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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