The war had been a confusing time, Bear. Among other things. I was already thirty years old, considered by some too old to fight, considered by others to have had no excuse for doing nothing. There were men my age who chose a side and enlisted. Others joined the resistance. But this wasn’t my plan. I hadn’t yet managed to save the money I would need to start my own business, and I was still working for the man under whom I’d apprenticed. I was good at what I did – very good – and I could think of nothing else than to build something of my own. Naturally the war slowed everything down, so I stayed right where I was. I began to fear it would be this way for ever.

But then my grandfather died. And he’d left everything to me. Finally, there would be enough money that I could lease my first factory space as well as a bandsaw, a lathe and a sanding machine, and purchase most of the tools I would need, drawknives and whittling knives and mallets. The man I had been working for all those years helped by giving me a bargain on a lot of what I would need.

This makes me sound callous, as if I were more concerned with what I could get from the death of my grandfather than with what I had lost. It may sound that way but it wasn’t. This was an opportunity, a way to honour and to remember.

Your mother and I had been married only a few months when he died, and I was lucky to have her with me on this trip to Karmøy to settle his affairs. The house had been sold and all that was left to do was to pack up what my father wanted (he wasn’t sentimental and had asked for only a few things to be salvaged), to decide what to give away and what to throw out. A whole life, a marriage, in boxes and kitchen drawers and closets. In a cedar chest and a glass-fronted armoire. In a crawlspace under the stairs, I found my father’s old binoculars. I prised open the rusty snap of the hard leather case and flipped up the top, and fastened to the underside of the lid, a yellowed and brittle slip of paper. On it my grandfather had written that these binoculars had been given to my father for his twentieth birthday by an uncle. Everything had been itemized, memorialized, in this way, as if in preparation for audit: a tennis racket, a jewellery box, a clock. All in my grandfather’s tidy script. Your mother found a box of photos and we lost two hours drinking cheap wine out of the bottle, sifting through photographs labelled on their backs with dates and names that were known to me because of my grandfather’s stories. There was the cousin who’d gone to America and married a Mexican on a horse ranch, and the fisherman who had been lost at sea and was believed by everyone in the village to be dead. But then who, two weeks later, washed up with his boat in some craggy Scottish cove. He’d been blind drunk on spirits the whole time.