Neither Here Nor There Read Online Free PDF

Afterwards, I went to Kokken’s and wrote in my diary, ‘Interviewed Mayor. Weather cold.’

    One Sunday afternoon in the hotel I overheard a man about my age talking to the proprietor in Norwegian but to his own children in Home Counties English. His name was Ian Tonkin. He was an Englishman who had married a Hammerfest girl and now taught English at the local high school. He and his wife Peggy invited me to their house for dinner, fed me lavishly on reindeer (delicious) and cloud-berries (mysterious but also delicious) and were kindness itself, expressing great sympathy for my unluckiness with the Northern Lights. ‘You should have seen it just before Christmas – ah, fabulous,’ they said.
    Peggy told me a sad story. In 1944 the retreating Germans, in an attempt to deprive the advancing Russian Army of shelter, burned down the town. The residents were evacuated by ship to live out the rest of the war billeted with strangers. As the evacuation flotilla left the harbour, they could see their houses going up in flames. Peggy’s father took the house keys from his pocket and dropped them overboard, saying with a sigh, ‘Well, we shan’t be needing those any more.’ After the war the people returned to Hammerfest to find nothing standing but the chapel. With their bare hands and almost nothing else they built their town again, one house at a time. It may not have been much, it may have been on the edge of nowhere, but it was theirs and they loved it and I don’t think I have ever admired any group of people quite so much.
    From Peggy and Ian and others I met, I learned all about the town – about the parlous state of the fishing industry on which everyone depended in one way or another, about the previous year’s exciting murder trial, about accusations of incompetence concerning snow removal. I began to find it engrossing. Hammerfest grew to feel like home. It seemed entirely natural to be there, and my real life in England began to feel oddly distant and dream-like.

    On my sixteenth day in Hammerfest, it happened. I was returning from the headland after my morning walk and in an empty piece of sky above the town there appeared a translucent cloud of many colours – pinks and greens and blues and pale purples. It glimmered and seemed to swirl. Slowly it stretched across the sky. It had an oddly oily quality about it, like the rainbows you sometimes see in a pool of petrol. I stood transfixed.
    I knew from my reading that the Northern Lights are immensely high up in the atmosphere, something like 200 miles up, but this show seemed to be suspended just above the town. There are two kinds of Northern Light – the curtains of shimmering gossamer that everyone has seen in pictures, and the rather rarer gas clouds that I was gazing at now. They are never the same twice. Sometimes they shoot wraith-like across the sky, like smoke in a wind tunnel, moving at enormous speed, and sometimes they hang like luminous drapes or glittering spears of light, and very occasionally – perhaps once or twice in a lifetime – they creep out from every point on the horizon and flow together overhead in a spectacular, silent explosion of light and colour.
    In the depthless blackness of the countryside, where you may be a hundred miles from the nearest artificial light, they are capable of the most weird and unsettling optical illusions. They can seem to come out of the sky and fly at you at enormous speeds, as if trying to kill you. Apparently it’s terrifying. To this day, many Lapps earnestly believe that if you show the Lights a white handkerchief or a sheet of white paper they will come and take you away.
    This display was relatively small stuff, and it lasted for only a few minutes, but it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and it would do me until something better came along.
    In the evening, something did – a display of Lights that went on for hours. They were of only one colour, that eerie luminous green you see