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

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.

Click here for the next instalment