The Cabin in the Mountains

by Robert Ferguson

  This sense of ambiguity towards a nostalgia for a time before I was born has never quite left me. I feel it most keenly when my wife and I join the annual autumn outings of Fjordmog, a club for Norwegian owners of Morgan motor cars. These outings are always referred to as the trebilfestival (‘wooden car festival’), a humorously ironic reference both to the famous trebåtfestival (‘wooden boat festival’) held annually in Risør on the south coast and to the fact that the frame of a Morgan is made of ash.

  My wife bought the car with her share of the sale of the summer cabin at Nøtterøy. Not long afterwards her brother bought the mountain cabin in Numedal, but for the past ten years the open car has been our ‘cabin-on-wheels’. And being in a club and going on outings turned out to be great fun. The trebilfestival each year usually has a historical or geographical theme, such as ‘Follow the Vikings’ or ‘The Silver Mines of Kongsberg’. Last year it was ‘I lakselordenes fotspor’ (‘In the footsteps of the salmon lords’).

  The goal of the trip was Oppdal, up in Trøndelag county. It’s nearly four hundred kilometres from Oslo and a long day’s drive even in the comfort of a saloon car with a heater. About half of us took the option to break the journey and stay overnight in the village of Skåbu, at the head of the Espedalen valley. Nina and I had spent a couple of hours there about four years ago, when we first started looking for somewhere in the mountains to have a cabin. We spent an afternoon driving round and looking at various sites with the builder, but in the end decided that the distance from Oslo was too great.

  The highlight of the overnight stay was a concert in the village hall given by three young students studying folk music at Vinstra secondary school. All three wore bunad (Norwegian national costume) for the occasion. A young woman got things under way, playing two stev (a kind of Norwegian folk-dance tune) on the hardingfele. She was followed by a lad who played a medley of folk tunes on the mouth harp. Unable to speak while playing, he told us once he was finished that he could dance too.

  And he certainly could. The climax of the mini-concert brought all three students together. A young maestro entered the stage carrying a hardingfele and a wooden chair and sat on the small stage. The woman who had opened the concert entered with a second wooden chair. She put it down on the floor in front of the stage and climbed up onto the seat. She was carrying a pole about two metres long. She took a soft grey felt hat from her pocket, hung it over the end of the pole and then held it out horizontally in front of her. The youth who played the mouth harp now entered the hall and began pacing around the open space in front of the girl on the chair as the fiddle player played. The music quickened, the boy’s pace quickened. He danced and spun round, his eyes flicking ever more frequently up to the hat on the end of the pole. The fiddle player was playing ‘Fanitullen’ (‘The Devil’s Tune’), a wild and brilliant virtuoso number said to have been learned from the playing of the devil himself. Inspired by the music the dancer sped up, running and spinning, dropping low to the ground then up again, eyeing the hat with nervous, flashing glances. Abruptly he left the ground in a wheeling, acrobatic backward leap. His upper leg shot out and he kicked the hat high and spinning into the air. It was a feat of astonishing agility and our small audience burst into rapturous applause. The three young performers joined hands and bowed deeply before running out through the door. As the applause died away and we all stood up to leave, smiling and commenting on the performance in appreciative delight, I found myself wishing, not for the first time, that I was Norwegian, that I’d been born here and spent all my life here, and this was my culture, my world.

  The main part of the outing was the two days spent at Oppdal, and all forty-one cars assembled there the next day, gathering at a beautiful old timber hotel with a levende tak a few kilometres outside the town. The main building stood on top of a grassy rise set back from the road, with a dozen or so free-standing stabbur refurbished and adapted for use as en suite hotel bedrooms behind and beside it. The dining room and bar were in a large converted barn at the bottom of the slope. Entry to the bar was up a låvebro, a grass-surfaced barn bridge made of earth. In the old days hay and feed was stored up here on the upper floor, with the livestock kept down below, where the restaurant now was.

  The timber hotel at Oppdal.

  As things turned out we followed in the footsteps of only one lakselord. This was an Englishman named Edward Ethelbert Lort-Phillips, who came to the region for the first time in 1886 to fish for salmon in the Driva, in Nordmøre. In short order he built five or six houses and fishing and hunting lodges, establishing a connection with the area he continued to visit regularly until 1937.

  One of these hunting lodges was at Vangshaugen. We drove there, parked our cars and made our way on foot to a villa built in a neo-colonial style, where we were invited upstairs to listen to a short presentation of the whole ‘English connection’ in the region. Everything in the house had been kept as close as possible to its original state, which meant no electricity. It was a bitterly cold morning and we were glad of the log fire roaring away in one corner of the room where we sat, most of us in sheepskin-lined leather flying jackets, most of us with the large collars turned up, cradling very welcome paper cups of coffee between our icy palms. Our guide was clearly a very knowledgeable lady, but I found I was becoming increasingly confused by the whole conception of the English lakselord. Lort-Phillips wasn’t an aristocrat, but until I saw the name written down I had thought – as I imagine most of the rest of our group did – that she was referring throughout the presentation to a certain ‘Lord Phillips’: ‘Lord Phillips’ wife, Louisa, designed the house herself in a neo-colonial Swiss style…’, ‘Lord Phillips was also a noted ornithologist…’ and so on. The situation was made more confusing by the fact that, in Norwegian, the word lort means ‘shit’. It’s not an infantile word, but even so I could not help but be impressed that not a single member of the party made any reference to this, once the penny dropped that it was a name and not a title.

  After about forty minutes we returned to the cars and were on our way again, further down the valley to Sunndalen and a house called Elverhøj. Under the direction of our guide, Tommy Fossum, a heavily bearded man wearing a kilt and full Highland outfit, we parked our Morgans nose-outwards in a line alongside a leafy, streamside car park, and then traipsed off behind him and into a field, where we stopped and grouped and waited for the stragglers to arrive. Tommy then gave us a succinct account of the history of the house. We were off-season and Elverhøj itself was closed for repairs, although the roof was just visible over the hedge we had stopped beside.

  Elverhøj’s most famous owner was Barbara Arbuthnott, and from everything we were to see and hear that morning it was clear that it was her life, and her fate, that lay at the heart of the region’s tourist activities, and were of the greatest interest to Norwegians. Born in Ireland in 1822 to a Scottish officer, she was married three times, widowed twice and divorced once. She and her third husband, a Scottish aristocrat named William Arbuthnott, had come to Sunndalen for the first time in 1866 to fish the salmon rivers and hunt bear and deer. They came again in 1867 and 1868, accompanied by James, the epileptic son of her first marriage. Barbara had fallen in love with the region and in 1868 she arranged to have a permanent home built.

  Barbara Arbuthnot, Elverhøj’s most famous owner.

  Elverhøj was ready the following year. But the marriage was failing, and when James died in 1868 at the age of twenty-one, following a fit at Fokstua in Oppland, she blamed her husband, William, the boy’s stepfather. William returned to Scotland, able to live in the style to which he had become accustomed thanks to an annual sum from Barbara. It seems that in his absence Lady Arbuthnott began an intimate relationship with Oluf Endresen, the man who had been their guide on their first trips to the region, and whom she now employed as her estate manager. She indulged her interest in horses, bred poultry and wrote books about the art that were highly regarded among British experts. She mastered Norwegian
well enough to translate the novelist Jonas Lie, now largely forgotten outside his native country but in his day one of de fire store (‘the four greats’) of contemporary Norwegian literature, the three others being Henrik Ibsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and Alexander Kielland.

  Rumours of her affair with Endresen reached Scotland and caused a scandal there that led to her being ostracised from her husband’s circles. She may have hoped the rumours and disgrace would be sufficient to persuade William Arbuthnott to grant her a divorce. Instead he made his way out to Norway again, armed and determined to avenge his honour, but apparently too drunk to pursue the plan in meaningful detail.

  Once he had returned home Lady Arbuthnott came out of hiding and resumed her life, now as a permanent resident of Norway. When Endresen died in 1879 she appointed a young local schoolteacher named Lars Hoås to succeed him as her business manager. Hoås’s sweetheart, a local beauty named Karen Lønset, was taken on as her maid. A close relationship developed between these three and they would spend the winters on the French Riviera at Lady Arbuthnott’s expense. These appear to have been the only occasions on which Lars made use of a baronial title Lady Arbuthnott had bought for him, presumably to dissuade the curious from looking too closely at their unorthodox ménage.

  In 1885 a series of financial reversals and the collapse of the banking concern on her mother’s side of the family obliged Lady Arbuthnott to begin selling off her assets. After a last auction in 1892 she moved into Lars Hoås’s modest little home. Karen Lønset moved in with them. In 1897 the unusual trinity took up residence in Einabu, a house partially financed by Sunndalen locals, grateful for all she had done for them over the years. She died there of a stroke on 28 August 1904 and was buried beside her son in Løken cemetery.

  All of this we club members heard from Tommy Fossum as we stood in the long grass beside that hedge, blinking in the faint and chilly autumn sunshine outside Elverhøj. Afterwards we strolled on into the overgrown but still recognisably exotic arboretum Lady Arbuthnott had designed behind the house and listened as Tommy told us the story behind this particular Victorian enterprise.

  At this point my attention began to wander slightly. Bordering the field outside Elverhøj a long and rather featureless ridge cast its dark shadow almost as far as the house, and I wondered idly why Lady Arbuthnott had chosen for her home a site so poorly favoured by the sun. I looked around at my group, all of us politely paying attention to these tales from the life of a remote and long-dead woman. We were almost exclusively couples. Most of us were around sixty. Many were retired from working life, many were still hard at work. Quite a number were self-employed. The blonde woman there in the leather jacket is a former ambassador. The tall man in the woollen earmuffs is her husband. The man in the red trousers and mustard yellow jacket is Petter Ellefson. I think he runs a security firm. A naturally hilarious man, even when hungover. That big man over there, so huge that I once made a point of watching to see just how he managed to spoon himself down into the tiny space between the bucket-seat and the wooden steering wheel of his Morgan, is a waver-on of cars on the Kiel ferry. In this regard the club is very Norwegian, very socially democratic. Snobbishness of any kind is frowned on, whether in regard to your job, or how powerful the motor of your Morgan is. That man there is one of the few who comes on every outing and is always alone. He’s a car salesman and an amateur poet. Someone surprised me once by telling me he was married. The big blonde woman there is Karen. She manages a rock club. Morgan Freeman is her idea of the perfect man. We must be finished, everyone’s heading back towards the car park.

  Tommy leads us past the cars and over a little bridge across the stream to the local museum. It seems to be heavily dependent for its exhibits on the British presence in these parts in the nineteenth century. I take the chance to sidle up beside him and ask about the kilt. A guide wearing a full Highland outfit was probably the last thing I had expected to see on our visit to Elverhøj, but the mention of Lady Arbuthnott’s Scottish roots solved the mystery.

  ‘What tartan is that kilt you’re wearing, Tommy?’

  Tommy Fossum, a guide at Elverhøj, dressed in full Highland garb.

  He glanced down at the kilt as though he hadn’t quite realised he was wearing one.

  ‘Jeg vet ikke,’ he said. I don’t know. ‘I saw it in a shop window in Edinburgh and I liked the look of it so I bought it.’

  I pointed to the scarf I was wearing and told him my name and that this was a clan scarf. He made the usual joke, asking if I was related to Sir Alex. I gave my usual response, that Sir Alex was my uncle.

  We had reached the small museum. Tommy stood on the steps and after briefly telling us what to look out for in the three or four small rooms, he let us loose. High tea would be served in half an hour in the main building on the other side of the museum compound.

  Tommy was what Norwegians call an ildsjel. The word means ‘a passionate spirit’, with the passion usually concentrated on some quite specific goal or issue. In the cultural life of small or remote villages and communities it is these ildsjel who keep things going and make things happen. Tommy turned out to be not only the museum guide, he had also written a book about the British lakselords in the region, and was the moving spirit behind the creation of a musical based on the life of Lady Arbuthnott. Since its premiere in 1996, more than seventy-five thousand Norwegians have seen performances in Sunndal’s kulturhus of Lady Arbuthnott – frua på Elverhøj (‘Lady Arbuthnott – the Lady of Elverhøj’).

  A chair made from the horns of water buffalo.

  After our wander through some of the occasionally quite bizarre Victoriana left behind by her ladyship, including an uncomfortable-looking chair made from the horns of several water buffalo, we all made our way over to the kulturhus, where the three long tables that took up almost the entire room were just enough to seat us, for what was formally announced as ‘high tea’.

  We collected our plates and cups and saucers from a table laid by the window and returned to our seats. Tommy rose from his chair at the centre of the table in the middle, tapped a glass tumbler with the blade of his knife as a signal for the chattering to die down, and announced a brief account of the history of ‘high tea’. First of all: did any of us know why it was called ‘high tea’?

  He looked around. Seventy-five faces looked back at him. Gradually, several of them swivelled towards me: Robert, you’re English, surely you can tell him why it’s called ‘high tea’? Eyebrows lifted. Encouraging nods. Tell us. Let’s hear it from the horse’s mouth… How I wished then I could have got to my feet, pushed the chair in, and resting my hands on the back of it given an authoritative and entertaining half-hour talk on just exactly what high tea is, and exactly why it’s called high tea.

  Naturally, I hadn’t the faintest idea what it was or why it was called that, and I was mightily relieved when Tommy went on to answer his own question.

  The ‘high’ element, he said, referred to the fact that at ‘high tea’ the tea is drunk sitting up at a table, and so in some way drunk ‘on high’. ‘Afternoon tea’ by contrast, is taken sitting down. I found the explanation a little disappointing, and in the privacy of my own mind couldn’t help wondering if it had come straight off the internet.

  I had failed to pass the test of a true Englishman. I had let the side down. But no one seemed to mind, and soon we were getting stuck into our tea and scones and jam and cream, pausing now and then to applaud songs by performers from the year’s production of Frua på Elverhøj. They were expertly accompanied by a man on the electric piano. It was a magical and unusually dreamlike afternoon.

  Back at the Bjerkeløkkja hotel we had two hours to relax and change before the evening meal. It was still a pleasant day, windy and with bright sunshine. My wife joined a number of other drivers who had decided to give their cars a wash after the exertions of the day. We had driven more than two hundred kilometres, often along rutted, one-lane tracks, up and down steeply descending and tortuously twisting
gulches, passing through scenery of such wild beauty it would be fruitless to attempt to describe it.

  I made my way up the låvebro to the bar to buy a local craft beer. It came in a half-litre bottle and cost the local equivalent of fifteen pounds, a price that seemed high even to Norwegians. With elaborate care I carried it down the låvebro and walked back up the grassy slope. I sat down at one of the wooden tables set out at the top that gave a fabulously uncluttered view of Snøhetta, the highest mountain in Dovrefjell range.

  After a few moments, during which I was bothered by a drowsy wasp that seemed to like the taste of the craft beer rather more than I did, someone sat down beside me. I looked up and registered with pleasure that it was Hjalmar Lid. At the biannual gatherings of the whole Fjordmog club I had grown used to the fact that conversation in general would be light and bantering, and that when it wasn’t it would be about the cars. The Fjordmog is a man’s thing. I was probably unique in that club in being the only man who had joined to please his wife. Nina and I would share the driving when we were out, but for most club members it was a case of the wife comes along, and the husband drives. As anything more than a means of transport, cars have never been of much interest to me. The only exception to this indifference I can recall was my dazed admiration for the Citroen DS19, once described by Roland Barthes as looking as if it had ‘fallen from the sky’. To admit as much in a club setting, however, would have been what Norwegians call å banne i kirken, akin to swearing in church. Hjalmar Lid was the only other man I had spoken to in the club for whom the literature, painting and history of his own country meant as much as his motor car. Certainly he was as avid about his Morgan – a beautiful grey and maroon 4/4S – as any other club member; but he happily wore his other hat for me.