Chapter 3: Summer holidays

Chapter 3: Summer holidays

Summer holidays! What wonderful words. Every summer, from the age of four to seventeen years old, was wonderful. We always went to Norway for our holidays.

Norway was home for us because my family was Norwegian, and we all spoke the language.

We were always a big group of ten or more people. There were my three sisters and my very old half-sister (that is four people). There was my half-brother and me (that is six). There was my mother (seven) and someone to help (eight). Two or more friends of my very old half-sister came, too.

In those days, there were no planes. It took four days to go to our holiday in Norway. We went by train, taxi, a second train, a second taxi, ship and then in a small boat.

We always went to Oslo first. We stayed one night in a hotel and visited our mother’s parents.

My grandmother was a very old woman with white hair. My grandfather was very quiet. He always sat in a chair and smoked tobacco from a very long pipe.

After the visit to my grandparents, we travelled to a little island. Its name was Tjome, and it was the best place on Earth. We went to the beach there. We swam in the sea and lay in the sun. We went to other islands in our little boat and ate fish from the sea. They were wonderful days.

I remember only one bad thing about our holidays in Norway. One year, my mother said, “We are going to the doctor. He wants to look at your nose and mouth.”

“What’s wrong with my nose and mouth?” I asked. I was about eight years old.

“Not a lot,” my mother said. “But I think you have adenoids.”

“What are adenoids?” I asked her.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

The doctor looked up my nose and in my mouth. I did not worry, because I was too young to understand.

Someone held a bowl under my face. The doctor had a very long knife. He put it in hot water over a fire to make it clean.

“Open your mouth,” said the doctor. But I did not want to.

“It will be quick,” he said.

I opened my mouth. The doctor’s knife went into my mouth. It moved very quickly. The doctor turned it four or five times. Something red went from my mouth into the bowl. It was a shock!

“Those are your adenoids,” said the doctor. He pointed at the red things in the bowl.

The top of my mouth was on fire. I held my mother’s hand. How could someone do this to me?

“You will breathe more easily now,” said the doctor.

My mother and I walked home. Yes, I said walk. There was no bus or car. We walked for thirty minutes. We got home to my grandparents’ house, and someone gave me a chair.

“He can rest there for a few minutes,” my grandparents said.

This was in 1924. It was normal to cut a child’s adenoids with no anaesthetic in those days!