The Cabin in the Mountains

by Robert Ferguson

  Wearing a lusekofte is a common ploy too among men who wouldn’t normally be seen dead in one until they find themselves in court charged with a crime of violence. David Toska was one example. Toska was adjudged to be the mastermind behind the theft of fifty-seven million kroner from the cash-handling centre of the security company NOKAS, in Stavanger, in 2004. It was the largest robbery in Norwegian history. Fifteen years on, more than fifty million kroner of the stolen money are still unaccounted for. The theft of Edvard Munch’s Scream and Madonna from the Munch museum in Tøyen a few months later was almost certainly an attempt, planned by Toska, to divert police resources from the investigation into the NOKAS robbery. The lusekofte ploy didn’t work and Toska was found guilty and sentenced to eighteen years in jail, which perhaps indicates he wasn’t such a mastermind after all.

  Partly as a result of this and similar attempts to use the lusekofte to make psychological capital out of the ever-present nationalism in Norwegian public life, a sort of irony has attached itself to the wearing of it, in the cities at least. For foreigners like me, however, the sheer exoticism and romance of the lusekofte remains untarnished. It does up at the front with round metal buttons – or sometimes elaborate silver clasps – that fasten all the way up to the neck. The basic shape reminded me of the jackets the Beatles wore in the days of their breakthrough in the early 1960s. These so-called ‘Beatle jackets’ also had round necks and round metal buttons with some kind of device stamped onto them. They were usually made of black, pinstriped corduroy. The Beatles abandoned the jackets after they became hippies, but I remember reading once that the fashion had lasted long enough to rescue the British corduroy industry from the oblivion into which it had sunk in the 1950s.

  To possibly slightly surreal effect, I topped off the lusekofte with a black woollen Blackpool FC beanie, which I still wore occasionally as a connection to my northern roots and the club I had followed, through all its declining fortunes, since 1959. I then walked Kåre round the cabin, pointing out the various points at which the fencing would change heights. I also suggested a matched pair of wooden gates that would be attached to the wall on either side of the front door. They could be left open while we were there, and during our absence they could be swung across to prevent sheep getting round to the back of the cabin.

  Within about ten minutes Kåre had, I think, worked out how he would do these two jobs, how long it would take him, and what price to ask. I was getting ready to bring up these matters when he suddenly gestured towards my hat:

  ‘I’ve been to Blackpool,’ he said. ‘I saw Liverpool play there. Blackpool beat us.’

  Given the gap in status between the two clubs – Liverpool challenging for the title in the Premier League, Blackpool floundering away as usual in the lower reaches of Football League One – I assumed he meant Blackburn Rovers. It’s a mistake commonly made by Norwegian football fans who follow the English game in the winter, when their own season is over for the year. There was a golden age of Norwegian football in the 1990s when the national team qualified for two World Cup finals in succession under Egil ‘Drillo’ Olsen and had upwards of twenty players holding down regular places with English Premier League clubs. Clubs like Blackburn Rovers, who signed Norwegian players such as Henning Berg, Stig Inge Bjørnebye, Lars Bohinen and Egil Østenstad during this period, naturally attracted a lot of support from Norwegians.

  He pulled a soft, cellophane-wrapped packet of Tiedemanns Rød Nr. 3 out of the chest pocket of his blue boiler suit, teased up a cloud of dark brown weed, flicked a paper up from a packet of Big Ben and slowly began to roll himself a cigarette.

  ‘It was a few years back. About ten years ago,’ he said.

  Then I realised that perhaps he hadn’t been mistaken after all. In the 2010–11 season, Blackpool had indeed spent a single season in the heady heights of the Premier League. The manager was Ian Holloway, an eccentric, straight-talking man with a strong West Country burr and a shaven head. On the first day of the season we had beaten Wigan four–nil away from home, and for about three hours, until Chelsea thrashed someone in the late kick-off, we were top of the Premier League on goal difference. Inevitably, with tiny gates and severely limited financial resources, it was mostly downhill after that and the season ended in relegation. I told Kåre how I’d gone down to Bohemen, a football pub in the centre of the city, to watch the final game, an impossible must-win fixture away from home against Man United.

  ‘Who won?’ he asked.

  ‘Who d’you think won?’

  We laughed.

  ‘But it went to the wire,’ I said. ‘We were leading two-one until halfway through the second half. Then they equalised and then Michael bloody Owen scored the winner. I left the pub before the final whistle. Couldn’t bear it.’

  ‘He was a great player, Michael Owen,’ Kåre said, declining to commiserate with me. ‘But he was always a Liverpool player, even when he was playing for Man United. Is that what “went down to the wire” means?’ he continued. ‘That you have to wait until the end before you know what happens?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is “the wire”?’

  I couldn’t help him there. It was an Americanism that had only come into British English after I left the country. Like something being a ‘double whammy’. Or an event not being over ‘until the fat lady sings’. From the contexts I knew how to use these phrases, but I had no idea of their origins.

  ‘There’s a tower there,’ he said, returning to memories of his visit to Blackpool. He raised his hand a few inches into the air, palm downwards, to indicate height. Blue smoke drifted around his fingers. ‘Like the Eiffel tower. We’re all Liverpool fans here,’ he added. ‘There’s a group of eight of us. We watch all the games on TV. A couple of times a year, for big games, we go over.’

  ‘What about the Champions League? Did you get over for that?’

  Liverpool had been beaten three–one in the final by Real Madrid earlier in the summer.

  Kåre made a sour face: ‘We don’t talk about that game,’ he said. ‘Ramos should’ve been sent off for what he did to Mo Salah. And our goalkeeper was a joke.’

  We carried on like this for some time. Norwegian football fans tend mainly to support big city Premier League clubs such as Manchester United, Everton, Arsenal, although I did once meet a doctor who supported the Scottish minnows Stenhousemuir, solely because he believed – erroneously, as it turns out – that the name was straight Norwegian for ‘stonehouse wall’ (stenhus mur).* So my contribution to such discussions would often take the form of a sort of corrective lecture about how my Blackpool had for many years been a top-flight English team. It was the team of Stanley Matthews, the ‘wizard of the dribble’ and the man who ‘taught us how football should be played’, according to the great Brazilian star Pele. I would relate how Matthews’ Blackpool had won the greatest of all FA Cup Finals at Wembley, against Bolton Wanderers back in 1953, coming back from three–one down with fifteen minutes of the game remaining to triumph four–three. And, as a kind of clincher, I might conclude by saying that an England team at one time featured no fewer than four Blackpool players in its starting line-up. I didn’t add that the game in question was against Hungary, at Wembley in 1953, and that England lost six–three, the first time they had ever been beaten at home.

  With a last deep drag on his cigarette Kåre extinguished it, squeezing the tip between his fingers and dropping the butt into his breast pocket. We shook hands and he said he’d be in touch soon. Then he climbed into his Subaru, waved and reversed away down the track.

  Nina was on the sofa, knitting. The dog was stretched out and dozing beside her.

  ‘Well, he seems like a nice man, Kåre,’ I said. ‘But I noticed he didn’t take a single note or measurement. I suppose he’s been doing that type of thing so long he can work it all out in his mind’s eye.’

  ‘I sent him an email with the measurements,’ Nina said without looking up from her knitting.

  ‘Last
night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Including the different heights for the fence?’

  ‘Yes. Everything.’

  ‘How did you know them?’

  Now she looked up. ‘Because I measured them.’

  ‘Last night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was I doing?’

  ‘I don’t know. Listening to music. Reading.’

  ‘And you’re sure he got the email?’

  ‘People always get emails.’

  ‘Oh. Well, that’s alright then. Did he say when he was going to start?’

  ‘On Monday.’

  ‘And how long will it take?’

  ‘About ten days. He works with his brother.’

  ‘Brilliant.’

  I turned and headed back onto the terrace and stood looking up for a few moments. The sky was a darker, colder blue. Looking hard, you could just see the first silver stars. As it had done so many times before, my wife’s casual efficiency astounded me. Suddenly I felt an urgent and compelling need to do something necessary and important.

  But what, exactly?

  The Numedal patterned rose-painted cupboard standing on a table.

  Then I had it. Ever since we had bought that beautiful old Numedal patterned rose-painted cupboard it had been standing on the table in the corner of the living room. It had small brackets mounted one on each side at the back, but it was heavy and would need two strong screws to mount it. Nina, with her deep faith in the expertise of anyone who works in a hardware shop, had come home one evening last week, after a long and detailed conversation with the man in the Jernia store at Røa, and handed me a small clear plastic pouch containing exactly two screws. They were long and black, and instead of the conventional flat or Phillips head they had a peculiar, counter-sunk shape, which I had never seen before and which I knew nothing in my toolbox would fit. Privately I thought that she may well have overcomplicated things in describing the job to the assistant. Out in the shed there was a jug of assorted screws, nails, and mysterious pieces of metal that I had accumulated over the years. There was bound to be something I could use among them.

  Entering the shed, I switched on the light and located the screw jug on the top of the Ivar shelving system I had assembled along one wall. It was cream and had the words Poubelle de table written around its belly in an elegant, ornate script. Four round timber offcuts had been left behind when the builders departed. They were about thirty-five centimetres high and made great stools and occasional coffee tables. We kept them in the shed and I rolled one of these forward, sat down on it, spread out an old copy of Aftenposten on the concrete floor in front of me and emptied the contents of the jug onto it. The sheer variety of all that came tumbling out detained me for a few moments as I picked through some of the stranger and more mysterious objects and wondered once again what on earth they were for, and why I would never dream of throwing them away.

  I then settled to the monotonous task of sifting through the contents in search of matching, ready-rusted screws suitable for hanging our rose-painted cupboard on the cabin wall. As I did so I began thinking about Kåre and his love of Liverpool football club, and how symptomatic that was of the Anglophilia that is characteristic of so many Norwegians. Its roots are firmly in the nineteenth century, and in the British discovery of what the Yorkshire mountaineering pioneer W. C. Slingsby called ‘the Northern playground’. Slingsby and his fellow British mountaineering enthusiasts gave Norwegians a new way of looking at their own country. The need for local guides meant that, from the start, the British visitors met and mingled with the rural farmers, reindeer hunters, herdsmen and budeie (milkmaids and herdswomen) and developed an intimate and respectful familiarity with the way of life in the remote Norwegian countryside. Wealth and education dictated the terms of the professional relationship, but Norway had abolished its native aristocracy as long ago as 1821, and most of the written testimonies to the nature of the relationship stress the natural and straightforward way Norwegians treated their wealthy visitors.

  Of perhaps even greater significance in the creation of this mutual tribal admiration, asymmetrical as it may have been in terms of money and possibilities, was the enduring influence of another group of nineteenth-century summer visitors from the British Isles whom Norwegians call the lakselords (salmon lords). In fact, few of the lakselords were aristocrats. Like William Slingsby and the mountaineers, they were from wealthy middle-class industrial families. They included Welsh and Irish, as well as English, but a great many of them were Scottish. Nineteenth-century Norwegians rarely made the distinction. All Britons of the imperial era were ‘Englishmen’ to them.

  Unlike the climbers, these lakselords would spend months in Norway. They built homes in the English style that seemed both palatial and impractical to the locals, as well as fishing and hunting lodges along the banks of Norwegian rivers like the Driva and Suldalslågen in Ryfylke, in the west of the country. A dynasty of lakselords built and fished as far north as the Vefsna river in Nordland, just twenty-eight kilometres south of the Arctic Circle.

  The influence of these British visitors was considered benign. Families like the Archers, the Campbells and the Hunters brought money and jobs and the outside world to some of the poorest and most remote parts of Norway. They provided employment for dozens of people, from the carpenters who built their houses and lodges to the chambermaids, serving maids, cooks, gardeners, boatmen, pilots and gaffers who served them once they were in residence. When the summer was over many of the Norwegian staff would be invited to England with their employers, where they could extend their knowledge of the world as well as their ability to spikka English.

  Walter Archer was a forerunner of the conservation movement. An assistant secretary at the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries who went on to become chief inspector of salmon fisheries in Scotland, Archer rented the whole of the Suldalslågen for a period of forty years. Over a hundred and fifty owners had to be individually persuaded of the benefits of entering into the contract, and Archer made his case at meetings in schoolhouses up and down the valley, stressing the financial impact the British presence would have on the region. The rights thus obtained in 1884 also included all the salmon spawning grounds and the tributaries leading to them.

  Once the deal was settled he arranged to have the river cleared of the debris of centuries. This was mostly in the form of old garn (gillnets anchored at the bottom of the river and floating on the surface like tennis nets) that had clogged the waters and made them impassable for the fish. Under Archer’s stewardship, for the first time in at least a hundred years the salmon enjoyed the freedom of Sandsfjord and the whole ninety kilometres of river. He also started a hatchery, built salmon traps and carried out the marking of about seven hundred and fifty salmon as part of a scientific study of their travels.

  The only hazard the salmon faced was from the rods of the fly-fishers. Slingsby paid for the privilege of using Norway’s beautiful mountains by introducing climbing as a sport to the Norwegians. In like fashion, Archer and his fellow lakselords repaid the loan to them of some of the country’s rivers by introducing the natives to fly-fishing; as a sport and as a method of catching fish it was unknown before their arrival. No doubt it seemed to a man like Archer that he was spending his summers in paradise, but his connections with the larger world and its problems pursued him even here. With tensions between the British and the Germans mounting, in 1912 it seems that he and his son were recruited as British agents and given the code names ‘Sage’ and ‘Sagette’, with a brief to report on German naval movements around the coast of Norway.

  Even while living in Norway, these lakselords observed the strict formal customs that governed life back home. Archer, for example, insisted that guests dressed for dinner. As I slowly and methodically sorted the contents on the spread newspaper before me into two piles, which I mentally labelled ‘screws’ and ‘miscellaneous’, I reflected that, even today, Norwegian Anglophilia shares this charac
teristic with the American version of it, that it is based on a type of Britishness that disappeared after the end of the Second World War and the dismantling of the British Empire.

  Many Norwegians still indulge this harmless nostalgia. They include my wife, and on days when I find myself wondering why on earth she married me, the mere fact of my Englishness sometimes seems the only possible explanation. Something similar is probably true of me too; that in my boundless love for all things Norwegian, her very nationality was a crucial part of the intense initial attraction I felt for her, overtaken as it soon was by any number of much more profound feelings.

  Not long after coming to Norway, marrying and realising there was a strong likelihood I would remain here for the rest of my days, I went through a period in which I listened to little else but the English music of composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Patrick Hadley, Herbert Howells, Gerald Finzi and Frank Bridge, gazing with a kind of rapt sadness at the covers of LPs that depicted, almost without exception, views of the verdant English countryside, with the occasional picturesque ruin in the distance.

  But there was always a double edge to this luxuriant wallowing in nostalgia. Putting on a treasured recording such as Peter Dawson’s singing of Vaughan Williams’s setting of D. G. Rossetti’s ‘Silent Noon’, from 1922, I might find my pleasure rudely sabotaged by an involuntary vision of the singer, standing with his hand resting on the lid of a grand piano in an empty room in an empty mansion. He’s wearing a lovat green three-piece tweed suit and brogues. There is a bristly, sandy-coloured moustache on his upper lip. A starched collar with a bow tie encircles his neck. It’s so tight it makes his eyes bulge. When I look closely I can see beads of perspiration glistening on his forehead. Suddenly I realise the strain of the performance is almost killing him and I cannot listen any more. I turn the music off.