Books

I was an avid reader, and for most of my childhood I read at least 4-5 books a week, and usually a book a day: It helped to connect with a larger world outside the smallness of the mountains, the endless forests and fields, the hamlet and the village. Books filled me with hope through filling colour, stimulating my imagination. Books, as the films I watched at the cinema, told me I had reason to dream - of other places, people, things to engage in.

Although having grown up in the country meant that we always had to be part of all the work that needed to be done around the farms, I took my first real job when I was ten years old. I worked in a quarry, and the job itself consisted of climbing up on a grid much like a monkey equipped with an iron bar. With this bar my task was to get lose any stones which had got trapped in the grid. I had to work fast, because it would only be a couple of minutes before another load of stone was poured over the grid, so if I weren't attentive or fast enough the whole loadful of stones would end up on my head.

Working from 7 am to 5 pm six days a week, I made the equivelant of £1 or a $1 and a meal at noon a day. I was nackered by end of the day.

At the end of the summer, I had a small fortune. I had been brought up to be very rational in my spending, so I bought a new desk for myself: so far I'd done all my homework at the kitchen table. My new desk was made of teak, and it looked mighty fine, I thought.

I still had money left, so I went to the local bookshop and I spent it all on books. It was a treasure. Buying my own books for the time in my life, was extraordinary, and I can still feel the tremor inside thinking about it, as I felt then. Books were my friends, my inspiration, my love.

"What do you want all those books for?" asked my mother. "Couldn't you have bought something sensible?"

Dokka

Dokka is a small village in the municipality of Nordre Land, in the county of Oppland in south eastern Norway. This is where I went to school, and I lived at Dokka until I was a teenager. Dokka is bordering on the two major vallies in Norway, Valdres and Gudbrandsdalen. Dialects are more rife in Norway as in the British Isles, and the original dialect used in Nordre Land is an interesting one as it in some ways is grammatically more similar to German than the commonly spoken and written Norwegian bokmål.

I left home at 15, which was terribly early indeed. At Dokka there was not much to do, however. Unless you were a physical activities fanatic, in which case opportunities were more than ample, the local library, the cinema, the Scouts, the School Brass Band, and two cafés - one placed at either end of the only street with shops in the village - were the only alternatives. You could take up smoking of course, which I did at the age of 10, and being addicted by the age of 12. A prerequisite for a successful young smoking career at Dokka, was that you ahd at least one smoking parent; that way you could go to the shops and pretend you were buying cigarettes for your parents. Otherwise it was impossible as everyone knew everyone.

We, the young rebels without a cause, preferred Kafé Vidar at the south end of the High Street because it had a juke box, and was decorated in green with warm colours. Centralkaféen at the north end, however, was dominated by respatex: it was all light, with white curtains and it had no jukebox. Pretty nasty for secretive and mischievous youngsters, in other words.

I think of my years at Dokka with great affection. Especially my mates, Jan Steinar, Jan, Bjørn, and Ole Johnny, and the my neighbour, a girl named Vesla whom I still have contact with.

Then there were my teachers. Oh my, how lucky I was! I bet not many have had the fortune of such good a match as Miss Torbergsen was for m. She was my very first teacher in Primary School, and she was ace! For a woman, she seeled huge: tall, big bones, prim and proper, dressed in black and with her greying hair in a tight bun at the back. - It would be difficult to top her, but when I was 9 we got a new teacher named Gunnar Bratrud. He was the first male teacher i'd had so far, and I came to really love him and respect him, at times adore him.

He was also the head of the scouts. At a scout nmeeting at his home, I noticed a book in his bookshelf which kindled my enthusiasm. It was called "Line" and was written by a well known Norwegian author Aksel Jensen, and it had been recently filmed. When I asked if i could borrowed, he looked a little amused, replying, "Yes, you may. But you've got to ask your parents'permission first." I did, they gave their permission, and my teacher brought the book to school. As soon as I was home from shool

Nature around Dokka was amazing in every way. Situated as a gateway to, some would argue, the most spectaularly beautiful parts of Norway, it was reach in vegetation with plenty of fields and woods, usually of scandinavian pine. The area main industries were forestry and timber, and agriculture.

I remember huge fields of lupines. Being near to where I lived, luscious and colourful, they used to take my breath away: I found them vigorous and beautiful. Not many shared my enthusiasm, however, complaining, "These awful lupines! The spread worse than weeds. It's that dreadful woman again who's put them in her garden. She never plucks the dead heads once they've finished flowering, so they keep spreading. Oh, she needs a good talking to!" Personally I felt grateful to the woman, whomever she was supposed to be, for spreading something so beautiful and enthusiastically engaged in life, I couldn't care less whether lupins were weeds proper. I loved them and look at them over and over. I still do.

Despite much of the earth being cultivated over large areas, some were still wild. Finding fields full of flowers was not usual, as in this filed of wild pansies. Apart from the mountains and the cattle, these fields were the main ground my granny would take me on her walks of exploration.

At Dokka two major rivers meet, the Dokka River, and the Etna. As kids we used to go bathing in these rivers, but only the Etna was suitable for swimming: it was deeper and much, much stiller; it was also endlessly more poetic and beautiful. In my childhood the rivers were used for bringing all the timber from the forests along the rivers to the huge sawmill by the fjord. This practice ended in 1969. Only an old pole nest used to catch and retain the timber remains bearing witness of this important practice which went on for centuries. It is represented in the coat of arms for the municipality, depicting the hooks used by the log drivers for manipulating the timber.

Dokka is situated at the end of the fourth largest lake in Norway, Randsfjorden. A magnificent and dramatic delta makes up these rivers' entry into the lake.