When I was seventeen we moved into a three-room apartment, to what my mother called ‘a better neighborhood’. The monthly rent was twenty kroner more than the old two-room apartment we used to live in. My father was sure it would ruin us, but my mother had gotten it into her head that we were going to move. She gave no justification for her idea, and my father couldn’t fight it. My brother had married shortly before, just to get out of the house. Maybe my mother thought I would stay home longer if I had my own room. But I had my room no more to myself than I had had in the old apartment. It was only mine when I was sleeping on the divan which used to be in my parents’ bedroom. Only a cretonne curtain separated my room from what my mother called ‘the sitting room’, which was intended for guests. But no one ever visited us except Aunt Anna. She was the sweetest and most cheerful person in all my childhood, but at that time I was only interested in young men and poetry. My mother considered both of these hostile elements in our family. All my poems were about love, and when she got hold of one of them, she burst into tears and said she couldn’t understand where I had been exposed to such disgusting ideas.

The apartment was in a corner building, and along one of the streets there actually was a semblance of propriety, which consisted of some stucco on the gloomy facades and somewhat fewer snotty children in the street than we were used to. On the corner there was a cafe, where there were constant fights and disturbances. And along the building’s other side, the street was exactly like the one we had moved away from. But we had lived in the rear before, which I only now realized was a huge advantage to me. Now my mother was able to sit lurking in my bedroom, ready to throw open the window as soon as I came home at night with a young man, to whom I would say a tender goodbye at the front door.

‘So, there you are finally!’ she would yell. ‘Get in here right now!’

All the young men got scared and hurried away before we were able to make a next date. When I went in (we lived on the first floor), she was standing there in her flowered cotton nightgown staring at me with angry, sleepless eyes.

‘You are becoming a woman of the streets,’ she said.