Anders was bubbling over with ideas for getting rich. When Thomas steered the conversation to more personal matters, Anders went quiet and turned evasive, or changed the subject back to his business ideas.
Thomas was also juggling plans for a company and wondered if they should work together.
‘No thanks, I’d never dream of mixing business and friendship,’ Anders replied.
What friendship, thought Thomas.
Anders went on talking about his entrepreneurial schemes. He was considering fixing billboards to a car trailer rather than a bicycle; a car was more solid.
They stayed chatting until late, before parting to go home. When Thomas got back to his student accommodation at Kringsjå, his girlfriend was already asleep. She woke up when he got into bed.
‘Have a nice evening?’
‘Well, a bit boring. I went out with Behring and it’s so hard to get anywhere near him,’ he sighed. ‘I don’t know what to make of him. He’s so ambitious, but sort of hollow at the same time.’
Anders was increasingly drawn into the Progress Party Youth’s social scene. They were all around the same age, most of them were single, and it was an open, liberal circle. The youth leaders saw it as part of their recruitment strategy to attract the members to social events.
In the Oslo West gang he got to know a girl who was the same age as him, but who was already making a career for herself in the party. Lene Langemyr was as thin as a rake with a playful expression and short, untidy hair. Smart and always ready with an answer, she sailed effortlessly into Anders’s life. They went to pre-parties, parties and afterparties together, visited each other, watched films and talked, went on outings and attended meetings with the other would-be politicians.
They fell for each other. She thought he seemed intellectual and rather exciting. She wasn’t the studious type herself, she laughed, as he lectured her on Adam Smith and Ayn Rand.
She was from the town of Grimstad in the south of Norway, not far from where Anders’s mother grew up. But really she was from New Delhi. There, she had been left on the doorstep of one of the city’s many orphanages one April day in 1979. Six weeks later she was brought to Norway. On Whit Sunday, a couple stood waiting at Oslo airport for the tiny girl. The information pack from the adoption agency had advised them, ‘If you cannot see a dark-skinned child fitting into your home then do not take the risk of adopting a baby from another country’ as the children could ‘turn out to be quite dark-complexioned’. In addition, the skin could darken with age.
Dolly, as she had been called at the children’s home, found herself growing up in a ready-made family of three older brothers. She tried to emulate them, her body grew strong and swift, she wanted to prove herself their equal and never cried when she hurt herself. Lene was eight when she first learned to fire an airgun; she loved the shooting range and being taken along on hunting and fishing expeditions.
Lene showed no interest in researching her roots. What would be the point? She was Norwegian and had a family who loved her. But sometimes the feeling of having been unwanted overwhelmed her.
‘I wasn’t loved by my mother,’ she told Anders. ‘I wouldn’t have been left there otherwise.’ She struggled with her sense of guilt at not having come up to scratch, she skipped school, wanted to get away, broke any rule she could, left upper secondary in the second year and rang the local recruitment office of the National Service Centre. The summer she turned eighteen she passed the physical tests and was called in for evaluation at Camp Madla, Norway’s largest recruit-training college, just outside Stavanger.
‘Hah, you’ll be home after a week,’ predicted her mother.
After two weeks she was elected to represent the other recruits. She was the first girl, and the first dark-skinned recruit to fill the position.
Lene was absorbed in being Norwegian and saw red on manoeuvres when Muslim recruits would not eat because they were served pork in their field rations. She was not sympathetic to those who asked for the kitchen to use special pots and pans to prepare halal food.
‘What if there’s a war? Is the field kitchen going to take special pans on operations for you? No, everybody has to adapt to conditions,’ she informed them.
Adapt, as she had done herself. She felt it in her bones. These guys had been born in Norway; they were Norwegian and couldn’t expect special treatment.
‘It brings out the hatred. I find it so dispiriting,’ she told Anders later. ‘My mother always said that wherever you go, you ought to adapt to the local way of life. Out of respect. They’ve got to do that too.’ The armed forces should stand for integration, not segregation.
It was her experiences in the military that prompted her to get involved in politics. She had moved to Tromsø, where she got in touch with two right-wing parties and asked them to send their material. The Progress Party Youth got in first. Within a few months, Lene was its leader in Tromsø and the regional chair in the Troms county organisation. In October 2000, Norway’s largest paper, Verdens Gang, published a big feature: ‘Dark-skinned and leader of Progress Party Youth’. A barrier had been broken, the paper said. Lene was quoted as saying that ‘tougher immigration policies and strengthening the armed forces are the things I care about most’.
Then restlessness set in again and she moved to Oslo, where she became the manager of a clothes shop in the Oslo City shopping centre. Once the shop closed for the day she made her way on high heels over to Youngstorget. There she would hang out at Progress Party HQ or prepare meetings and speeches. It was there she and Anders met.
A critical attitude toward Islam was common ground for Lene and Anders at the time. Because Lene’s appearance meant she was often mistaken for a Pakistani girl, she was frequently on the receiving end of comments in the street. ‘Get dressed!’ Muslim men would shout at her if she were wearing a strappy summer dress. She complained to Anders that men sometimes harassed her when she was lightly clothed, rubbing up against her in queues or groping her in the street. She was annoyed that it was immigrants, not Norwegians, who called her Norwegianness into question. She felt she was more exposed than her blonde sisters, and if she tried to buy a smoky-bacon sausage at a kiosk, she would often be asked if she realised it had pork in it. ‘I know that, and I love them,’ Lene would answer, in her sing-song Grimstad dialect.
‘“We do what we like with our women, so keep out of this or you’ll be sorry”,’ she had been warned when being critical of Islam, she had told Anders. ‘It must be awful to be a woman in that culture,’ she said to him one evening when they were on their own.
The Progress Party was a young party. Its forerunner had been set up in 1973 by Anders Lange, a forestry technician and anti-communist, under the name Anders Lange’s Party for a Major Reduction in Taxes, Duties and Public Intervention. The role of the state was to be minimal, in direct contrast to Labour’s welfare state. The party received support from the apartheid regime in South Africa for their 1973 election campaign. Lange said of Idi Amin’s regime in Uganda that ‘blacks needed white people to be in charge’.
He was critical of the fight for women’s liberation and of welfare provision such as maternity leave. ‘No one who has a good time with her husband in bed deserves financial help as a result,’ he said in one of his speeches.
But the year after founding his party, the colourful racist died and the young, ambitious Carl Ivar Hagen succeeded him as party chairman. In 1977 the name was changed to the Progress Party, and in the early years the party hovered at around 3 or 4 per cent in the polls. What had started out in the 1970s as a movement among individual members of the public against taxes and other duties developed a wider populist appeal in the yuppie era of the 1980s, when the country was caught up in the liberal spirit of the age. Even so, the People’s Party was not exactly mainstream and failed to attract the mass of voters.