Whilst the coastal town of Horten may not be a natural candidate for literary inspiration, I was lucky enough to spend the best part of that long warm summer on a shady terrace, reading Sigrid Undset, grappling with Norwegian verbs and scribbling tales of troublesome minds and fragmented loves. Soft winds, now and then, brought perfect, healthy air from off the Oslofjord, rustling through the trees banked in front of me. Naturally, ‘Jenny’ and her Italian misadventures enthralled me far too often and, among my various textbooks, phrase books and language CDs, my Beginning Norwegian sat gathering even more dust.
From time to time, however, the reality of my new Norwegian existence caught up with me – the missed jokes and teasing gossip, the feeling of uselessness before the pølse kiosk, the confused blank faces on both sides or the jarring familiarity of an English accent, heard, and the desire to appear disconnected from it. The reality pushed me willingly, yet utterly overwhelmed, towards study, towards comprehension of that new triplet of vowels and the seemingly illogical word orders, bewildered by subtlety and variation.
It was not the first time I had picked up Beginning Norwegian; it had been over five weeks now. Perhaps unadvisedly, I had skipped the first five chapters – the alphabet and pronunciation – for two reasons: firstly, I felt I had some understanding of this from my girlfriend’s attempts to educate me, and secondly, alone as I was in the apartment more often than not, there was nobody to correct me should I misinterpret the phonetics. And so I stumbled into the basics of grammar, momentarily and shamefully baffled by definite and indefinite (the result of inadequate English education), progressing slowly (through the adventures of Tor, Ingrid et al.). Yet that inscription! it soon became a real fascination: the mysterious Peggy Johannessen, and her world during the November of 1943. The fact that it was an American book, the very name ‘Peggy’, brought flooding into my brain pencil-skirted, black and white images, mid 20th Century movie stills, Lauren Bacall, Margaret Lockwood, high hair and cigarettes. I pictured her (Peggy) like some troubled Mary McCarthy character, high-rised and lonely in some New York apartment, newly married to a Norwegian businessman, empowered and determined to master this stubborn Scandinavian tongue, to impress the stern, archaic mother-in-law on summer vacations after the war, the countless emigrated friends and relatives of her husband in Northern states – Peggy, determined to impress, to prove her capabilities.
Maybe Herr Johannessen was a soldier; they had met whilst he had been stationed in Canada, training to join up with the British military, like Olaf Reed Olsen. All in all, the inscription, the ancient smell and the beiged pages, the archaic verbs and obsolete spelling, even the queer, ugly little diagrams served to transport me from that warm terrace to some vintage daydream, bygone and civilised and quiet.
And today, opening the book again, something felt different. Today the faded abstraction was brought further to life; the previous, fanciful, literary based trips were about to have deeper, far greater substance; a discovery that threw a whole new perspective swooped down and carried me into greater fascination than those simple, inky words identifying the book’s first owner.
From the low terrace, my legs dangling into the sunshine, I watched the pines on the slope opposite, picking out the almost imperceptible movement, the lightest of summer breezes tickling only the lightest branches, enough to generate the daintiest vibrations of air, the frequency of gently rustling leaves. The smell of a new pot of coffee drifted out from the kitchen, whilst I cooled my hot head with some fresh iced orange juice, sweet and soothing in my mouth.
In the spirit of my careless learning structure, rather than opening Beginning Norwegian to my current place, I closed my eyes and reclined as far as I was able into the plastic garden chair and allowed the pages of the book to rush off my thumb, pushing the good, musty fragranced air, cool onto my face. Again, and the delightful antiquity wafted up to me, my thumb, this time, fractionally heavier in release, appeared to interrupt the rifling pages, stopping midway through the book. Slowly, the sunlight harsh, my adopted blindness ceasing, I looked down at the book to assess the cause of this queer breech of my scented page fanning. Attempting another heavy thumbed pass, I allowed the pages to fan, and again the passage failed midway, the book fell open. All seemed normal, no obstacle, no bookmark had caused the pages to part. I closed the book to see if any inconsistency in page size had caused the pages to pause at this point. No, nothing, no sign; and so I repeated the fan, prepared to concede that it was of my own doing. And again, there, the book fell open, seemingly at the same spot.
I took a moment to consider the trees on the bank, the pristine sky above, reacted and took a sip of juice. On my lap the book was split, lying open at the point it had most recently paused. The right hand side, text, the start of a new chapter, the left hand side, blank, a gap at the completion of the previous chapter. But no, the page was a little whiter and, looking closely, yes it was the same size as the pages of the book, the same size but alien, unconnected. This was the cause of the book falling open: a separate sheet.
Over many years of isolation, squeezed between the hard pages, the piece of paper had fairly attached itself to the page preceding. With a small blow along the edge, however, it fluttered clear and, reverentially, I loosened it and allowed it to fall free of its resting place, tucked into the spine.
To find a fragment within a book is far from an extraordinary occurrence, the true measure of value only revealed on closer examination: perhaps something as disappointing as discovering some recent clipping, a crumpled piece of packaging or a supermarket receipt. Yet even something as mundane as an old cigarette packet flattened, gives a tantalizing glimpse into the past, into the obscure life of a previous owner, providing stimulation for terrific and fanciful thought, transporting pan-dimensionally into some potential, conceived pre-existence.
From this shabby old textbook, the fine thin watermarked paper, the stain of modern life edging slowly in, pale brown – immediately I sensed something rewarding in this piece of old ephemera. And such was the revelation upon turning it over. Dark, yet faded, heavily crooked, heavily distinct hand, odd curls on k’s and h’s; strong, almost clumsy great T’s and t’s; familiar indentations in the text: the formality of paragraphs.
Clearly, this draft was ancient and, of course! at the very top – a date. My heartbeat accelerated, knowing this would tell all, would define the true rarity, the potentially magical antiquity of this document. Nov 7 1944. Oh my. Aged, and furthermore, a wartime missive – the potential charm and passion of a wartime note intrigued me wildly, the signature at the bottom suggesting once and for all that, surely, this was a letter.
I guessed at the first word; it looked to me, clearly, like ‘Haugen’, only with a slightly eccentric ‘H’. A name I had already seen in Norway many times and, I quickly recollected, the name of the author of the book! Surely not, it seemed too much, to discover a letter to the author in a book of his own work? And the date, the date was close to the date of publication. This would make perfect sense. But why would a letter to the author end up in a book owned by an American lady?
Needing to know, quite frantically now, the content of the letter, I employed the services of my quietly knitting girlfriend to offer life to the blind swarm of unknown and hardly legible words. Her reaction was much the same as mine, a delight in such an obscure find, questions in disbelief of where I had discovered it, the suspense of its obvious antiquity.
As she looked over the words, a faint smile crept out from behind the concentration and general bemusement; I offered my ‘Haugen’ suggestion, proudly linking letter and linguist. She giggled a little, crumpling my proud detective work just slightly, before flattening it all together: “No. No, it’s ‘Mangen’ – it’s an old form of the English ‘Many’ – ‘Mangen har hatt det håb’,” she read the first line – “‘Many have had the hope’ – it’s quite odd…”
“Go on,” I encouraged her, delighted in this unravelling.
“It’s something like: ‘many have had the hope that we would be able to celebrate Christmas together in Norway.’”
“Well, that would fit in with the date – and the fact that it was wartime…”
She picked out a few further words before surprising me, determining it quite difficult. And thus, I drew her attention, instead, to the monogram printed in the top left. “It looks,” she declared, perhaps even with a slight gasp, “rather regal.”
“Exactly,” I reaffirmed, “look at the figures in the centre: roman numerals, who else would use such figures in a monogram?” And, frozen, we sat and stared at each other, not prepared to believe what we just might have stumbled upon.
“They represent the number 7,” I offered.
Looking again at the paper, her eyes lit up and breathlessly she managed to add:
“And this…these curls…oh my…this is an ‘H’…which means…”
Immediately our attention was focused on only one remaining detail, one way of confirming all – the signature.
And there, at the foot of the page, six fading inky letters: H – a – a – k – o – n.
How often is it that one finds something tucked in a book? How often does one find a letter from a King! And now the letter sits framed on my bookshelf, liberated, like its author and his country would be before the next Christmas. I am still beginning Norwegian, it is tough in a nation of such enthusiastic English speakers; but in the company of this wonderful document I feel like I have had the warmest welcome, I am just a bit more Norwegian.
