The Promise of Iceland Page 3

  A few weeks before they had been merely names and illustrations in her geography textbook. But during the journey out, during those exquisite hours she spent alone on deck watching the passing shoreline, the treasured information in her schoolbooks had been transported into the uneven, chaotic outlines of ports. Real ports. They were her future.

  Again, that line from Auden fits: the ‘ports have names for the sea’.

  Bluey stopped by a small timber building and Mum dismounted. There was no-one outside, but she heard the sound of shoes and bare feet echo among the trees. She stood for a minute, reigns in hand, thinking someone might appear. When no-one did, she chose a tree by the side of the schoolhouse to tie up the horse.

  ‘You’ll have to wait for me here,’ she said. ‘Wait here, Bluey.’

  She whistled her way to the school house—apparently, it kept away the snakes—and walked in.

  Mr Jason Savage, a handsome teacher of no more than twenty, introduced himself and the class, most of whom belonged to one family, the Kirkmans. Mr Savage wore shorts and long socks. He sat her at a desk roughly suited to her height, or only a little smaller, and asked her what she’d seen during the trip to Australia.

  ‘The Pyramids,’ she replied.

  ‘In that case,’ said Mr Savage, ‘let’s have a day in Egypt.’ I wonder what would have happened had he not indulged his new student in this way. I know from my own experiences that the one consolation of a new school is being not only novel but exotic. It was a consolation that could become a little addictive.

  In the time it had taken her to ride from the farm to school, Susan learnt that a way out of feeling alone was to capture again, even in memory, the sensation of living that she felt in those ports: how they gave her contact with the wider world, its romance, and its distance from the everyday. It was to these ports and others like them that she promised herself a return. After school, the ride home was better for my mother but her resolve was strong. She never wavered from that promise to herself. Not after school, and not now, nearly sixty years later.

  The warmth of the afternoon had soaked into the track, releasing insects and the green sweetness of the grass. Bluey, recognising that he was close to home, cantered along the track. It was Australian optimism: get home, have a feed, rest. When she saw her father at the front door, she released all the fears of the morning, jumped off Bluey and ran in crying. ‘I don’t want to go back to school,’ she wept.

  Harold was feeling as unsettled as his daughter. It had been a mistake to come out to Australia; that much was clear to him. In the end, they managed just six weeks at Thumb Creek before they followed the track and its cows to the coast. They bought a small house in Macksville, on the north bank of the Nambucca River on the edge of a highway that ran from Brisbane to Sydney. Across the river stood the Star Hotel, the cinema, and the milk bar—the compass of urban experience in the 1950s.

  In front of the house, the traffic hummed an irresistible tune to both father and daughter. They knew there was more: you just had to follow the cars out of town. Four years later they did, to Sydney and a return passage back to England.

  It was a disaster, just as it had been a mistake to move to Australia in the first place. Like so many immigrants, Harold was tricked by unreliable memories; firstly of home and then of the new country. Within weeks of landing back in England he told a disconsolate family that he was homesick for Australia. They would, he said, have to make a second migration.

  ‘I’ve had just about enough of you looking for somewhere you like,’ said Mildred.

  ‘England’s changed. It’s not what it was when we left.’

  England hadn’t changed, she replied, and nor had he. She felt it was just his way of saying that family life wasn’t enough. Or, that this family wasn’t the one he wanted. They argued bitterly, Harold always convinced that the next step in his life would be the defining one. He was, though, made to wait by a force greater than Mildred. Australia was as popular then as it is now, and it took nine months for Harold to find a passage back to Sydney.

  As they were in-between homes and countries, Harold and Mildred thought there was no point in their daughter going to school. Instead, when she was fifteen Susan Diggons took a clerical job at the local council, and at night she went to secretarial school. It was a strict, dry kind of education—typing speeds and shorthand symbols—but in those days a very useful one. It would one day get her a job in Reykjavík.

  On their return to Australia, the family moved to Wollongong where, perhaps inevitably, Harold and Mildred separated. They had, it seemed, moved across the world just to split up. He found somewhere to stay near the sea, Mildred took a job at a boarding school and moved there with my mother’s sister, Lee, who was younger and closer to Mildred. My mother was found a bed at a women’s hostel. At sixteen, she was on her own, a state which from then on she would return to as a home of sorts, a corollary and yet also an alternative to being let down by the ones you loved. Being alone is the natural companion of change.

  My mother’s full escape arrived three years later. It came in the form of the Australian Navy and the man declared by Icelandic law to be my father, Ed Reid. A year after she joined up, she married him. She was nineteen and felt she was on her way at last.

  Ed was handsome and very Australian: grinning, a lot of facial hair, thin, an adventurer—he’d trained as a radio operator and wanted to go on expeditions; his hero was Douglas Mawson. Shortly after their wedding he left for Antarctica. A year later he returned with sketches of emperor penguins and news of a rocky outcrop named in his honour.

  Perhaps symptomatic of the era, while he travelled she stayed at home and waited. She spent a year with the in-laws and managed to save one thousand pounds. But she had fallen for someone even less steady than her father. As if to prove it, the day after he came home, Ed spent six hundred pounds on a Kombi van, and off they went. Away from Sydney and the in-laws.

  It was a good marriage, though, and in many ways a fulfilling one for Mum, who from then on joined Ed on all his outdoor jobs—in the Snowy Mountains, Kangaroo Valley, on the Hawkesbury River. She had found someone to travel with, and she was in love. The ports she’d met in the journeys from England faded a little in her memory because it was enough to simply be with a man who saw the world as you did and moved around a lot. ‘Why not?’ they said in unison. It was the 1960s after all. There were always jobs going, no matter where you went. Live freely. The creed of a decade was a revelation for Ed but Mum had been living what other people called ‘free’ all her life. She didn’t need much convincing to believe that the wanderer’s life was the best one going. Home was always somewhere else. Later on, she wasn’t so sure.

  She was twenty-six when Ed told her that he’d met someone else—someone, of course, who understood him better than she had. It was the worst moment in her life and she couldn’t eat or sleep. When she talks about their separation, she always remembers her first sleep after Ed left, a full two weeks later, and her first, very plain sandwich—all she could eat when she could again stomach food. But his departure reunited her with a sense of self-reliance that she’d formed when her parents had separated a decade before. Places mattered, people left.

  As it was a childless marriage—they couldn’t have children together—and because Ed couldn’t stand the idea of a mortgage, there was no property to divide. Just the Kombi. For a young woman in the mid 1960s, when most were stuck at home while their husbands were working and having affairs, she found herself relatively free. She now felt she had a second chance to take off, to do something she’d been promising herself since she was ten, and she grabbed it. She just went, like Harold and, it seemed, Ed had.

  First, she went to Lord Howe Island, a crater mass miles out to sea from Sydney. Then, Mount Cook in New Zealand. By June 1969, three years before my birth, the impulse had taken her as far as Nakhodka on the east coast o
f Russia, where she boarded the Trans-Siberian train for Moscow. She was heading for England, this time on her own.

  It was fourteen years since she’d been in England as a teenager learning shorthand and typing, but the charm of the place was still there, layered and, as always, to some extent hidden—the hedgerows and the summer evenings, the polite irony of odd conversations at bus stops, English television. It was all as good as everyone had reminded her, and as fresh as she remembered. Even her childhood friends were true. She began looking for work.

  My guess is that at this time she was already thinking about where to go next. But the story she tells is that the next step took her by surprise. It was an advertisement in The Times that stated, ‘English-speaking secretary wanted for Iceland. Twenty-five pounds per week, no tax’. It was only two lines in a broadsheet, but it was enough. The following Monday she rang the number in the paper and was talking to an employment agent who couldn’t believe anyone would ever want to go to Iceland. A week later, Mum had signed up for her first winter.

  She was met by the representative of T & J—or G. Thorsteinsson & Jónsson, importers, in the full version—a young man who held my mother’s arm and led her urgently to the car. Through experience she had become independent, and the country with which she was about to fall in love valued independence, probably above all things. She was at her most beautiful, with straight, black hair down to her waist—something like the most famous Viking princesses who, a thousand years before, had come to Iceland from the far corners of the old Norse world, Sweden, Russia, Scotland and even the north of England. But, like most travellers, she was lonely. She didn’t really believe herself when she said that your own company was the best. And perhaps, most importantly for me, she had grown used to unreliable men.

  ‘Welcome to Iceland,’ yelled the representative, as they walked through the car park. The wind picked up, as it almost always does at such moments in Iceland—during arrivals and departures—and they began to run.

  ‘You have come at a very vindy time of year.’

  ‘Is December particularly bad?’ my Mum asked.

  ‘Yes. But it can be quite nice in July.’

  They drove in the half-light of a winter’s afternoon. On one side, the lava field ran without interruption to a ridge of dark craters; on the other, the grey ocean surged. Farm buildings stood isolated, as if unattached to the small fields around them. Thirty minutes later, the aluminium smelter, with its high tower painted in barber shop stripes of red and white, appeared—the first indication that you were getting close to the town of Hafnajörður and, just beyond it, the capital. When they arrived in Reykjavík, Mum was dropped off with her suitcase at a basement apartment.

  ‘This is Sólvallagata,’ said the driver. ‘Quick. Get in out of the vind.’

  Before she did, she looked down along her new street, an elegant arc of four-storey buildings. It was a lovely street. The next day, when the wind had settled down a bit, she discovered the street ran towards a gorgeous, small town that was unspoilt, unpolluted, and undeveloped. This was before the economic miracle had really taken hold of Iceland. In December 1970, there was just a single supermarket for the whole country.

  Mum found the people were in a way like her: quiet. And just like farmers, they took the time to explain things, even though they were all working two or three jobs—a habit they hadn’t managed to leave behind on the farms of the old days. For the first time in her life, Mum felt understood, as these people liked her quietness, her self-reliance, and also what was, I suppose, her paradoxical willingness to be adopted, to be taken into a culture that made you wait. The idea that you could be more yourself by moving had happened.

  Icelanders might be quiet and therefore difficult to know, but now and then they were prepared to reveal an inner voice that resonated with her, a lost-in-the-world irony and dislocation. They had a delicate wit that was self-deprecating, time-tested, and rural. Many of them made her giggle, despite her being the non-giggly kind.

  She quickly discovered one thing you could always do in Iceland, no matter the weather: swim. Like so many foreigners in Iceland, Mum fell in love with the outdoor swimming pools, where a steady steam rose from the depths. They had given the town its name—Reykja-vík, the ‘bay of smoke’. The water was piped miles from its source deep underneath the heaths to the south. The sulphurous stink of the hot springs were a reminder in the urban world of the villages and farm clusters where everyone had once lived, and it provided much needed time outside.

  These hot spots, along with formal coffee time, were provincial rituals that gave everyone the chance to fill in what the countless biographies of a polite, desperately small society left out: the illicit world of the Reykjavík cycle of affairs. They weren’t exactly meant to happen—this was a conservative, Lutheran place after all. But the cold being the cold, the darkness being the darkness, and the familiarity being so intense, affairs were inevitable, and rather common. There was even something of a local tradition of forgiving them. What did a scandal matter if, at the end of it all, there was another child in the world? It wasn’t a universal view—my father certainly didn’t share it—but it was still the dominant one.

  Among the local people, my Mum stood out. If she had looked English, she might have seemed less different. But, as Ed had liked to joke, everything about her was becoming more and more Italian—she didn’t look Doncaster with her olive skin, black hair that ran far down her back, glamorous legs, deep eyes, and good nose. Gísli noticed her straight away and tried to catch her eye in the coffee room.

  He was the charmer in the office, and so not at all my mother’s type, she told me. She thought he was handsome in his way—you could tell that he thought he was good looking. Dashing and, like me I suppose, a touch vain. But, all the same, she couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, why the other women in the office made him out to be something special. What caught her notice then?

  ‘I was lonely and he was clean,’ she said.

  It’s a joke, yes, and very much a Mum kind of joke, full of dismissal of higher emotions or the rhetoric of love. Unlike me, Mum wouldn’t ever voice an appeal to the moon for inspiration—perhaps there was no moonlight in Iceland that year. From the photographs I have seen, Gísli did seem handsome. Well, in those days, he looked like me; of course she fell for him.

  As it turned out, she was about to fall in love with another one of those men with a destination he didn’t quite understand himself—another Harold, another Ed; another man she could never really have. From what little I know of him, I would say that Gísli was, in fact, just loud enough to catch her eye from under her shyness, and whimsical enough to conceal from her that she was falling in love with one of those loud, charming ones she’d never much liked.

  3

  LOVE IN THE TIME OF COD WAR

  Maybe, it was just the smell of cod in the air, an ichthyologic aphrodisiac. In the 1970s, Iceland was more concerned with the Cod Wars than the Cold War. Comical-sounding affairs, but they were achieving their ends. The enemy was the English, who were barging in and stealing fish like all the cod thieves before them: the Danes, the French, the Dutch, and the Spanish, each of them taking turns to exploit the fisheries while the locals were made to stand by the shore and watch. Not any more.

  ‘This won’t do!’ declared a fuming Minister for Fisheries. It was time for war. And so the trawlers, armed with massive net-clippers, fought it out in a series of North Atlantic battles between a few Icelandic patrol boats and the Scots’ fishing fleet. Against all probability, the Icelanders won and claimed more than their share of the fishing grounds.

  After centuries as a nation of starving peasants and drowning fishermen, Iceland was now becoming wealthy. There were even cod millionaires, or ‘quota millionaires’ as they became known locally—they sold their small fishing quotas to the bigger operators and then retired, bored, to the higher street
s of town. With the fish, Iceland became a proper nation. A nation of singing fishermen. In the course of three wars, spanning from 1958 to the years after my birth, they won the fisheries, and this was how the Iceland of my childhood became the Iceland of new money.

  Before that, though, Gísli must have been planning his own international manoeuvre for some time. One evening, when he and my Mum were both working late, he asked if he could walk her home. They passed Bárugata, which he told her was his mother’s street, the street of his childhood. Even in his youth, Gísli was sentimental. The area hadn’t changed much since his boyhood years, he told Mum. Vesturbær, the oldest part of town, still looked like a Norwegian fishing village. They were near the harbour, and he told her about how he’d worked on the trawlers fifteen years before.

  ‘Were things so bad in the old days that children had to work on the boats?’ she asked him, as he was too young, surely.

  ‘Well, at the time I saw myself as a young man.’

  ‘Not at ten!’

  ‘No, not at ten. I was nearly twenty.’

  ‘But you don’t seem much more than that now.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, Susan. You’re very kind. I turn thirty-five this year.’

  She hadn’t meant to compliment him, and she stumbled for a way of taking it back, before remembering that nothing was going to happen, anyway. She was more or less resigned to that. They’d reached Öldugata, a narrow street of apartments.

  ‘Just up there,’ said Gísli, ‘is Ferðafélag Íslands and the Icelandic Touring Club. You should get up into the highlands,’ he went on. ‘That’s where you go to become a real Icelander.’