The Cabin in the Mountains

by Robert Ferguson

  As we sat sipping our champagne-priced beers and keeping a cautious eye on the wasp, occasionally wafting it away, we expressed our pleasure at the day’s outing ‘in the footsteps of the lakselords’. It brought us presently on to the general subject of Anglophilia. I was interested in its possible roots beyond the presence of so many English aristocrats for sporting purposes in nineteenth-century Norway and the general admiration people seem to feel for the citizens of a nation powerful enough to have policed the world. Hjalmar pointed out to me that when Norway was suing for independence from Sweden in 1905 and it appeared that the Swedes might attempt to prevent secession from the union by military force, Britain had anchored a warship off Kristiania (Oslo) harbour as a warning to them not to do so. British support for Norwegian independence was certainly a factor, he said.

  I knew that Hjalmar, like so many Norwegians, had a great love for Knut Hamsun’s novels, at the same time as he took great exception to Hamsun’s political stance in the 1930s and 1940s, when he expressed his admiration for Adolf Hitler and support for the German occupation of Norway. I asked him if he knew that Hamsun, then well over forty years of age, had actually enlisted in Colonel Stang’s volunteers in Drøbak to fight the Swedes should it have come to military conflict in 1905.

  ‘Yes. And he praised the British for their support because it made fighting unnecessary,’ Hjalmar said, adding, with a smile, ‘It was about the only good thing he ever had to say about the British.’

  Ever since I first heard of the prejudice, Hamsun’s Anglophobia had interested me. I described its manifestations at length in a biography I wrote of him some thirty years ago. The earliest example I had come across was in a travel book called I Æventyrland (In Wonderland), published in 1903, which contains his account of an episode on a tram in Munich in which an English passenger arrogantly demands his money back when the tram runs over a child and his journey is delayed. Among its most extensive statements was Et Ord til Os (‘A Word to Us’), an essay published in 1910, in which Hamsun expressed his fears concerning the detrimental effects English tourism was having on the farming communities of rural Norway. He lamented the way that wagons and horses that should have been hard at work on the farms were being instead rented out to transport affluent visitors from one beauty spot to the next. He objected to the way the farmers put themselves at the service of these tourists as drivers and guides, doffing their caps as they opened and closed the farm gates for them. In due course he added examples from history to bolster his dislike. These included the British starvation blockade of Norway during the Napoleonic wars and the bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807; and the British invention of concentration camps during the Boer War. Early recognition of his talent as a writer from the Germans, combined with a lack of interest from British readers, served to deepen the prejudice, and on the outbreak of the Great War he was passionate and open in his hopes of a German victory and a crushing defeat for the British.

  The Scot William Archer, who played such a crucial role in introducing the work of Henrik Ibsen to British audiences as his translator, took issue with some of Hamsun’s newspaper articles on the subject of the war. Hamsun conceded in response that his was a lone voice: ‘I know that ninety-nine per cent of my countrymen support the English,’ he wrote. ‘But I do not.’

  I drank some more of my beer and, instinctively moved to defend a novelist whose books had meant so much to me, remarked to Hjalmar: ‘People forget the historical context in which Hamsun developed his dislike of the English. They condemn him for supporting the Nazis when the Second World War came along, but in a way the political system in Germany didn’t matter to him. It was Germany itself he was in love with and that meant that in the event of war, any enemy of Germany’s was an enemy of Hamsun’s.’

  ‘Well, that’s the charitable response,’ Hjalmar replied. ‘I think you would have to call him a Nazi. You just have to separate the books from the man. We Norwegians have been doing it for decades.’ He lifted the bottle and took another drink of his craft beer. ‘Doesn’t his hatred of the English bother you?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘I can’t take it seriously. It’s difficult to, when the Norwegians in general are so positive about the English.’

  ‘And do you think it’ll last? This Anglophilia?’

  ‘It’s fading already,’ I answered. ‘England used to be special. Now it’s just another European country. America is where the power is now. America is the policeman of the world. America is where the cultural focus lies. Norwegians under forty you meet, they don’t speak English, they speak American.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Well, the accent. King Harald speaks beautiful Oxbridge English. But his kids speak like members of the cast of Friends.’

  Hjalmar gave me a puzzled look. I said I was talking about that quizzical lilt young Americans add to their speech, which makes everything they say sound like a question.

  ‘The older generation that admires the English for their self-deprecating irony, stiff upper lips and Oxbridge accents, that’ll soon die out and it won’t be replaced. How could it be, when the original no longer exists? Mind you, you still have outposts of it. Like Fjordmog.’

  We raised our glasses and drank a toast to the club.

  ‘I read in Sliding Pillar that over seventy per cent of the Morgans made at the factory in Great Malvern go for export,’ said Hjalmar.

  He lost me for a moment until I recalled that Sliding Pillar was the name of the club magazine.

  ‘So I don’t think nostalgia for old England will ever go out of fashion,’ he went on. ‘As a matter of fact, I’m going over later this year.’

  He finished off his beer, yawned, and stretched his arms above his head.

  ‘I’m going to the vintage air show at Biggin Hill. Meeting up with six Englishmen. We’re staying in a caravan. You want another?’

  He stood, held up his empty beer bottle and wiggled it at me. I didn’t like the price, or the taste, but I liked the company so I said yes.

  I watched Hjalmar as he strolled down the hill and then up the barn bridge and vanished in the shadows of the barn door. As I waited for him to return I glanced over to my left, to where my wife was standing in the sunshine by an outdoor tap on the side wall of the hotel. She was filling a red plastic bucket, holding it by its white handle and staring with great intensity down into the frothing water. It was an extremely pleasant and almost dreamlike sight.

  *

  I had entered so deeply into these reminiscences that when the faint barking of the dog recalled me to the present I was, for a moment, thoroughly disorientated to find myself sitting on a log in a shed at Veggli, a newspaper spread on the floor at my feet, my gaze focused with hallucinating clarity on two quite ordinary wood-screws. Half-obscured in the central fold of one of the newspaper’s pages, they lay some fifteen centimetres apart. For several seconds I sat there, literally scratching my head as I wondered what on earth my interest in these two screws might be. And then it came to me: they were ideally weathered and the perfect length for attaching the rose-painted Numedal cupboard to the wall of the cabin.

  The Numedal patterned rose-painted cupboard hanging on the wall.

  Pocketing the screws, I shuffled the remainder of the nuts, bolts and other assorted items into the central fold of the paper, lifted it up by its two wings and poured the tinkling metal stream back into the jug. I then stood up, returned the jug to its place on the top shelf, rolled the cylindrical wooden stool back to its home beneath the two pairs of skis hanging from the side wall, picked up the combination screwdriver and drill, closed the door behind me, headed back into the cabin and within ten minutes had the cupboard mounted on the wall.

  Perhaps disproportionately content with my afternoon’s work, and for some reason feeling slightly more Scottish than either Norwegian or English at that moment, I picked up my phone, navigated to a recording of Jimmy Shand playing ‘The Birks O’ Invermay’ on his accordion, and for the next fe
w minutes danced in celebration around the living-room table, quite forgetting what lay in store for me for the rest of the weekend: a fight to the death with two IKEA sofa beds we had bought some weeks previously and which lay in wait for me, piled and unopened, in a corner of the upstairs bedroom.

  * The place-name Stenhousemuir is in fact Old English in origin: stan (stone) + hus (house) + moor.

  12

  Friday evening,

  21 December 2018

  The difficulties of sofa beds – the terrace in place – decide to clear snow from the terrace – on making a dream come ‘true’ – on Bernhard Herre’s Recollections of a Hunter – a love triangle – influence of mountains on Norwegian philosophers – Arne Næss and Peter Wessel Zapffe – Næss’s mountain cabins – how smoking saved Bertrand Russell’s life – Næss, Else Herzberg and Zapffe climb Stetind – failure of my efforts to clear the snow – on Zapffe’s ‘Anti-Natalist’ philosophy – Zapffe’s extreme environmentalism – we sit down to eat

  Geirr Tveitt’s Vél Komne med æra is less than four minutes long, and once the music came to an end the spell was broken, the sky was just sky again, the stars in the valley below just electric light. I stood up, turned off the radio, crossed the room and climbed the hønsetrapp to the first floor. It’s narrow and steep. Going down is best done backwards, like a seaman on a boat. We had talked about fixing a rope to the wall as a handrail, anchoring it through three wrought-iron loops. Jørgen’s in-laws, who owned the first cabin we looked at, that day I had to take the dog out of the christening in the chapel, have already sold and moved on. I heard someone say, as I was passing that langbord gathering of cabin-owners a few months ago, that it was because they couldn’t manage the stairs.

  At the small landing at the top, where the thick black pipe from the stove passes between the floor and the ceiling, I turned into the smaller of the two rooms in the hems and looked at the sofa beds again. It had been six or seven weeks since I had finished assembling them. I had had no particular purpose in climbing the stairs, but looking at those two sofa beds I recalled the difficulties I had experienced in getting one of them into place. It was fractionally too wide to fit against the wall where it had to stand, and, with some trepidation, I had had to saw about fifty millimetres from the outer edges of each of the four legs. The room is small, and as nearly as possible the sofa bed had to be assembled in the position in which it would eventually stand. One tends not to look too far ahead in the instruction brochures that accompany IKEA products, and the thing was at least two-thirds built when it dawned on me that the four support bolts that secured the back legs of the bed to the frame had to be screwed into the frame from the outside. With the bolt in position and ready to be screwed in with the metal key, there was simply no room between the wall and the bed for the hand to turn the key. And yet by an amazing piece of luck it turned out there was just enough free space to wriggle the whole construction until there was enough of an angle to the wall to slide a hand in and turn the bolt.

  As promised, Kåre and his brother had built us the apron-terrace. It took them nine days from start to finish, and they’d done a beautiful job. We had managed a single symbolic breakfast out there on a bitterly cold November morning, wrapped in scarves and thick pullovers and enjoying the view of that Blefjell pyramid over a bowl of porridge swimming with butter, brown sugar and cinnamon. There were a few jobs left, but they were small ones: an inside wall of the shed needed painting, which we’d put off doing because it meant taking down the shelves I’d put up when we first started work on the cabin; and the cornices above the kitchen area still needed painting. We weren’t content with the discus-like light fittings provided in the living room and bedroom and had bought two black, wrought-iron replacements that seemed to us better suited to the rustic atmosphere conjured by the thick timbers of the interior walls. But our visits to the cabin were no longer dedicated to working on it. Assembling the two sofa beds up here had been the last big job, and now we would be ready to receive visitors. There is a strong tradition of hospitality attached to the Norwegian hytta culture. Nina had already booked a weekend visit just for herself and a group of friends, and I had family from England coming over in February.

  I noticed in the corner of the windowsill a tiny collection of objects left over from the fight with the sofa beds. I picked them up and studied them. Two wooden dowels, a black plastic grommet, and the little silver key spanner. There’s always something left over after an IKEA job, a reminder that you haven’t done a perfect job, but the thing will hold. Recalling the words of the Han dynasty official Ssu-ma Ch’ien, who tells us in his Records of the Historian that builders in ancient China always left a tile off the roof of any house they built, ‘to mirror the great imperfection’, I couldn’t help wondering if the oversupply was deliberate, an obscure part of the IKEA philosophy. In any case, there was no question of throwing them out.

  I placed the little collection back down in the corner of the windowsill and looked out of the window across a snowy slope with the edge of a pine forest about fifty metres away. By the light of the risen moon I saw a trail of footprints, probably a fox, crossing it in a syncopated curve and sloping upwards before straightening out and heading into the forest. For a moment I thought of the indescribable harshness of its life, and shuddered. Then I walked across the small landing and into the larger of the two hems. There were two more sofa beds here, comfortably positioned opposite each other along the long walls. At the gable end of the room, a small wooden table and chair stood on a striped rag rug. The table was the first thing we had bought for the cabin. It didn’t quite fit any more. The wood was too light for the walls.

  I bent to look out of the window and down at the terrace. At its widest, here at the front, there was room for the circular table and six chairs we had bought. Come the spring we would eat out there every day. Kåre had left a gap of about twenty centimetres all the way around, between the bottom of the panelling and the terrace floor, so that snow could easily be pushed off the boards through the gap. Nina was still in the bathroom showering and shampooing the dog. Snow continued to fall heavily, and I decided to fill in the time before we ate by clearing the metre-high wall that had piled up on the long side of terrace. I would really only be making room for more, but it was a pleasure to be out in the snow.

  I went down the stairs, sat on the bench by the front door, pulled on my black rubber snow boots and stepped outside to the shed. With the snow scoop broken now, there was only the shovel left. I unhooked it from its wall mountings and trudged round the back of the cabin with it. Unbolting the gate Kåre had fitted to the end of the terrace, I stepped up onto the snow and began systematically shovelling it out through the gap below the fence. The snow was a little wetter and heavier than the snow on the roof had been.

  More tired than I realised from my exertions on the roof earlier in the afternoon, I very soon took a break. Resting on the handle of the shovel, I glanced up and saw the small, pyramidal peak in the east. Its sides were fairly straight, and its peak almost perfectly pointed. It looked like a child’s drawing of a mountain. As I turned my head to the right to look in through the window there was a sudden spill of light in the room as the bathroom door opened and Alex came tearing out, followed at a gentler pace by my wife. She stepped over to the kitchen wall, raised her hand to the switch and the series of downlights around the edge of the ceiling lit up. The switches are wireless, there’s no ‘click’ as they go on and off, you just touch them. It’s unnerving. I watched as the dog raced round and round the furniture in a dizzying series of loops, the way he always does when he’s been shampooed – he’s trying to get dry, I suppose. Nina was standing in front of the open fridge, peering into its bright interior.

  Clearing my throat, I spoke to myself. ‘You’ve done it,’ I said, turning to look down over the valley, ‘You’ve nearly done it. It’s nearly done. Nothing can undo it now, it’s nearly done. You’ve nearly done it. Seventy years old and you’ve nearly
done it.’

  But what had I nearly done? Made a dream come true? Does it give structure and meaning to a life, to make a dream come true? Is it proof that you always secretly knew what you were doing? Of course it doesn’t. Of course it isn’t. Beyond the vaguest outlines, I never had the slightest idea what I was doing or where I was going. I had learned Norwegian merely to read novels written by a Norwegian author in the language in which they were written. As young people will do, I had identified with the hero of one of those novels.

  A novel that moves you profoundly creates a world of its own. When you first read it, you have no interest in whatever banal truth might lie behind its invention. A desire to know what inspired its author to write the book is something that comes later. Hamsun wrote Pan in 1894, and I read the novel in the 1970s, but it was only some years afterwards that I discovered the true story that had provided him with his starting point. I came across it in a book called En Jægers Erindringer* (‘Recollections of a Hunter’), by a nineteenth-century Norwegian named Bernhard Herre.

  This slender book was published posthumously in 1850, shortly after Herre’s death. I bought a copy of it some years ago from an antiquarian bookseller, along with a brief presentation of Herre written by Henrik Jæger, who was later to become Henrik Ibsen’s first biographer. On the morning of Sunday 15 July 1849, writes Jæger, Herre with two other men had gone hunting in the Kristiania marka, part of the great belt of forest that surrounds the city on three sides. In their wanderings they came to a hill at the far end of Maridalen. The track was steep, and they needed to use both hands to claw their way up. They carried their rifles slung over their shoulders. Herre was walking alone, some distance from the others, when an overhanging branch dislodged the rifle. As it fell, the hammer struck a stone and the rifle discharged, sending a bullet in under Herre’s chin and up into his brain. His companions ran to his side and found him still alive. He was capable of speech, Jæger tells us, but death had already clouded his brain and he was in great pain. An hour and a half later he was dead. Ever since reading Jæger’s account I have wondered whether the precision with which he described the shot, its progress up through Herre’s chin and into his brain, was his way of implying what many people have come to believe over the years: that Herre committed suicide.