This Shining Land

by Rosalind Laker

  There was some foundation for Viktor’s nickname since Steffen Larsen had been born of an English mother, who had wanted him educated in her own country, and a Bergen sea captain. Bilingual, favoured nephew of a rich Norwegian aunt with whom he had made his home after losing his parents, he had led a privileged existence, having one foot in England where he had made many friends, and the other foot in Norway where he had established his career and his future.

  As it happened, his aunt’s home was at Ålesund on the west coast, a town well known to Johanna since it was within easy reach of her own home valley of Ryendal from which her family had taken its name many generations ago. She had never to her knowledge seen him in Ålesund and neither had she met him in the Alsteens’ house, although he kept a room there as a base for the times when he returned to the capital for business meetings with the company that employed him. He did not like hotels and did not want the expense of an apartment in use for only a few times a year. Anna’s comfortable room to rent and her good home cooking to enjoy had been the solution. A consultant engineer, he travelled a great deal, projects keeping him to the most part in northern Norway where much was being developed. Somehow whenever he had made one of his visits to Oslo since Johanna had been living there, she had either been away for the weekend or home on holiday. Sometimes she wondered if it had been deliberate avoidance on his part, particularly since he always telephoned Anna well ahead. Anna, a veritable matchmaker, might have been the reason. Very likely he wanted to retain his freedom to come and go in the Alsteens’ house without finding himself forced to be sociable with a girl in whom he had no interest. His unexpected arrival today, without forewarning, was contrary to his usual procedure. Perhaps the clue was the two cups left in the kitchen. She knew from Anna that he had a girlfriend in Oslo, an Englishwoman who worked at the British Embassy. Anna did not like her.

  “Tell me exactly why you disapprove,” Johanna had asked, quietly amused. She was well aware that Anna, who did not like to be thwarted, had contrived unsuccessfully to bring Steffen and her face to face. “You’re usually pleased to see young couples matched up for marriage.”

  “For marriage, yes. Not for any other kind of liaison that falls short of it. In any case, she’s not right for him. I’m hoping it will fade out. That young woman is hard and determined.”

  “She probably holds an extremely responsible job at the embassy. Women have to be tough to compete with men in their own field. It’s still a man’s world. We haven’t changed that yet. What’s her name?”

  “Delia Richmond.”

  “That’s a nice name.”

  But Anna had not been willing to concede on any point.

  Johanna turned away from the snapshot and went upstairs to her room. There she changed out of her office clothes and brushed the skirt before hanging it away. Having grown up in hard times when any kind of new apparel was a special treat, it was natural for her to look after her wardrobe. During her early days in Oslo, a run in a silk stocking had been a major financial disaster. Fortunately those days were gone.

  She liked the room that had been hers since first coming to the city. The painted wooden walls were a faded rose colour and there were crisp lace curtains at the window and plaited rag rugs on the pine floor. The puffy quilt on the bed was encased in a white linen embroidered cover, the pillowslips trimmed with lace.

  Johanna had added some personal touches of her own to the room. A print of one of her favourite Edvard Munch paintings, that of three girls on the bridge at Åsgårdstrand on the Oslo Fjord, held pride of place. She had stood on that same bridge one hot summer day. The small silver Viking ship in the window had been a bequest from her grandmother. In the corner was an antique rocking chair that she had bought for a few kroner and piled with assorted cushions. She kept her necklaces and trinkets in an ornamental box that had been a skating prize in her school-days. Her father had carved the bookends that supported her favourite books on the chest of drawers. An enamelled frame held a family photograph of her parents standing with her two brothers outside the farmhouse, which had been built over two hundred years earlier.

  She spent the evening in the sitting-room listening to the radio. It was one of Anna’s most recent purchases, replacing an older model. This one had an attractive sunray panel and the reception was excellent. At ten-thirty Johanna went up to bed and read for a while. It was a Sigrid Undset novel and hard to put down. She finally slipped in a bookmark and put it on the bedside table before turning out the lamp.

  When Steffen returned she was asleep and did not hear him park his car in the drive. Neither did she know when he entered his room, which was next to hers, although the floorboards creaked and he shut the door more loudly than he had intended. He had taken Delia to dine at Blom’s, the artists’ restaurant where they both liked to eat. Afterwards they had danced at a night-club and rounded off the evening on their own at her apartment, to their mutual pleasure and satisfaction. Having an important business meeting in the morning that had brought him south again, he set his alarm clock and flung himself into bed to sleep at once.

  Miles from Oslo, at the mouth of the fjord, a small patrol boat was battling against a fierce sea and a rain-lashed wind. The storms around the coast had been exceptionally bad for several days. Suddenly the captain stared ahead in deep alarm, scarcely able to believe the evidence of his own eyes. Looming out of the darkness and heading into the fjord at full steam, their grey bows scything through the rough waves, were a number of alien warships of great size and power. Realisation dawned instantly. Invasion! “Good God! It’s the German fleet!” he exclaimed hoarsely.

  He snapped his orders in the same breath. The radio officer responded instantly by sending a signal through to Oslo while the patrol boat’s gun fired a warning shot across the leading cruiser’s bow. Moments later there was the rush of a torpedo from a following German gunboat. The patrol boat was blown to pieces, filling the sea and sky with golden fire. There were no survivors.

  In Oslo, upon receipt of the radio signal, the lights were extinguished throughout the city in an immediate blackout. Government ministers and high-ranking military personnel were roused from sleep or summoned from social gatherings. In the palace the King was informed that an invasion fleet was sailing up Oslo Fjord.

  Complete confusion reigned at the meeting convened. Nobody was prepared for such a contingency. A call was made to London. “It appears we are at war!” One decision went unquestioned. The country would be called to arms. When the German ambassador presented himself at four a.m. his demand for capitulation under German protection was totally rejected. He drove away, secure in his expectation that at dawn Wehrmacht troops would be landing in Oslo Harbour. He believed the annexation of Norway would be completed in a matter of hours.

  In the Narrows at Drøbak in the Oslo fjord the German fleet, arrogantly and fully lit as though for a naval regatta, was running into unlooked-for opposition. At the ancient Oscarsborg fortress the officer in charge ordered the two turn-of-the-century guns, never before fired in assault, to aim at the leading cruiser as she sailed past.

  With a great boom that shook the old stone walls, the guns let forth across the water. The target was hit full square and began to sink rapidly, taking hundreds of sailors and soldiers down with it. An immediate change of plan was ordered by the German command to avoid further sinkings. Instead of being transported right into Oslo Harbour, the soldiers were disembarked from the troop-carrying ships below the Narrows and far south of Oslo in Vestfold, the west side of the fjord. The German fleet turned and left, leaving the battalions of the Wehrmacht to face a long and rain-swept march to the still distant capital.

  It was early light when the wail of an air-raid siren and the thud-thud of anti-aircraft fire caused Johanna to awaken with a start. She sat bolt upright in bed and pushed her hair back out of her eyes with one hand. Automatically she leaned over to press down the button on her alarm clock before it should ring, thinking it was an unholy hour for the r
outine test of a siren and for gun practice. Turning back the bedclothes, she put her bare feet to the ground and reached for her cream silk kimono. She drew it over her shoulders as she ambled leisurely towards the window. Halfway there she paused, her back stiffening as she tilted her head slightly, listening keenly. She could hear a low throbbing hum overhead like the approach of angry bees.

  Abruptly she threw herself towards the window and stared upwards through the glass in horrified disbelief at the sight of German bombers with swastikas on their tails—planes passing inland across the early morning sky. Shock enveloped her. Her country’s neutrality was being violated and the only possible explanation was too terrible to contemplate. She stayed as if transfixed, unaware that she was gripping a handful of the lace curtain with a force that drew it taut on its rings.

  Suddenly there was the hammering of a fist on her bedroom door. A man’s voice shouted through to her: “Are you awake in there? You must go down to the cellar for safety! Do you hear me?”

  She heard, but in her stunned state made no move to answer the summons. The door burst open. Startled, she spun round. The morning light caught her hair and cast a bloom over the curve of her barely concealed breasts in her thin cotton nightgown. Steffen Larsen, fully dressed himself, stared at her, drawing in his breath.

  “Move!” he exploded, his expression belligerent in his anxiety for her.

  She obeyed him at once. Pulling the edges of her kimono together she rushed from the room, he following her. Down the stairs she ran and across to the cellar door. Hardly had she descended the steps, he switching on the light as they went, when she paused to look upwards at the cellar ceiling in fear and bewilderment. A curious descending whine was coming from somewhere overhead.

  “What’s that?”

  “Down! Get down!” Steffen shouted in warning.

  He threw her with him to the floor, his body a protective shield over hers as the bomb’s huge explosion made the whole house shift on its foundations, blasting the small cellar window into glittering shards. All around them the collected debris of years clattered down from the shelves in a welter of cardboard boxes and biscuit tins and other containers, some old magazines sliding into an avalanche. As the vibration subsided, the single electric light bulb continued to swing wildly on its flex, trailing a cobweb strand.

  When he felt it was safe to move, he raised her up into a sitting position, crouching in front of her. “Are you all right?” He peered with concern into her face, for she was extremely pale.

  She nodded. “I think so. Everything happened so fast.”

  “The planes have gone over now. That one bomb appears to have been all they had for us on this first occasion. There may be another wave of aircraft to follow, so we had better stay where we are for a while longer.” He saw that she was shivering as much from shock as from the chill of the cellar and took off his jacket to put it round her shoulders. “Here, that should help. Don’t stay sitting on that cold stone floor. There’s an old sofa by the wall.”

  She took his advice, tucking up into a corner of it. “That’s better. I hope we don’t have to stay down here for long.”

  He perched on the sofa arm. “My apologies for bellowing at you in your room. I’m afraid it was necessary.”

  “I know that now. I was in a state of shock. I am still, for that matter.”

  She was registering, without realising it, that his face had matured since the days of the sculling snapshot. Now she observed that he had the straight nose, square chin and classic cheekbones that combined with the light blue eyes to reveal his Norse ancestry. His Englishness was in the general look of him and in the dark brown of his hair, which was thick and well cut, rippling above his ears and at the nape of his neck. In all he was a man of immense physical attraction. Then her mind began to concentrate on the crisis that had erupted and she drew her fingertips across her forehead. “It’s difficult to believe that this is happening.”

  “I agree. I was downstairs getting breakfast when the announcement came over the radio. A minute later I heard the bombers droning overhead.”

  “What did the announcement say?”

  “At dawn this morning, without any declaration of war, Germany launched an invasion of Norway at targets all along the coast from the south to far north of the Arctic Circle.”

  She was numbed by the information. It was far worse than she had supposed, her thoughts having been that the bombers must be the spearhead of an onslaught in the Oslo area. Instead, the whole country was under attack. In her mind’s eye she pictured Norway spread out like a map before her. Topographically it was made up of rugged mountains, high plateaus, glacier tables, thick forests and lakes, leaving less than four percent of the land for cultivation and habitation. As for its fjord-indented coastline, that measured twenty thousand miles. It was a country impossible for a small army to defend against a great invasion force attacking at all points.

  “Why?” Her face was baffled, her voice sombre.

  “Well, strategically I suppose Norway would be an excellent base from which to attack Allied shipping in the Atlantic. It’s within easy range and the fjords would provide hidden shelter to German warships and submarines, giving them the advantage.”

  “That mustn’t happen!” She was vehement.

  “I agree, but the situation is bad. Extremely bad. We have practically no air defence and not a single officer or man with previous combat experience in the whole country. It’s a hundred and twenty-five years since we last went to war and regained our national independence from Sweden, and now these Nazis are aiming to take it away from us again.” He bunched his fingers into a fist and slammed it into the sofa arm, barely able to control his fury. “We’ll see them in hell first!” Restlessly he thrust himself away. “I must report for military duty. Every minute counts and I’m doing no good down here. I’m going to take a look around.” He hurried up the cellar steps into the house. She heard the cracking of glass underfoot and he reappeared, putting his head briefly through the cellar doorway to give warning. “Several windows have been shattered. Come up now, but take care.” His glance went to Johanna’s bare toes. “Where are your slippers?”

  “By my bed.”

  He returned a couple of minutes later to toss in her slippers and she caught them. After putting them on she rose to her feet, still shivering and thinking of a hot bath to warm her through again. In the hallway she paused by the sitting-room door. Steffen had cleared up some of the glass from the shattered window and was listening attentively to the latest bulletin on the radio. She was in time to catch the tail end of it and her heart sank still further. It was more bad news. Denmark had been similarly invaded at dawn on that fateful Tuesday morning of April 9 and German troops were overrunning the country.

  “What of Sweden?” she inquired huskily from the doorway, removing the jacket he had lent her from her shoulders and putting it across a chair.

  He glanced in her direction. “No attack there.”

  “Will it come later?”

  “That’s highly unlikely now. The Swedes’ moment of danger is past, I would say. After all, the element of surprise has gone. No, Sweden would have been included with Denmark and us if anything had been planned against them.” He switched off the radio. “I have some things to do here before I report to the mobilisation centre. There is a general call to arms.”

  Through the broken windows she could see that neighbours had gathered in the lane. From the direction in which they were pointing it was obvious that the bomb had dropped in a shallow dale nearby. She hoped that nobody had been hurt. There were no military targets anywhere in the area.

  Before going upstairs she tried to call her parents on the telephone, but without success—the lines out of the city were jammed. She had more success in getting in touch with a local glazier, who promised to replace the panes during the morning. When bathed and dressed she came downstairs, to be met by Steffen with a mug of hot coffee for her. She drank it while clearing up the
remainder of the glass. He was working in the cellar, feeling unable to leave until he had made it as secure against air raids as possible for Johanna and for the Alsteens when they returned. He had already removed the bulk of hoarded rubbish and secured shutters over the cellar window, boarding it up on the inside. Afterwards he cleared the shelves of anything that could inflict injury and installed a first-aid box. In his late teens, before going to Oxford, he had served a compulsory conscription service of a few weeks in the Norwegian Army, but had learned little more than how to handle a gun and look after saddle horses. There had been nothing about bombing raids on the scale for which the Luftwaffe had become notorious. He was simply using his common sense in thinking of ways to turn the cellar into a safe shelter.

  When he had finished his work, Johanna called him into the kitchen where she had made ready the breakfast he had just begun to prepare when the bombers had come. “This looks good,” he said appreciatively, sitting down with her to boiled eggs, cheese, cold meats, homemade preserves and hot home-baked kringler rolls and crusty bread. They both ate heartily, falling into a lively discussion of the present crisis and how long it might take for the Allies to send military support and aircraft. The situation was drawing into a companionable closeness with a speed that could only come from the imminence of danger. They had just finished the meal when the doorbell rang and its sudden clangor broke in on them with an intruder’s touch.

  “I’ll go,” Johanna said.

  She opened the door to a young woman she had never seen before. Simply and smartly clad in a belted raincoat, an emerald silk scarf lightly knotted at her throat, the girl had anxious grey eyes. Instinctively Johanna guessed the stranger’s identity. A car with passengers and the engine running was drawn up by the gate.