As the pregnancy test showed its blue stripes in December 1991, Gorbachev’s empire was being broken up into fifteen republics. Tone and Gunnar decided to celebrate the pregnancy with a trip to the other side, to the nearby city of Murmansk, where people were still living in some sort of equality of poverty.
The people of northern Norway had a lot to thank the Soviets for. Hitler’s army torched every building in Kirkenes and other towns and villages in Finnmark before it was sent south by Stalin’s troops in 1944. People up here had not forgotten it was the Red Army that liberated them. But since the war there had been precious little contact between the two peoples.
Now, the parents-to-be stood on deck in the cold on their way into the huge city and saw the vast collection of nuclear submarines in the ships’ graveyard stretching halfway along the fjord.
Tone shivered. What if the radiation damaged the baby? A new life, vulnerable and longed for. She would have to be more careful now.
The snow melted, spring came, and spring turned into summer. A summer of sorts, at any rate, with average temperatures at midsummer of six to seven degrees centigrade, which suited a mother-to-be who was growing larger and feeling hotter all the time.
It was the end of July when the contractions started.
The birth at Kirkenes hospital was long and hard. It took all the long, light night. Towards morning the baby finally arrived, big and bonny. They would call him Simon, Tone decided.
When a little brother put in an appearance eighteen months later, Simon treated him like a teddy bear. He would lie beside the baby tickling him, especially his earlobes. If Simon was going out, he would throw his toys into the playpen so his brother wouldn’t feel lonely.
It was little Håvard who turned out to be the showman of the family. He was especially keen on singing. He often put on concerts at home, with the rest of the family as his audience.
Two teachers with two children, an average Norwegian family.
Every weekend they were out and about around Pasvik with the boys in child carriers, fishing for wild salmon in the rivers, lighting bonfires under the midnight sun, before they all slept in the tent they carried with them. In July they picked bilberries, in August it was cloudberries, and in winter they wrapped the children up in sheepskin and pulled them out into open country on a little sledge.
If Simon and Håvard’s feet got cold, their parents would have them run barefoot on the crusted surface of the snow. An old American Indian trick, their father told them. The first time, he had to dance in the snow with bare feet himself before the two chilly boys were convinced. It worked: the blood was soon coursing round their veins.
Gunnar taught his boys to distinguish between the tracks of wild creatures and tame ones. Wild animals walked in a straight line, tame ones tended to wander more aimlessly. The lynx, with its big, round pawprints, always chose its course and stuck to it. So did the wolverine with its long, narrow prints.
He impressed on the boys that they had to be alert to the dangers of nature. Wolves could attack something as big as an elk, and scarcely an anthill was left undisturbed if bears were on the prowl.
One summer’s day, when the family was taking a break, on the hill behind them a wolf stood staring. Thin and grey, it almost blended into the rocky mountainside. Gunnar froze.
‘Keep still. Don’t move,’ he said to the two boys. Tone picked up Håvard and Gunnar led Simon away, walking backwards. Very calmly, without any sudden movements, they withdrew up the slope to the road. The wolf slipped between the trees and was gone.
‘It is time for the kids to get to know their kin,’ Tone said one day. Distances in northern Norway are vast, and trips are expensive. It was time to go home. In Kirkenes they had a council flat, it was a nice one, but it wasn’t theirs.
‘We need to find something of our own,’ Gunnar agreed.
They were lucky: the house next door to Gunnar’s grandparents fell vacant. So they moved one county south, to the place where Tone saw Gunnar for the first time: Salangen, in Troms.
‘What a romantic place,’ exclaimed Gunnar when he returned to Upper Salangen, a short distance up from the fjord on the way to the high fells, an untamed bit of the natural world.
‘We’ve got to make sure we meet people,’ Tone soon concluded. So she and the woman next door started a revue group. Then they needed writers and performers. Gunnar had once penned love poems, hadn’t he, so perhaps he could write some scripts? As for Tone, she was eager to try her hand as a stage diva.
The car was a great place for practising revue numbers. The whole family bellowing out. Håvard always the loudest.
A girl lives in Havana, makes her living how she can, sitting by her window, beckons to a man!
Every year, after the New Year’s Eve fireworks, the children of Upper Salangen put on a show. Astrid, the eldest of the neighbours’ children, was the director. The children devised comedy routines and practised their gymnastic displays. As the new year started, Reserved signs on cushions and chairs around the house showed the grown-ups where to sit.
Håvard usually opened proceedings with a show tune. Simon was too shy to stand on stage, so he was the lighting technician. Throughout the show he carefully kept the family flashlight trained on the performers on the stage. He was never prouder of his younger sibling than on New Year’s Eve, when Håvard stood up there alone on stage, expertly illuminated by his big brother.
Gunnar’s scripts and lyrics soon earned quite a reputation in the district, and schools and children’s clubs started to ring up and ask him to write something for them. The PE and IT teacher spent whole evenings writing and composing. He learnt to read and write music, and once the children were in bed he would sit, polishing up dialogues and scales.
The two boys learnt to trust in themselves early on. From Year 1 at school they went off on their own across the garden, up the lane to the main road, then along to the crossroads where the school bus stopped. In winter, when the polar night descended on northern Norway, it was mostly pitch dark, as neither the lane nor the main road had street lights. One morning Tone was standing at the window with her coffee when she saw a shadow in the early-morning gloom. A huge bull elk was bearing down at top speed on Simon, who was ploughing along, head down, through the squally wind and snow. The elk and the seven-year-old were on course to blunder straight into each other. Tone cried out as she lost them both from sight in the snowy storm. She rushed out in her slippers and yelled.
When she caught up with Simon, down by the road, he looked up at her and asked, ‘Why are you shouting?’
The boy hadn’t even noticed the elk. With his back to the wind Simon looked at his mother.
‘Don’t worry about me, Mum,’ he said calmly. ‘I’m a man of nature.’
Young Dreams
Anders had to find a name. Before he could write on walls, he needed to find a really good writer name. It mustn’t have too many letters, preferably between three and five. Some letters were cooler than others, and it was important that they looked good together, leaning on each other. He experimented in his room with felt pens and paper, producing several rough sketches.