The class around me. Jakob sat at the front. He lived on the outer edge of the school catchment area, at the bottom of 6Skottegaten, on a corner facing Claus Frimannsgate. He played the piano and always got the best grades. Then there was Benny, whose real name was Bernhardt and who was the class tough guy: he carried ten kilos more than most of us, smoked when he was ten, drank alcohol when he was thirteen, went to sea at the age of fifteen and later ended up as Bergen’s most reliable digger driver. And then there was Paul Finckel, who sat at the back, plump and short of breath, even then a wit, who played to a riotous gallery with his cheeky comments. And there was ‘hi-how’s-it-hanging?’ and ‘to-hell-with-it!’ Helge, the charmer, who was the first of us to go the same way as Jan Petter, when he fell into a cargo hold while unloading goods in Liverpool one day during Easter 1964. And there was gentle, dark-haired Arvid, so reflective that he died of cancer at thirty-six years of age. And Pelle, who lived in the same street as I did and was my best pal in those days. The two of us set up everything from secret gangs to detective agencies, from boys’ marching bands to cycling clubs, before our fathers’ careers brought that to a halt. Pelle and his family moved to Fredrikstad and we never saw each again. There were at least twenty others, big, small, auburn, blond, freckled and chubby. When we posed for the class photo, we looked like any other boys of that period: dressed in thick cardigans, sweaters and windcheaters, breeches made out of our fathers’ Sunday trousers from the thirties. To show respect for the photographer we held our woolly hats in our hands, those blue hats with a bluish-white stripe along the turned-up brim – the colour ran in the wash – or plain, grey hats minus the bobble, torn off in a fight. No one had inked a black cross above our heads. No one had told us when we would die.

The congregation sang: ‘Lead kindly light, amid the encircling gloom, Lead thou me on.’ It was a hymn I remembered from 7music lessons in the days of yore. ‘The night is dark, and I am far from home; Lead thou me on.’

Beside me, Jakob Aasen sang in a ringing tenor: ‘Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see the distant scene: one step enough for me.’

On the first pew someone was sobbing quietly.

When one of us died it was as though we were still sitting in the same classroom, at some point midway through our schooling, in the fourth or fifth class. Most of us were still sitting at our desks. The chairs for Helge and Arvid had already been empty for several years. Now Jan Petter had risen to his feet and left us. One by one, we would be called forth, as if summoned by the school dentist for a check-up. One by one, we would leave the room until all the chairs had been vacated and the great headmaster came to send some of us up to the art room on the top floor and the rest down to the boiler room in the basement.