Another important vital condition in her choice of husband, or victim, was that he had to be an entrepreneur who had ceased his business activities — bluntly described by Jørgine as his treasonous activities — in good time and had seen the wisdom of one of the rules of mountain safety which everyone in Norway would later know by heart: there’s no shame in turning back — although in his case it was more a matter of turning his coat back. And to be on the safe side he had even become involved, half-heartedly and very circumspectly, in some underground work. The minute she met him Jørgine noticed that his eyes were set abnormally far apart. He looked a bit like a hammerhead shark. This sinister feature became more marked as the war progressed, as if it took its toll to keep looking two ways at once. Be that as it may, he neatly avoided being arrested or punished when peace was declared, despite government investigations and a bloodthirsty public hue-and-cry against collaborators.
It is tempting, even though it lies outside the scope of this story, to take a closer look at the boom in certain sectors during the war. Disturbingly many Norwegians made a lot of money, just as the whole of Norway today grows richer with every war waged, due to the attendant rise in the price of oil. Much has been written about the astonishingly cooperative line taken by the Norwegian authorities, with the exception of the King and the government, towards the occupying force, more or less from day one. ‘The wheels have to be kept turning in the interests of the working people,’ was how it was phrased. This cooperation also included tasks of such military importance as the repair and extension of airfields. In the spring and summer of 1940, not one class, not one organisation, not one political party advocated an open policy of sabotage, and so it continued, with surprisingly few exceptions, for some time. This says a lot about Norway. Other countries lost millions of people, to famine, in battle; the citizens of the Soviet Union, not least, fought and died — also for Norway’s benefit. And what did Norway do? The somewhat less than heroic answer would be: ‘We trod softly.’ Poland lost about twenty per cent of its population, Norway three per mil. Not counting the sinking of the Blücher, the fight put up by certain divisions in the very earliest phase of the war, not least at Narvik, a few dozen genuine heroes and, of course, the navy, the Norwegian resistance campaign could be said to have been one of the least heroic ever. All military operations were terminated in June 1940, after eight weeks. Later, it also came out that every fifth Norwegian officer had been a member of Quisling’s National Unity party. Within just about every branch of trade and industry hands were extended to the Germans. And the gains could on occasion be prodigious. Which makes it all the harder to understand — for a foreigner particularly — how Norway, a country which was subjected to a relatively mild period of occupation, could have carried out such an unreasonably relentless series of judicial purges after the war — as if all the hostility and outrage could finally be vented, five years too late. Despite everything so far written about Norway and the Second World War, it would not be too bold a prediction to state that our contribution to the war effort, our spirit of resistance, will be shown to be even more frayed and pathetic when still more researchers have delved into the events of those five years. Such a statement might be hard for a few people to swallow, but Jørgine Wergeland for one would have declared herself heartily in agreement. ‘Our military honour was lost when the dreadnought Norge was sunk at the Battle of Narvik,’ she said once to Jonas. ‘With the battleship Eidsvold our ideals too went down.’
In other words, by the time the Germans left the country, Jørgine’s second husband had made himself a nice packet. Which no one knew anything about. And better stilclass="underline" he had been shrewd and foresightful enough to stash away his money in an obscure network of bank accounts. It had, in other words, been nicely laundered.
Right from the day when he effected his carefully calculated about-turn, at a time when everyone could see that the Germans’ luck was also turning, he was convinced that he would get away with it. He had not, however, reckoned with his wife-to-be; how was he to know that behind a smiling, friendly and indeed apparently loving mask, Jørgine Wergeland viewed him quite simply as another Hitler, a man whom she had resolved to bring down. If he had not suspected anything before, then he should have done when she turned to him as they walked out of the registrar’s office, looked him straight in his hammerhead face and uttered her first words as a newly-wed: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’
Jørgine Wergeland declared war on her husband, she commenced a campaign of resistance of which no one was ever aware, conducted as it was within the four walls of their home. And she resorted to tactics which were much more ruthless than the clattering of pots and frying pans.
I do not know whether Jonas Wergeland associated Høyanger with demonstrations, with women and saucepans, but I noticed the rapt expression on his face one day when we were strolling along the steamship wharf and he spotted the old Høyang emblem on the door of the metalworks. He was clearly moved by the sight of that name, which had been stamped into the aluminium of so many of his boyhood’s saucepans, including the ones on which he had done some cacophonic drumming of his own.
Whitsun was just around the corner. We were tied up at a pontoon dock out by the breakwater, under the southern face of Gråberget, with a great view of the town and Hålandsnipa forming a wall behind it, and of Øyrelva, its foaming white stream snaking down the mountainside on the other side of the fjord. The chimneys at the metalworks no longer spewed out black smoke as they did in the old photographs taken by Olav Knutzen; fluoride-laced smoke that had, in the past, done so much visible damage to the environment. No one now could call the works at Høyanger a ‘black cathedral’ or a ‘dark, satanic mill’. And yet, as we sailed up the fjord I had the strong impression of a meeting between a new age and an old. At first glance the sight of the vast metalworks, the production halls and the towering silos in which the raw material, oxide, was stored, was impressive. But when I thought about it I realised that the Voyager, our modest little craft, housed an industry every bit as great. It had struck me before that our boat, with its enormous capacity for storing information and its possibilities for wireless communication with the whole world, represented something bigger, mightier, than all the Hydro Aluminium buildings in this mountain-encircled basin. In terms of potential the Voyager was, in fact, an aircraft carrier; theoretically we could sit here, out on the fjord, and generate assets as great as Hydro earned by selling the aluminium made at Høyanger. Sailing there on the fjord, we provided the perfect illustration of the new Norway and the old. A small mobile object approaching something massive and steadfast. And vulnerable. No one, least of all the townsfolk, could tell when the owners of Høyanger’s cornerstone industry might see fit to shut down the plant, possibly set up production elsewhere.
Sogn. Again and again I was struck by how extraordinary, how unique, this area was. In many ways it was Norway in a nutshell. Until well into the nineties there was not a single state wine monopoly outlet in the Sogn and Fjordane region. And in the whole district there was but one set of traffic lights. Sogn was like a little Switzerland smack in the middle of Norway. Often, when we sailed round a point and one of those little towns hove into view, tucked away at the head of an inlet or the arm of a fjord and ringed by high mountains, I would find myself thinking that there was something unreal about it, that it was a bit like the valley of Tralla La in Carl Barks’s story about Uncle Scrooge; a place where everyone was happy. And people in Sogn were happy. A host of surveys confirmed, time and again, that the inhabitants of this region were the most content in the whole country. In every set of statistics they came out on top where what mattered was to be top, and came bottom where that was best. They lived longest and were least sick, if you like.