From Nordnes you had a tremendous view: over to Askøy where many spent their summer holidays, east to Skoltegrunn quay, Skuteviken and the distant rock formations in Sandviken, west across Pudde fjord to Laksevåg, which was outside the city limits and therefore was part of the coastal and rural region known as Strileland. Boats passed in the fjord and we could recognise most of them by the sound and the chimneys. There were the small, stocky tugs with names like Titan and Vulcanus; there were the Bergen—Newcastle boats MS Leda and MS Venus and the Norwegian America Line’s Stavangerfjord, Oslofjord and Bergensfjord. There were the express coastal steamers north, freighters with a whiff of foreign harbours, like Rio and Frisco, Havana and Cadiz; there were fjord boats and lighters, and last 89but not least there were fishing vessels, loaded to the gunwales with herring in the stupendous-catch years of the mid-fifties when the whole town lay in a haze of fried herring fumes, and the illustrator Audun Hetland made one of his famous drawings, which appeared on page four of the Bergens Tidende, in which a father comes home from work exhausted, the cat is lying in the hall chewing herring bones, the mother is in the kitchen frying and the typical Bergensian brat waiting in the doorway looks up at his father and says: ‘Guess what we’re having for tea!’

But Nordnes also had wounds to lick after the war. Large parts of the eastern side of peninsula had been bombed and razed to the ground, and the big explosion of 1944 had left its mark on the area until well into the fifties. The ruins between the burnt-out red-and-white brick foundations were an endless playground for the youngest children. We fought fierce cowboy and Indian battles and built pioneer villages from the shuttering we fetched from the many building sites that were gradually appearing and slowly but surely changing Nordnes from an open plot of land into a concrete city. Civilisation caught up with this part of town, soon it was given over to car sales and all of us kids were becoming too big to play anyway.

To Nordnes, one late-summer’s day in 1946, came a little four-year-old girl with a Hardanger dialect. A girl called Rebecca.

In the picture taken by the front step of our house in 1949–50 she was small and thin with an unruly fringe, wearing a grey patterned cardigan, a red-and-white dress and white knee-length socks, her hands wrapped protectively around her knees and a shy, semi-solemn smile for the unfamiliar photographer. Because my father, the amateur photographer, was an exotic bird for the children in the street. He had never been known for his social ease. No one dared dodge the tram fare when he was the conductor.90

We were children from an era that will never return. When we were that small there was no difference between boys and girls, and even Anita, who was two years older than us but hadn’t developed breasts yet, sat digging in the sand with us.