from a week in Norway, the land of my mother’s mother. We were there for the 75^th birthday party of my mother’s sister, who lives in the country. When I was a child we went to Norway as a family every summer to stay in a village by the sea with lots of cousins. As a teenager I visited several times on my own both in the summer and to ski, staying with relatives and family friends. Since then – nearly 50 years ago - I’ve not been back.

Phew. I didn’t know what to expect and felt quite nervous, both about the travel arrangements which hadn’t been easy – travel agents didn’t seem to know about Norway apart from cruises on the fjords*, the northern lights and dog-sledging, but eventually we were sorted out by the wonderful Student Travel Association – and at the prospect of colliding with family (which I don’t find easy at the best of times). I felt better however when I decided to treat the trip as something I was doing for work, as research perhaps for some writing. It wasn’t a holiday; I was there to observe. Detachment was the key. Well, that was the idea anyway.

Having changed planes (and waited four hours) at Amsterdam airport, we touched down at Kristiansand on Norway’s southernmost tip on a blinding afternoon – Norway was having the same heatwave as us.

Amsterdam's Schipol airport was a scrum but we liked this cafe (The Amsterdam Bread Company) and these stone benches. They were surprisingly comfortable.

Even though Kristiansand is supposedly one of Norway major cities, you could scarcely see the houses for trees, and we had descended over a vast blue bay that reminded me of Sydney harbour in Australia. As we stepped on to the tarmac people waved at us from behind a fence and we were hit with the scent of pine as if we’d been in Greece. Frog beamed. ‘I like it,’ he said. I almost cried. He’d been even more nervous and even more reluctant to go than me.

We picked up a hire car from a charming young man with impeccable English and after ten minutes trying to find out how to start the darn thing and several wrong turnings we reached the E18, one of Norway’s biggest roads, and headed up the coast towards Fevik and the Strand Hotel where the party was to be held. We had the road almost to ourselves, and while Frog concentrated on right-lane/left-hand driving, I distracted him with my squeaks. If we weren’t going through a tunnel under pillars of rock, we were scooting over spectacular bridges above expanses of sparkling water – rivers? lakes? fjords? It was magnificent, amazing, gorgeous.

The hotel staff greeted us with the same easy charm and impeccable English as the car-hire man and, too tired even to wash, we dumped our cases in our room and headed for the bar. We sat on the terrace, looking out over the beach where – even though it was 8 in the evening – people were still swimming, still walking around in towels and bathers.

A hot summer's evening on the terrace of the Strand Hotel looking out to sea

We decided not to worry about the prices (at least double those in the UK) and ordered ourselves drinks and food, and while we waited a lovely Romanian waitress (on her only her second day there and who didn’t speak Norwegian so was delighted to discover we were English) plied us with extra portions of scrumptious (and free) focaccia.

At 11pm we drew our curtains against the light and collapsed into bed. We’d managed the first hurdle: getting there.

* Fjord cruises are not popular with the Norwegians. They add nothing to the local economies and the boats block views and destroy the locals' peace. Just saying.

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