In the winter we sledged down Nordnesveien, which wasn’t treated with salt, or down ‘Death Hill’ in Nordnes park when we were big enough to enjoy high speeds.

In the spring we played commandos in the alleyways, lay on all fours and followed the ants into a rock between Nordnesveien and Nordnesgaten, caught woodlice under the leaves behind the sailmaker’s house and followed the Nordnæs Batallion on Saturdays when they were doing their drills between the barracks by the old place of execution, where they later built the Aquarium and the Institute of Marine Research and laid a football pitch.

In the summer we went to the sea baths with mothers or elder siblings, and through the wooden walls we heard the high-pitched voices of the girls changing in a different room, then we went into the country and were there for a few weeks: the summers in Ryfylke with my grandad the vet.

And then came autumn with darker evenings, long shadows between the alleyways, new hide-and-seek games and – some years later – postman’s knock.

For some years the girls disappeared from our lives, only to return with renewed vigour. For some years it was Paul and Varg and Pelle and Jan Petter and the whole lot of us. Once in a while Jakob and Piddi from Klosteret came along, but generally it was the boys from our area who stuck together. We played footie in the street and down by the quays. In the children’s park by the maritime high school we had a fort, which we defended against the Red Indians from Haugeveien. We played traditional Bergen 91games and from the age of ten we had bikes which we raced through the town with bits of cardboard held to the frame by clothes pegs so that they sounded like planes when we arrived.

And then, suddenly, the girls were back. And one of them was Rebecca.

I had probably been in love with her all the time, without being able to articulate the feelings growing in me. For seven years we had been in parallel classes at Nordnes school, which stood majestically in the shadow of Frederikberg’s granite-grey fortress, a reddish-yellow plastered façade and glazed, reddish-brown roof tiles, and surrounded by deciduous trees: in summer, nicely packaged in a rich green; in autumn, rotting leaves strewn across the playground; in winter, black marbling against a pale, grey sky.

Boys and girls were separated for classes. When we had singing lessons we were led with a firm hand to the girls’ side of the school, past the rows of girls. Whoever, in their youthful exuberance, stepped out of line risked being sent directly to the headmaster’s office. However that was a punishment most survived because Bernhard Steen governed with a gentle hand, rocking on the balls of his feet as he delivered his sermon, and never without a twinkle in the eye.

Girls were a country we were not allowed to know about, we were never tested on in geography, but the name of whose capital we all knew. The rude version had four letters and was written on a cubicle door in the boys’ toilet so that we would never forget.