Hanna #2
Despite the queasiness in my stomach, I made myself eat the hearty serving of fish stew the woman set before me in the dining room, not knowing when my next meal might be.
Once I’d mopped my bowl clean with a slice of bread, I retired to my attic room.
I pushed open the window to let in the breeze, craning my neck to catch a glimpse of the masts in the harbor.
The wind stirred the curtains, carrying with it the salt smell of the sea.
I lay on the bed, trying to nap, but was too nervous to sleep, so instead I listened to the familiar screeching of the gulls as they harangued the fishermen over the day’s catch being unloaded at the fish market.
The hands of my watch seemed to move very slowly as the time ticked away, but finally they reached four o’clock, and it was time to go.
The skipper of the fishing boat was a cheerful, talkative man, and this clearly wasn’t the first time he’d had a stranger on board.
I perched on a barrel in the hold, hidden from the soldiers patrolling the quayside, watching him make everything ready for the trip ahead.
It was the same type of boat as Pappa’s, with both an engine and a mast for hoisting a sail to save fuel on longer trips.
“We’ll be off in a few hours, but we have to wait until German patrol ships come in to anchor for the night,” he said, as he topped up the engine with oil.
“When I was getting the fuel, I told them I’d be heading to the herring grounds in the north.
It’s the wrong time of year, of course, but fortunately they don’t know anything about our fishing seasons.
They’re still pretty jumpy after the raid, though.
They made a lot of arrests. A terrible business.
” With an oily forefinger, he tapped a crudely printed newssheet that lay on the boards beside him.
“It says here they sent the ones they didn’t kill to a camp they’ve set up in Grini, outside Oslo.
Bad things happen there, and the conditions are terrible.
It’s not a place you’d want to end up. It takes a lot to break us Norwegians, mind you. But those bastards will do anything.”
It was a relief when he went back up on deck and I was left alone. I picked up the newsletter and read it in the square of daylight coming through the open hatch of the companionway. It was an underground paper, the official press now controlled by the German administration.
The headline was a message from the exiled King Haakon VII, typed beneath his emblem—a hand-drawn letter H with the number seven framed within it.
The German occupiers are not practicing war, but murder and arson, it said.
My decision to leave Norway was one of the hardest I’ve ever had to make, but from Britain the government and I can represent a free Norway and continue the fight for our country’s liberation.
I am with you all in spirit. His words helped calm the jittering of my nerves as more long hours ticked away.
At last, a couple more crew members arrived and, under cover of nightfall, we set off.
To maintain the illusion of heading for the fishing grounds, they set a northwesterly course to begin with.
I remained hidden below until we were safely out of sight of land and any remaining German patrols.
I tried to get a little sleep, although the drumming of the engine and the strong smell of diesel made it almost impossible.
Then, several hours into our journey, I felt the ship veer onto a new course, turning toward the southwest. A crew member came down the ladder to check the engine and said, “You can come up on deck now if you want.”
It was a huge relief to be in the fresh air once again, and I gulped lungfuls of it.
The little boat plowed through the waves, and at first there was only starlight to show us the way.
I stood in the stern, looking back toward Norway, but the land had disappeared in the darkness, and I had to steady myself by holding tight to the transom to dispel the sense of loss that surged over me.
Eventually, a faint wash of grey appeared along the eastern horizon, and I took comfort in the thought that the new day was breaking for Liv and Erik back there in Fagernes.
The wind picked up, and the crew hoisted the sails, helping us pick up speed as the boat surged onward and the sea turned to silver in the dawn light.
I moved forward to the wheelhouse to get a little shelter from the chill wind, and the skipper beckoned me in.
He poured me a cup of coffee from a pot that sat on a small Primus stove.
I clasped my hands around its warmth and sipped.
Then he turned his attention back to a chart of the North Sea, on which he was plotting our course.
I looked at it with interest and saw it was printed with English words.
“This was smuggled in,” he said. “Our friends in Britain send us all sorts of useful things.” I wondered whether it might once have been stashed in a fish barrel in the compartment beneath my fishing hut, but I just smiled and nodded.
The skipper tapped his finger against the map, pointing to our destination.
It seemed we were heading for a scattering of islands, far to the north of the British mainland, labeled Shetland.
“If this wind keeps up and we don’t run into any trouble, we should be there in about four days’ time,” he said.