We clambered down onto the track through the heather and started walking back towards Veggli. Jan Erik was in front of me. After about five minutes he stopped and turned to me.
‘Bloody eclipse,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Did we actually see it, or not?’
And without waiting for an answer he turned and carried on walking.
* In what is probably another sign of the ongoing gentrification of the area, I noticed on a recent visit that this troll has now been banished to a site behind the supermarket.
† I used the obsolete English word ‘sixpence’, meaning a coin from the pre-decimal age. For some unknown etymological reason it remains the standard Norwegian term for ‘a flat cap’.
‡ This is now the National Library.
§ Erichsen’s film was based on Sigurd Senje’s documentary novel Ekko fra Skriktjenn (Echoes from Skriktjenn), published in 1982.
** Grini prison camp in Bærum, a western suburb of Oslo, was used as a concentration camp by the Nazis during the Second World War. After the war it housed Norwegians convicted of treason and collaboration.
10
Saturday, 6 October 2018
Wood delivered for the first winter – stacking the wood – I buy a tarpaulin – some byoriginaler (‘street eccentrics’) – Willy the Jesus Singer – Norwegian comedians – lack of comic writers in Norway – a closely observed delivery man – conversation with an anarchist – walking the dogs – Frisbee golf comes to Norway – Willy and the newspaper seller
Before leaving Oslo we had arranged for Jørgen the landowner to deliver a favn of wood to the cabin on the Saturday. That’s the equivalent of about fifty-five full, forty-litre sacks of wood. I had earlier sent Jørgen an email asking if he could cut down the tall, dead pine that stood just over the boundary of our land on the western side. Since this plot was still unsold it would be his responsibility if the tree came crashing down in an autumn storm and went through the roof of the car, the cabin, or even both.
No reply.
But an order for firewood meant money, and at about two o’clock on the Saturday afternoon we heard him chugging along the track towards the cabin, dragging a trailer along behind his bright red Massey-Ferguson tractor.
In our absence work had already started on the new cabin to be built on the plot below ours. It was surprising and impressive to see how quickly things happened. The site had been completely grubbed, and for much of Saturday morning a digger had been pushing and shaping the earth and rubble platform into place ready for the concrete footing. Odd, the same young man who had cleared our site, was driving. I watched him navigating back and forth across the narrow space in the large yellow caterpillar, braking expertly, the large treads hovering over the edge of the mound. One more metre and the whole cab would have gone somersaulting over and down into the valley below. I had missed this stage in the building of our own cabin, and watching the process unfold at close quarters on the neighbouring plot I was filled with a peculiar pride at being a member of the human race, so daring in its dreams of what is possible.
The access track to our cabin had acquired a branch down and to the left to service the new cabin, and Jørgen turned down into the lower arm of this Y and then reversed back up and around the bend towards us. Since I planned to stack the wood under the long overhang of the shed I asked him to drop the load as close to the shed as possible. He couldn’t get in much closer than about ten metres. Then, with its tailgate open and the trailer tilted down at the back, he pulled forward a few metres and the enormous jute sack slowly slid off and onto the gravel, logs tumbling out of its gaping, pale green mouth. It was an extremely satisfying sight.
Over a cup of coffee we talked briefly on the terrace afterwards. After about ten minutes Jørgen thanked us for the coffee and said he had to be on his way, he had a meeting set up with a drone-photographer who was going to take aerial views of the remaining plots that were still for sale.
As I watched him chug away on the Massey-Ferguson I reflected on how his life must have changed since he had been granted permission to develop his mountainside into a cabin village. Until then the land had been good for little but sheep-grazing. All his time and effort now went into this new career of selling off the land. It must have brought about a dramatic change in his financial status. That was probably true of the whole village. This was a boom time for the carpenters, plumbers, electricians, shopkeepers, café-owners and petrol stations of the middle stretch of the valley.
I stood for a few moments contemplating the task of getting the logs out of the enormous sack and over to the wall of the shed. But with Nina sorting out the smaller pieces of wood that would make good kindling, it was all done within the hour. The stack stood about chest high against the wall and I reckoned it would be enough to see us through the winter. If we did run out we could always replenish supplies from Plantasjen, the big garden centre we passed at the top of the hill just before the road descends into Kongsberg.
We’d already lit the fire a couple of times on chilly evenings, and I remained thrilled both by the economy and efficiency of our Jøtul stove, and by the aesthetic pleasure it gave. The exposed black cylindrical chimney radiated heat all the way up to the ceiling, so that guests sleeping up in the hems found the whole floor naturally warm when retiring for the evening.
From the end of October to well into April, heavy snow is inevitable at almost a thousand metres above sea level. The overhanging eaves of the shed provided natural protection from above for the stacked wood. Most of the wind seemed to come from the north and the east, and the long wall of the cabin provided good cover from that direction. But I was concerned to find a way to cover the stack and protect it from the snow that blew down through the channel formed by the shed wall and the long wall of the cabin just two metres away, and from snow that would inevitably slide down into this channel from the roof of the cabin.
We paid Jørgen an annual sum to keep the access track clear of snow, but the size of the snowplough meant that he had to stop well short of the shed and the terracing at the front of the cabin. There was cleared space for the car in front of the shed, but the path between the car and the main entrance to the cabin had to be made by hand each time we came. We had snow shovels and scoops, but that wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem. When fresh, snow is easy to push about from place to place. Old snow that has lain awhile, impacted, wet, often frozen at the bottom, is another matter.
I needed to find a way to cover the wood that did not at the same time trap moisture inside it. Some cabin-owners simply placed a sheet of zinc over the top of the stack and anchored it with stones. Some attached a small jutting roof to the side wall of the shed and stacked the wood under it. Neither solution offered much protection from snow that would slide down off the roof into the space between the front door and the shed and presently I settled on a tarpaulin as the best solution. I knew the Clas Ohlson back home in Oslo stocked these, primarily intended for use as boat covers, with metal-ringed eyelets along the edges. My plan was to wedge one end of this behind the woodpile, let the body of it fall like a curtain over the wood, and anchor it at the bottom with three or four large stones on the gravel in front of it.
It seemed a simple and environmentally sound solution and I briefly outlined the plan to Nina. After thirty-five years of marriage she still has remarkably little faith in my often homemade and unorthodox solutions to practical problems. She believes this ‘impracticality’ is something I inherited from my late mother. Her scepticism can be traced back to a visit my mother paid to us some thirty years ago, when she came to spend a few days at the cabin in Nøtterøy. At that time, in the late 1980s, Norwegians still decorated and furnished their cabins in a conventional way quite distinct from the style of their permanent homes. In the living room you would often see wooden platters, usually painted red or blue and decorated with rosemaling, displayed on wall-mounted plate-racks; small, stiff-backed and not very comfortable wooden armchairs; and woven tapestries on
the walls. In the kitchen, old brass cooking utensils might hang from the walls, with a flounced pelmet across the kitchen window.
A traditional brettholder.
Quite often, in the kitchens of those old cabins, you would see a tray or dish hanging on the wall between attractively braided cloth straps decorated in a distinctive regional pattern. One of these brettholder was hanging on the wall next to the kitchen sink of the old cabin at Nøtterøy. My mother must have been greatly charmed by it, for when we visited her at her little house in Edenfield a few months later we saw that she had attempted to recreate the effect in her own kitchen, using a pair of frayed maroon braces bought from the local Oxfam shop in place of the braided straps to support a pale pink metal tray.
Nina was as charmed as I by the inventive and bohemian nature of this tribute, but in time it became a fatal reference point whenever the question of my practicality, and not least my aesthetic sensibilities, arose. But as the man of the house, having willingly handed over most of the interior aesthetics of the cabin to my wife, I was not about to relinquish my control of the way the woodpile was going to be covered. I firmly believed that her objection to my plan was aesthetic rather than practical and as such could safely be ignored.
Early on Monday morning, back in Oslo, I headed up Bogstadveien to Clas Ohlson and bought the tarpaulin (olive green) and a ball of red and black twine. Afterwards I sat on the concrete bench outside Baker Hansen at the corner of Kirkeveien and Slemdalsveien with an Americano, the large blue plastic Clas Ohlson bag at my feet, ready to resume the study of Norway and its inhabitants, my hobby and pleasure as well as my job. Almost immediately it occurred to me that I now saw both, the country and the inhabitants, not so much with the eyes of a foreigner as with the eyes of an elderly man who has lived most of his adult life in Norway and become prey to a double nostalgia. For almost as long as I can remember, visiting England has been like visiting Mars. In the days before Ryanair, the cheapest flights between Norway and the UK were called Apex fares. They cost around £200 return and had to be booked months in advance. This was a prohibitive sum of money for the penniless student I then was and the penniless writer I later became, and it was rare for me to manage more than one trip a year back home. Perhaps the long periods that elapsed between each of these visits left me more vulnerable to the cultural changes taking place there. I recall my shock at the speed at which cars now sped along leafy country lanes; and my surprise on realising that redevelopment had rendered the centres of most of the English towns I was familiar with more or less indistinguishable from each other.
Experiences like these left me feeling alienated and un-English. Born and raised in England of Scottish parents, with the coming of the age of identity politics I had even toyed for about three minutes with the idea of identifying as Scottish. Nostalgic for a vanished England, I suddenly realised I had become equally nostalgic for a vanished Norway. Coming to this country at the comparatively late age of thirty-five, I had felt reborn. Now, thirty-five years later, I was no longer dewy-eyed about everything Norwegian. There were times when I feared I might have exhausted my enthusiasm and replaced it with an unattractive cynicism. What, I might ask myself, what if a thousand years of almost religious reliance on the rule of law in this country revealed not so much trust and faith in its community as the exact opposite? A cynical acceptance of the fact that people cannot be trusted to behave well and require the constant supervision of law to keep them from cheating, robbing and killing each other, and an unremitting insistence on conformity as a way of enforcing the law?
At such times, few things could cheer me up as much as the sight of Willy Danielsen setting up on the other side of Slemdalsveien. I knew from a profile interview I read years ago in Aftenposten that Willy had at one time been addicted to heroin. Somewhere along the way he had found Jesus and had never looked back. A tall man, slightly bow-legged, he had been singing and preaching around the streets of Majorstuen for as long as I could remember.
Willy is what Norwegians call a byoriginal. He’s one of a vanishing number of Norwegians who live out their eccentricity on the streets of Oslo, in a city centre still small enough to make them impossible to ignore. They inhabit a sort of uncelebrity. People know their names and their particular eccentricities, and lament their passing. Until quite recently Justisen, the pub on Møllergata, had a gallery of photographs of these characters on the walls of the ground floor bar. One was Einar Olsen, known as ‘El Jukan’, a street singer who also gave pavement-fakir shows in which he swallowed razor blades and light bulbs. Another was Advokat Hermansen (‘Hermansen the lawyer’), a gymnast and former lawyer, a fascinating and oddly frightening man who astonished passengers on the T-bane (‘tunnel track’, or Metro) by performing feats of strength on the handrails and grab handles and doing somersaults and cartwheels up and down the carriage floors. ‘We’re getting more and more stupid,’ he was once quoted as saying. ‘We turn into standard issue people. Norwegian standard issue. The children start school under the sign of the Department of Education and Religious Affairs. Look at children before they start school. Their spirits haven’t been broken yet. You just can’t behave naturally in society. Everything is rules. That’s why I’m crazy – but not insane.’ Alas, in 1993 he was beaten to death at the age of eighty-three by a man who couldn’t tell the difference.
Advokat Hermansen on the streets of Oslo.
Every morning, between eight-thirty and nine o’clock, Willy arrives at Majorstuen, his wooden guitar, Bible and tracts fastened to the small blue trolley illustrated with a picture of Jesus that he trundles along behind him. He stops, raises the peak of his faded blue forage cap, scratches his forehead and looks skyward for a few moments. Then he unhooks his guitar, slings it around his neck and for the next forty minutes sings hymns in praise of Jesus. His voice is quiet and you have to stand close to him to hear it above the constant roar of traffic – the crosstown number 20 bus passes every six minutes, and three separate tram lines converge here. His guitar playing is similarly quiet, and so hesitant you sometimes wonder if he’s actually touching the strings at all.
In between songs he leaves the guitar dangling in front of his chest, closes his eyes and addresses Jesus directly, waving his arms above his head in slow, fluid gestures and rocking from foot to foot in a series of tiny, delicate, almost balletic steps. He holds a tract or Bible in one hand. Now and then he stops in mid-dance and, without lowering his arms, uses his free hand to point insistently to the words of some particular verse. He accepts money to pay for the independent social work he does among the drug addicts and the homeless. In return he’ll give you a copy of his CD Jesus Lever (Jesus Lives). There’s no track listing on it, just a quotation from the Bible, Matthew 11:28. His favourite pitch has always been the raised concrete apron outside the main entrance to Majorstuen T-bane station. In recent years, however, he has faced competition from the travelling Roma musicians who have become such a feature of Norwegian street life. If some accordion player has beaten him to it then he’ll wheel his guitar over to the far side of the road and set up on the corner of Bogstadveien and Kirkegaten, between Thune the jewellers (‘Please Ring for Attention’) and McDonald’s.
Willy the Jesus Singer sets up outside the entrance to Majorstuen T-bane station.
The entrance to the T-bane station is popular with other people besides street musicians. Most weekday mornings a salesman for Klassekampen will set up his four-poled tent on the station concourse. He lifts it out of an oblong black box on wheels and, like someone coaxing a new-born giraffe to its feet, he prods and pokes it upright with a few practised nudges. Once it’s up he lifts a pile of newspapers out of the box, closes the lid, and the box becomes his counter. He starts offering free copies to passers-by. Quite a few people are willing to take up his offer, fewer are willing to stop and enter into a conversation that always ends in an invitation to take out a subscription to the paper.
The young Roma bloods gather there too, after they’ve
driven the older family members around and dropped them off at the entrances to the suburban supermarkets and shopping malls where they are to sit begging for the day. Four or five of them stand for a half hour, smoking and chatting, taking and making calls on mobile phones, watching the girls go by, before starting their own work. For many of them this involves trudging the streets collecting empty cans and plastic bottles from rubbish bins. An average deposit of two kroner (about 20p) per item soon mounts up, so by Roma standards the money is good. Towards the end of the day you’ll see them heading into the supermarkets with bulging black sacks of empties slung over their backs to feed into the deposit machine, which afterwards issues them with a note redeemable at the checkout.
The younger Roma women concentrate on the city centre. They dress in long, colourful skirts and stride swiftly and purposefully about among the crowds, using all the bright, bird-like charm at their disposal to get people to buy a copy of Folk er folk (‘People are People’). This is a magazine, in Norwegian, about the Roma. Produced by idealistic Norwegians who wanted to give the Roma an alternative to begging, it puts them in direct competition with the Oslo drug addicts and homeless who sell a magazine of their own, a Norwegian version of the Big Issue called = oslo (Equals Oslo). A mutual tolerance seems to exist between the two groups, although I did once see an = oslo seller crossing Kirkeristen to remonstrate angrily with a Folk er Folk seller whom he had spotted squatting with her knickers down and peeing in the bushes behind Oslo cathedral.
I sit drinking my coffee and watch the ever-changing stream of people. When the traffic lights on Slemdalsveien are against them they bunch two metres away from me, and then swarm across as soon as the green man shows, some peeling off to the right towards the side entrance to the station for the eastbound trains, others marching purposefully towards the main entrance and turning into a short passage that has a kiosk on each side selling an almost identical range of small items – newspapers, magazines, train tickets, coffee from a machine, hot sausage wrapped in a choice of potato cake or bread roll.
The Cabin in the Mountains Page 20