‘One Sunday in early spring we invited our local vicar, Christen Raustøl, to come over. When the children had been put to bed that evening, Tarjei went up to his room and brought down a few pages of manuscript which he began reading to us. He seldom used to read aloud from anything he was working on, so this was a little out of the ordinary.

‘And what he read to us was out of the ordinary. It was the chapter from The House in the Dark that describes the meeting between the Resistance leader, Stig, and the clergyman, “the man who holds this extraordinary and impossible office”. I don’t think we said a word when he had finished. I don’t suppose we were able to find any…. We sat mute, moved, full of wonder. What we had heard was taken directly from the days, the dark night, through which we were living, and yet it touched on timeless problems. And how could the writer know all this?…Who are you, after all, you whom I should know so well?

‘Later he brought me the completed manuscript to read. At that time it was called The Pointer on the Wall.

‘I sat alone, reading. He kept away. For once I had not a single alteration to suggest…. Never before, when reading one of Tarjei’s manuscripts, had I felt so strongly that I was holding something exceptional in my hands. Nor something so dangerous. “This is more dangerous to have about the house than the radio,” I said.

‘And out of the house it went immediately. He made a solid zinc box for it, and buried it among the trees above the lake. Afterwards he took me there and showed me where he had hidden it, so that I should be able to find it again if he himself were gone when the time came to have it published.

*

‘And then, May 7th: the News. We ran out of doors, laughing and crying, found the flag and hoisted it. People from the farms further down the hills were working out in the fields. They straightened up and stood stock still. On the farms higher up they had no radio and could not see the flag. We wrote notes and sent the children off with them, then put the radio on the living-room table and turned it on full blast in front of the open window….

‘Of course we had to get together, everyone in the district. We had the largest living-room. The children ran off again with more messages telling people to come. And come they did, old and young: the smallest was eight months old. We listened to the jubilation in Sweden broadcast over the radio, we sang, Tarjei and I took out and read our hidden writings that no longer needed to be concealed. It was daylight on May 8th before we broke up. After a few hours it was again time to switch on the radio and open the window, so that those who were back at work in the fields could keep in touch with what was happening. And the very first thing that did happen was one of the most moving – Olav Midttun’s familiar voice: “This is the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation…”