Still Life by Elisabeth Luard

Author:Elisabeth Luard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Land of the Midnight Sun

Norway is a hard country: hard to know, hard to shoot over, and hard – very hard – to fall down on: but hard to forsake and harder to forget.

J. A. LEES, Peaks and Pines (1899)

No voyage round the culinary habits of Europe could be considered complete without Scandinavia. I knew nothing of the Land of the Midnight Sun, and Nicholas, whose Hebridean childhood had left him with an insatiable appetite for the sparkling beauty of northern seas, needed no persuading.

Summer in Scandinavia is short but brilliant – all the more so since for nine months of the year it’s twilight even at midday. But for three months, the light is so bright it could earn itself a place on Elizabeth Taylor’s engagement-ring finger.

We took the plane to Stavanger – preliminary staging-post for the oil-riggers of the North Sea – and immediately transferred to one of the internal flights that serve the Scandinavians almost like long-distance bus rides.

Our true starting point was Trondheim, one-time capital of the seafaring Viking kings, where we had arranged to rent a car – a Volvo, what else? – for the long swing north.

On that sunny summer day of 1985, the streets of Trondheim were full of shoppers and the sunshine had brought everyone out into their gardens. On every lawn were tables and chairs. The air sparkled.

‘Sunningdale-on-Sea,’ said Nicholas, inspecting the neat villas with the eye of a man who knows a suburb when he sees one.

Trondheim is a new town. Flattened by the retreating German Army in 1944, it had to rebuild itself from scratch. This is not a nation that takes kindly to interference from outsiders: while Norway was under German occupation during the war, it took one German soldier to every four inhabitants – man, woman and child – to keep the population in a state of subjugation. The result was a retreating army that bulldozed everything, including the telephone poles.

The rebuilding allowed for the inclusion of every modern convenience in the housing stock. Creature comforts mitigate, even if they don’t actually cure, the gloom induced by latitude.

Leaving Nicholas to book into the hotel, I made my way to the fish market by the harbour, a vast utilitarian warehouse that towered over the town. Trondheim depends on the fishing industry, as it has since the days of the Vikings. The market opened early, customers were few and the fishmongers were already sluicing down the aisles. Even at the end of the day, the space was scrubbed and sanitized, whereas in any Mediterranean market there would be slops underfoot and fish guts waiting for the gulls. Light poured on to marble slabs on which, fresh as a mermaid’s minder, piled in the profusion only possible where the inshore fleet can find a ready market, lay the harvest of the Atlantic. Creatures caught in cold northern waters are all the colours of ice. The scales act like prisms, splintering the light. To the amusement of those still conducting their business, I settled down in a corner to complete a couple of sketches.

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