It was actually Daniel who had told them about St George, because Daniel was in the Cubs and they had recently celebrated St George’s Day with much pomp and ceremony. Jonas and Ørn instantly fell for the story of the knight who sets out to rescue the princess from the dragon. They had originally been thinking of recording a simplified version of Jack London’s Call of the Wild — with Colonel Eriksen the elkhound playing the lead — but soon found that this presented certain insurmountable problems as far as the sounds were concerned. It was one thing to get an extremely placid Colonel Eriksen to bark in the right places, or even howl; manufacturing a whole pack of wolves was something else again.
But what sort of sound does a dragon make? Or to put it another way: what is the creepiest sound you can think of?
The tape recorder they were using, or ‘magnetophone’ as Mr Larsen grandly referred to it, had only one track, which meant they had to record the voices and the background noises at the same time. Incidentally, this machine, acquired for Mr Larsen to brush up his ‘Can you tell me the way to the nearest restaurant?’ in eight languages, was itself a little marvel. I take it, Professor, that you recall the Tandberg tape recorders of the mid-fifties? TB2s they were called: like little temples to sound with their mahogany casings and loudspeakers installed behind latticed glass panels.
Actually it would not be entirely out of place to dwell for a moment, here, on the name Tandberg: on the company’s founder, Vebjørn Tandberg, a prime Norwegian example of the pioneer spirit and industrial farsightedness, and perhaps even more on the blissful feelings of nostalgia which Tandberg’s products arouse within a large proportion of the Norwegian population. Say ‘Silver Super’ and you trigger a collective landslide of memories, mental pictures of casings in highly polished, lacquered wood, possibly shot with the memory of the feel of a fingertip turning a tuning dial or even the give of the buttons when pressed. Newer models produced around this time were a delight to the eye as well as the ear, not least the real battleship of the Tandberg fleet, the ‘Huldra’, the ultimate expression of tasteful design, a Norwegian equivalent of Denmark’s Lego, an object which, when set in its place in the living room, raised the whole house several rungs up the ladder of modernity and sophisticated elegance. With its knobs and lights, its teak casing and its wood-nymph name, it imbued an apartment with an air of space age, tropical island and mysterious forest combined.
We find ourselves, therefore, in an era which already seems remote, a time when the living room was still arranged around the radiogram, the wireless being the household altar, occupying the place soon to be accorded to the television set, when people switched religion as you might say, swapped old gods for new. And when Jonas Wergeland was a boy the most eagerly awaited radio programme was the Saturday Children’s Hour, and best of all, like the trinket in the centre of a lucky potato: the weekly serial. Jonas could never get enough of these, especially the noises in the background which one could barely hear but which acted like drum rolls on his nerves, made him bite his knuckles — creaking doors, footsteps on stairs, matches being struck inside dark caves — his brain fairly seethed, he saw those scenes, clearer than he ever would later when he saw, with his own eyes I mean, those notorious pieces on television’s Armchair Theatre: the Finnish plays, for example, with their hilariously exaggerated sounds of feet scrunching through cold snow. All those afternoons spent in a chair pulled up close to the radio — breathtaking hours of listening to The Road to Agra, The Jungle Book, Around the World in Eighty Days — taught Jonas that sounds have an unconscious effect on us, just as a song can tip an incident over into a whole other dimension — like the time, one May 17, when Wolfgang Michaelsen, under duress, of course, and blushing furiously, played an infernally strident clarinet during the singing of the national anthem on the flag green in the morning, thus inserting an ironic, not to say anarchic, element into the pompously patriotic tenor of the day: the chairman of the residents’ association, standing there in his new suit, May 17 ribbons fluttering, all the children in their Sunday best with money burning a hole in their pockets. All things considered, it was the radio, and more specifically the radio plays, which truly taught Jonas Wergeland about the power of illusion, how little it took to fire people’s imaginations. ‘It’s really quite amazing,’ he said to Ørn, ‘how the mere sound of somebody crumpling a bit of paper can make you so scared you pee your pants.’
So what sort of sound does a dragon make? Like a hundred lions? Or like a peach stone scraped across a blackboard?
The voices for the play about St George presented no problems, because Jonas did them all. Jonas was a master when it came to mimicry, to putting on different voices. And after the visit to the Pentecostalists’ tent he was even more conscious of containing a whole gallery of role models within himself; it was almost as if he had been ‘possessed’ by the spirit to perform radio plays involving a host of voices.
The challenge therefore lay in the sound effects. And Jonas and Little Eagle were perfectionists. For months they had been completely taken up with this new hobby, every day after school. They could spend a week finding the right sound for their own dramatization of the ascent of Tirich Mir, based on the book by Arne Næss. At last they hit upon it: to give the listener the picture of a mountaineer digging his crampon into ice, they stuck the tip of a pocket-knife into a lump of resin. In their eyes this was an achievement on a par with the ascent itself, and they were quite sure that philosopher Arne Næss would also have applauded it, perhaps even embarked on fruitful speculations as to the link between resin and Tirich Mir — looked upon it as an incitement to climb still further in his thoughts. ‘I probably get as much pleasure from a good sound effect,’ Ørn once said, ‘as a counterfeiter gets from looking at a perfect forgery of a hundred-kroner note.’
So far nothing had had them stumped, not thunder, not lightning, not fire — they used rustling cellophane for that — not even steamy love scenes: Ørn’s simulated kiss was in the Casanova class. Ørn was also a wizard at imitating cars — right down to the different marques. They walked about with their ears on stalks; every noise was a potential sound effect for a radio play. It reached the point where they begged Ørn’s mother to let them cover the living-room walls in egg boxes to get rid of an annoying echo. And although she refused, she had to turn a blind eye to the mysterious disappearance of a whole host of things from the kitchen: a hand whisk, greaseproof paper, brushes and pans — even the vacuum cleaner. You needed more than a few measly props for a masterpiece such as In the Sultan’s Harem or Napoleon and the Battle of Austerlitz.