15

Oslo 2016

ABOUT TWO YEARS BEFORE HE DIED, I WENT WITH MY old friend Erling to a Cinemateket showing in Dronningens gate to see Tom Cruise in Minority Report. It’s one of those rare, overtly commercial films that turn out to be thought-provoking. Based on Philip K. Dick’s short story of the same title, it is set in a future in which certain kinds of people called ‘Precogs’ have developed the power to dream the murders of the future, and by using their foreknowledge the police are able to intervene so successfully that no murders are committed and the murder rate in New York (or wherever the film is set) drops to zero. The would-be killers are then kept in a state of cryonic arrest in giant test-tubes in some kind of vast underground prison vault. The point of the film is the ethical problem raised by the fact that they never actually committed the crimes for which they are now being held in this state of permanent vegetation.

As Erling and I headed toward Karl Johan along Dronningens gate I tried to communicate my excitement about the film to him. He kept stopping in his tracks and seemed to be trying to respond, his eyes wild, his fingers clasping the top of his head as though he felt his brain was about to explode. Thinking back on it now I realize this performance had nothing to do with the ethical problem raised by the film. It was simply that his alcoholism had left him pitifully vulnerable to the sensory assault of any American film, that it was the loud background music, the explosions and banging that had distressed him so much and which he was still, fifteen minutes later, trying to claw out of his shattered head.

We parted company in Egertorget, and I took the westbound metro. As soon as we boarded I noticed the young man. He was blonde-haired, in his early thirties, and casually but smartly dressed. With almost palpable absorption, he was reading a paperback. What other people read on trains always interests me. Glancing at the cover I saw that the book was in English and written by Bruce Bawer, an American writer living in Norway. I knew Bruce. As expats and writers of roughly the same generation, we shared the same frame of reference, and the many evenings we had gone out for a beer, usually to Eilefs Landhandleri on Kristian IVs gate, were oases of rich and allusive and flowing conversation in my otherwise quiet life. It was the first time I had ever had the experience of seeing a complete stranger reading a book by someone I knew, and I thought for a moment about informing the young man that the author of the book he was reading actually lived here, right here in Oslo. But Egertorget to Majorstua is just two stops, and I let the moment pass.

Bruce is a married gay man. One of his earlier books was Stealing Jesus, an attack on the fundamentalist Christian churches in America for the cynical way they ignore the true gospel message of inclusion and selfless love. The book the young man on the metro was reading was While Europe Slept. It’s another expression of Bruce’s distaste for religions that foster hatred and exclusivity, in particular expressing his fear that social tensions arising from the sudden arrival of large numbers of Muslims in secular and largely atheist Europe might provoke the need for an accommodation between religious and secular communities, and that the first to feel the effects of any such accommodation would almost certainly be gay men, whose hard-won and fledgling social liberties might be considered negotiable in an emergency.

As I got off the metro at Majorstua I was still thinking how pleased Bruce would be when I told him about the incident but soon forgot all about that intently reading young man until the July day a few months later when he dressed up as a policeman, murdered seventy-seven people, seriously injured a great many others and tried to blow up the government buildings in central Oslo. Among my more trivial reflections on the events of that day, I thought back to Minority Report, and imagined a world in which Tom Cruise came crashing feet first through the carriage window and slapped the handcuffs on Anders Breivik before he could even get started on his rampage. And yet even in that world there is one thing I feel sure of: neither the Norwegians, nor the Swedes nor the Danes would have put him under cryonic arrest in some underground vault and thrown away the key.

In March 2016, Breivik’s case against the Norwegian state, for the violation of his human rights in keeping him in solitary confinement for much of the preceding five years, came up. For security reasons, the hearing took place at Telemark prison, Skien, in a prison gymnasium specially converted for the purpose. The international press was there in force. The New York Times report opened with a paragraph about prison life in Skien, how Breivik served his sentence in a three-room suite, with windows, that was about 340 feet square (31.5 sq m); that he had his own workout equipment, his own fridge, a DVD player, a Sony PlayStation and a desk with a typewriter; that he’d been taking a correspondence course at Oslo University, had access to television, radio and newspapers; that he was allowed to make his own food and entered the prison’s Christmas gingerbread-house-baking contest last year. Most of the other, non-Scandinavian, reports conveyed the same sense of quiet disbelief at this treatment of one of the worst mass murderers of recent times. The feeling did not diminish when in due course the court found for Breivik and against the state.

My instinct on the day it happened was that the police should have shot him and dropped his body into the sea like any bin Laden. In line with those Norwegians in 1945 who revived the long-dormant death penalty and executed Quisling and his Nazi associates and collaborators, it seemed to me that this was a crime so heinous, so exceptional, that it demanded an exceptional response. And I had thought, once the trial started, that there was little to discuss. Breivik had confessed, the evidence against him was overwhelming, the whole thing would be over in a week or two.

It went on for months, with the killing and wounding of each individual treated as a separate crime and requiring its own full and separate investigation and verdict. As the weeks passed, I slowly came to realize that the trial was not about Breivik at all, that at the heart of the long and painstaking process lay a profound respect for each and every single individual life lost on that unspeakable day. Knowing that the maximum sentence Breivik faced was twenty-one years,* I still felt, as many of my Norwegian friends did, that a prison term of four months per victim could never be thought adequate for a crime that had plumbed new depths of human degradation. Yet my reaction when the maximum sentence was duly handed down was one of speechless admiration rather than outrage. The law had won. As it says in the laws of the Trøndelag Frostating, the oldest extant Norwegian legal code, written down in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, med lov skal landet bygges: ‘our country shall be built on the law’. They meant it then, and they mean it now.

The same fidelity to the sanctity of law, come what may, was seen in Sweden in 1988 when Christer Pettersson, a psychopathic drifter who had already murdered one complete stranger and narrowly failed to kill another, was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment for the shooting of the Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme, two years earlier. On appeal, he was freed on a technicality later the same year and awarded 300,000 Swedish crowns in damages for wrongful imprisonment. On the day of his release, he became an instant celebrity. Press photographs showed him heading out to celebrate with two bottles of gin and a bottle of Bailey’s under his arm, cigarette in mouth. That same evening Stockholm’s bartenders were offering a gin and Bailey’s cocktail to their customers. They called it dräperen (‘the killer’).

Palme and his wife Lisbet had been to the cinema alone that night. Palme had told his bodyguards he wouldn’t be needing them. The couple had originally planned to see Lasse Hallström’s My Life as a Dog, but when their son Mårten rang and told them he and his girlfriend were going to Suzanne Olsen’s Brødrene Mozart (The Mozart Brothers) at the Ritz on Sveagatan, they changed their minds and joined them. Several months earlier, Suzanne Olsen had contacted Palme to offer him a cameo role in her film. She described it as a farce, pointing out the connections with the Marx brothers’ A Night at the Opera; but it didn’t take him long to reject the idea, amusing as it might have been. He was curious, however, to see how the film had turned out, and how the actor who had finally been cast in ‘his’ role performed. Leaving the cinema after the showing the couple set off to walk home. They crossed Sveagatan to a store where Lisbet wanted to window-shop. As they walked on, at the corner of Sveagatan, a busy main street, and Tunnelgatan, a narrow old city cut that turned into stone steps running up the walls on each side of it, 50 metres in, Lisbet Palme heard a loud bang. She thought it was children playing with firecrackers. She turned to say something to her husband and saw him lying face down on the pavement. There was a second crack as the gunman fired at her. The shot went through her coat. As she knelt over Palme’s body, a witness heard her scream something which he thought was in a foreign language. Another who heard the same wail of anguish thought she heard ‘My God, what have you done?’ The killer jogged away along Tunnelgatan and up the steps.

The enquiry into the murder of Olof Palme remains open, with a permanent group of five officers still attached to the investigation. It has grown into the largest murder investigation in history, exceeding even the man hours and documentation of the Kennedy assassination. The overwhelming majority of Swedes, including those with close knowledge of the case, remain convinced that Pettersson was the killer. When he died in 2008, from head injuries sustained during an attack of epilepsy, his body remained unclaimed in the mortuary for almost five months. Finally, a funeral service was arranged at Sollentuna Church, with music and singing provided by members of the Maranata sect, a fundamentalist Christian group to which Pettersson had grown attracted during the last months of his life. Sollentuna council paid the costs of the burial.

The whole complex of personalities and events surrounding Palme’s murder is an unmitigated tragedy – for his family, who have to live with the knowledge that his murderer will never be brought to justice, and more generally for the Swedish people, who pay the price of trauma for their heartbreaking fidelity to the values that have created and sustained and illumined their gentle society for so long. Anna Lindh, the Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs and a woman tipped by many as a future leader of the Social Democrats and the country’s first female prime minister, was one of Palme’s protégées. She was insisting on those values the day she entered the NK shopping mall in central Stockholm, without bodyguards, in 2003 and was stabbed to death in full view of other shoppers. Anna Lindh was forty-six years old. The killer was found within days. At his trial, Mijailo Mijailovic was sentenced to life imprisonment. For Swedes, the ‘Open-Unsolved’ nature of Palme’s murder makes it the worst crime novel ever written. A generation of Swedish crime-writers have been trying to put things right ever since, writing book after book after book in which the murderer always gets caught.

*

The relationship between the three members of the Scandinavian tribe was always contentious. In 1971, the British writer Roland Huntford, for many years the Daily Telegraph’s man in Stockholm, published The New Totalitarians, a book in which he expressed his reservations about the strongly authoritarian nature of Sweden’s social democracy. In terms of negative characterization of a society, it was comprehensively trumped in 1983 by Tilfaeldet Sverige (‘The Case of Sweden’), by the Danish journalist Mogens Berendt, in which he damned Sweden as a land in which ‘everything is forbidden and nothing is permitted’.

The Swedes in turn passed the accusation of totalitarian socialism on to the Norwegians. In a television news broadcast in September 1999, in what he thought was an off-mike moment, the Swedish Industry Minister Björn Rosengren vented his exasperation at negotiations with his Norwegian counterpart in a telecommunications merger involving Swedish Telia and Norwegian Telenor. He was heard complaining that Norrmännen är ju egentligen den sista Sovjetstaten. De är så oerhört nationalistiskt... allt är politik – ‘Norwegians are actually the last Soviet state in Europe. They are so unbelievably nationalistic… Everything is politics.’ Confronted with the remarks, Rosenberg tried to explain that it was a joke, but someone had forgotten to tell him that politicians aren’t allowed to make jokes, and in deference to the media fashion of the times he eventually had to offer the usual meaningless ‘apology’ to the entire Norwegian nation.

Beneath these brittle exchanges one sees clear traces of the traditional Scandinavian tribal pecking order and the thousand-year dominance of the Danes, briefly interrupted in the seventeenth century by Sweden’s Age of Greatness, with Norway permanently cast as the kid brother, told what to do, now by the Danes and now by the Swedes, and with that last outburst from the Swedish minister a poorly disguised irritation at the Norwegians’ temerity in suddenly overtaking both of them on the back of their oil wealth.

It’s a long time now since different branches of the tribe actually fought against one another. Both Sweden and Denmark-Norway had been bit-players during the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars, with Denmark-Norway on the French side, the Swedes on the side of the British and their allies. Sweden’s king, Karl Johan, a Frenchman by birth, had been expected by those who had offered him the crown in 1810 to solicit Napoleon’s help in recovering Finland, which Sweden had lost to Russia the year before. But Karl Johan was more interested in acquiring Norway from Denmark as compensation for the loss. By the terms of the Treaty of Kiel in January 1814, Sweden was given Norway as a spoil of war. This was an arrangement to which the Norwegians objected. At a gathering of the country’s leading men at Eidsvoll on 17 May, a constitution was drawn up and the serving Danish regent in Norway, Prince Christian Frederik, was elected the new King of Norway. The move put the onus on the Swedes to claim their prize by force, and this they presently set about, putting an army of 45,000 up against the 30,000 Norwegians mustered to resist them. In the brief weeks of fighting that followed, a last deadly battle was fought at the Kjølberg Bridge, near Fredrikstad in southern Norway, on 9 August 1814.

A captain on the Norwegian side, Jens Christian Blich, has left a detailed account of a skirmish in which he was personally involved that day. The fighting started early, at about 4 o’clock in the morning. Torrential rain was falling. Blich had divided his force of 200 men into a left and a right flank and was about to attack a Swedish position at the top of a slight rise. Leading his men on the left through a forest, he began shouting orders. Soldiers on both sides were wearing identical cylindrical hats, visibility was poor, the heavy rain left the smoke from the muskets trapped in the lower branches of the trees. Suddenly he realized that the men he was shouting to were Swedes. They, in the general confusion, assumed that Blich and those around him were Swedes too, and at once began moving towards them to join forces.

Blich called on to his own men to charge and led the way himself. All save one of the Swedes fled. Blich shouldered his musket and took aim, but the drenching rain had soaked his powder and the gun misfired. The Swede, seeing that Blich was in trouble, levelled his bayonet and charged at Blich, lunging ferociously. By an extraordinary piece of luck, as Blich relates, he was carrying a wallet in the inside pocket of his jacket, and it was this that took the full force of the blade. Blich then parried the bayonet with his left hand and with his right drew his sword and struck the Swede so fiercely across the face that the sword’s guard was shattered and the weapon rendered useless. The wounded Swede fell to his knees but managed to hold on to his rifle. His comrades, meanwhile, realizing that their pursuer was a solitary Norwegian, were running back to help him. At this point, writes Blich, a second Norwegian arrived on the scene and hit the Swede with the butt of his rifle. As he toppled to the ground, Blich snatched the gun from his hands and stabbed him to death with his bayonet. As several more Norwegians now began arriving the outnumbered Swedes again fell back through the trees, and for the remainder of the morning the fighting continued in this demented and confused manner.

A ceasefire was called the next day, 5 August 1814, the day that marks the official beginning of Sweden’s 200 years of neutrality. The skirmish did nothing to change the terms of the Treaty of Kiel. The sheer size of the Swedish Army forced Prince Christian Frederik to relinquish his claim to Norway and hand over power to Karl Johan. Or nearly: the handover was not formally to the Swedish king but to the Norwegian government, on the understanding that Norway would govern itself until the Storting reassembled and formally ratified the new reality. Karl Johan also promised to honour the constitution of 17 May, with the necessary amendments that a union with Sweden would entail. Whether it was an act of generosity or a lack of political foresight, Karl Johan’s decision astonishes historians to this day. It meant that once the terms of settlement were accepted, the Swedish Crown took possession of a Norway that was very different from the one it had been awarded at Kiel. Far from being a simple Swedish dependency, Norway was now a country with a constitution of its own and a national assembly and government of its own. It lacked only independent consular representation and a foreign minister. The next hundred years saw an inexorable rise in the demand for both of these national facilities and, in 1905, their eventual satisfaction in the Norwegian declaration of independence.

*

Of the 400 years or so between the beginning of the Kalmar Union in 1397, which joined the Scandinavian tribes into one ‘loving union’, and the Treaty of Kiel in 1814, Sweden and the kingdom of Denmark-Norway had spent 134 of them waging war on each other. That’s counting only the formal declarations. The statistic easily exceeds the corresponding one for hostilities between England and Scotland over the same period.

The struggle for bragging rights in the region never quite comes to an end. Football, being the continuation of hostilities by other means, witnessed the first international between newly independent Norway and a Sweden still smarting from the humiliation of the loss as early as 1908, in Gothenburg, in front of a crowd of 3,000. Organized sport in Scandinavia was still in its infancy. The Danes were the first to start a club, the Kjøbenhavn Boldklub, a sports club founded in 1876. Among the summer activities of the club was kricket (sic), and to give the kricketers something to do in the winter a football team was started. Other Danish kricket clubs followed suit, and in 1889 the Dansk Boldspil-Union (DBU) was established to put things on an organized footing. League football wasn’t introduced to Sweden until 1910, and then as a private initiative, which it remained until the establishment of the Allsvenskan series in 1924.

In all three countries football remained an amateur sport until the 1960s, leaving those Scandinavian players keen enough on the idea of playing professionally no option but to try their luck abroad. One was Carl ‘the Shoemaker’ Hansen, a Danish centre-forward who signed for Glasgow Rangers in 1921 and went on to win three Scottish championship medals with them. In footballing terms, the Danes always considered themselves the big brother of the three and found it natural to measure themselves against Germany or England rather than their Scandinavian neighbours. They won the silver medal at the 1908 Olympics, losing 2–0 to England in the final after beating France 17–1 in the semis. Harald Bohr, brother of the great physicist Niels, led the forward line.

The 1908 game in Gothenburg, coming just three years after the break-up of the union, marked the start of a long and difficult period in which Swedes and Norwegians had to adjust their status vis à vis each another. The Norwegians fielded several players from the Kristiania (Oslo) club Mercantile FK, including a Belgian engineer who simply happened to be working in Norway at the time. The Norwegians got off to a sensational start when their outside-right, Tryggve Gran, another Mercantile player, set off on a mazy run in the first minute of the game, jinxing his way past two Swedes, body-swerving and wrong-footing a third before hitting a perfectly judged cross for the centre-forward Ole ‘Minotti’ Bøhn to nod into the back of the Swedish net. Briefly the Gothenburg crowd was stunned. But by half-time the Swedes had recovered to lead 5–3 and in the end they ran out easy winners 11–3. Near the end of the game, a group of Swedes lowered the Norwegian flag to half-mast, a gesture that so incensed the patriotic Gran he left the pitch with play still in progress and personally raised it again.

It turned out to be Gran’s only cap. But he was also one of Norway’s top skiers, and three years after the Gothenburg game, on the advice of his friend Fridtjof Nansen, Captain Robert Scott invited Gran to join his expedition to the South Pole so that he could teach other members of the team how to improve their skiing. Gran was a member of the search party that set out to look for Scott, Oates, Wilson, Bowers and Evans after the Pole group failed to return. When the buried tent was found, and the snow and ice cleared away, he was the first to enter. In a letter to his mother he described the sight that met his eyes: the three dead men, Scott, Wilson and Bowers, with Scott in the middle sitting up, half out of his sleeping bag, as though in a grotesque attempt to greet them. Gran noted how the extreme cold had given the skin of the three men an eerie, glassy sheen beneath which their blue veins glowed. It was, he said, like looking at a geological cross-section of the human body. For the remainder of his life, he said, he was haunted by sound of Scott’s arm snapping off as someone retrieved the journal wedged beneath it. A brittle, whip-like crack. Before leaving the site, Gran took off his skis and fastened them above the tent in the form of a cross, as a memorial and a marker in the landscape. Then, in a gesture of great tenderness, he strapped on Scott’s own skis so that, as he put it, they at least would complete the journey.

On the day after that 11–3 trouncing, the players from Sweden and Norway ate breakfast and drank schnapps together before parting on the best of terms, and for most of the next ten years Norway continued to lose football matches to the Swedes with a good grace. Winter sports were different. The first in what the Swedes hoped would be a series of winter games had been held in Kristiania in 1903. Two years later, when the next Nordiska Spelen were due to be held in Stockholm, the Norwegian team stayed away, explaining their absence as the result of a ‘profound depression’ brought on by Sweden’s negative reaction to the demand for independence. The Swedes were outraged by the deliberate mixing of politics and sport. By the time of the 1907 games, sporting relations between the countries remained sour and the Norwegians arranged a games of their own in Trondheim. Foreigners were invited to take part, but none attended. Formal winter-sports relations were resumed by 1909, but the Swedish hosts had to endure the Norwegian flag being raised and Rikard Nordraak’s lovely national anthem being played four times as the great Oscar Mathison from Oslo won skating gold at all four of the classic distances.

The end of the Second World War brought a revival of sporting tensions between the neighbours. Their experiences had been so different, Norway’s five years of harsh occupation in such sharp contrast to Sweden’s neutrality. Certain aspects of the way Sweden had managed its neutrality had left many Norwegians feeling bitter. During the early years of the war Sweden had arranged winter games to which both the Germans and the Italians were invited. So when the time came for the first Holmenkollen meeting – a Norwegian winter-sports event held around the ski jump on the northern outskirts of Oslo that had become a national tradition – the Norwegians invoked a technicality to declare the race open to domestic competitors only. Their skiers were national heroes, and after five undernourished and humiliating years they did not want to court further humiliation by seeing the heroes beaten by the next-door neighbours. The same technicality was not deemed applicable to the ski-jumping, however, and five Swedes and two Danes were among those allowed to launch themselves into the empty air above Oslo, in the certain knowledge that none of them would end up anywhere near the podium. As for the femmilla, the classic 50-kilometre (30-mile) ski race that is the blue riband event of the games, the Danes would probably not even have bothered to enter anyway. For simple geographical reasons they don’t do winter sport.

The sea-change in the status of football that came about in the 1990s means that people the world over are more likely to know the name of Sweden’s Zlatan Ibrahimović than that of Ingmar Bergman, to recognize a photo of Norway’s Ole Gunnar Solskjær but stare in puzzlement at one of Edvard Munch. Most of us are more familiar with Scandinavia’s footballing heroes than its artists or politicians, and our associations and memories from the recent history of Denmark, Norway and Sweden are more likely to be sporting ones than social and political ones of ultimately much greater significance: Sweden reaching the World Cup Finals in 1958, the year of the Brazilian revelation, and losing 5–2; Zlatan’s four goals for Sweden against England in 2012, including that wonderful bicycle kick from near the half-way line that sailed over Joe Hart’s head and into the empty net; Zlatan the irritable genius, who was so annoyed at coming second to tennis’s Björn Borg in a Swedish sports journalists’ poll to find the country’s greatest-ever sports star; Solskjær’s toe-poke lunge in the last seconds of the Champions’ League Final against Bayern Munich that won the trophy for Manchester United in 1999; Denmark getting a wild card entry to the European Championships in 1992, after the break-up of Yugoslavia meant it couldn’t compete, reaching the final and beating Germany 2–0 (a game I listened to on the car radio driving back from Tønsberg to Oslo, so desperate for the Danes to win I had to pull in at the petrol station at Sande for the last fifteen minutes to make absolutely sure they did); Paul Gascoigne in the same year saying ‘Fuck off Norway’ when asked by a friendly journalist if he had a message for the Norwegian people ahead of an England–Norway game; or the urbane and stylishly-dressed Swede Sven-Göran Eriksson, one the best and most successful England managers of recent years, and his affairs with the glamorous Nancy Dell’Olio and Farah Alam which so fascinated the English tabloid press and which gave the Swedish people their first shocked insight into the true nature of redtop journalism in England; or the less urbane and stylishly dressed Egil ‘Drillo’ Olsen, who twice took little Norway to the World Cup Finals in the 1990s, who habitually wore wellington boots in the dugout and was for many years a card-carrying member of the Norwegian Communist Party.

Olsen always said that his two favourite teams were the Brazil of almost any era and the Wimbledon of the Joe Kinnear ‘crazy gang’ era, and he went on to endure a short and unsuccessful spell as manager of the club; but his finest hour came as manager of the national team that had to beat Brazil to proceed from the group stage of the 1996 finals and did so, thanks to Kjetil Rekdal’s penalty kick. I watched that game in a hotel room in Park Lane with Hallstein Laupsa, a man whom I had never met before, the boss of the publishing firm where my wife worked. He happened to be in London at the time on business and staying at the Hilton. I called on him, looking for some company in which to watch the game, and the two of us sat on his hotel bed and emptied the mini-bar as the minutes ticked by and when the final whistle blew embraced each other like madmen. It was as if Norway had landed a man on the moon. Hallstein and I left the hotel after the game to celebrate, first at the 12 Bar, a little folk and blues club on Denmark Street, then on to Ronnie Scott’s in Frith Street. Every so often we would stop talking, grab each other by the lapels and stare into each other’s eyes, shouting in wild and ecstatic disbelief We beat Brazil!

For many Norwegians, the 2–1 victory over England at Ullevål Stadium in 1981 was a still more astounding achievement. The game has been immortalized by the bi-lingual ravings of the Norwegian commentator Bjørge Lillelien as the final whistle sounded:

Norway has beaten England 2–1! We are best in the world! We are best in the world! This is incredible! We have beaten England, birthplace of giants. Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper, Lady Diana, we have beaten the lot of them, we have beaten the lot of them! Maggie Thatcher, can you hear me? Maggie Thatcher, I have a message for you in the middle of our election campaign, I have a message for you: we have knocked England out of the football World Cup! Maggie Thatcher, as they say in your language in the boxing bars around Madison Square Gardens in New York, your boys took a hell of a beating! Your boys took a hell of a beating, Maggie Thatcher! Norway has beaten England at football! We are best in the world!

Even now, almost forty years on, one’s reaction remains poised between delight at the surreal charm of the rant and dismay at its utter silliness. I remember how England dominated the game completely, and how I surprised myself by greeting each of the three goals with the same howl of delight and fist-pumping jump into the air. Many years later I was in Haugesund, on the west coast of Norway, to give a talk on Ibsen in connection with an exhibition at the city’s art gallery of paintings inspired by his plays. I was having a drink afterwards with the curator, an Englishman who had recently moved to Norway to take up the post, and in trying to convey to him the joys of immersing oneself completely in the culture of another country I described that evening in 1981 and the joy with which I had greeted all three goals. I remember him replying, almost with a shudder, that he hoped that would never happen to him. Then as now, however, it seemed to me a case of loyalties doubled rather than divided.

*

I watched that game on my mother’s black-and-white TV in the front room of her little pebble-dashed council house in Edenfield, near Bury. It was the year after I had graduated from University College London with a degree in Scandinavian Studies. I was thirty-three years old. My only reason for taking the course had been so that I could read Knut Hamsun’s novels in the original. Other than to get closer to unravelling the secrets of Hamsun’s mysterious style I had no further notion of where the study might take me, and indeed no particular expectation that it would take me anywhere at all. That night, as I lay in bed listening on a Walkman to Olafr Havrevold’s legendary reading of Hunger from 1959, I began to hear the novel, with its intense and compelling introversion, as outstanding material for a radio play. On the train back to London the next day I drafted a few scenes for an adaptation, and a few days later sent them to Richard Imison at the BBC Radio Drama department. He liked them enough to commission a play, and a few months later the adaptation was broadcast.

One of those who heard it was Torbjørn Støverud, a former Norwegian cultural attaché in London. I met him not long afterwards in the cafeteria at my old college, where I had called in to return a library book I thought I’d lost – I remember now that it was Axel Sandemose’s novel En flyktning krysser sitt spor (A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks). In those far-off days, before cheap air travel and the advent of the internet, one still met the kind of Englishman I had once been, who thought polar bears padded the streets of Oslo, and that Stockholm was the capital of Norway, and anyone exhibiting even a minor obsession with their remote community was actively encouraged by Norwegians to pursue that interest. Støverud urged me to apply for a government scholarship that would allow me to spend a full year in Norway. Few prospects could have been more appealing to me, and I did so. In late October of 1983 I left England in a van driven by a man from Reading about whom I knew almost nothing save that he owned a van. We travelled on the overnight ferry from Harwich to Gothenburg and then on up the E6 to Oslo. In the back of the van I had everything I owned, everything I valued, everything I would need to start a new life: four cardboard boxes of LPs, a record-player and a suitcase full of clothes.

I stayed on after my year was up.

* Under the terms of a preventative detention known as forvaring the state has the option to extend a maximum sentence indefinitely if it considers the prisoner still poses a danger to society.

 

 

 

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