district of Oslo, on the corner of Dælenenggata and Gøteborggata. In order to get there I had an almost ridiculously short distance to walk every morning because I had a small flat right down the road from the college, at Carl Berners Plass. I had just turned twenty, it was the first place I lived which was not my childhood home: the terraced house in Veitvet where I grew up in the late Fifties and Sixties, and I had moved out as soon as I got my student loan. That was what you did back then, whether you wanted to or not, if you were allowed to go further , as it was still called, in our street, and in many other streets.
The first thing I did was to go into town and buy a stereo with some of the money, a TR 200 Tandberg amplifier, a Lenco record player and a couple of 20 watt loudspeakers of a make I can no longer recall, but the sound was superb, and to be honest the whole thing was identical to the stereo my eldest brother had put together and bought with his student loan. I was going through a phase where I copied him a lot. Not in everything, of course. I was a Communist in those days, a Maoist, which he was not; but he was so talented with his hands, with carpentry, drawing and painting, that it did not even occur to me to try and emulatehim. Instead I read books. Many books, and I guess to him it looked so intriguing and intense, the way I lost myself in those books, that sometimes he tried to copy me , and that made me happy.
If I walked from the college at the corner and down Gøteborggata, which I often did, I soon reached the Freia chocolate factory. My mother worked there. She stood at the assembly line in Confectionery eight hours a day, five days a week, plus overtime and had done so for many years. All over Dælenenga and Rodeløkka there was a smell of chocolate, of cocoa, in the mornings especially, when the air was sharp and a little damp maybe, and it was only when I had been out drinking too many pints the night before that I found the smell unpleasant. Otherwise there was a feeling of comfort about it that brought back to me certain days in my childhood, with certain faces attached and family gatherings with tables laid and tablecloths and the slanting sun through gleaming white blinds and then me , in the middle of it all with this sudden feeling that everything around me was so fine, so perfect. Sometimes, in the late nights, in my small flat at Carl Berners Plass, in Dælenenga, I allowed that feeling to well up from the past, and then I would long for my childhood with such teeth grinding intensity that I almost frightened myself.
When classes were over or I was just fed up sitting in the canteen, I would often stroll down Gøteborggata and turn right towards Dælenenga Stadium where the workers’ entrance to Freia was, and I would stop and lean againstthe brick wall surrounding the factory and they smelled good those bricks, they smelled of nature, smelled of places I had been with my father, the forests of Østmarka, Lillomarka, and I gaped up at Arnold Haukeland’s heavy, shiny, slowly rotating metal sculpture on a plinth near the entrance. It had been there only two or three years at the time, and was supposed to be a wind harp, and sounds were meant to fold out from it when the wind blew, like music, I had been told, but no music had ever been heard as far as I knew. I smoked the Petterøe 3 cigarette I had rolled myself, and I had all the time in the world in a way I have never had since. I stood in the sunshine and waited for my mother who would soon come from the huge building and walk along the flagstoned path to the gate when her shift was over. I could see her from afar when she came through the door, and every time she did, I found myself thinking of Rudolf Nilsen’s poem which begins:
Long had I seen you as you came
for always did I know when you were near ,
which, strictly speaking, was a poem to his girlfriend some time back in the Twenties. But I thought about it because of
The first thing I did was to go into town and buy a stereo with some of the money, a TR 200 Tandberg amplifier, a Lenco record player and a couple of 20 watt loudspeakers of a make I can no longer recall, but the sound was superb, and to be honest the whole thing was identical to the stereo my eldest brother had put together and bought with his student loan. I was going through a phase where I copied him a lot. Not in everything, of course. I was a Communist in those days, a Maoist, which he was not; but he was so talented with his hands, with carpentry, drawing and painting, that it did not even occur to me to try and emulatehim. Instead I read books. Many books, and I guess to him it looked so intriguing and intense, the way I lost myself in those books, that sometimes he tried to copy me , and that made me happy.
If I walked from the college at the corner and down Gøteborggata, which I often did, I soon reached the Freia chocolate factory. My mother worked there. She stood at the assembly line in Confectionery eight hours a day, five days a week, plus overtime and had done so for many years. All over Dælenenga and Rodeløkka there was a smell of chocolate, of cocoa, in the mornings especially, when the air was sharp and a little damp maybe, and it was only when I had been out drinking too many pints the night before that I found the smell unpleasant. Otherwise there was a feeling of comfort about it that brought back to me certain days in my childhood, with certain faces attached and family gatherings with tables laid and tablecloths and the slanting sun through gleaming white blinds and then me , in the middle of it all with this sudden feeling that everything around me was so fine, so perfect. Sometimes, in the late nights, in my small flat at Carl Berners Plass, in Dælenenga, I allowed that feeling to well up from the past, and then I would long for my childhood with such teeth grinding intensity that I almost frightened myself.
When classes were over or I was just fed up sitting in the canteen, I would often stroll down Gøteborggata and turn right towards Dælenenga Stadium where the workers’ entrance to Freia was, and I would stop and lean againstthe brick wall surrounding the factory and they smelled good those bricks, they smelled of nature, smelled of places I had been with my father, the forests of Østmarka, Lillomarka, and I gaped up at Arnold Haukeland’s heavy, shiny, slowly rotating metal sculpture on a plinth near the entrance. It had been there only two or three years at the time, and was supposed to be a wind harp, and sounds were meant to fold out from it when the wind blew, like music, I had been told, but no music had ever been heard as far as I knew. I smoked the Petterøe 3 cigarette I had rolled myself, and I had all the time in the world in a way I have never had since. I stood in the sunshine and waited for my mother who would soon come from the huge building and walk along the flagstoned path to the gate when her shift was over. I could see her from afar when she came through the door, and every time she did, I found myself thinking of Rudolf Nilsen’s poem which begins:
Long had I seen you as you came
for always did I know when you were near ,
which, strictly speaking, was a poem to his girlfriend some time back in the Twenties. But I thought about it because of