The Story Behind the Story: Occupied Norway
All the way back in 2006 - practically the Dark Ages - I was spending my youth on a remote Norwegian pig farm. The farm sat sandwiched between a mountain and a fjord, and all the neighbours had the same surname.
It was the World Cup, and one lunchtime as I came back from the barn, Germany were playing Argentina. Tore leant over to me and asked “Who are you supporting?”
I shrugged. I was thinking more about the rapid arrival of my kjøttsuppe & melboller than I was about the game.
“Germany, I guess,” I said.
He was OUTRAGED.
“How can you? You’re English!”
I didn’t have the heart to remind him that the UK had fought Argentina too, and more recently.
“Well,” he said. “They came here, to this valley. They took my father’s sawmill, took the trees. Took our milk, took our pigs. Thousands of them, just over there.”
Over the next few weeks, he told me more anecdotes and memories from his childhood.
“That neighbour’s alright - his grandfather had a radio hidden in his barn, and he and my father would listen to the real news on the BBC. But that neighbour, his grandfather was a member of the Nazi party. He thought he was so superior, puffed up on his own importance, listening to the German programmes, thinking we didn’t know what was going on. But we did.” He paused, looked at the neighbour’s farm just metres away. “We don’t talk to him.”
Later, I also spent time at a lighthouse out on Smøla, the island chain off Kristiansund where my debut novel is set. There I heard similar - still fresh and raw - stories of British airmen hiding in caves, spying on German fleet movements. The locals had helped them, fed them, at great personal risk. In return, the airmen shared their real coffee with their new friends for a Christening party - which was almost their undoing when the local snitch turned up unexpectedly…
For years, I remembered those conversations, those stories. They went round and round in my head - what had it been like to be at the centre of those tensions, those decisions. Would I have been brave enough to hide a radio, trade on the black market? The more I thought about it, the more I came to conclusion it wouldn’t have been as simple as my friends’ stories made out.
Eventually, I had to get the story out of my head and onto paper. And thus was Solveig and the rest of the gang born.
I did a lot of reading to get the details right, but the germ of the story was there in that first conversation in front of the football, over my steaming, delicious lunch. After all these years, I remember the conversation, and I most certainly remember the soup, but forgot the result of the match. In case you were wondering I googled it, and it turns out Germany won on penalties.