14

Pieter

Ben Nevis, Scotland, 1931

Bear. there were stories I wanted to tell you. My grandfather, he was a natural storyteller. My father, not so. People die and maybe they leave something behind, a wristwatch or a ring or a set of silver tableware, but none of that means anything without the story. It’s what keeps us here after we’re gone, and we’re only truly dead when those who know our stories are also dead.

I’d like to tell you about the foolish thing I did when I was twenty-two years old, in 1931, when I was an apprentice making toys for another man. I was very lucky to have this position, Bear. It was my greatest ambition to one day have my own company, to manufacture my own toys, and working under this man, who was very good at what he did, was a good start. In the beginning, I was very happy working for him.

Every year, this man closed his workshop for the month of August to holiday with his family at their summer home, and so there I was with an empty month and nothing to do. One evening, a day or two into my break, I was eating a meal with an old school friend and he told me about Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Scotland. He said it was relatively easy to reach the top, he’d been the summer before, and so I decided that is what I would do. I would go to Scotland and climb this mountain.

I had never been to Scotland. I had been walking in the hills in Norway but I was hardly an experienced mountaineer. One could purchase topographic maps from the Royal Geographical Society and I knew how to use a compass, to start a fire, to raise a tent, so I thought I would be well equipped. And when you’re twenty-two years old, you tend not to recognize the things you should not do.

I borrowed, from this friend, a pair of sturdy leather boots, without taking the trouble to try them on for size, and very quickly organized rail and ferry travel. My efficiency at purchasing tickets, at organizing transfers, at selecting good-quality socks and a useful knife, lulled me into believing I knew exactly what I was doing. Instead of sailing on the Bergen Line from Stavanger into Newcastle, in the north of England, I arranged to travel by train to Calais, and from there boarded a ferry to Dover. It was a meandering, circuitous and frankly nonsensical route to take, which cost more than double, but I had always wanted to see the white cliffs.

This is something to see, Bear – the cliffs at Dover, across the Channel from France. The cliffs are composed of a white chalk, which is the compounded skeletal remains of billions of tiny sea creatures called plankton. Numbers you cannot even imagine. Looking at the cliffs is like witnessing a part of the earth’s history, one which originated underwater and eventually broke the surface into the air. Quite something.