And Ingeborg, her dad’s stern sister, whose looks could kill if you started in on your food before grace had been said, or if you helped yourself from the berry bushes. Aunt Ingeborg who would also stroke your cheek with her rough hand and say, ‘Tell you what, Kay-Kay, why don’t you and I bake a really tasty sponge cake? If you fetch four eggs from the henhouse, I’ll get the flour. Four of the smallest now, mind!’

The eggs. She can still practically taste them. Just ordinary eggs, straight from the nest. And then the ones from the ducks, as big as her fist. She was allowed to help collect them, but can’t remember anyone ever eating one because the duck eggs and the large chicken eggs were sold in the marketplace in Thorsvik.

The marketplace. Not the local one in Lysvik, the big one, held every Saturday down in the harbour on the other side of the sound. Taking the ferry across, wind in her hair and admonishments not to climb the railing. The long trestle tables where farmers and fishermen lined up their wares and tried to outshout each other with unbeatable offers to coax southerners and gullible tourists to open up their wallets. Shouting and hollering, always in an exaggerated Noorö dialect with consonants as sharp as razors. For some reason that helped move the goods, or so Finn had told her.

The coolers full of cod, wolffish, herring, halibut, haddock, ling and cusk. The yarn dolls made of carded and spun wool in grey, black and almost pure white. The knitted socks and mittens, the cured leather. The bottles of cordial, the punnets of berries and mushroom fit to sell: raspberries, blueberries, blackcurrants and chanterelles. Gooseberries and sheep polypore for their own consumption. And the things that weren’t put on display, but rather sold furtively from boots and flatbeds: car parts, ‘antiques’ and at the far back, white plastic containers full of special Noorö cordial that had nothing at all to do with blackcurrants.

And the smells. All her memories seem suffused with the smell of tar, diesel, fish, sheepskins and warm raspberries.

*

Driving through the gateposts and seeing the farmyard is like meeting an old childhood friend and realising the years have not been kind. Over by the barn, an old banger has been left to rust next to a tractor that looks as though it hasn’t been used in years, a pile of timber and junk. The grass around the junk pile is so tall you’d need a scythe to get to it. The only things that look exactly as she remembers are the main houses: a long two-storey building of grey stone flanked on either side by a smaller detached house of the same height and material, all three topped with red-brick roofs rather than the traditional black slate.