“Tombé, tombé, tombé”, the band sing and children happily obey, hopping up and down in their wet weather gear on a drizzly Thursday morning in Brodø
A short walk away is the Norwegian Aviation Museum. It contains a large and well displayed collection of military and civilian aircraft and related items. It is to the entrance of the museum that I want to draw your attention. First, here is the building with a gardener and a helicopter.
Now here is something that says a great deal about Norwegians today. On either side of the entrance to this modern museum are two things that send a powerful and moving message to visitors from all over the world; a Hurricane fighter and a memorial, that I will let you read. I shed a tear.
I cannot think of any other nation that is so generous in its tributes to allies and so modest about its own contribution to the war. (In the museum there is an American news film clip called Wings For Norway in which a young Prince Harald tears paper off the fuselage to reveal the name of an American fighter ‘plane destined for Norway.)
I am writing aboard the M/S Lofoten, crossing to Svolvaer in the Lofoten Islands. The crossing takes six hours, arriving at 9.00 pm.
Dinner on board is four courses, served by staff in white jackets. We are allocated a table with a stout Norwegian, about my age, who sports a lavish grey beard and moustache. He lives not far from Oslo and is up here to re-visit scenes of his National Service. Now retired, he was a cinema projectionist and is a cineaste. We have a wide-ranging discussion about world cinema and a second bottle of wine. I learn that Babette’s Feast is based on a story by Karen Blixen and that his favourite film is Cinema Paradiso (natch). An admirer of Sir Richard Attenborough, as he correctly calls him, he was in the projection suite for the Norwegian première of Ghandi and afterwards had a chat with his hero, to whom perhaps his beard is a tribute.
The pub at Svolvaer stays open until 1.00 am in summer.
