limited to the odd motoring holiday in Sweden and, strange as it may sound today when foreign travel is so cheap and so common, neither Mum nor Berit nor Arvid had ever been further from home than that either.
We drank in every word these people said, we tucked away every story, every remark and observation, and at school or at a party with chums of our own age we repeated it all, presenting it for the most part as if it were straight out of our own heads.
After dinner, too, the format was, on the whole, pretty different from what we were used to. In our homes it was always the women who cleared the table and retreated to the kitchen, and the talk over the washing-up was usually of family matters. My mum’s favourite topic was illness: pain and suffering in general and the poor children in particular, and I’ve never known this to be anything but a popular talking point with other women, too. Meanwhile, the men sat in the living room, waiting for the women to bring in the coffee, to which they would add a dash of something stronger. They smoked roll-ups, swore, and robustly debated the national budget or talked of a pipe that had sprung a leak in someone’s basement, and every now and again they would shout something to the woman, something meant to be a bit daring and close to the bone: “Oy! Get a move on with that coffee, will you! We’re bloomin’ parched in here!” And Mum and the other women would pop their heads round the kitchen door and pretend to be annoyed. “Oh, shut your mouth, you old rogue, or you’ll get nothing!” And they would all laugh.
After dinner at Silje’s and her mother’s place, on the other hand, it was as natural for the men to clear the table and help with the washing-up as the women, and the conversations in the kitchen were extensions of the conversations that had been conducted during dinner. And I, for one, could detect no male–female divide in these. Oddrun’s contributions to discussions on progressive taxation, German literature between the wars and Soviet foreign policy were as impassioned as the men’s and, unlike Mum, who might occasionally venture to make a joke, but never anything that went beyond the bounds of what was considered decent for a woman, Oddrun could be every bit as crude and blunt as the male dinner guests. Once she’d had a bit to drink she would often start to joke about the number of lovers she’d had and how easy it was to trick a man into doing this or that: “All you have to do is show a little cleavage and they’ll do whatever you ask,” I remember her saying late one evening, and neither you, I, nor anyone else thought her improper or immoral on that account.
That said, when people got drunk at Oddrun’s they tended to behave in ways that would have been absolutely unheard of at the grown-up parties you and I had been used to up till then. There was, for example, a former actress with the Trøndelag Theatre, a skinny woman with long, white hair and bulging eyes, who stripped naked, stepped out onto the balcony and sat down, and there she stayed, smoking and staring defiantly at everyone who walked past on the street below. No friend of Mum or Berit would have dreamed of doing anything like that, no matter how drunk or far from home they were, and if such a thing had ever happened and had got out it would have been a personal disaster and an eternal source of shame. But the next morning, when we were all up and sitting at the breakfast table, this same white-haired woman emergedfrom the bedroom and, contrary to what you might think, she had neither forgotten, nor did she pretend to have forgotten, the incident; she didn’t look the slightest bit embarrassed, instead she laughed until the tears rolled down her cheeks as she described the looks on the faces of the male passers-by and everyone else at the table laughed just as hard.
But no matter how broad-minded Oddrun and her friends and Silje herself were, we never dared to tell them
We drank in every word these people said, we tucked away every story, every remark and observation, and at school or at a party with chums of our own age we repeated it all, presenting it for the most part as if it were straight out of our own heads.
After dinner, too, the format was, on the whole, pretty different from what we were used to. In our homes it was always the women who cleared the table and retreated to the kitchen, and the talk over the washing-up was usually of family matters. My mum’s favourite topic was illness: pain and suffering in general and the poor children in particular, and I’ve never known this to be anything but a popular talking point with other women, too. Meanwhile, the men sat in the living room, waiting for the women to bring in the coffee, to which they would add a dash of something stronger. They smoked roll-ups, swore, and robustly debated the national budget or talked of a pipe that had sprung a leak in someone’s basement, and every now and again they would shout something to the woman, something meant to be a bit daring and close to the bone: “Oy! Get a move on with that coffee, will you! We’re bloomin’ parched in here!” And Mum and the other women would pop their heads round the kitchen door and pretend to be annoyed. “Oh, shut your mouth, you old rogue, or you’ll get nothing!” And they would all laugh.
After dinner at Silje’s and her mother’s place, on the other hand, it was as natural for the men to clear the table and help with the washing-up as the women, and the conversations in the kitchen were extensions of the conversations that had been conducted during dinner. And I, for one, could detect no male–female divide in these. Oddrun’s contributions to discussions on progressive taxation, German literature between the wars and Soviet foreign policy were as impassioned as the men’s and, unlike Mum, who might occasionally venture to make a joke, but never anything that went beyond the bounds of what was considered decent for a woman, Oddrun could be every bit as crude and blunt as the male dinner guests. Once she’d had a bit to drink she would often start to joke about the number of lovers she’d had and how easy it was to trick a man into doing this or that: “All you have to do is show a little cleavage and they’ll do whatever you ask,” I remember her saying late one evening, and neither you, I, nor anyone else thought her improper or immoral on that account.
That said, when people got drunk at Oddrun’s they tended to behave in ways that would have been absolutely unheard of at the grown-up parties you and I had been used to up till then. There was, for example, a former actress with the Trøndelag Theatre, a skinny woman with long, white hair and bulging eyes, who stripped naked, stepped out onto the balcony and sat down, and there she stayed, smoking and staring defiantly at everyone who walked past on the street below. No friend of Mum or Berit would have dreamed of doing anything like that, no matter how drunk or far from home they were, and if such a thing had ever happened and had got out it would have been a personal disaster and an eternal source of shame. But the next morning, when we were all up and sitting at the breakfast table, this same white-haired woman emergedfrom the bedroom and, contrary to what you might think, she had neither forgotten, nor did she pretend to have forgotten, the incident; she didn’t look the slightest bit embarrassed, instead she laughed until the tears rolled down her cheeks as she described the looks on the faces of the male passers-by and everyone else at the table laughed just as hard.
But no matter how broad-minded Oddrun and her friends and Silje herself were, we never dared to tell them
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