The Borrowing Days by Frances Murray

Author:Frances Murray [Murray, Frances]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Rosemary Booth
Published: 2011-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

Per sent Tomas up to the bar on Deck 7 with instructions to sit with Harriet and Paul and learn whatever he could about the dead man. He would see what he could discover from Farman’s computer. He fetched it, plugged it in, set up his own printer and began the tedious process of examining the public files and printing out the Wills.

Tomas joined Paul and Harriet in the bar and fetched himself a beer.

“This better?” he asked and indicated the bar with his hand.

“Not a lot,” Harriet admitted, “but we can see more and the seats don’t slide about even if people do look at you as though you have bird ‘flu.”

“Not a lot to see,” suggested Tomas. “Just snow.”

“Once in a while you can see the village. Gamvik, isn’t it? What’s it like?”

“Small,” Tomas said. “One shop, six wood houses maybe seven, a wood church and a store of fisherman’s gear and all else, bread, milk, groceries, meat. A cold-store depot. And a school, which is also the Town Office. The harbour dries so no ferry goes in. At a time they come off in boats to board the ferry but now there is a road and they drive to Mehamn, board it there.”

“One thing I have noticed about the villages around here,” said Paul, “they all look so new. I suppose it’s because most of the houses are wood and are painted often and in such bright colours.”

“Not so. It is that they are new,” said Tomas. “Before they go the Germans burn every village in the north.”

“They did what?” demanded Harriet.

“All the villages are burned. It is this time of year in 1944. Every one burned as far south to Lyngen.”

Harriet and Paul stared at him.

“It is in your booklet,” he told them. “It is true. You look. General Rendulic order this before the German army pull out.”

“What happened to the people?” asked Paul.

“Some are evacuated, so my grandmother tell me, to Tromsø and other big town and those not found shelter in stone houses and cellars and the churches. But many die. Cold and not food to eat. Ferry not run. Fjords mined, so food not much. And it was a bad winter, all over it was a bad winter. Cold, much snow.”

“How unspeakable!” Harriet exclaimed. “In 1944 when they must have known they’d lost the war, long after D day. That wasn’t war.... that was just hateful beastly spite.”

Tomas shrugged.

“They think Russia come take our Atlantic shore,” he explained. “They want make it be difficult.”

“How, difficult?”

“No people, no shelter. No supplies. No petrol or oil.”

“You know, I’d all but forgotten Norway was occupied,” Paul said absently.

“We not forget. Even I, born thirty year after. Germans come for vacation many and many each year and we say welcome and still many think...yes, your people were here before and not welcome. We have graves of men shot, women too, because they aid England. No. We do not forget. There are scars. The same scars all over Europe.

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