The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  The smells and sounds were different from the woods I knew. Saltwater with added fish guts and the thick smoke of burning coal or peat. The screeching of seabirds, the rumbling of the breakers striking the cliffs at the mouth of the inlet. The North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean on either side, forever throwing themselves at the coast. It was like standing in a besieged fortress.

  I breathed in the sea air. A cold, salty wind, fresh yet rotten. I liked and disliked it at the same time; it reminded me of mould making room for something new.

  Something was missing. Something I had expected, but I could not figure out what it was. When I had driven a little further I realised, yes, of course: There were no trees, not a single one. Just small thickets, stone houses and pastures. Not even the lean stem of an aspen.

  How could a cabinetmaker stand it?

  *

  I bought a map and sat in the car. The Shetland Islands resembled a shattered bottle; small reefs and islands were like shards along the length of the coast.

  The priest had made out two place names, Unst and Scalloway. The northernmost island and a little town near Lerwick, on the opposite coast. As I plotted my route, it dawned on me that I had spoken proper English for the first time. A map of Shetland, please. Yes. Thank you. And it had been easy. Every victory was a victory over Hanne and Bestefar. Don’t get lost? Yes, I had neglected my English lessons, but I had other teachers to turn to. Joe Strummer and Shane MacGowan had taught me English. A silver Pioneer stereo and the lyrics on the sleeves of L.P.s had taught me English – at least enough to buy a map.

  But for Shetland, I realised, I should have learned old Norwegian instead. The map teemed with names from another age, names for travelling in longships, names for mounted warriors. Wick was a bay. Voe was a slightly larger bay. There were skerries everywhere, and Swarta Skerries must mean that the skerries were black, while Out Skerries and Haaf Skerries were reserved for those furthest out to sea.

  But this came at a price, particularly for someone embarking on a search. The map had ten or twelve instances of Hamnavoe, even more for Sandwick, and the small islands were either called Inner Holm or Outer Holm, and if they were not called that, they were called Linga.

  On Unst, the Norwegian did not seem watered down at all. Bratta. Hamar. Little Hamar. Framigord were the farms closest to the road. Taing of Noustigarth was a tongue in the sea near Nordigard.

  I could not work it out. What possible attraction could Einar, the Parisian, have had for this place where everything seemed to be named after a Viking skald? A man who, already in his teenage years, had tired of making kitchen dressers for country estates. He would be well over seventy now. What do you say to someone who has been away from his family for all these years? Was he even going to care that his brother was dead?

  All of a sudden I felt like turning back, letting everything be like before. Because the Leica was on the passenger seat and the last exposure was of Bestefar’s dead face. I remembered something he once said, it might have been the autumn after I read Det Hendte.

  “Seed potatoes,” he had said. And I noticed in the way that he straightened up from his work, the way that he studied me and in the words he had opened with, that this was something he had been prepared to say only when I was “big enough”, and that he had measured me and found that the time was ripe. I do not know what I had done in the preceding minutes to make Bestefar suddenly realise that I was old enough. I thought I had been working as I always did, but maybe I had developed something pragmatic about the way I worked that made Bestefar straighten up like that and say:

  “Each potato is the other potato. All the potatoes we put in the ground now are in fact the same plant. Only when we set actual seed does new growth form. Those we planted last year, all those we plant next year, are one and the same potato. So called seed potatoes do rot, yes. But the new ones are just growths from the old ones. They are not only family, they are one another.”

  I started smoking that year, and I smoked his tobacco.

  *

  I pulled off my anorak and reached for a chocolate bar from the glove compartment. In addition to tinned food and potatoes, there were twenty Gullbrød, twenty Firkløver and ten bags of peanuts as emergency supplies. Tools and spare parts for the car. A box of things from the secretary desk that I had not found any explanation for. I had photocopied the most important documents and made a print of slide 18b, the one that did not fit in with Bestefar’s photographs of Germany.

  I munched on the chocolate and told myself that it was just a matter of keeping going. Suddenly the wind subsided. Maybe it was a bad omen to break open the emergency supplies on the first day?

  A dark-grey bank of clouds was rolling in from the mouth of the inlet. The storms at home announced their arrival well in advance, and always with a muggy messenger, so I imagined the rain would reach Shetland that evening. But the shifting weather blew in as fast as an angry bull. The wind picked up again and fifteen minutes later I had the windscreen wipers on full and was heading for Lerwick, for Agnes Brown’s hair salon.

  *

  When St Sunniva Hairdresser’s closed in 1975, they must have simply let out the last customer, swept the floor and not bothered opening the next day. And so the years passed, until now, when I stood looking through the shop’s dusty window. A faded Wella poster was hanging over the entrance, showing the profile of a woman with a wavy hairstyle. On a table was a yellowed copy of the Shetland Times, so dry that the pages curled towards the light. It was difficult to see further inside, but I could make out that large, light-blue hairdryers had been abandoned in the middle of the room. Old-fashioned shampoo bottles by the washstands. The place reminded me of Einar’s workshop, deserted and yet intact.

  I turned and stood under the eaves. The rain ricocheted off the asphalt. It was Friday and people seemed to be shopping for the weekend. They walked quickly, untroubled by the cloudburst. Simply pulled up the hoods of their rain jackets.

  All around there were drab stone houses with small gardens. On the way here, walking down King Harald Street, I had passed majestic buildings with spires and round, lead-glass windows that reminded me of the castle on the copy of Robin Hood I had back home.

  And here, in St Sunniva Street, a tiny hair salon had attracted its customers. A light was on in a window above the salon. I opened an iron gate, walked through a small garden that had not been tended to for some years, and felt a shiver when I saw the brass sign by the door.

  AGNES BROWN.

  I pressed the doorbell three times. No-one came. A window was ajar. I stepped back into the rain and shouted Hello, but there was no response.

  Across the street was a clothing shop. A lady with curly red hair was repairing yellow oilskins. The repairs were being made with a Tip Top puncture repair kit, the same I used to mend my inner tubes back home.

  “The hairdresser,” I said and nodded at the salon.

  She put down the tube of glue and scrutinised me. “You don’t need a haircut, do you?”

  I laughed. “I need to find Agnes Brown,” I said.

  “She hasn’t cut anyone’s hair for years. Go to St Magnus Street or King Erik Street. There are good hairdressers there.”

  “How much do you want for that?” I said, pointing to an oilskin.

  “It’s not finished yet.”

  “But when it is.”

  “Don’t know,” she said and held it up to the ceiling lamp, perhaps to see how much the tear lowered its value. “Depends on how much you have in your pung,” she said.

  “Hm?” I said, surprised to hear the Norwegian for scrotum.

  “You’re Norwegian, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you call the thing you carry money in?”

  “Lommebok,” I said.

  She repeated it clumsily. “Loomi-buuk? We call it a pung.”

  We made the transaction. “I don’t need a haircut,” I said. “It’s Agnes Brown I’m after.”

  “She is s
uch a lovely old lady. Apparently won a beauty contest in her younger days. But I haven’t seen her in a long time. She keeps to herself.”

  Her pronunciation was easy to make out. I had thought that the Shetland dialect would have a lot of Scottish influence, but the ring of her words was more like what I heard in the car on the B.B.C.

  “Do you know of a Norwegian by the name of Einar Hirifjell? Came here during the war.”

  She shook her head. “Sorry, no.”

  “Does anyone else live in the flat above the salon?”

  “I believe Agnes has lived alone her entire life,” she said, folding up the oilskins. She was in no hurry, smiled as though she wanted to ask me something, but it was too soon to do so there and then. Her calm and open nature carried the promise of a “next time”.

  I was not used to having no past. Down in the village I was always on guard; here in Shetland, I felt as free as I did in the mountains.

  On a whim I pulled out the notebook. “I think this is Agnes’ number,” I said. “You have a telephone here, I imagine?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Could you dial the number? If she answers, then ask if she minds a visitor.”

  She went into the back room and dialled the number. Poked her head out. “No answer,” she said.

  “Try again.” I bounded across the street to the entrance door in the back garden. Looked up at the open window and waited. No telephone rang in Agnes Brown’s flat, and it was small enough that the sound would have reached here.

  Back at the gate, I heard a jingling coming from inside the salon. I peeked inside. Next to an open cash register, a grey telephone was ringing.

  *

  I got back into the car. The priest had mentioned something about Scalloway, and the old harbour for the Shetland Bus. Ten minutes later I parked the car, put on the oilskins and looked around me. Scalloway was simply a few streets around a small wick.

  This is where his life must have taken him. He had crossed the grey, desolate sea to put an unresolved conflict with Bestefar behind him. As I had done too, in a way.

  What could a cabinetmaker find to do here in this fishing village, made a headquarters for the war effort by geographical coincidence? I tried to imagine those years. The same landscape, the same weather, though it was only the dark side of everything that mattered.

  On the other side of the street was a sign. Royal Mail. Why had I not thought of that before?

  The place was full of people but did not look like a post office, more like a second-hand bookstore: rows of shelves with dusty pulp fiction and magazines in orange crates. The only thing qualifying it for the sign outside were two plastic crates: a yellow crate with stamped letters that had not been franked, and a red case filled with newly arrived post. People seemed to be helping themselves to the letters, but soon I made sense of the system; whoever took several letters with them was probably dropping off post to the neighbours they passed on the way.

  I waited until the red case had emptied a little and the crowd had thinned before approaching the postmaster, a balding man who was sorting through some comic books.

  “Einar Hirifjell,” I said quietly. “A Norwegian. Does he live here in Scalloway?”

  The postmaster looked up at the ceiling. Seemed to be making a mental calculation. A young man came to pay for some books. Suddenly I had second thoughts. The local gossip would spread, maybe even reach Einar before I did. Our meeting was not meant to take place with a full audience and a brass band. I wanted to observe him from a distance, let the sight of him arrive undisturbed.

  “No,” the postmaster said. “But some Norwegians stayed behind after the war. And then they took our womenfolk back to Norway. I’ll ask Lise,” he said and picked up the telephone.

  *

  Five minutes later I was in the gentle tentacles of Lise Robertson, a buxom lady wearing a flowery jacket and sensible shoes. She was half Norwegian, and one of Scalloway’s guides for the Shetland Bus. Her delivery was like a tightly edited radio broadcast, something she must have been perfecting since 1945, and with a meticulous sense of detail she described how the Norwegian fishing boats had operated a shuttle service between Scalloway and the coast of Norway. Weapons and explosives and saboteurs one way, refugees in return, while low-flying German fighter planes peppered them with machine-gun fire through gaps in the fog.

  We hurried around the pier and stopped by a sculpture of a fishing boat riding the waves. Beneath the inscription ALT FOR NORGE were rows of names of Norwegian seamen who died working the Shetland Bus.

  “Norwegians have always been popular in Shetland,” she said. “We were Norwegian. This was Hjaltland, right up until the Scots took over in 1472.”

  She described the horse-trading that took place when the Danish king married off his daughter and, unable to pay the dowry, he gave away the Shetland Islands instead. These were dark times for the Shetlanders. The Scots did away with Viking law and turned free men into tenant farmers. On the island of Yell, the feudal lord had forced forty men out on a fishing expedition in rough weather. It soon turned into a storm, and thirty-four families lost their fathers and sons. For that reason, the word Norge had always had a golden ring to everyone in Shetland, as it was a link to their time as free people.

  “Then the war came,” she said as we stood on the jetty known as Prince Olav Slipway, “and suddenly they were here again, the Norwegians, in fishing boats from across the sea. Fearless folk, just as we had imagined them. Young and brave. The Germans shot their boats to pieces, but the Norwegians did not yield. Repaired them down at the workshop and set out again the next night.”

  “Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Did you say they used wooden boats?”

  “I said they used fishing boats.”

  “But they were wooden?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they were repaired here?”

  “Right down there,” she said and pointed at a dilapidated building near the dock. “Jack met all of them.” She tilted her head at a man wearing a boiler suit. He was heading towards a shack, carrying a wooden box which was obviously heavy, as his pace quickened after he had set it down.

  We followed him into the workshop, to the sound of chisels and angle grinders, and Lise Robertson managed to persuade Jack to speak to us in his cramped office.

  Only one piece of information came to light over the next quarter of an hour. But it was significant.

  Einar Hirifjell came here in 1942 and became a first-class boatbuilder.

  “That is to say, he wasn’t a boatbuilder to start with,” Jack said. “But he learned his trade remarkably quickly. As I understand it, he was a cabinetmaker originally. A true miracle. Could repair a splintered hull faster than any of them. They built brilliant hiding places for the weapons. One of them looked like a fish barrel, but inside there was an anti-aircraft gun that could be raised in a flash. But they had to stop in 1943. By then the Germans were using more planes and had sunk every second boat. The crossings came to an end, didn’t start up again until the Americans supplied U-boat hunters.”

  I was listening intently.

  “Yes, because of course on a steel ship, there’s nothing for a cabinetmaker to do,” he explained.

  “Ah, I see,” I said. “What happened to him then?”

  “Hung about unemployed. Did odd jobs. Built fishing-net boxes in exchange for tobacco. Then he disappeared. I heard he had taken on a job for a wealthy man on Unst.”

  “Unst?”

  He scratched his stubble. “Unst,” he repeated.

  I picked up the photograph Bestefar had taken. “Is this Unst?”

  He took a quick look at it and shrugged. “It’s on Shetland, at least,” he said.

  I waited for him to continue.

  “Because there are no houses,” he said.

  The mechanics began to get ready to go home. The lathes and the drill presses stopped one by one, until they were all silent and heavy, surrounded by a whiff of machine oi
l. Jack glanced at the clock, his eyes revealing that soon he would have to be making a call to explain why he, the foreman, was going to be late for dinner.

  I began to walk towards the door, then turned and asked:

  “Do you know, by any chance, whether he went to France during the war?”

  He shook his head. “The Norwegians got up to a lot back then. ‘Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies’, they used to say.”

  Scalloway was already quiet. By the time I left, the Friday evening calm had hoovered up the entire place. The light from the Royal Mail sign was the only indication of life.

  *

  There were fewer and fewer cars the further north I drove. When I reached “Great Britain’s Most Northerly Fish & Chips” in Brae, I stopped the car, switched off “Brownsville Girl” and walked inside.

  While I ate I pictured the farm back home. Deserted for the first time in 150 years. Grubbe had sat on the stairs and would not let me stroke him. He had sensed that I was going to leave.

  At the very back of the tool house was a horse cart, the one my great-great-grandparents had arrived in to break fresh ground at Hirifjell. As I left, the buildings shrank into place in the rear-view mirror. The reflection rattled when I drove over the cattle grid, and a moment later I closed the gate and swung out towards the county road. As I crossed the mountain, it was as if I was driving away from the old version of myself, but now, sitting here and eating foreign food, it was like the old me had returned, and I began to question whether I had remembered to lock the gate by the cattle grid.

  Full and with the salty taste of deep-fried potatoes in my mouth, I changed cassettes to The Clash and continued northwards, just caught Bigga, the ferry to Yell, before racing on past “Britain’s northernmost pub”.

  Unst greeted me with a light rain, but the yellow oilskins kept me dry. I stood at the very front of Geira and felt the shuddering of the ferry’s steel hull carry me closer and closer to this rain-laden, desolate location in the sea, as treeless and barren as Yell, ground down by salt wind.