One autumn I fell ill, during the day I lay in bed and was bored and one morning before going to work Dad brought me some books. He’d had them in the cellar, they were from his childhood in the fifties and I was free to borrow them. A handful had been published by a Christian company and for some reason they were the ones that made the strongest impression on me, one of them indelibly. It was about a boy whose father had died and who stayed at home to look after his sick mother; they lived in poverty and were completely dependent on the boy’s efforts to make ends meet. He was confronted by a group, or a gang more like, of boys. Not only did they hound and beat up this boy who was so different from them, they swore and stole as well and the inequity of this gang’s successes, in the light of the constant setbacks suffered by the honest, loving, and upright protagonist, was almost impossible to bear. I cried at the unfairness of it, I cried at the evil of it, and the dynamics of a situation whereby good was suppressed and the pressures of injustice were approaching bursting point shook me to the core of my soul and made me decide to become a good person. From then on I would perform good deeds, help where I could, and never do anything wrong. I began to call myself a Christian. I was nine years old, there was no one else in my close vicinity who called himself a Christian, neither Mom nor Dad nor the parents of any of the other kids — apart from Øyvind Sundt’s parents, who warned him off Coke and candy and watching TV and going to the cinema — and of course no young people, so it was a fairly solitary undertaking I initiated in Tybakken at the end of the seventies. I began to pray to God last thing at night and first thing in the morning. When, in the autumn, the others gathered to go apple scrumping down in Gamle Tybakken I told them not to go, I told them stealing was wrong. I never said this to all of them at once, I didn’t dare, I was well aware of the difference between group reactions, when everyone incited each other to do something or other, and individual reactions, when each person was forced to confront an issue head-on with no hiding place in a deindividuated crowd, so that was what I did, I went to those I knew best, my peers, and said to each one that apple scrumping was wrong, think about it, you don’t have to do it. But I didn’t want to be alone, so I accompanied them, stopped by the gate, and watched them sneak across the age-old fields in the dusk, walked beside them as they scoffed apples on the way back, their winter jackets bulging with fruit, and if anyone offered me anything I always refused, because dealing was no better than stealing.