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forward to going to Copenhagen.

5
    BECOMING A WRITER was never a conscious decision. It’s as if I was given no choice; all I can remember is writing, even before I actually knew how to. As a boy, I never drew cars or houses like the other children, but copied letters from newspapers and books. And I’d be convinced I had written a story, even if I had only copied a shopping list. Afterwards I would ‘read’ the story aloud to my parents, who listened willingly and were always encouraging.
    Once I learned to write, it became my favourite occupation. Again, I would write when everyone else was drawing. I would imagine the drawing I could have made, but draw it with words. ‘The Red Indian on his horse sets fire to the fort with a burning arrow’ was one of my earliest works. I had a clear picture of the scene and could visualize it down to the last detail when I read my text. It frustrated my teachers and worried my parents so from time to time I would draw the occasional picture, mainly to reassure them. However, the alphabet always crept in: the elephant was an ‘a’, the house was an ‘H’ and birds ‘m’s against the blue-shaded sky.
    After the first few years at school we stopped drawing pictures and my parents could heave a sigh of relief and start delighting in the top marks their son got in Danish. I wrote articles for the school newsletter and published my own stories, which I painstakingly transferred to blueprint paper, printed and handed out in the lunch break. It attracted a fair amount of attention, mainly because I did it all by myself.
    At high school, I continued with my writing. I became the editor of the school’s weekly newsletter, Posten , in my first year and my sarcastic reporting style and acerbic editorials quickly made me one of the popular students. My appearance changed. I dyed my hair black, dressed in black and listened to The Cure. On special occasions I would wear black nail polish and eyeliner. I took up smoking, favouring obscure east European brands without filter, and my choice of alcohol was cheap whisky, usually J&B or King George.
    To my great surprise I discovered that an inspired pen was extremely effective when it came to the opposite sex and I proved, on several occasions, that you could write the pants off a girl. Afterwards I would write up the conquest rather successfully as pornography and sell it. I always made sure that I obscured my ‘victim’s’ identity, but most of them worked it out anyway and some even felt honoured to be included in my library. It all enhanced my popularity and I attracted a small group of disciples. In best Cyrano de Bergerac style, we helped bashful students out of their painful state of virginity by writing love letters for them, or we forged letters from parents, in return for payment, obviously. There was nothing we couldn’t achieve with a great script or a poem, and this gave us the idea of forming a writers’ commune – a creative utopia where we would do nothing but read and write. We would devote ourselves to the written word with an earnestness and reverence worthy of monks. Our combination of pomposity and naivety makes me smile when I think about it now.
    My parents assumed I would become a journalist. I had the talent and the grades for it and since I had shown an interest in the profession by writing school newsletters, their ambitions on my behalf were understandable. But it held no attraction for me. Journalism was too restrictive. I didn’t want to end up writing for Ekstra Bladet or some other tabloid. Control of the story and the word was crucial to us, and our view of literature as the finest medium of all left little room for compromise.
    To my parents’ dismay, I and two of my writing buddies realized our dream of setting up our commune, the Scriptorium, as we named it, in a six-room luxury flat on Nørrebro near the Lakes in Copenhagen. This was before the area was renovated so the rent was still manageable