Being a conceited teenager I carefully read the local paper to see whether it reported the impending concert and I was pleased to see that it did so, even though it was only a couple of lines at the bottom of page 17, squashed under a rather longer report about proposals to repaint a local zebra crossing. Two other reports in the paper were more interesting. The first read:
A man due to appear in court accused of being drunk and disorderly thought he would be sent to prison. So in a “state of hopelessness” he stole lead from Forest House, Bacup, a brass table top from Heightside Mission, a table from Bainbridge Slipper Works, an antique clock from Bethel Baptist Church Hall, and a bottle of sherry from outside a supermarket. “He felt he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb,” said Mr Philip Whittaker, defending, at Rossendale Magistrates Court on Monday.
There is something about the list of items and about the defence in court that has kept me amused for many years. If this news story seems to epitomise northern comedy, the second one seems like the plot of some Victorian whodunit:
After being tricked into leaving his home by bogus policemen, a diamond merchant who became goat farmer returned to find items worth an estimated £186,519 missing, Burnley Crown Court was told last week.
There are so many questions I would love to ask. Did the diamond merchant become a goat farmer because he had lost his property, or for some other reason? Bogus policemen? How did he come to have £186,519 worth of removable items in his home (at that time an average house would have cost perhaps £20,000)? And how is a value estimated to £186,519 (rather than £186,520, for instance?). Rossendale life was never dull.
“Would you give a recital to mark the re-opening of an organ?” Given that this was the second “opening recital” that year I couldn’t resist a private smirk of self-satisfaction whilst confirming that “I could probably fit that in”.
It was a strikingly modern church in a suburb of Reading, and its pleasant little organ – like most of the rest of the church – was still packed up in plastic whilst a leaky roof was being repaired. The organ (though relatively new) had received a small makeover whilst the church was closed, so its unveiling, and that of the rest of the church, was an event worthy of celebration.
The organist, the minister and the churchwardens all met up to show me round, clearly proud of the now-watertight building. “What do you think of it?”. It was a fine, light, practical space and there were a hundred compliments I could and should have paid it. “It’ll look good when the scaffolding comes down”, I said. A lengthy silence followed this remark and glances were exchanged to decide who was going to point out that the tubular-steel bars criss-crossing the ceiling had earned the distinguished (and knighted) architect an award.
I still did the concert, of course, and asked my friend and fellow-student Steve Wellmann to play the violin as well, for moral as well as musical support, but somehow my copybook was blotted and, unusually, I remember very little of the concert other than telling myself “don’t mention the roof!”.
Playing music in such circumstances is an odd and unnatural experience: playing "correctly" is so important that personal expression - or humour, even - becomes secondary. Music shouldn’t really be competitive (it’s about communicating feelings rather than showing how clever the performer is), but as a student, life is competitive, exam-based and without the luxury of a conscience.
The competition involved playing a couple of prepared pieces and a completely unfamiliar piece "at sight" before a judge, who in this instance was a distinguished composer.
I survived the set pieces, somehow, without catastrophe. The distinguished judge then placed some music on the organ; a recent publication by an important university press. "Take a minute to look through it and then play this". I took a minute. Evidently a trickly exercise in coordination, made worse by the fact that it was in a "modern" and thoroughly unpredictable idiom. The music seemed "cold" and without any particular meaning, but I struggled through it after a fashion and was pleased, or rather relieved, to make it to the end without complete disaster.
The joy and relief of finishing almost made the ordeal seem worthwhile as I finally relaxed into euphoria. "Who on earth wrote this stuff?", I enquired of the distinguished judge, handing back the sight reading.
"I did".
How I came to win that competition I'll never know.
The opera contains some sections for choir, some for soloists and a little orchestral music and, for whatever reason, Peter decided that he wished to conduct the choral and orchestral bits but to play the harpsichord during the soloists' sections. This meant, of course, that someone else had to conduct during the solos and play the harpsichord during the orchestral and choir sections. This job fell to me.
The only problem with this system is that Purcell's music, rather than being divided into distinct sections, runs from the one number to the next without a break, meaning that there were no obvious opportunities for Peter Wishart and myself to swap tasks.
Undeterred, Peter designed a cunning and novel solution - a long and well-polished harpsichord bench. As one number drew to a close the person conducting would sidle across to the right-hand end of the bench, sit down and begin to edge towards the middle, conducting with the right hand and taking over the flow of harpsichord notes with the left. The harpsichordist would edge off the left-hand end of the bench and take up the conducting.
The system worked well and enabled regular, seamless handovers between conductor and harpsichordist. Nevertheless, it can't really be described as a success because the audience was so enthralled by the comic double-act being played out between the musicians that they found it difficult to pay attention to the drama that was taking place on stage.
It was Johnny's last degree ceremony before his retirement and his colleagues at University House came to me with an unusual request. "Would I", they asked, "play as the final music after the ceremony some variations on the old wartime song 'When Johnny comes marching home again'"? I wasn't sure whether I dared break so radically with tradition but I was anxious to please, and besides I liked Johnny and wanted to make the event memorable for him.
At the end of the ceremony I played "When Johnny comes marching home again" followed by a compact set of home-made variations. I expected an amused reaction to such a break with tradition - a chuckle, perhaps, when people realised what I was playing, or an appreciative comment afterwards. The music was met with silence and no-one spoke to me on leaving (though I had an impression that one or two people muttered things under their breath). It obviously hadn't gone down very well at all. Not even Johnny came across to chat. As I slunk away, the temperature seemed to have fallen by several degrees.
It was several days later when one of my more outspoken colleagues asked what on earth I'd been thinking of to do such a thing at a degree ceremony. I explained that I didn't normally indulge in frivolity but that the request had come from the University Registry and I didn't really see the harm in it. "No harm in insulting the students?", spat my colleague. I had clearly committed a graver offence than I imagined, but it was (surprisingly, perhaps) some time before the truth sank in. The tune "When Johnny comes marching home again" is far better known to an entirely different set of words -- the children's song about Noah, "The animals came in two by two". Neither the students nor their parents knew James Johnson as "Johnny", nor was his impending retirement at the forefront of their minds; their whole attention that day was naturally on the students, coming two by two into the hall to receive their degrees.
John Stanley, one of the greatest English-born composers of the eighteenth century, wrote many "voluntaries". 30 were published at the time and half a dozen others survive in manuscripts scattered around the world. In a series of three concerts in London I was to play all these works: almost certainly the first time all of the published and unpublished voluntaries had been brought together in one concert series.
Playing the unpublished works entailed making copies of the manuscripts, which is why I found myself one day in Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum, reciving stern instructions about how to handle the museum's treasures. "When you want to see the next page, please raise your hand and an assistant will turn the page for you. Do not under any circumstances touch the paper, and try to avoid breathing on it if possible".
Was it a trill or just a smudge? After an hour or so of concentrated and painstaking work I'd copied out most of the piece, working bar by bar and then double- and triple-checking for accuracy. The notes were beginning to blur and I bent low over the manuscript (not breathing, of course) to try to make them out.
Plop. A little puddle of blood had arrived on the desk, almost touching the manuscript. It is said that a shock is the best cure for a nosebleed and I can attest to the fact. As I glanced round, convinced that if touching the manuscript was an offence then bleeding on it would surely be worth years in jail, the nosebleed stopped instantly. No-one had noticed and I furtively wiped the desk.
Was it worth the effort? Certainly. The piece was attractive enough and it made the series complete. Or at least it would have done if I hadn't left my copy on the train on the way to the concert.
It was a dilemma, though with years of hindsight neither the concert nor my decision was as significant as it seemed to me at the time. Should I confess my stupidity - admit that the "complete Stanley" series was not in fact complete at all because one movement of it was presently in a cleaner's bin bag at Paddington station? Or was there another way? What would the great Roger North have done? I decided just to make it up.
Roger North's "perfect volunteer" understood the style of the music so well that he could improvise at the drop of a hat, just as (according to North) "common fiddlers can play whilst fast sleep". So improvising a missing movement was actually thoroughly in the style of eighteenth-century England and therefore authentic. In fact, it was more authentic than playing the real thing would have been. Or so I told myself.
One further problem remained. My intended page-turner was unable to get to the concert, so a gentleman in the audience volunteered to help out. He diffidently hoped that he would manage the task and asked me to give a clear nod whenever I wanted a page turning. I promised to do this and generously told him a little about John Stanley, organs and music in general, information he seemed glad to have. "At least", I thought, "I now don't have to explain the missing movement to my page turner, so no-one will ever know".
The concert proceeded well enough. I gave clear signals to the volunteer page turner so that he would know when to turn and at the appropriate moment I slyly improvised a short movement in the style of John Stanley, without the page turner noticing.
"Ah, this one's my favourite", observed the page turner suddenly, just before I played the final piece. This innocent comment was disconcerting. It implied that the page turner could read music well enough to recognise his favourite piece, which meant that he undoubtedly had noticed the fake movement. Not only that, but the wide-ranging knowledge of John Stanley's music implied by the fact that he had a favourite movement at all, was not in the least what I wanted to hear.
The stranger was very gracious, thanked me for the concert and said that he had enjoyed the experience of page turning. And he did not refer at all to his recent book, which had dealt in some depth with John Stanley's organ music. He was, in fact, the perfect volunteer.
The young William had learned his composing craft by being apprenticed to another local organist, one Thomas Curtis, composer of Divine amusement: a selection of psalms and hymns and The Jessamine: six new songs; the latter apparently sung at the “grand lodge of the Noble Order of true Brittons” and with texts such as:
Ye true BRITTONS all whose brave Loyalty Dares,
To face the French King and his Popish Snares;
Exert all your Might in sound Liberty’s cause,
And Stand by true BRITTONS and Stand by their Laws;
Then haste to the Bottle, & Joyously sing,
To Glory & Health, & long life, of our KING,
In a Bumper drink lasting Success to our Arms,
That BRITTONS may ever be free from Alarms.
I just had to quote this because it’s so awful and because I do wonder what was in the Bottle to which the True-Brittons were hastening (smuggled French brandy, perhaps?). Another Curtis song “On the intended French invasion of England in 1798 … in which is introduced his imitation of the Trumpet, as performed by him in Private Concerts” (such a loss to the public) includes the immortal lines:
“Their flat-bottom’d Boats, and the Rafts, and their Schemes
Will soon glide away like a drunken-Man’s Dreams”
– with any luck the only song ever to feature the words “flat-bottom’d Boats”.
With such a teacher we have to admire Smethergell’s accomplishment and wonder what he would have composed if he’d had the advantage of being taught by a Handel or a Mozart.
It was a bitterly-cold winter's day. To get to Boxhill I had to change trains somewhere; there was a coal fire in the station and I warmed my hands gratefully. At Boxhill I set about obeying the instructions, though rather hesitantly. Had I misunderstood? Ringing the doorbell and then walking off seemed so very eccentric, but ...
And there I was, in Susi Jeans' stone-flagged kitchen, being invited to huddle closer to the stove so that I didn't freeze, and being presented with a priceless manuscript in one hand and a mug of tomato soup in the other (for warmth). The kitchen looked alarmingly like a Victorian museum that I'd visited the week before, except for piles of books and journals on every flat surface and bottles of vitamins and curious potions in every cupboard. Nothing in the room looked as though it had arrived since the death of King Edward VII except for an electric orange squeezer. "Vhen you go back to Ze university, vill you take zis orange squeezer to ze technical people and ask if zey can fix it?". In utter bewilderment I found myself back at Boxhill Station in the snow, clutching a disfunctional 1950s orange squeezer and somehow – astonishingly – an invitation to return to the most extraordinary home and remarkable person I'd ever encountered. "And do call me Susi, everybody does".
As the years went by I returned regularly to Cleveland Lodge for organ lessons – Susi Jeans' organ lessons were like nothing else on earth yet somehow she managed to managed to infuse something of her remarkable wisdom into all her pupils – and for her boundless friendship and hospitality. I even lived at the house for half a year whilst writing up my doctorate, but of this, of course, I had no inkling as I headed back towards Guildford, wondering what on earth I should say to the university technicians (assuming I managed to find any) when I, a guest at the place, turned up with stranger's orange squeezer. No-one else could have made me do it.
Everyone knows that microphones are dangerous things and not to be trusted. I sat on another organ bench on another day in connection with a live radio broadcast. I wasn't enjoying it. Nowadays I refuse to play any music that I don't like - not to be awkward but because unless I'm passionate about the music I can't possibly make other people excited by it, which is after all my job. But as a young performer, conscience is spelt h-u-n-g-e-r. I played the music and grumbled about it to my page turner. "You know, just listen to this next bit: can you imagine anyone composing something so dreary?". My page turner agreed: "There's a lady with a pink hat over there and I think she's asleep". Only afterwards did someone helpfully point out that there was a microphone placed immediately above my head. At least anyone who was bored by the music would have been kept entertained by the comments, but it was one of several occasions when I started investigating career openings for fishermen in the south seas or shepherds in Argentina.
I've never been able to concentrate for more than half an hour or so at a time on any one bit of music and it struck me the following morning, as I moved a couple of half-full mugs of peppermint tea away from the organ, that Susi had evidently been practicing the same piece of Schmidt nearly all night – something that made me thoroughly ashamed of my own laziness. Worse still, the same happened the following night and the night after.
A week or so later, back home in Wales, there was a call from Susi. She was due to give a Schmidt concert at the Royal College of Organists in London in less than a couple of weeks but was too ill; would I be a dear and give the concert for her? Looking back I wonder whether this was another instance of Susi's selfless generousity; the concert was a high-profile event organised by the BBC and the Austrian Institute at a venue where all the best organists would be present. Why ask a young student to stand in when there were many better-qualified individuals who would have leapt at the chance? Was it because her illness was not actually so serious at all but she was offering this opportunity as a gift? Whatever the reason, it was a powerful lesson about encouragement. It was also a great challenge. On the programme was Schmidt's C-major Toccata – the piece that I'd heard during the nights. It was hard. And very long. I spent most of the intervening days and nights learning it – and the rest of the Schmidt programme – for probably the most nerve-wracking concert I've ever played at. In the event, Susi was well enough on the day to play a part of the programme and I took the rest (including the Toccata). Given the short preparation time and the stress of the event I don't know how well the performance went but the audience was kind and simply being there was a huge privilege. Even now whenever I play that Toccata I hear the pedal notes as if they were still drifting up through the floorboards on those long-ago nights at Cleveland Lodge, and wish I could turn back the clock and be woken by them again.
People make some odd requests of their organist. At the one extreme, a couple optimistically asked me for “The Messiah” at their wedding, whilst at the other extreme (from sublime to ridiculous) someone wanted “I’m for ever blowing bubbles”. I read an article about wedding music once in a bridal magazine which recommended Sweelink’s beautiful variations on “Mein Junges Leben hat ein End” – a fantastic piece of music but the author didn’t seem to understand or appreciate the irony of the title (“my young life is at an end”)! I've never been asked to play "Fight the good fight" (though a prospective Anglican minister did want to go out to "The War March of the Priests"), but without question the most memorable choice was at a wedding in Wales. Although the couple (and, so far as I know, their families) spoke only English, they had decided to add some "local colour" to the proceedings by including a Welsh hymn. I can only imagine that this hymn was selected randomly from the hymn-book pages headed "weddings", without noticing that the section heading had actually changed half-way down the page. I believe (and hope) that the minister and myself were the only two people in the church to understand what we were singing. We tried to avoid each other's eyes as we both had difficulty maintaining an appearance of respectful composure whilst we sang:
Arglwydd mewn trugaredd, Moes dy nefol hedd
I'r eneidiau ffyddlon Aeth drwy byrth y bedd.
Yma, mewn gorthrymder, blinder beunydd ddaw,
Yno, wedi'r ymdrech, boed eu rhan heb fraw.
To give a very literal word-for-word translation:
Lord in your mercy, grant your heavenly peace
To the faithful souls going through the gates of the grave
Here, in oppression, daily troubles come,
There, after the struggle, let them be without pain.
Severe were their sorrows during the great battle,
Good doctor, put your ointment on their wounds now;
O healer full of grace give complete cleaning,
Forgive their transgressions through your valuable mercy.
And so it continued. As the antithesis of a wedding hymn it could hardly have been better chosen.
The boy, of course, was Aled Jones and he rocketed to stardom so fast that that first record fell foul of a new recording contract and was not released for another twenty years. But there were plenty more occasions to enjoy Aled's singing as we worked together on a number of occasions.
So it was that one icy-cold winter's day Aled and I set off in my car to Clynnog Fawr to record a series of programmes for the Welsh channel HTV. As we drove down the winding lanes, the boot of the car in front of us suddenly opened and a box of eggs flew out. The lady driver was evidently unaware of her mishap and due to the narrowness of the road and the necessity to avoid the tins of beans and bags of flour that one by one followed the eggs every time the car hit a bump, we were unable to get past to warn her.
After a journey that had been anything but dull, we arrived at the medieval church of Clynnog. This evocative building was an inspired choice, though not an especially practical one. The facilities were sufficiently limited that the recording was treated effectively as an "outside broadcast", powered and managed from the HTV van parked just outside the church door, which was left open to allow the cables to be run through. Unfortunately, the organ was located just inside the door, through which a sharp wind was blowing a substantial snowfall.
"Try not to breathe when the camera's pointing your way", said the director. "I can see your breath". Every now and again an assistant arrived to brush the steadily-accumulating snow off the organ keys."Try to look comfortable, won't you?".
But it was worth every frozen minute and every numb finger.
During the first couple of pieces I was puzzled by the amount of coughing from the audience. Concert-goers are generally very polite and try hard not to make too much noise during pieces, but Tyneside evidently had an altogether different culture. After a fe wminutes I jumped off the organ bench to introduce the next work - if nothing else, talking to an audience is a good way of re-establishing personal contact when the organ is up on a gallery. But the audience was nowhere to be seen. In fact, nothing was to be seen except dense cloud.
Within a minute I was coughing as well and the concert was halted for a while. It seems that the underfloor heating system had chosen that evening to burn out and and release clouds of fumes into the church.
The Chancellor (The Prince of Wales) was visiting Bangor to celebrate the centenary of the University college by distributing honorary degrees. As well as processional music from the organ and royal trumpeters, I was to play a short programme of music at the start of the proceedings.
The College had been in a frenzy of cleaning and painting for weeks, whilst security precautions ranged from checking guests to allocating private facilities to the royal visitor. It did not seem worth the effort of organising security clearance for a page turner to join me on the platform so I asked for someone to be nominated for this task.
The nominated page turner turned out to be a lady of ample proportions with the endearing habit of grasping each page firmly by the bottom right-hand corner (thus obscuring the last few bars of notes) and slowly turning the page before carefully wiping her hand a few times across the new page to flatten it out - an effect rather like trying to look through over-active windscreen wipers.
It was hot on the platform. Not only was it a warm day but hall and platform were tightly-packed with people wearing heavy academic gowns. In addition, powerful floodlights were aimed at the platform for the benefit of television cameras recording the event. Sitting at the organ, in the middle of the platform, I was uncomfortably aware of being in full view of everyone present and struggled not to suffer too visibly.
My page turner was evidently suffering, too, and found it necessary to sit down. The only seat available was the end of the organ bench, but being generously built she took a disproportionate amount of space, forcing me to move over towards the other end of the bench. As she gradually made herself more comfortable I found myself being pushed further and further towards the edge until it was a struggle to reach some of the higher notes and I wondered whether I eventually would be pushed right off.
Sitting down seemed to offer some respite but now the page-turner's legs were not quite comfortable so she placed both feet solidly down in front of her, completely oblivious to the fact that she was now pressing the pedals and producing dischords entirely unplanned by the composer.
"Would you move your feet, please?", I hissed. She seemed surprised and stood on a few more pedals to support her whilst she shuffled into a different position on the bench. "You're playing pedal notes!", I shouted. She looked at me quizzically, trying to work out what this strange organist was asking her to do now.
It must have been a surprising and disturbing experience for her to find her legs being kicked out of the way, but then organists are strange creatures and have to be humoured. And it all created an unusual diversion on film.
The programe included an intensely moving and quiet Stabat Mater and it was at the most sombre and poignant moment of this work that a particularly forceful gust of wind chose to attack. The choir clung tightly onto their music, the conductor steadied himself and my page turner grabbed wildly at the music rack to stop the book from flying across the square.
From the loudspeakers in all directions came a new sound: "cha, cha-cha cha, pling! cha, cha-cha cha, pling!". The page turner and I tried dozens of buttons before we found the one that was bringing an entirely new dimension to the work, while the conductor glared and the choir fought a new battle, this time to recover composure.
The electronic keyboard that had contributed to all this trouble was a very long, slender instrument housed for transport in a sturdy box. Although not well disposed towards it I did agree to keep it for a couple of days in my office at the University until it was collected. When the time came for it to leave I asked the porter to help me carry it down the stairs and along the corridors to the main entrance. He suggested that we should protect the box from knocking against sharp corners by covering it with a blanket, to which I readily agreed. It was summer, the students were away and some Americans were holding a conference in the building. As the porter and I carried our long, thin, blanket-covered box past small groups of the American visitors, they stopped their chattering and stood to attention. One man removed his hat. At least it was a delightfully dignified exit for an instrument that had managed so little dignity in its concert.
Another characteristic of Cleveland Lodge was that every room contained a half-drunk mug of cold peppermint tea. Susi's progress around the house would be punctuated by a mouthful from whichever mug was nearest at hand. Once – only once, and on one of my very first visits to the house – I made the mistake of tidying up one of the mugs and washing it up in the kitchen. The absence of the mug was noticed almost immediately and earned a rebuke that left no doubt about my error.
Opening a cupboard door, especially in the kitchen, was an operation that demanded some care to avoid being buried under a cascade of vitamin bottles. Susi kept herself enthusiastically informed about research into the health benefits of Alpha-tocopherol vitamin E in relation to cancer, heart attacks, strokes and joint disease. These ideas seemed rather cranky and unfashionable in the 1980s but curiously, a quarter of a century later are receiving a good deal more scientific attention. In any event, Susi kept the local chemist in business with standing orders for specialist vitamins (collecting these was another job for her students!) and the occasional waterfall of pill bottles was a well-known hazard around the house. Eventually the vitamins proved to be a different sort of hazard. Susi wrote to me in January 1989: "I started again a terrible cough, just after Christmas and thought I was in for pneumonia, until I managed to cough up a vitamin E capsule which stuck somewhere low down in the trachea. I soon felt better"
Susi's prolific and long letters to me were always a source of entertainment. I've kept over 50 of them and they remain a treasured possession. "Please excuse terrible handwriting. I sit on the floor and try to dry my hair in front of my stove, my hair-dryer vanished while being used to warm up frozen pipes" (1985). "I had 4 wonderful days [walking and mountain climbing in Austria] ... only once got into trouble when a herd of goats and rams with enormous horns tried to push me off into something like a ravine. I found that only by attacking them with a big piece of wood, I managed to shoo them away. ... Here now [back home] life is on the whole quite hard. Had to get onto the roof to sweep the leaves off, help the chimney sweep; and some others to open the manholes" (1983 - aged 72). "When I type, all the papers, pencils, etc. round the typewriter fall down on the floor! ... I think I might try a computer, could you tell me, where the most knowledgeable one is?" (1983).
It wasn't long before the weather showed its hand. As I waited in Newcastle for the ferry across the North Sea, a cold wind was blowing angry waves across the harbour. As the ferry set off from the dock it was already lurching violently and before we had left the harbour area a member of the ferry's crew was being conspicuously sick in a corner - an ill omen. So lucky, I thought happily, that I never get seasick. Although we spent the next 24 hours crossing the North Sea in the company of Hurricane Charlie I saw nothing of either from the wretched seclusion of a toilet compartment and it was not until we were cruising up the coast of Norway the next day that my eyes began to focus again and the desire for life began to return.
A 24-hour train journey took me to the northern town of Mo, where it deposited me at 4.30 in the morning. Alone, very hungry and a long way from home I wondered the deserted and silent streets of a town that felt in every sense foreign. At six, some lights came on in a small hotel and I went in to find somewhere warm and light to sit down, hoping to hide out of the way behind a potted plant and wait for morning. Reality turned out even better, however, as the kindly hotel staff took pity and rapidly produced for their lone and unexpected guest the most wonderful breakfast. Freshly-baked breads and rolls of every description, eggs, cold meats, herring in every kind of pickle, cheeses and pastries were all washed down with gallons of coffee and juice. It was a heartened and severely over-fed organist who a couple of hours later set off walking towards the nearby community of Ytteren, in search of the first concert.
Everything was fresh and new: the surrounding mountains had a first dusting of snow, the fjord glistened in the sunshine and even the road signs were somehow novel and exciting. A pair of 8-year-old girls on bicycles rode down the pavement and I stopped them to ask where the church was. They introduced themselves as Camilla and Priscilla and told me the way. The church was a modern, light and airy building with an excellent new German organ at the front; ideal for a concert. The people were warm, friendly and interested; so delightful that a couple of decades later I'm still in touch with several of them.
The following day the bus drove over the mountains towards the coast. Long sections of the road were unsurfaced and occasionally the bus drove over rickety wooden bridges to cross waterfalls and canyons. The road was being improved here and there, and at one point two diggers, which were in the way of the bus, both had to raise their shovels so that the bus could squeeze past between them. The journey ended with a breathtaking two-and-a-half-hour ferry ride amongst small islands; mountains rising vertically out of the sea, an unimaginably spectacular and beautiful landscape. I struggled ashore with my arctic boots and thermals to sit in the warmth of my host’s garden with the hot northern sun beating down on a clear-blue sea and thousands of brilliantly-coloured flowers peeping out amongst the grass.
I gave three concerts on different islands in this group: Lurøy, Lovund and Træna. The first of these made such a profound impression that just one year later, as a young newly-married organist, I made it my home, so I’ll say no more of it for the moment. The second, Lovund, was a peaceful and beautiful island, home to 350 people and a fish-exporting trade of thoroughly international dimensions. I’d been given a description of the island in advance, which mentioned amongst other things that “the island has a cementary, but not many people are buried there”. Curious to see whether the infamous “concrete waistcoat” had indeed made it to the Norwegian coast I found that the islanders had a wonderful longevity. Unusually, there was a funeral whilst I was there, and the whole island turned out to walk behind the “hearse” (a tractor with the coffin tied to the fork). I visited the founder of a salmon-exporting company whose products were familiar in several countries. He was a kindly, quiet man who asked me particularly to play “Jesu, joy of man’s desiring” on his grand piano. He was celebrating his eightieth birthday and asked me to join him for coffee and cake. As we sat and discussed his beloved island the front door opened (it’s not the custom to knock on the door on these islands) and a sprightly old man walked in and sat himself on the settee. My host turned to me and said: “this is my father …”.
During the concert the local organist translated my remarks about the music. It was an unfamiliar experience to speak to an audience through an interpreter, but it functioned reasonably well. One of the pieces I played was entitled “Elves” and was a 19th-century French tone poem depicting, well, elves. I tried to explain this to the interpreter. “Elves?” he enquired, blankly. I tried a variety of explanations. Small people who weren’t really there, that sort of thing. This only made him more confused, until, in a moment of inspiration I said: “like fairies”. This he understood and explained at considerable length to the audience, using curious wobbly hand movements. After the concert I asked him to tell me just what he’d told the audience about the “elves”. He explained that he’d told them that I’d chosen to play the music because it was so relevant to their situation, being all about island communities and boats carrying people and goods across the sea. Ferries. Ah well.
Træna, a mountainous island far out in the sea, seemed oddly familiar, though of course I’d never been there before. As a small child I’d been fascinated by my parents’ atlas, which included a small selection of black-and-white photographs of exotic places around the world. I longed to visit these amazing places and meet the people who lived there. It was some years before I revisited this atlas and found to my astonishment that one of these photographs had been of Træna (though incorrectly labelled in the atlas as being in the Lofoten islands). The organ in Træna was the best instrument in the region, though it suffered from a very rattly pedalboard and rather cramped conditions. Despite my best efforts from the organ gallery, the rattles and bangs from the pedals were clearly audible down in the church. Even more worryingly, a light switch was placed under the keyboards, just at knee level, which turned the gallery lights on whenever I played an F#. A group of teenagers (the “Træna tearaways” or some such) came to the concert (there obviously wasn’t a lot else to do on the island). I don’t think they thought much of the music, but at least they felt at home with the percussion and lights show.
The tour continued, first to nearby mainland and then to southern Norway, but it was these islands that were the really memorable part of the trip: and the excitement has never faded.
As we returned home from tea with the bank manager, we noticed a lonely figure with a paint brush, high up the church spire, painting. It was the "major".
The vast grandeur of the seascape and the different shapes of the mountain islands has made this part of Norway rich in history and in legend. During the Second World War the remote island mountains and caves became hiding places for members of the Norwegian resistance against the German occupiers. For instance John Kristoffersen, a young man from Lurøy, hid for months in a little den in Lurøy Mountain, radioing vital information about the movements of passing German shipping to the Allies, before his location was discovered and he made a most daring and brilliant escape from the clutches of many soldiers to continue his resistance work elsewhere. Centuries earlier, the tales were of a different nature. Local chieftains Vågakallen and Suliskongen had disobedient children: the former a son, Hestmannen (”the horseman”) and the latter eight daughters who he tried to keep under close control. One evening the daughters sneaked out to dance and bathe in the moonlit sea. Hestmannen saw them and fell in love with the eldest daughter, Lekamøya. He came to take her but the girls fled southwards, with Hestmannen riding in pursuit, his cape flapping behind him. The seven younger daughters, exhausted, leaped out of the way at Alstahaug whilst Lekamøya continued down the coast to Brønnøysund. Realising he could not catch up, Hestmannen shot an arrow at her. A nearby troll king (Skarsfjellgubben) saw what was happening and threw his hat in the way of the arrow. The arrow went right through the hat and landed nearby. At that point the sun came up and (as generally happens in such cases) all the characters were turned to stone, where they remain to this day: the island of Lekamøya, Torghatten (a hat-shaped island with a hole through it, near Brønnøysund), the seven sisters (a mountain range near Sandnessjøen), Hestmannen (an island resembling a horseman with trailing cape, near Lurøy) and the two chieftains, Suliskongen and Vågakallen, furthest north in Salten and Lofoten respectively.
It was to be a long time before Norwegian came as naturally and easily as English or Welsh. A couple of years after these conversations I met a local farmer who lived with his aged (and occasionally absent-minded) mother. "Ho gamle mor har vandret bort i natt", he said, which I understood perfectly. His aged mother had wandered off in the night. "Should I help you look for her?" I suggested, helpfully. This comment was greeted by one of those protracted silences that never seem to bode well. I went home shamefully to revise my euphamisms: "left us", "fallen asleep", "gone to a better place". There's no end to it. Or just the one, I suppose.
Tracy and I were joined on this flight by an old friend, Margaret. It was Margaret's first visit to us on our little Arctic island; her first visit, indeed, to Norway, though there were to be many more. I must introduce her. Life would have been so much poorer for Tracy and I if we had never met Margaret. Gracious in the best sense of the word, she is a lady of entirely indeterminate age who is perpetually calm, considerate and warm-hearted. If life were a film in which the few survivors of a tropical plane crash had dodged the sharks and swum ashore only to be surrounded by hungry cannibals, Margaret is the lady with the unruffled hair-do who would arrange a table under a parasol and invite the cannibals to a cup of Earl Grey while they told her their troubles.
Our early-morning flight took us via Copenhagen to Trondheim, where we had left our car in a lock-up compound at a petrol station in Hell, close to the airport. (That Trondheim's airport is in the village of Hell is rarely advertised: after all, who would buy a one-way ticket there?). On landing we received the bad news that none of our checked-in luggage had arrived with us. It was, however, soon traced and the ever-helpful Braathens agreed to fly it up to Bodø airport for collection later. Thankfully, I had as usual brought the case of organ music as hand luggage. Reaching the petrol station, we were told that the man with the key to the padlock had gone off on some indeterminate errand, but if we cared to sit down with a cup of coffee he'd probably be back sooner or later. Life in Norway just won't be rushed.
Our 8-hour drive homewards took us north up the E6 (a road which in those days was of such dire quality that it was often referred to as NATO's last line of defence against a Russian invasion), through the broad fields and elegant farms of North Trøndelag, the forests and salmon rivers of Namskogen and the steadily more dramatic hills and moors of Nordland; then from Mosjøen past the little island of Sundøy that always seemed so inviting and out to the sea to catch our ferry. Tracy was to stay at home whilst Margaret and I carried on to Bodø for the concert, but as we all wanted to wind down after the first stage of the journey we all took the ferry to our island.
Of all the time we lived on our island I never remember it being more perfect than that day. As we walked in the hot sunshine from the little harbour to our house, the flowers by the roadside seemed to be competing to impress, Lurøy’s mountain rose into a cloudless sky and the sea was the brilliant blue that can only be found within the Arctic Circle. Even we were speechless at the beauty of it all; Margaret simply said: “Now I understand why you live here. I never imagined it could be like this”. A cup of tea later, Margaret and I took the ferry back to the mainland for the next leg of our journey: the six-hour drive up the coast road to Bodø. Being without luggage until we reached Bodø, Margaret had borrowed some old clothes from Tracy. The old road that winds along the mountainous Helgeland coast is one of the unsung glories of Norway, but after an hour or two we were hungry enough to stop off at a roadside café where we ordered a large pizza each. Large, we discovered, meant huge; hungry as we were we could only eat one between us and had to smuggle the other one out to the car for later. Margaret was amused to find that the road tunnels under the mountains here were sufficiently long to contain junctions and signposts.
We arrived in Bodø in the early hours of the morning, some 20 hours after leaving Manchester airport. Calling at Bodø airport to collect the baggage which had failed to arrive in Trondheim, we found the place deserted apart from a cleaner who spent some time poking around in evident confusion before eventually locating the bags in a quiet corner. The short drive to our hotel – the impressive SAS hotel in the city centre – was a struggle to stay awake.
Checking in at the hotel, Margaret – having arrived from abroad – was confronted with a long form to fill in. The questions (which were all in Norwegian, of course) I translated into Welsh, but even so we were so tired that it was hard to answer the questions. “Where was I born?”, asked Margaret. The hotel rooms contained a built-in alarm clock, so before settling down for what little remained of the night I set the alarm clock in Margaret’s room as well as the one in my room, just to make sure that we were up for breakfast.
It only seemed a minute or two later that there was a banging on my door. Margaret was concerned that her alarm clock was ringing and she didn’t know how to turn it off. It was very loud and she was worried that it would disturb other people. It took a moment to realise that the ringing was actually the hotel’s fire alarm and it was still only 5am. After a brief trip to the assembly point in the hotel car park, we were able to return for the rest of the night.
The morning brought with it a new problem. Although Margaret now had her suitcase of respectable clothes, it was secured by a large padlock, the key to which was in her own clothes now at our house on Lurøy. The hotel had a small collection of padlock keys but nothing that would fit, so the receptionist recommended a nearby blacksmith who was apparently used to cutting padlocks off suitcases. The concert was not until mid-day, which left sufficient time to get the case open. Breakfast was laid out in the hotel’s sumptuous dining room, with its chandeliers and lavishly-mirrored walls. Although Margaret has the ability to look fully in control whatever the circumstances, she did confess to feeling a little uncomfortable in such visibly-opulent surroundings, dressed in hastily-borrowed and heavily-travelled clothes. The local blacksmith kept a huge pair of clippers under the counter for just such occasions and in one snip removed the padlock, allowing Margaret to get hastily changed so that we could get to the cathedral and practice for the concert.
Stepping through the door of Bodø Cathedral we were confronted by an elderly lady who was dressed from head to toe in black. We were even more startled when she greeted us with “Bore da!” (“good morning” in Welsh). She proceeded to tell us her life story. During the Second World War she had been evacuated to a convent in Wales (I never did quite understand how a Norwegian girl came to be evacuated to Wales, but no matter). The nuns, she told us, regarded her first name as unpronounceable (Åshild) and her surname as unseemly (Bugger), “so they just called me Dorothy”.
It’s often the case that a concert given under almost impossible circumstances brings out the best in a performer, tapping perhaps into some hidden reserve of energy and creativity. At any rate, this concert was very successful and enjoyed by an appreciative audience. Åshild/Dorothy was very kind in her comments and insisted on taking Margaret and I round a nearby exhibition of picture frames. We were actually a little short of time because we had to drive through the afternoon to Nesna to catch the last ferry home to Lurøy, where I was playing the following morning, but our host was so delightful that it was impossible to offend her.
Having delayed our departure there was no time to stop for a meal on our way south, but in the car was the remaining pizza, still only 18 hours old. We hastily bought a carton of mixed salad and a bottle of pop from a supermarket and set off. Tea time found us on a layby beside the E6 somewhere south of Fauske. Margaret, still dressed in her finery, sat at a picnic table drinking pop from a bottle and eating a bean salad with her fingers. She reflected that concert tours were never dull but that being appropriately dressed for meals seems to be a particular challenge.
Os itself is a village at the far northern end of Østerdalen, just before the county boundary at which the countryside opens up into the moorland of Trøndelag. The interior of the church was lavishly decorated in a marble pattern of bright colours, whilst on the balcony stood not one but two organs: a very serviceable modern 2-manual organ and a smaller, historic instrument that was not in use. I asked about its history.
In about 1860 a Swedish organ builder called Malmqvist was invited to build an organ for the church at Tolga, the next village down the valley from Os. In order not to disrupt services in the church he built the instrument in an adjacent farm – Storbekken, where incidentally in our time my friend Egil Storbekken made flutes and recorded folk music right up until his death in 2002. Unfortunately, just after the instrument was completed there was a party at the farm and someone rashly used the organ to play dance music on. Obviously, having been used for such a purpose the instrument was tainted and could not possibly be taken into a church, at least in Tolga. Up the road in Os people were not quite so fussy so the organ was taken up there.
While I was in Os, a group of very respectable teachers from the local school invited me to spend a day with them at their cabin in the hills. Most Norwegians have, or have access to, a cabin in the hills. The ideal cabin has neither electricity, running water nor road access (and should involve at least an hour’s walk to get there) but is the perfect base from which to walk, relax, ski, fish, hunt or simply to enjoy the quiet. This cabin offered all these possibilities but first we settled in to enjoy a barbeque. The delicious meat was accompanied by a powerful alcoholic drink which the teachers showed a remarkable reluctance to discuss. Before I left they suggested that I didn’t talk too much about it down in the village, and in fact it might be better if I didn’t say too much about the meat either. Something about shooting permits and the wrong season, or something. But that was the way of things in the remote border region. I later drove over the border into Sweden, just to see what it was like. It was raining. On the way back I stopped to admire the customs post at the Norwegian border. A large sign read “If you have anything to declare, please pass this customs post between the hours of 9am and 4pm”. What a country!
The idea of a stave church is that it is a frame, built around vertical posts and clad in vertical panelling. In the oldest stave churches the wooden posts stood straight into the ground, but as these had a tendency to rot, later builders supported their posts on a stone foundation. At Ringebu, holes can still be seen in the ground from the posts of a yet older church, and some holes from a structure earlier than 200AD (long before Norway was a Christian country). The wooden panelling on the outer walls is protected against the weather by regular repainting with a type of tar. Over the course of a few hundred years, layer upon layer of this tar gives the outer panelling a curious texture. Seeing two American tourists standing with their hands pressed against the outer walls I couldn’t resist moving a little closer to hear what they were saying. I just caught the one saying to the other: “you know, I’m not sure it is plastic …”.
French music, of course, is unlike anything else in creation. Whilst the rest of Europe was busy creating what we ironically call a lingua franca, a universal, Handelian style of music, the French, naturally, were going their own way. One of the founders of this style was none less than the great French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, who was an Italian (unlike Handel, who was a German, educated in Italy, who became English). Lully – a musician and composer of undeniable talent – saw at an early age the possibilities of patronage by the French court and became French. Elbowing his rivals out of the way by any means available (including, in all fairness, by being better than them) he gained enough of a reputation to survive his fondness for seducing pageboys and other practices which make it rather gratifying that he became the only musician ever to die through accidentally stabbing himself whilst conducting. Couperin, at least lived to the age of 65; a good and wise man by all accounts, and admired by his contemporaries including even Bach. This is perhaps not music that shakes and stirs us like that of a Beethoven, but it can certainly move us.
We had arrived in the village some seven weeks earlier and my first experience there reminded me just what village life was like. The very first morning after we arrived I was to attend a meeting in the small town nearby. As I left in the car I passed our village shop, behind which was a tiny business making fishing hooks. I didn't want to be late for the meeting but I thought that (as I hadn't met anyone in the village yet) I could call in anonymously and buy a couple of hooks without being drawn into a long conversation. The owner of the business greeted me warmly. "Didn't you bring hooks with you when you moved?", he asked. My "cover" was obviously blown before I'd said a word. "The bus driver was telling me that you had an English fishing rod". I confirmed that the bus driver had a good eye for equipment and apologised that I was in a hurry. As I was leaving the shopkeeper called me back. "Do you want to buy a boat?", he asked. "No thanks", I said, "I've already got one. Why, are you trying to sell one?". "Oh no, not at all", reassured the man hastily. "It's just that they were saying in the petrol station that you bought a boat magazine yesterday and I thought you might need help finding something suitable".
On the way I reflected that it was a good thing it was a boat magazine I'd bought and that my reading habits don't extend to the picture magazines on the top shelf.
It's always said that in a village you can't sneeze without everyone you meet for the next week enquiring after your health. People brought up in the anonymity of cities wonder at such a visible lifestyle, but years later when tragedy struck our family with such a heavy hand, the closeness of the support we would receive from these same neighbours was the most valuable thing in the world.
The whole village turned out to hear the concert and to chat. A few days later I met a couple of tough, rebellious teenagers, out for an evening's fun with a motorbike. "That Bach piece was really good", said one. It was better than any 5-star review.
At the very beginning of the 17th century, the political situation in Scandinavia was tense. Norway was technically a part of Denmark. The Danes would have liked also to include Sweden in its empire, while the Swedes’ ambition for their own empire included Northern Norway. Armies and weapons were assembled. In 1612 some Scottish army officers undertook on their own account an operation to enlist a mercenary army to fight for the Swedes. They visited prisons and offered prisoners instant freedom if they joined the army, and they press-ganged unfortunate passers-by. It’s a little puzzling that these officers were assembling an army for the “wrong” side: King James I (whose brother was the King of Denmark) was rather cross when he found out, and the whole motley crew had to skip the country in rather a hurry.
Of course, there were two major weaknesses with the plan. Firstly, to get from Scotland to Sweden you have to go through Norway, and there is a certain awkwardness about the idea of walking through Norway with a band of recruits for the Swedish army which was coming to fight the Norwegians. Secondly, when a few officers have recruited three shiploads of murderers and assorted prisoners whose only interest was getting out of prison, and passers-by who had probably just been enjoying a merry evening with a bottle of whisky before waking up in the middle of the North Sea with a hangover and an army number, it would be asking for trouble to give them all firearms. So the entire army (none of whom had any military experience anyway) was to walk unarmed through enemy country.
The ships aimed for the port of Åndalsnes (still a popular destination for British tourist ships). As they entered the Romsdalfjord, they met a fisherman and asked for directions. “We have these boatloads of soldiers who’ve come to fight you. Could you show us where to tie up, please?” The fisherman, called Peder Klungnes, somehow persuaded the Scots that they couldn’t land at Åndalsnes but he invited them to land at his farm (Klungnes) and then walk round the bottom of the fjord (Isfjorden) to Åndalsnes, thus delaying the Scots by at least half a day. It’s thought that having recognised the vistors as Scottish he told them that the landing fees in Åndalsnes were a rip-off and he could do them a better deal.
In any event, as soon as the army had left, Peder Klungnes sent his dairy maid in his fastest rowing boat over to Åndalsnes to warn the men of the town to take up arms to repel the invaders. Being a fairly laid-back town, however, the inhabitants decided simply to offer the visitors coffee and point out the road towards Sweden. They did, however, send a messenger up to the next town, Dombås, asking them to deal with the approaching army. The men of Dombås were also a fairly relaxed bunch who got coffee and waffles ready. “For Sweden, you take the E6 southbound and turn left at Ringebu”. Some of the Dombås men, however, got on their horses and rode down the Gudbrandsdalen Valley, collecting others from the villages along the way. At a place called Kringen, the old road southwards squeezes itself for a couple of miles into a narrow gap between the steep mountainside and a fast-flowing river. A group of people travelling along the road would have to walk single file. The villagers hid themselves amongst the trees on the mountainside, posting a girl called Guri with a horn up the mountain, from where she could see the approaching army. Once the Scots had all spread out along the narrow track, Guri sounded her horn and the locals came out and shot them all. The whole troop was wiped out or captured, although one or two of the Scots must have quietly slipped away during the march south because for years afterwards there were stories of wild men living in the forests around Dombås, playing strange wailing music on dead octopuses and popping into the local Spar to ask whether they stocked haggis.
What is really interesting about this story, however, is that whenever the Scots met with the locals (with Peder the fisherman, with his dairymaid and with an old lady along the road) they had conversations. In other words, ordinary people from 17th century Scotland spoke more or less the same language as ordinary people from Western Norway.
Having played "The arrival of the Queen of Sheba" at Hen church I couldn't help reflecting on the rather less welcomed arrival of the Scots and of their walk right past that very spot.
We checked into a hotel. It was a traditional establishment, immaculate even if some of the floors, walls and doorframes were at rather odd angles. The proprietress did not seem overjoyed to see us. Perhaps she feared the effects of all the cherries we had brought with us. "You are to be in by 10 o'clock, when I will lock the door". So much for a night on the town. "If you wish to watch the television" (slight hint of disapproval at the idea) "there is one in the lounge". I had a distinct feeling that she was about to ask to see our marriage certificate but for some reason she thought better of it. There was a film on that evening so we rather guiltily joined another couple in the lounge for what felt like an illicit pleasure. At 10 o'clock, with half an hour of film still to run, the lounge door opened to reveal the propriertress in the doorway, a bunch of keys in her hand. She stood and jangled them pointedly for a while, clearly indicating that 10 o'clock was also time to turn off the television and get off to bed. The four of us gazed steadfastly at the television. It developed into a quiet war of attrition, in which neither the jangling keys nor the watchers were willing to give way and accept defeat. Victory in the end was ours, but breakfast the next morning was a little strained. When one of the previous evening's miscreants put a coffee cup down on their table the landlady was at their side in an instant, picking up the cup and reuniting it with its allotted saucer with a splendid crash. They don't seem to make landladies like that any more.
We flew to Kirkenes to begin the tour. Kirkenes is a long way away. From Oslo, for instance, Kirkenes is as far away as Milan. According to an internet route planner, to drive through Norway from Kirkenes down to Egersund (in south-west Norway) should take 46 hours of solid non-stop driving (and given the low speed limits that is almost certainly a considerable underestimate). To put it another way, if you were somehow to put a large drawing pin into the bottom of Norway (though it would probably object) and swivel the country round by 180 degrees, the top of Norway would end up in Africa. And whilst we’re gathering interesting facts, Norway’s coastline, counting the fjords and other wiggly bits (remembering that to the East, Norway has a land border, so the coast only goes up one side of the country) is 57000 kilometres long, which is nearly one-and-a-half times the circumference of the earth.
Airports in the far north of Norway vary considerably. The previous year I’d flown into nearby Vadsø airport. As the little 8-seater plane bounced to a stop on the grass, I watched a small lady with a purposeful handbag hurry out of a hut, padlock the door and drive off in a car. She was the control-tower staff and now the plane had arrived she was going home for her tea. Another car (a battered old Nissan) drew up, hitched the aeroplane onto its tow hook and pulled it into the hanger. As I left the airport building the porter padlocked the door behind me and the place was closed for the night. This type of airport is the mainstay of transport, especially away from the coast which is serviced by the daily Hurtigruten steamer.
The airport at Kirkenes is in a different league. Large jets land there regularly, there’s an airport café and if you ignore the reindeer grazing fitfully around the perimeter you could be at any town airport. There are occasional direct flights from London and one of the regular entertainments for the local population is to watch t-shirted visitors, having boarded a plane on a warm day at Heathrow, emerging incredulously into the snow and biting winds of Kirkenes.
The town itself is Norway’s last outpost, bordering onto Russia. We walked up to the border fence on a Friday evening. Where it once was permanently watched from the Russian side by armed troops, it was now (in 1993) deserted. The huge gates were fastened, but only by an absurdly tiny padlock. Russia was closed for the weekend, but not very securely.
Vehicle regulations are very strict in Norway. Not only must cars be in a good technical condition, but they must strictly conform to certain specifications. Different rates of purchase tax are applied to different categories of vehicle: for a domestic car it’s about 100% on top of the actual price, whilst for a commercial vehicle it’s substantially cheaper. Minibuses (10 seats or more) attract no tax at all, which means that large MPVs by Chrysler, Mercedes and others may ironically be much cheaper to buy than an ordinary saloon – provided you have a minibus license to drive them with and are careful to maintain them appropriately. It was recently reported in the media that a family left their large dog in the back of their minibus and returned to find that the dog had eaten one of the seats. On the way home they were stopped by the police and presented with a tax bill of over £25000 for driving a minibus with less than 10 seats. To be a “commercial vehicle” there must be a solid dividing wall between the “goods” and the “passenger” sections of the car. The car that met us at the airport was another indication of how far we were from Oslo. It was a “commercial” vehicle of uncertain pedigree, advanced years and indefinable qualities. The “dividing wall” was missing and our suitcases were loaded into the back on a bed of hay from which sheep had recently been removed. The journey from the airport to the town gave us plenty of opportunity to study the road: it was clearly visible below our feet. The seat belts weren’t attached to anything and the brakes weren’t all they might have been, but the driver was a philosopher worth a 6-hour flight to visit.
After an uneventful concert in Kirkenes we collected a hire car and drove to Vardø. Vardø is the next town-but-one: a six-hour drive along a desolate coast, it’s connected to the mainland by Northern Europe’s oldest undersea road tunnel. Like so many of the places along this coast, it’s a place of superlatives: the world’s most northerly fortress, Norway’s most easterly town, the oldest fishing village in Norwegian Lapland and so on. A raw wind whistles from the sea and into the quiet streets (this is the only town in Western Europe to be officially within the Arctic climate zone). The town centre was full of Russians in fur hats – Vardø has always been an important trading centre with Northern Russia. On the way back to Kirkenes after the concert we called in at Finland and chatted to the customs staff at the border. Here, at Europe’s furthest north-easterly corner, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Russia all meet, but business was slow at the customs station.
A flight to Tromsø heralded the next part of the tour. The Victorians visited Tromsø expecting to find only polar bears, but to their astonishment they found a centre of learning, culture and fashion so striking that they labelled it ‘The Paris of the North’. The modern visitor, taking in all the obligatory superlatives (the world’s most northerly cathedral, university, brewery, etc) whilst sitting at the busy quayside or strolling over the long bridges and watching the ships passing below, finds a city that is sunny both in weather (at least during the summer) and in mood. There is an incurable optimism in Tromsø, and we needed every drop of it when we checked into our hotel with its collapsing furniture and dysfunctional bathroom.
After a surprisingly well-attended concert on the historic and satisfying Claus Jensen organ at Tromsø Cathedral (Norway’s only wooden cathedral) I went to give another concert at Hansnes church on nearby Ringvassøy Island. For Michael Palin, on the first leg of his epic journey “From Pole to Pole”, the island of Fugløy in the Ringvassøy group was his first sight of land after leaving the North Pole, and standing on the quayside in Hansnes does give the impression of being on the very frontier of civilisation. The little café where I had dinner was empty apart from a morose fisherman and a space-invaders machine, but the man from the local culture office, who turned up after a while, was happy: “it’s a lovely community here”. The church was a modern concrete building with a leaky roof (I had to arrange the buckets) and an expensive new Danish organ. In the church cellar were the recording studios for the local radio station. Near the church were several new houses and the villagers seemed to share the optimism of nearby Tromsø. The man from the culture office drove me back along the long, deserted, bumpy road to Tromsø. He drove slowly, not out of consideration for the car: “the police are always out with radar controls”.
Building roads in a country of mountains and fjords is demanding and those of Norway are an astonishing technical achievement. The trains are also wonderful and the country is well served by local airports. But the real way to travel from town to town along the coast of Northern Norway is by Hurtigruten, the daily coastal steamer which delivers post, goods and people to the 34 ports from Bergen to Kirkenes. The service has been essential for everyday life in the coastal communities for over a hundred years and the present fleet is in the process of being replaced by larger more modern ships which offer more space and comfort for the increasing number of tourists using the service as a holiday cruise. Some of the north-coast fishermen and farmers who for generations have used the service to transport fish and animals to market are complaining, though, that the Hurtigruten operators are beginning to turn up their noses at smelly fish because the tourists don’t like it: the service is becoming too “posh” for the very people it was originally intended for.
It was one of these newer ships that took us from Tromsø to Hammerfest for the next concert. A calm sea and a bright late-summer sun which set gradually in a blaze of red over the mountains before rising again half-an-hour later, kept most of the ship’s passengers on deck all night. Not much talking, but video footage being shot by the mile. That meant not many takers for early-morning breakfast, either. Hammerfest – the world’s most northerly town – comes to life for the short summer season and its one street was crowded with tourists. The square in the town centre, with its fountains playing in the sunshine, was full of stalls in which Sami (Lapps) in full-colour traditional costume were offering hand-carved traditional items (Visa cards accepted). In the churchyard, the largest reindeer I’ve ever seen was pushing its nose under a hearse to nibble the grass between the wheels and small herd of reindeer was making its way up the road (they’re probably employed to do so by the local tourist board).
Having arrived in Hammerfest by boat we opted to leave by bus for the long journey across the completely desolate Repparfjord Mountain to Alta. Alta is not only a long way North, it’s a long way from anywhere. When you fly there you begin to realise this. You glance down from 30000 feet and see an endless plain, and a lone Lapp standing next to a reindeer. Then the cheerful hostess brings you a cup of coffee which occupies your attention for ten minutes or so. Looking out of the window again after the coffee you’re startled to see an endless plain, and a lone Lapp standing next to a reindeer.
Alta is a puzzle – a town built in the heart of Lapland, where people have hunted reindeer since the Stone Age (and left cave drawings to prove it). But it has no ‘frontier-town’ feeling: anonymous concrete buildings, roads with unlikely roundabouts, a Chinese restaurant and rows of tiny suburban gardens. We asked an old lady who was out mowing the lawn for directions to the town centre, but she didn’t know. We asked the same thing of a group of teenage boys, who looked incredulous at us for a moment before walking on without answering. I wondered briefly whether I was speaking the wrong language, but it gradually dawned on us that Alta simply doesn’t have a centre – merely a sprawl punctuated by the occasional shop. The church at Alta was temporary home to refugees in so-called ‘church asylum’. These were refugees not formally approved by the immigration department, who had taken advantage of ancient law and sought sanctuary in the church to prevent being arrested and deported. Many of Norway’s churches housed such refugees during 1993 until the government worked out a more satisfactory solution.
Alta’s originality, though, isn’t so much a matter of location as of lifestyle. I began to suspect something when I read an advert in the newspaper for my concert. It gave the date, but the time was given as “after milking”. When I asked just what time the concert was due to start I was told that it would start “when people got there”. Time’s a bit like that in Lapland. “Sometimes”, the organist added, “people turn up the next day instead”, which sounded disconcerting as I was due elsewhere by then. Distance, too, is measured not in miles or kilometres but in the number of coffee stops required. Alta is a 6-coffee-stop journey from almost anywhere. It is said (mostly by Norwegians elsewhere in the country, jealous of the free lifestyle of Lapland) that the most popular sport in Alta is shooting the local mosquitoes, a sport which requires a large-calibre rifle.
It was with mixed feelings that we boarded the plane to Evenes for the final part of the tour. We were leaving the unpredictable rough-and-ready cheerfulness of Lapland for what felt like the far south – Vesterålen, on the border of Troms and Nordland counties. Vesterålen is an area rich in islands, so, for the first time on a tour in which we seemed to have used every type of locomotion apart from camels, boats really came into their own. We stayed in the pleasant surroundings of a Methodist college where, for the first time in a fortnight, we could settle in, unpack and sleep in the same rooms for several nights in succession. I was giving three concerts and a lecture/recital in the area, including a ‘midnight-sun’ concert on a remote island.
Vesterålen was not without its surprises, though, especially for our visitors Margaret and Helen. After the final concert of this series, where the peaceful and remote little church at Tjeldsund was packed out by an enthusiastic audience comprising virtually the entire population of the nearby village, we returned to the college by private boat from the beach by the church. Due to the gently-shelving beach it wasn’t possible to bring the boat right to the shore, which left the problem of transporting two respectable ladies out to a rowing boat bobbing around in a Norwegian fjord. Two teenage self-professed ‘Vikings’ demonstrated that Vesterålen has its own brand of rough-and-ready amiability by hoisting the two surprised ladies onto their respective shoulders and wading out with them to the boat.
A quarter of a mile of private lane led up the hill to our house, and keeping it passable in winter was a constant struggle. The must-have “status symbol” of that part of Norway was a snow blower – a hand-held or sit-on machine that lifts the snow and throws it into the ditch or over the fence. It was just such a machine that I set off to buy one winter’s day in 1994. The shop was a large warehouse-like building on the edge of the small town and the machine I was wanting to look at, typically, was on the very top shelf, 30 feet above the ground. This was just a few feet higher than the safe operating height of the fork-lift that the warehouseman had available. As he scooped the heavy snow clearer on to his extended fork lift, it swayed and wobbled alarmingly and I stepped sharply aside so as to be well clear if it fell. Somehow, though, the driver steadied the machine and brought his cargo safely to ground level. Had the snow clearer fallen it would have landed on a pile of boxes that were stacked on the floor, and I joked with the driver that their contents had been in danger of being dented. I looked closer to see what these contents were, and saw that all the boxes were labelled “DYNAMITE: HANDLE WITH CARE!” Had the snow clearer fallen Norway would presumably have had one fjord village less (and these memories would never have been written)!
The event that had prompted me to go and buy the snow clearer had happened at the start of the week. A particularly snowy weekend meant several hours’ hard work clearing the lane in order to get the car out to drive to the Brahms concert at Hen Church. By the time I got home again, more snow had fallen but the temperature had become a little warmer, making the steep and winding lane up to our house impossibly slippery. The car valiantly struggled half way up the hill, but just after a sharp bend refused to make any further progress. Unfortunately I soon discovered that, although the car was happy to stay where it was whilst I had my foot on the brake, if I tried to take my foot off the brake and get out, the car slipped backwards towards a steep drop. The house was within sight and I tried sounding the horn and flashing the car lights to attract attention. This produced merry waves from the house window for a while, before Tracy eventually came out in the snow to tell me to stop fooling around and come home. She was despatched for a rope, which she tied round a tree and fastened the other end to the front of the car so that I eventually could get out and hobble home (my foot was stiff from pressing it hard against the brake pedal for so long).
The temperature continued to rise that evening and by morning all the snow was gone. A neighbour called by and sat in our kitchen drinking coffee. Several times he seemed to be wanting to make some remark but didn’t quite know how to say it. Just before leaving he enquired cautiously: “do you always tether your car to a tree at night?”.
An example of this is that church travel expenses are claimed on a complicated form, divided into various means of transport. There are different set rates for driving a car, for driving a car on unsurfaced roads, for driving a car in Tromsø; for driving a snowscooter, for driving a boat (small engine) or a boat (large engine), or for other means of transport on water. The last of these raises all manner of interesting images: high expectations, perhaps, of the abilities of church staff to make their way across water without a boat.
At least my journeys fitted comfortably into the system in that I regularly used my own boat (small engine) to travel to the church directly over the fjord from my house. It was possible to go by road, but this entailed an hour's drive around the end of the fjord; taking the boat was quicker and allowed a little fishing on the way home. One particular day, however, I was asked to play at two funerals in quick succession: the first on the other side of the fjord and the second on "my" side. This posed no great problem, of course: it was simply a matter of fifteen minutes' sailing from the one to the other. The early-Spring weather was good and the temperature above freezing. I left the boat loosely tied up at the shoreline on the deserted beach close to the first church whilst I went to the funeral. As I sat on the gallery and played quiet music before the service began, footsteps approached up the narrow (and always noisy) wooden stairs and a member of the bereaved's family popped her head round the corner. "At the end of the service, whilst we're all going out, could you possibly play ..." and she added the name of a folk song I'd never heard of, turned and clattered back down the steps. There are times to be obliging and times to ignore odd and inopportune requests; this was obviously a chance to try out the latest in technological gadgets - the new (and at that time far from widespread) mobile phone, which I had as a safety measure for on board the boat. After the first hymn, when there was a solid gap before I'd be needed again, I crept quietly out into the back room and rang a good friend who seems to know every local folk tune and traditional song. She ran a shop in the local town and was a little surprised to be asked to sing a song down the phone (her customers enjoyed it, apparently) but I wrote out the melody as she sang it, and duly played it at the end of the funeral – a use that Nokia had never envisaged for its phones.
As I hurried back to the beach the bells of the other church could be heard distantly from over the water. The boat had gone. Unthinkable that it could have been stolen (nothing was ever stolen though all cars, houses and boats were always left open), but what could have happened to it? Eventually I saw it, tied alongside a fishing boat that was anchored a hundred yards out in the bay. I found out afterwards that a kindly fisherman had worried that the changing wind might make my boat damage itself against the rocks and had pulled it out to his before going off to do something else. In the meantime I was faced with the problem of reaching the next funeral with a missing boat and no alternative means of transport – a situation for which musical training had unaccountably failed to prepare me. There was only one thing for it: an improvised striptease on the beach, a very cold swim and even colder boat-ride back to the beach to get dressed again, followed by a hurried and rather damp-feeling journey to the next funeral.
But at least I had solved the riddle of the travel-expenses form and duly entered “swam 100 metres” in the “other means of transport on water” box – and was duly paid for it, too.
After spending the morning practicing on a wonderful historic organ in the former East Germany there were a few hours to spare before returning to the church in the evening to play the concert. It was a perfect opportunity to take my son to see the nearby Colditz Castle. We had both read and seen films of wartime escapes from the dreaded castle and the chance of visiting it in reality was too good to miss.
We ambled along beside the high perimeter wall, looking up at the bleak building beyond and trying to visualise wartime life within. Part-way round the wall, a wide gateway opened onto a path that led to the castle itself. The gates were fastened open and there were no signs to say “keep out” so we ventured in along the path right to the castle walls, where we stood on the infamous track leading up to the main door, along which so many prisoners had been marched.
Sadly, time was limited – we needed to be back in good time before the concert – so we headed back. Arriving at the gateway we were surprised and dismayed to find that the gates were now closed – and firmly bolted on the outside. There was, of course, no chance of climbing over the 20-foot wall or the equally-high gates (they had, after all, been designed to prevent this) and there was absolutely no-one to be found. Colditz was closed for the weekend, holding two new prisoners. I’m sure that no previous detainees had been anxious to escape from Colditz in order to get to a concert (and of course their plight had been infinitely more serious than ours), but that was of little comfort at the time.
Having searched for alternative methods of escape we returned to the gates. The two gates were secured with a large bolt that slid into large iron hasps on the outside, with the one gate additionally held by a bolt into the ground on the inside. There was no way to push anything between the gates to move the bolt. Pulling up the bolt on the inside did allow the gates to move a little, however, and we found that pushing and pulling at the gates was causing the bolt to move a little in its hasps. Eventually, persistence paid off and we managed to get the gates to move enough to be able to squeeze out through the gap.
We walked away from the castle with the satisfaction of escapees and when we met two tall men with an Alsatian dog on a lead it almost felt as though we would be challenged and returned to the castle. “Just behave naturally!” whispered my son as we passed them.