It was an impressive sight. These young people, in the most fascinating of all the fascinating rooms in the National Gallery; romantic music performed in a gallery full of marble busts and gilded frames, glistening oil paintings of moons half-hidden behind dramatic cloud formations and wrecks being relentlessly beaten against sharp rocks. All the members of the orchestra were elegantly dressed, the boys in dark suits, the girls in long dark-blue frocks of various design, and with their hair up. All were possessed with that elation and ardour only found in young musicians who have just reached the stage where they can master any piece of music. There was an exuberance and a passion in their playing, in the tossing of their heads, the flaring nostrils, the glances they exchanged, that you never saw in an established orchestra consisting of older, experienced musicians. To Jonas they all looked as though they were in love. As though this wholehearted, fiery performance was merely the foreplay to some steamy, feverish lovemaking. He could not tear his eyes away from Sarah. She made a natural focal point with her theatrical, but at the same time natural arm movements. Jonas felt particularly drawn to her hands and fingers; one had the impression that she could have done anything with them, produce sound from a stone. And as he watched, as she kindled and sustained a wonder in him and in the other museumgoers who stopped short then sank down, entranced, onto the chairs set round about, he thought what a rare delight it would be to feel those graceful fingers on the back of his neck, running through his hair.
The paintings gave added resonance to Tchaikovsky’s serenade, the music lent a new glow to the canvases on the walls. Balke’s pale images of the North Cape and the lighthouse on Vardø positively shimmered. Jonas ran his eye over motif after motif, over mountains, glaciers and waterfalls, cog-built farmhouses and milkmaids in traditional costume, menhirs and herds of wild reindeer. It may even have been that Jonas saw the twenty-odd paintings in the room as forming a frieze illustrating Norway itself: an impression so powerful that — yes, why not — he actually began work on his television series Thinking Big right here.
And speaking of that mammoth television production: we have already touched on Jonas Wergeland’s schooldays, so something ought also to be said about the final and by far the most surprising phase of his education, a brief, but momentous apprenticeship on which he embarked towards the end of his time as an announcer on NRK television.
Having abandoned his original, high-flying plans — behind him lay several disheartening years at university and college — Jonas Wergeland considered himself lucky to have found a job in which his talent did not trouble him, where he could, in fact, in all likelihood, have buried it for good and all. But since he and Margrete had been together — he was inclined to say: because of Margrete — an ambition had begun to stir in him once more. He wanted to make television programmes himself. In the early eighties, Jonas Wergeland made the leap from announcer to programme-maker, moved by a desire to try to dive, as it were, from the surface down into the depths. When the NRK bosses agreed to his request he packed his suitcase, with Margrete’s blessing, and left the country. If one did not know better, one might think that he had had second thoughts, that he was running away from his big chance.
Later, all manner of rumours went the rounds — prompted mainly by the acrobatic, televisual feats Wergeland performed — about where he had been and what he had done. Some people affirmed that the original idea discernible behind all of Wergeland’s programmes could only be ascribed to his having been inspired by Sufism during a visit to Samarkand — an assertion which also appeared in print in a serious article. Others maintained, with all the confidence of insiders, that he had been sitting at the feet of the celebrated film director Michelangelo Antonioni. There were even a few who, in the wee, small hours in some bar, could be heard to mumble something about a Mexican woman by the name of Maya. None of these more or less mythical accounts came anywhere close to the truth. Over the years, to the question regarding what had led up to his epoch as a programme-maker, Wergeland honed an honest, if cryptic reply which not uncommonly so nonplussed his interlocutor that he or she asked no more questions: ‘I got to the top by lying on my back.’
In going abroad, Jonas was making a virtue of necessity. Timewise, his trip fell exactly midway between the two referendums which led to Norway saying no to Europe. Although Jonas Wergeland often viewed his homeland as an unscrupulous Festung Norwegen, there were times when he was more inclined to liken the Norwegians’ tendency to shut themselves off to a mentality he found reflected in René Goscinny’s and Albert Uderzo’s hilarious Asterix comics. For while their Gallic neighbours allowed themselves to be conquered by the Romans, Asterix and his kinsmen stood their ground. One small village still held out, as it said at the beginning of each story. The same could have been said of Norway. The way Jonas saw it, the wealthy land of Norway had surprisingly many things in common with Asterix’s indomitable community. Norway, too, shielded itself from the world around it, while raising menhirs to its own excellence and having its praises sung by unspeakable bards. Like Asterix’s Gauls, the Norwegian people considered themselves invincible, and the oil was their magic potion. Jonas Wergeland did not find it at all hard to envisage Norway as the world’s largest village, surrounded, and almost driven into the sea, by the mighty civilisation of the Roman Empire.
But, like Asterix, sometimes one had to journey out — out of the provinces, to the Rome of one’s day. And because of his special requirements, Jonas Wergeland was never in any doubt as to what was the Rome of his day: London. Jonas’s favourite Asterix story was, as it happens, Asterix in Britain. Generally speaking, Jonas felt he had a lot of ties with the British metropolis, from the music of LPs such as Rubber Soul, recorded at Abbey Road, to the exterior scenes from films like Blow-Up, which had got into his blood.
Jonas booked into a hotel in Harrington Road in South Kensington, only a stone’s throw from the tube station. The hotel is under new ownership now, and has a new name. Nonetheless, they ought to hang a plaque on the wall outside, because it was here that Jonas Wergeland laid the foundations of his illustrious career. It was in this part of the city, too, that he would have two encounters which would totally floor him, the one physically, the other mentally.
Jonas Wergeland never took an academic degree in Norway, but if his uncompleted studies in astrophysics and architecture could be said to count as a foundation course of sorts, then his major course of study was conducted in London. Jonas always maintained that he left Norway to study at Britain’s foremost university. And by Britain’s foremost university he meant neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but British Television. Jonas Wergeland travelled to London quite simply to watch television. So he had only two requirements in choosing a hoteclass="underline" the television in his room and the accompanying remote control had to be in good working order, and the bed had to meet a satisfactory standard. I should perhaps also say that this was in the days before satellite dishes made it possible for NRK — or anyone else, for that matter — to receive virtually any channel you could wish for. Although Jonas would probably have gone anyway: he preferred to conduct these studies in secret.
Having got himself installed, he strolled eagerly down to Exhibition Road and a shop selling art materials. Here he purchased a large notebook with blank pages and marbled covers together with a couple of good pens. For once, Jonas Wergeland was planning to write, and to his mind this was such a momentous decision that he thought of his new acquisition as a copybook, much like the ones in which he had written his first ‘a’s, or ‘H’s, ladders up which to climb. In a newsagent’s next to the tube station he bought the TV Times and the Radio Times, which between them provided information on the week’s programmes on all four channels. And the rest, you might say, is history. Jonas pulled out a pen, opened the notebook at the first blank page, switched on the TV and settled back on the bed, and there he stayed. In one month he got through four thick notebooks with different coloured marbled covers, filling them with terse notes in tiny writing, as well as lots of little diagrams and sketches. In later years he would refer to these four volumes as ‘the golden notebook’.