During the first school years they were held in tantalising isolation, on the other side of an invisible line drawn across the playground. If nothing else, at least it taught us to understand what the Iron Curtain was.

Then, in one of the final years, the border was lifted. At first 92we still largely kept to our side of the playground, but by the time mixed classes were introduced, we were already mixing freely.

During my last school years I always kept an eye on where the girls were, and when she finally appeared, usually at the last minute, running through the gates as the bell rang, consciously or unconsciously, I would stand watching until she merged into the crowd and was lost from view.

And so she ran through my childhood, her legs longer with every year that passed, until at the age of twelve or thirteen, when her breasts had begun to develop, she had a strangely disproportionate body, legs still too long, hips still narrow, torso slightly too short and her head oddly slanting on a slim, white neck around which she wore a chain with a crucifix.

But by then we had long shared our first moments of immediate affinity, the way a boy and a girl of the same age can be playmates, later good friends and then all of a sudden so close that we could almost be siblings.

Sometimes I had been allowed to go to her house.

I came from a rather humdrum home – the only child of parents who were slightly too old. My father, the tram conductor, sat poring over his many books about Norse mythology, smoked roll-ups, had a nasty cough and made his personal notes for a book that would never be written, while my mother sat over needlework, and I read books about the Wild West or ghosts, and the radio broadcast pointless weather forecasts and news, record-request and music programmes, quizzes and whodunnits. On the walls hung rocky landscapes of windblown Norwegian nature – heirlooms showing Ryfylke and Sunnfjord.

In Rebecca’s house, and in the houses of other children, I experienced insights into other kinds of family life, where there was a different kind of togetherness.93

In Pelle’s house there were watercolours of places such as Rome and Paris on the walls, and parents and children passed the time playing cards and Monopoly together, while we drank pop from tall glasses surrounded by chairs and a coffee table painted red, blue and yellow.

Rebecca’s family gathered for communal singing, prayers and Bible reading. On the walls there were family portraits and pictures of Jesus, but around the clinking coffee cups and over thick slices of lefse there was still a warm cheer, which I only very seldom experienced with my father, the heathen, and his wife.

Before we ate we lowered our heads to say grace. I mumbled indecipherable words to myself and glanced across at Rebecca’s folded hands with slender, white, hairless fingers. While her father read the day’s Bible extract about how Jesus fed the five thousand with two fish and five loaves of bread, I snatched some stolen glimpses of her thirteen-year-old face, soft, no make-up, sensitive lips, nostrils that had barely begun to smell life, a nose that was big enough to make her beauty interesting, greyish-blue eyes with warm pupils and dark-blonde hair that wasn’t so unruly now, but brushed back from her forehead and held in check with a pink hairband before falling naturally over her ears towards her delicate shoulders. Beneath the white blouse were her budding breasts, and my gaze lighted on them as we again lowered our heads and finished off with the Lord’s Prayer.