On a sunny June day in 1971, I packed my school rucksack and travel bag, and finally left the house I named “The White Slavery” in my childhood album with desperate cockiness. It would take almost 40 years before I set foot in the door again.
This is despite the fact that I have always been a frequent guest in my home village, a few kilometers away. The old school building with its chapel and tower sits painted white in Hanøyvika, surrounded by Vesterålen’s green mountains and the blue Raftsundet. It’s beautiful here, I see that today.
When I was sent here as a first grader, I thought the mountains shut me in, and longed for the open, unobstructed view of the western sky at home. There was softness more to long for. Ho Mom and he Dad. Ho Mother and he Father, my grandparents. The big sisters. Eventually, his little brother too. The playhouse and all the docks. And he Mons.
The school at Myrland was closed down in 1963, – there were too few students. A boat ride and boarding school became the solution. Today, you drive from Myrland to Hanøy in less than ten minutes. Back then, the boat trip took a seasick hour in the sturdy fishing boat that was a school transport boat.
Hanøy school was a small, so-called divided school, with some twenty pupils in total. In the “small class” there were first, second and third grades, in the “large class” there were fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh grades. In my cohort, there were a record number of us – seven – while several were alone in their grade. In my first years of school, the large class and the small class each went their own weeks, Monday to Saturday.
Two weeks on and three weeks off for the small class, three weeks on and two weeks off for the big class. In recent years, there was school every week, and we only came home on weekends. At home they said that it was so gentle not a little weak. But I cried a hell of a bite Sunday night.
Thinking back to life in the outskirts of northern Norway in the 1960s is not only about a class journey, but also about a time travel. We lived in a completely different reality than today’s mobile and globalized world. Most of the children came from homes where their father fished, while their mother was a small farmer, with the professional title of housewife. The telephone exchange was closed at night. The first black-and-white TVs were just starting to arrive.
To and in the roadless villages, transport was by boat, horse and tractor. And Melkeruta, Reidulf. Still, the standard most of us were used to from home was sky high above the run-down and old-fashioned boarding school we were accommodated in. There was an outdoor toilet in the courtyard – four cubicles: a teacher’s toilet, a priest’s toilet, a boys’ toilet and a girls’ toilet.
There were simple windows without insulation, with a lot of draughts and leaks. When the water froze, we had to carry in snow, and thaw in large tubs. The girls’ room and the boys’ room were dormitories. There were bunk beds with drawers underneath for clothes, and a large table to do homework at.
The kitchen was in the middle. We ate at long tables, neatly in a row, girls on one side, boys on the other. Teacher and housewife each enthroned at their own short end. One day we got a herring. Heime got to eat when the adults ate herring. And at home, the pickled herring was served as fillets, with onions. Here I got a whole herring with a thick layer of salt on the plate. There she lay and stared at me. I stare back. There was no place to escape. I put my head in the lap of Dagmar, who sat next to me, and cried my brave tears. After that, I didn’t have to eat herring.
In the morning, the housewife had to get up early and fire up the kitchen stove and in the black round stoves in the boys’ and girls’ rooms. Washing water was heated on the stove. Then we stood there and huffed, each by our dented washbasin on stools in the kitchen. First the girls, then the boys Some of the boys were bedwetters. The pungent smell of urine hung heavy in the air in the boys’ room. In the kitchen, the housewife had to wash the pee laundry in a tub, and wipe over the stove. She didn’t like that. They heard that, those who peed their way out at night. I never got a beating home.
But some of the guys had terribly hard fists. “Dokker just has to catch up,” the adults said when we complained. “Docks need fresh air,” they said, and locked us out in the afternoon. Once I caught up. Lay in the snow and fought on the blood with one of the guys. He was strong. The others stood around and cheered. There was no place to escape.
But I liked to read. I liked to learn, I liked to draw and to write style. The small school library was a gold mine: Helge Ingstad, Dikken Zwilgmeyer, Icelandic family sagas, the Tsar’s Kurer. One of the teachers lent me Hamsun. And sometimes he was Father with the school shuttle boat when we were to be brought home. The cassette hat and the brown knitted cardigan shone a sense of security from afar.
A lot got better when Mrs. Nøis came. Helfrid Nøis was almost 65 years old when she started as a housewife in the autumn of 1965. She had a diverse life behind her; growing up in Øksnes in Nordland, many years of work in Oslo, wintering in Svalbard, evacuated to Scotland during the war with her husband, the hunting veteran Hilmar Nøis.
Mrs. Nøis was not a lady of legal age. She banged on the table and threatened to close the entire boarding school if it was not renovated. Little by little, a new well, water closets, showers, washbasins with hot and cold water, wardrobes and electric panel heaters were added.
At a school with many inexperienced teachers, who usually only stayed for one year, it was a gift to bring in an adult, wise person who stayed for almost six years. “Don’t you learn anything at school,” she snorted indignantly, and gave us an impromptu history lecture on The War over supper. “And I tell you, girls, you must not let yourselves be dominated,” she admonished. In a subdued southern dialect, acquired in Oslo.
For some reason, we were not allowed to bring toys to the boarding school. Eventually, it got better. We were allowed to bring skis and hang up movie star pictures. At the end it was so free-spirited that we were allowed to bring a record player. We played Creedence and the Beatles, and learned to dance swing on the floor in the girls’ room after “Hello, Mary Lou”. Mrs. Nøis taught us to play cards, and we became very good at playing American.
But we had a hard tug-of-war with a teacher who got the idea that card games were sinful. He constantly confiscated the decks of cards. And we drew new, sticky shelf paper on the back of the cards and hid them under the mattress.
The school was closed down in 1986. The villages in the school district have more or less been abandoned. The farms have become holiday homes. School children hardly exist. Some of us met last summer, at reminiscences in the old school. Only a handful of my schoolmates still live in their childhood village. Most people live in nearby towns. Some of us have traveled further afield. One still has sheep, two or three are fishermen. A few are on disability benefit.
One is a construction worker, one is a captain, one works with fish farming. Some work in a shop, office or factory, one is a hairdresser, an electrician and an accountant. One works in the surveillance police, and one is a journalist in Klassekampen. We have cabins, houses, cars, pleasure boats, mobile phones and flat-screen TVs, and we go on holiday abroad.
I had dreaded me a little before the meeting. Not to meet the others. We are friends, and have met at irregular intervals over the years. We have been in the war together. Have experiences few others our age have. Childhood memories that usually only siblings have in common. But I dreaded going into the house I was so happy to leave in 1971. It wasn’t dangerous anymore. No skeletons in the cupboards, just the old picture of the National Assembly at Eidsvold.
We taped it together and hung it up in its permanent place in the classroom. Then we toasted in wine and beer, and ate good food from a newfangled catering company. Because in the end, we all escaped. We have built many kinds of lives on the foundation we were given. Shaken off our chains and taken with us both the scars and the strength that the survivor always carries with them. There is no need to escape anymore. And it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.
By Sissel Henriksen, written in Klassekampen 2009
