Even though I can’t have been more than four years old, I still imagine that I can remember the day Rebecca moved into our street. A green flatbed lorry had parked in Nordnesveien with 87the back full of old suitcases, cardboard boxes secured with rope, kitbags and grey, typically Norwegian rucksacks: a removal van. Rumours ran wild through the alleyways, and soon all the kids (and some adults) poured up the street to see what was going on.

A robust strawberry blonde in a blue woollen coat, her hair tied in a bun at the back, and a tall, thin man in a grey coat, wearing a soft hat, were unloading the lorry, helped by the driver, a small, thickset man in worn blue overalls. ‘Have you got any children?’ asked one of the boldest kids at the front. The woman gave a friendly nod and raised three fingers.

It wasn’t until a few days later that the three children appeared on the street. The smallest one was a girl and her name was Rebecca.

To begin with, all the children spoke a strange dialect, and later we found out that they had moved to Bergen from Hardanger. Their surname was Holmefjord and Rebecca’s father was an office-machinery repairman in working hours and a lay preacher in his free time. In this way he took assiduous care of people’s earthly and spiritual accounts. Rebecca’s mother was – like all mothers at that time – a housewife. There were her two elder brothers, too big for us ever to have any contact with them. And then there was … Rebecca.

Moving to Nordnes in those days was no simple matter. It was not for nothing that this part of town was often called the Republic of Nordnes, especially by its own residents. It was situated on a peninsula in By fjord, surrounded by saltwater on three sides, and if some Bergensians could occasionally say ‘We’re not from Norway; we’re from Bergen’, it was not at all unlikely that one might also occasionally hear ‘I’m not from Bergen; I’m from Nordnes’.88

In Nordnes we were largely self-sufficient. We still had a bakery, a dairy shop, a greengrocer’s and a fishmonger’s in most streets. On top of that, there were laundries, tailors, vinmonopols and cobblers, doctors and dentists, cycle-repair shops and scrap dealers. Down in Strandgate you could buy everything your heart could desire, from clothes to toys, from cheap coffee service sets to garish lamps, because the boats from the fjord districts put in on this side of the peninsula, so most could get a good deal here. If once in a while you went through Muren, which stood like an old-fashioned city gate between Nordnes and the rest of Bergen, it was because you were going for a Sunday walk in the mountains, or on a rare trip to the cinema or theatre, or because you had to go to hospital, the police station, the Post Office (before the branch in Nordnes was opened) or to some other public body. Mothers might take a trip to the market square for vegetables in season or live fish whenever the need arose, but that was still the exception rather than the rule. Most people stayed in the part of town where they lived.