Then there are all the holiday snaps from the summers in Ryfylke at my maternal grandfather’s house. He was a vet. There are pictures of a boat on a fjord, my mother and I sitting on the deck beneath a low sun with a pile of wooden crates beside us. There are pictures of long hay-drying racks, us drinking coffee on the front doorsteps, seaside snaps of a stony beach, women still wearing one-piece bathing costumes and men’s trunks that seem to have been knitted. There is Bamse, the buhund dog, which was run over on the main road in the late fifties; there are close and distant relatives, long-deceased aunts and uncles, male and female cousins with whom I have lost contact.

There are photographs of my grandfather who took me on fishing trips, quiet, grey mornings when the water lay around us like a mirror, and before the first birds struck up the dawn chorus in the trees. Photographs of my grandfather gutting fish, rowing, keeping an eye on the weather, drinking coffee and eating waffles. His thinning hair, rugged complexion and strong, thin fingers that had handled more new-born calves than anyone else in the district. At eighty-five years of age he suddenly stopped rowing and fishing. But the boat was still tethered at its mooring. One dark August evening when I was eighteen he took me down there, took a half-bottle of export from the space under the rear thwart, mumbling that one of my uncles had left it there when he last used the boat, opened it and let me take a swig. Without saying much more we sat there that late-summer evening, sharing the bottle. It was then that I had first felt I was a grown-up. Later that autumn he died, as suddenly as he had stopped rowing.

There aren’t many photographs of Nordnes though. Taking snaps was for holidays. The album pages are full of summer holidays in Ryfylke, a rare trip to Sunnfjord, a visit to the capital 86(always squinting into the sun because my father, the amateur photographer, in exemplary fashion, made sure that he had the sun behind him, which meant that his shadow crept in – a discreet signature in the bottom corner of many photos). Nordnes is in only a few – always from a great distance – in one from Tollbodalmenningen on Nordnæs Battalion’s foundation day on 3rd May, but there are none of the great centenary celebrations in 1958. By then my father, the amateur photographer, had long entered the eternal darkroom and I still hadn’t been given a camera.

In one picture a handful of children are sitting on the doorstep in front of our house. It must have been the last shot of a film that needed to be finished. We would have been seven or eight years old, so the year must have been 1949–50.

There we are. Me in breeches made from a pair of huge trousers, Jan Petter in solid pitch-seamed boots and thick, patterned woollen socks, Paul with a scampish Peter Pan expression in a windcheater with an elasticated waist, Pelle’s hair hanging over his forehead, and he was holding up a magnifying glass in one hand, because at that time he had been intending to become one of the world’s greatest private detectives. And then there are some girls. There is Irene, who was Pelle’s sister and two years younger than him, with plaited hair wound up over her head. There is Karen, who was dark-haired and chubby, and would later end up in a sea-food shop, sentenced to a life in Bergen because her face gradually acquired the colour of finely minced fish, but who was sitting on the doorstep of our house because she was Irene’s best friend that year. And then there is Rebecca.